THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT CHECKS IN FROM THE STUDIO

 Metal News  12 Responses »
Mar 032012
 


A blast from the past.

Pardon my harsh language, but if you don’t like The Monolith Deathcult, you’re a ninny and a poop-head.  You’re a nincompoop, even. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

The band have been working on a new album, Tetragrammaton — excuse me, TETRAGRAMMATON. Advance pieces of music, which may or may not appear on the album (and likely will sound quite different if they do appear) have surfaced over the last year, and they sound just fucking fine. Some of what we’ve heard has disappeared from public view, but some pieces remain — the evidence of works in progress. We’ll get to that in a moment.

But in addition to dribbling out songs in various stages of completion, TMDC are starting to give us up-close-and-personal insights into the recording process, fleeting glimpses of genius at work. Yes, we will now have a series of all-important video studio reports from TMDC as TETRAGRAMMATON continues to take shape.

Yesterday, we got Part 1 of a planned 342.4 video reports on the recording of the album. In Part 1, we see “offline” member of TMDC, Carsten Altena, laying down a keyboard track with the kind of verve and virtuosity that shames the classical masters. People who like a bit of orchestral grandeur in their blast-furnace death metal are going to eat this up like a plate of fresh road kill.

As for other evidence of the band’s creative progress, we have four clips of music retrieved from the TMDC SoundCloud page (some quite recent). The first one is “Aslimu!!! — All Slain Those Who Brought Down Our Highly Respected Symbols To The Lower Status Of The Barren Earth”, which the band released about a year ago, as kind of a gap-filler between albums. It’s still available for free download via the SoundCloud player. Continue reading »

A DIFFERENT KIND OF 2011 LIST FROM MICHIEL DEKKER (THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT)

 Listmania  3 Responses »
Jan 022012
 

We’re big fans of The Monolith Deathcult, and we’ve written about them repeatedly over the last two years. Most recently, Andy Synn included them in a post called “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King”, contrasting “the electrifying, eclectic, and downright esoteric bludgeoning of” their album Trivmverate with the puzzling Ilud Divinum Insanus: “Unlike Morbid Angel’s most recent offering, this actually fuses a brilliant variety of techno-industrial elements and symphonic excess onto a chassis of pulverising death metal utterly seamlessly, making a whole that is far, far greater than the sum of its parts.”

Andy also wrote a SYNN REPORT about their discography, and last March I had the pleasure of interviewing the band’s guitarist/lyricist/backing vocalist Michiel Dekker (published here), who is also a high school history teacher. TMDC have been painstakingly writing and recording a new album called Tetragrammaton — almost two years have passed since the band’s last release, The White Crematorium 2.0 — and the interview provided a few insights into the typically fascinating lyrical subjects of the new album.

So far, the only lasting taste of the music from the new album is a track called “Aslimu!!! — All Slain Those Who Brought Down Our Highly Respected Symbols To The Lower Status Of The Barren Earth”, which was released last February, and can still be heard HERE. I’ve also had the privilege of listening to unfinished demo versions of a few more songs, which has only made me eager for more. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Tetragrammaton will be released in 2012 — it’s certainly one of my most anticipated albums for this new year.

All of this is by way of introduction to the real point of this post. As part of our year-end Listmania series, I asked Michiel Dekker if he would give us a list of the best albums he heard in 2011. Instead of that, I got something perhaps more interesting. Continue reading »

THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING

 Uncategorized  23 Responses »
Nov 222011
 

(Andy Synn wrote the following opinion piece.  If we don’t get some comments on this one, I’ll be quite surprised. Andy’s got some questions at the end, and we’d love to hear your answers.)

Here’s a question that’s been on my mind for a while now; what do we do when our heroes let us down? What happens when the bands we love go off the boil, make weird creative decisions, or just simply move away from playing the music for which we fell in love with them?

Music is an intensely emotional topic, and one which promotes a peculiar kind of loyalty to develop in those of us who love it deeply. As metal fans in particular, we seem to embody the very extremes of this trait; treat us well and we will die for you, cross us and our wrath and enmity shall be eternal. Indeed, once a certain line is crossed it’s very common to see a band written off as “dead” by any number of their former fans.

