British liturgical death metallers Carcass has announced their return to North America this coming October and November alongside with death metal militants Obituary, abstract murder metal suspects Macabre, death and crushing grinding metallers Exhumed, and newcomers Noisem.
Surprisingly, the frontman of the extreme British death metal pioneers, Jeff Walker, had came lately to stand out while defending what is called Babymetal against metal elitists, or self-proclaimed purists of the genre. In his personal yet predominant statements against the “gimmick” label and revolting reviews that also target Swedish rockers Ghost.
Both presses, media and metal fans already got their stance by turning away to accept baby metal as a sub-genre, a musical style that only unified in 2010 when Japanese superstar Sakura Gakuin went viral with a video that mixed J-pop (abbreviation for Japanese pop) with heavy metal in a very school-ish and entertaining style for some, symbol of outrage and disgust to others.
One of the members of Ghost also quickly came to the refutation of such genre when interviewed at Sonisphere Festival. Ghost had performed live right after Babymetal had left the stage, claiming he enjoyed their performance yet with all the weirdness the act managed to fetch into their musical act, visually speaking.
On a personal side, and as an extreme metal fan, I might concede that both Babymetal and Ghost does not slightly catch my attention since they first came out. And I couldn’t be less concerned if by doing so, I am considering either an “elitist” or a “purist” among the masses, what really concerns me is my musical liking and not, by any means, the “fusion” that somehow seems to be successful for them. Slipknot did the same when they released their debut album back in 1999, the highly acclaimed self-titled album ‘Slipknot’ and metal fans from an older era were overwhelmed by their reception as they were not “metal enough” to stand out among the (back then) dying death metal scene.
Today, at least for me, I can evaluate Slipknot as a band that gathered an older and younger audience together, by combining brutal vibes into their unconventional sonority, which resulted in the revival of death metal per say, and the “fusion” of new blood into the metal scene (I am not saying I support the raising of metalcore, and deathcore, on the contrary).
As for Carcass, the band is ready to come back to the United States once again and they made sure to comment on the upcoming tour:
[blockquote cite=”Jeff Walker”]We thought it would be cool to go off the beaten track a bit and play some places that usually get overlooked. We figure some of the tumbleweeds needed blowing away. Pretty chuffed to have managed to get our pals Obituary to come along on these dates. As anyone who has seen them recently will testify they’re tearing it up live nowadays![/blockquote]
Obituary, however, too desired to comment regarding the tour and their new album:
[blockquote cite=”John Tardy”]We’ve been waiting to announce this tour for weeks. Finally the cat is out of the bag. What an awesome tour for us and you fans. We are so STOKED!!! Our new album ‘Inked In Blood’ will be released on October 28th the same day as the first show at The Rock in Tucson AZ. Can you say album release party!!![/blockquote]
What can we expect when two veterans of the death metal scene get together in one single tour? Total destruction!
