Quote: Anyone remember thrash-funk? It was this short lived trend among a few northern California metal bands for a while. Mordred were probably the best known example but there were a few others, and some bands like Death Angel even started incorporating slap-bass beats into their sound.
Don't forget Scatterbrain, which I think was made of Mordred members or something. But yeah, this is a dead genre. Dead dead dead.
Quote: Sometimes I get a little nostalgic for that brief time around the turn of the millennium when metal bands tried to "modernize" their sound through any number of affectations, usually in the area of production. I always associate it with Akkerhaugen Studio. Some were more successful at it than others: Zyklon's World ov Worms, Cadaver Inc's Discipline, Myrkskog's Deathmachine, and, arguably, Abigor's Satanized are some of the more interesting ones from that era. I suppose Dimmu's Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia and Emperor's IX Equilibrium fit here as well, though both of those felt like downward steps for the bands.
Of course it also gave us eternally dull bands like Sirius and Tidfall, who I'm betting nobody remembers. Rightfully.
The backlash to this stylistic experimentation, though, the "return to roots" organic grimefest that still goes on today, is pretty overdue for its own evolution. I wish more bands would take the approach of Spite Extreme Wing's Vltra and, rather than try to recreate a specific band's sound, channel some original and inspired ideas through the throwback aesthetic of their choice. I guess Horrendous and Binah were successful at this. Oh and Ataraxy, I love that Ataraxy. Maybe a lot of these OSDM revival bands are well on their way to finding their own voice.
I think there was "backlash" but I look at Blut Aus Nord as basically continuing that lineage of "modernized" black metal or whatever you want to term it. I think because there wasn't really a second wave of records from those particular bands in the mid 2000s that was worth half a shit, we basically forget Dodheimsgard, Fleurety, and the last December Wolves record (as examples). There hasn't been, for example, anyone demanding we revisit Diabolical Masquerade's Death's Design, and that was among the most critically acclaimed albums of 2001. So it sits there forgotten while people go on about how exciting bands doing something similar now are.
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