Into The Slaughter

Well, finally Slaughter Strike has an 18 minute demo tape availble for public consumption.

$6 North America, $8 World, paypal dkristiansen80@yahoo.ca

If you want more than one demo or a shirt e mail first

Death Metal is a strange old beast, until 1993 i loved the stuff then it very famously became a steaming pile of shit and even the good LPs suffered from three good songs at the beginning and a whole bunch of crap afterwards. Too many songs that sounded like a bunch of transitions sequenced together with no real song underneath it all.

Then it went 'professional' and 'respectable' which lead to vomit inducing moments like in this documentary where some random dullard (maybe it was one of the Immolation guys, i forget) tries to convince us of death metal's merit because some of the guitarists are awesome and can play anything, even classical and jazz. LIKE THAT'S A FUCKING SELLING POINT YOU CLUELESS MORON!

And suddenly death metal was utter shit. Bad songs, boring riffs, laughable PR, horrible "professional" studio sound and worst of all no actual sense of horror or death. Cue several Norwegian's derisory and 100% spot on remarks about Life Metal. I blame Swedish teenagers and the entire state of Florida.

In the last few years the state of death metal has got considerably better once again, possibly thanks in part to underground black metal's continued longevity and people relearning some lessons from that crowd. Stand outs in recent years for me have been Drowned, Repugnant, Hooded Menace, Nominon, Necrovation and several others. And no one with any interest in this stuff can ignore Abscess or Nunslaughter's continued refusal to progress.

And it's funny, apparently now it's the return of Old School Death Metal. Within three days of our myspace page going up we'd had several offers of full lengths based on three roughly mixed songs (the final mixes aren't actually that different to be honest). Hell, more than one of these labels was a fairly big name which says one of two things to me. Either 1) Slaughter Strike is the best band in the whole universe and we've somehow managed to reinvent the wheel or 2) the music industry is fucked and will try and grab anything that might be half decent and might fit in to an emerging trend. Take your pick, or come up with your own.

And a lot of people congratulate us on such groundbreaking moves like our lack of triggered drums. Which really says something about the state of death metal.

So is this the return of Old School Death Metal? Personally i don't think so. Clearly journalists and some record labels need to pretend loose collections of shared values are a scene. It makes it easier to sell things.

We can learn something from hardcore here. In the 1990s hardcore was suddenly predominantly all that unlistenable fucking garbage like Coalesce, Dead Guy, Earth Crisis, Kiss it Goodbye, Snapcase, Starkweather, Refused, Cave In etc etc. At the end of the decade and at the start of this one bands like DS13, Career Suicide and more than i can be bothered mentioning were touted as retro hardcore or old school hardcore. Now that this trend has turned out to not be such a trend after all and is here to stay it's just hardcore. A different shade than the JNCO wearing lactose intolerant crowd, but still *just* hardcore. And if anything the bands that were called hardcore in the 1990s that bore little to no relation to hardcore before it are acknowledged as the abberation.

And anyone reading this that thinks hardcore is eye liner on dudes (Kevin Seconds and Jack Control excluded) and spin kicks at the local enormo-dome energy drink sponsored show needs to educate themselves.

And death metal is the same. Foregoing drum triggers and riffs that sound like a collection of eight million notes over gravity blasts, singing about a zombie apocalypse, getting away from photoshop album cover hell, releasing tapes and vinyl, having an underground DIY approach to booking shows and much much more is not old school death metal. It's just fucking death metal.

So yeah, we have a tape. We're recording a 7" and another tape before the end of the year and working on a full length next year.

Long Live Death.