Most recently, however, I’ve been trying to take positive steps when confronted with this situation. Rather than entering into either a) a defensive flame war on behalf of our fallen heroes, or b) seizing on the opportunity in order to heap my own well-earned scorn on the victims of this public derision, I have instead been taking the fall of our chosen heroes to promote potential successors who are ready and waiting to step up and take on the mantle.

This does, however, raise one further issue: to what extent we, as metal fans, are willing to accept our heroes being replaced and (if that is the case) do we actually always have one eye out for the Next Big Thing – not the one who’ll necessarily sell the records and get the airplay, but the one who will step into the well-worn shoes of our heroes once they have gone to the sacred feasting halls of Valhalla?

Now 3 particular albums/events inspired these thoughts recently… Continue reading »

OH FUCK! THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT PUT UP A NEW TRACK!

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
May 222011
 

If I’d just waited five more minutes before putting up that last post I’d have seen the news leak that one of our favorite modern metal bands — The Monolith Deathcult — has an in-process song that can be snooped on SoundCloud. The title (or at least the working title) is “HWA”.

There’s a note beneath the SoundCloud player which says this: “not finished, need some serious finetuning and extra lyrics.” Fair enough, but goddamn, this is sounding damned sweet.

The song may not be up there for much longer, so TMDC fans, check out this shit without delay. And for anyone new to TMDC, you can read more in Andy Synn’s SYNN REPORT about the band or our interview of TMDC mastermind Michiel Dekker (here).

HWA by TMDCHQ

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 8: THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT

 Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT  44 Responses »
Mar 162011
 

Yesterday we posted an interview with Michiel Dekker of The Monolith Deathcult. Today, our UK contributor Andy Synn, who apparently writes as fast as a peregrine falcon can fly, prepared this companion retrospective in his latest edition of THE SYNN REPORT.

In order to keep up a bit of consistency on the site, I’ve shuffled The Monolith Deathcult up a few notches in my list of bands, so as to best take advantage of Islander’s interview with band main-man Michiel Dekker. Rest assured that the next Synn Report will finally get me back on track with the band I have been wanting to address for several weeks now!

Stormtroopers of avant-garde death metal, The Monolith Deathcult originally formed in 2002 under the moniker “Monolith” before switching to the far more verbose and distinctive title they operate under today. Fusing brutal, technical death metal with grandiose symphonic sounds, industrial strength electronics and a historically focussed lyrical bent, the band have thus far crafted three albums of devastating yet artistically complex death metal.

Eschewing the “more for more’s sake” attitude of speed and technicality so prevalent in death metal, TMDC chose to step sideways, incorporating and exploring new ideas, more twisted song-structures and an array of extraneous instrumentation into their sonic sculptures. Less of a “progressive” band than they are an “experimental” one, TMDC’s main goal appears to be the stretching of traditional death metal boundaries to, and perhaps even beyond, their breaking point. (more after the jump, including music . . .) Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MICHIEL DEKKER (THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT)

 Interviews  11 Responses »
Mar 152011
 

On the last day of February, we included a brand new song from The Monolith Deathcult in one of our MISCELANNY posts. For us, it was a better-late-than-never introduction to the music of this Dutch band — and that new song continues to be obliteratingly good. You can read the post and hear the song at this location.

That post led to the chance for us to conduct an e-mail interview with Michiel Dekker, the band’s mastermind (and its vocalist/lyricist/guitarist). To prepare for the interview, we browsed TMDC’s Facebook page to get better educated about the band’s latest news, and discovered that it’s one of the more entertaining band pages we’ve yet come across, due to Michiel’s literate, sometimes cryptic, usually quite funny musings.

For example, we saw a poll he was conducting about whether the band’s next album should include any lyrics in Volapük (go here if you want to know what that language is). Other poll candidates included Esperanto and West Country English. There was also a comment about learning to play the saz.

TMDC is painstakingly preparing a new album, to be called Tetragrammaton (unless Michiel and his comrades change their minds). To get a few insights into that work and when it will be ready, and see Michiel deftly and amusingly handle my feeble attempts to ask some off-the-wall questions, follow along after the jump. (and we’ve got an eerily topical song for you, too . . .) Continue reading »

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