overground scene

The visuality of metal music has always fascinated me, so recently I started experimenting by pairing records with everyday domestic artifacts. It’s really just another excuse to admire my records and be playful. Here are some of the results, accompanied by brief commentaries on each album.

Invocator‘s Excursion demise (1991) is an album I bought in the late 1990s, from the now defunct record store Happening at the centre of Athens, Greece. This one must have cost around 2,000 drachmas, so around £4. A truly breath-taking album – not many match its intensity. It’s what most people would call death-thrash, but really it’s just extreme metal, super-fast, complex, with top musicianship. Seriously, the sheer attack of “Inner contrarieties” makes me wanna jump out of my skin. The sound is a bit too plastic and clinical for my taste, but you can hear everything clearly and, I guess, that is important with this level of complexity. I have always associated this album with Assorted Heap’s The experience of horror (1991), ‘cos that’s another obscure death-thrash album I got from Happening, and with Hypnosia’s fantastic Extreme hatred (2000). The latter owes a lot to Invocator; there are riffs on Extreme hatred that definitely allude to Excursion demise (compare “The persistence from memorial chasm” to “Act of lunacy“). In this picture, the album is embraced by the blue door-stopper snake made out of old tights.

For victory (1994) is the first Bolt Thrower album I listened to and my all time favourite one of this band. I’m pretty sure I bought this one in the summer of 1997, from the now defunct Rock City (the underground one) in Akademias street, in Athens, for 3,500 drachmas, so around £7. I also bought Sinister’s Hate (1995) on CD from the same shop on that day. Good times. “When glory beckons” and the eponymous one instantly blew my mind. The whole album is an epic death metal masterpiece; after all these years I still can’t get used to it… I mean, the way “Remembrance” explodes is sending chills down my spine, and that ending of “Lest we forget” sends adrenaline through my bloodstream! Anyway, in terms of the cover, a very different visual approach on this one, after the cartoonish second and third albums and the Romantic fourth one, here we have a photograph of soldiers walking in the sunset along a shoreline. In this picture, two little wooden animals walk alongside the soldiers down the path to victory, or defeat, and a third one stalls the procession and looks up towards the skies. To quote Peavy, “killing people’s not a job”.

This is the Century Media re-issue from 2020 of one of the most beautiful death-black albums ever made, Unanimated‘s Ancient god of evil (1995). I first listened to it when a friend bought the CD in the mid-late 1990s, but I didn’t like it back then. I appreciated it maybe a decade later, and I love that I could finally own this on vinyl after so many years of listening to it on mp3. I bought this off Amazon for £21 a year and a half ago. Here, the album is enveloped by various signifiers of Christmas. The result is quite funny, ‘cos the little Santa and the snowman are smiling, a mood completely at odds with the mood of the album, an album steeped in misery, nihilism and hopelessness. Not to mention a bunch of Christian symbols sitting happily next to a massive inverted cross.