Wednesday, July 16, 2008

New Black Metal bands on Earache?


Question: what does earache think of the more urban based black metal bands doing the rounds, as you signed one of them Anaal Nathrakth. Im wondering if you have been paying attention to any of the others eg the axis of predition or the howling wind for example, and do you think is selling point is that people can relate to it more than the corpsepainted masses? From:

Answer: We released Anaal Nathrakh because we are long-time friends with Neil of the label we licensed the titles from, Mordgrimm (and if ya didnt know, he started Cacophonous before that) and also because the 2 members were signed to Earche as their other grindcore band- Mistress -at around that time anyway, so it made sense.We have since stopped working with Mistress.Our releases of AN are available in USA only.
Earache over the years has had a love/hate relationship with the entire genre of Black Metal.We were in early, and had a good look at the original set of bands, Varg from Burzum made his only trip outside Norway to stay at my house even, and then we rather stupidly decided to ignore the genre completely for the next decade, standing by watching it grow into arguably the most extreme and highly popular genre in underground metal.You could say its the label's biggest mistake.
We still watch the BM scene, recent bands that have impressed us are Watain and The Shining, its hard for us to take the plunge and actually sign and work with bands in a scene we have basically shunned all this time.Though we will do so if the right band comes along, corpsepainted or not wouldnt matter to us, if the music was 'right'and contemporary and innovative.
As for Axis of Perdition- we find them a tad pretentious, if undeniably extreme.Any band that records using plastic spoons and mics up Fishfood containers to record eerie sounds - well, you have to applaud eh?
As for The Howling wind same thing.

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