Surely, we don't live in the 80s anymore, and a skeleton on the cover of your favourite metal album won't scare even your grandmother nowadays. However, there still are topics with a decent potential to shock the audience, one of which is Islamic radicalism. This topic was pioneered by Bryn Jones (Muslimgauze) well before 9/11 (not to mention the Islamic State insurgency or Charlie Hebdo shooting), and then continued by numerous projects which are making witch house remixes of nasheeds (it's a very popular trend by now, at least here).
Now we have a 100% digital noise project based out of Ivanovo, which have released dozens of albums and EPs in just one year under different aliases (Noise Jihad, Hargeysa, Virtual Mosque, and so on). Just like Bryn Jones, the anonymous person behind Noise Jihad focuses on Islamic aesthetics and imagery, and just like Bryn Jones (who never actually visited Palestine or Middle East in general, despite recording a shitton of Middle Eastern-themed albums), he doesn't seem to have a really deep knowledge of the affairs he writes music about. That said, I'm not an Arabist or Islamic scholar too, so I'm not sure if I'm in the position to judge his work.
I haven't listened to the whole vast discography of Noise Jihad (and, frankly, I don't want to), but out of what I've heard so far, I'd recommend "Jihad" for starters. If you don't like it, don't bother yourself listening to the rest of Noise Jihad's releases.
Пост Мортем (or Post Mortem, if you wish) are a russophone rap trio from Kazakhstan, consisting of Alibek "Dr. Fulci" Jusip, Maxat "AzRaiL" Bekes and Evgeniy "j0nny" Postebailo. Their lyrical themes have been described as: "infanticide, dismemberment, slavery, hate, genocide, drug abuse,
paranoia, rape, war, torture, terminal illness, child abuse, domestic
violence and religion (or lack thereof)" [and Lucio Fulci's movies, I must add]. To put it in short, it's rap with death metal lyrics & imagery. The subgenre of rap music which typically employs such lyrical themes is known as "horrorcore", but the members of Post Mortem don't like this term, preferring their music to be called "macabre rap" instead.
Another, much more well-known horror rapper who dislikes the term "horrorcore" (and prefers to use "death rap" instead) is Necro, of whom I was a fan for a long time, but I always thought it takes a native (or close-to-native) English speaker to fully enjoy Necro's lyrics. And how we have a hip-hop act which is nearly as good as Necro, and raps in my language. Isn't is great? While I normally prefer metal to rap by a wide margin, it's much easier for me to relate to this kind of rap than to the majority of generic death metal. Of course this album isn't a masterpice, but it's infinitely better than almost all the cRAP produced by the post-USSR hip-hop scene. "Infanticidium" is easily the best track on the whole album, and as someone has rightfully said, "that track should be aired on TV as it's a way superior alternative for all these shitty reality shows".
"Infandum Renovare Dolorem" is Пост Мортем's second and the last (and, in my opinion, the best) album. Their debut album "Macabre" isn't bad too, but it's more straightforward Necro worship, with some experiments with death metal which I personally didn't like that much. Their 2012 EP isn't bad either, but this more experimental than their early works, and the lyrics are less explicit. Sadly they haven't released anything in the last couple of years, although the debut solo album of Dr. Fulci is expected to be out on 31st of March.
As you should have noticed, I finally decided to use my .net domain for this blog. At first I planned to use it for a Wordpress-based mirror of all entries from here, but it turned out that a free blogging platform (Blogger) is more convenient to use than Wordpress on a paid server.
The process of domain change turned out to be a hassle, with unexpected problems appearing at nearly every step, but hopefully everything works OK by now. I'll work a bit on improving the blog design and description in the next few weeks; hope I'll have some free time to write several new reviews as well.
IIRC I've posted an EP by Mystica Girls last year this day, and now it's time to post another EP by an all-female band that isn't particularly well known. This time it won't be metal, though.
Misgive are 4 girls from Kota Kinabalu - the capital of Sabah (the easternmost state of Malaysia). Their music is typical pop-punk which is played by a lot of young bands all around the Western world, but I never heard anything like that from Southeastern Asia yet. They're virtually unknown outside their home region, but recently they got some publicity here, mostly due to our local J-rock / J-punk communities. I personally never was a big fan of pop-punk or J-rock, but all these simplistic yet catchy songs on this EP remind me of the late 70's punk which I used to post here circa 2010-2011.
As for the "short skirts" part - the girls themselves definitely like it a lot, judging from their stage outfits designed for them by Afraid Clothing. It's hard not to notice that their outfits are extremely short, and I like it this way too :)
The official page for this EP is here, and if you want to have a free download of it, it probably won't be hard to find.
Here's another compilation from Cracked Core, consisting mostly of tracks which he did for the EVE Online-themed series of compilations "New Eden Logs", using an alias "...Und Null Sekunden". This is dark ambient/drone, nothing particularly outstanding or innovative on there, but it's still quite good. Actually, it isn't hard to guess what kind of sound you'll hear on this compilation by just looking at its cover image.
