Back in the August ’07 issue of Decibel, Anthony Bartkewicz and I bravely assembled a list of the Top 20 Death Metal Guitarists of All Time, fearing (but also strangely looking forward to) the inevitable message board dissections of our choices. After eight months of sleeping on it, I still stand by our selections (though based on his performance on Origin’s forthcoming Antithesis LP, Paul Ryan should certainly move up a few notches). At least we know an enterprising Italian fellow simply known as “Jeckill” agrees with us. In fact, he (it’s gotta be a he, right?) dug our Top 20 enough to create the following “photo-mentary” soundtracked by Death’s “Jealousy.”

But if you’re still fuming over the list, don’t worry—“loadtha6pounder” deftly articulates your displeasure in the video comments section.

According to Pitchfork, Phil Elvrum is planning to go “hard core” on the upcoming Mount Eerie EP Black Wooden Ceiling Opening. The album art sort of looks like a black metal cover and Elvrum described the band’s current sound as “kind of like Black Metal but made of natural materials.” We’re not sure what to make of this after listening to the track streaming on Pitchfork (”Don’t Smoke”). It sounds like a giant Flaming Lips/ Queen/ Blur/ Weezer mash-up. Not hardcore or black metal in the least, and more in keeping with the fractured pop Elvrum championed on The Glow Pt. 2. One one hand, the term “black metal” has already been drained of its essential menaing, to the point where a band like Teeth of the Hydra can describe its sound as “1970s black metal” and pretend like it means something.

“Black metal” now exists as critical shorthand for “sad/ambient/haunting songs recorded on a 4-track in someone’s bedroom,” as in: “Hey, have you heard this new black metal song by Beth Orton?” On the other hand, Phil Elvrum comes from the same scene as folks like Agalloch and Wolves in the Throne Room and the stuff he’s been doing as Mount Eerie is creative and blissfully idiosyncratic and fucked-up. But I’m going to say that Elvrum actually came a little closer to the Platonic ideal of black metal while shifting recording aliases on the 2003 Microphones record Mount Eerie, a concept album about the universe with Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson acting as the voice of God. And yeah, it’s almost as hard to digest as that Liars record everyone hated so much.

MP3: The Microphones, “The Sun”

I’m still amazed that Tipper Gore and a group of Washington DC housewives actually sat down to review stuff like Mercyful Fate and Venom to suss out “objectionable content” when the PMRC was formed in the mid ’80s. What would the PMRC make of the Nunslaughter track the Deciblog linked to yesterday? The “Filthy Fifteen” list the PMRC came up with seems so demure by today’s standards. Except for “She Bop” — that’s just dirrrrrty. Hey, remember the mass hysteria that followed the Norwegian church burnings? Back in the ’80s and ’90s, the mere appearance of a pentagram in a public place was enough to get the local TV news crews out in full force. People do not scare as easily these days and our heroes all sound like pro atheletes during interviews. Screw that, it’s time to get evil:

Glen Benton

Chuck Schuldiner

Ihsahn

The special edition of the new Nunslaughter/ Mutilated Messiah split 7″ went on sale last week and sold out in three days.

You just missed your chance to own one of the nastiest records ever created.

Let’s qualify that a bit first. This is not the weirdest packaging we’ve ever seen — that honor probably goes to Throne of Blood’s out of print record I Hope You Fail Miserably And Never Accomplish Anything Ever Again, which featured molded latex and a glass eye and kind of looked like those Evil Dead special editions with the 3-D Necronomicon covers. And it’s not the grossest concept for a special edition, either, since deceased Japanese noise artist Koji Tano once put out a limited run (of a single copy) of one of his MSBR records packaged in a glass sheath filled with human sperm.

But this is easily a contender for the vilest packaging for a record in (relatively) wider release. 100 people just dropped $22 apiece for the honor of owning a record encased in a hard jacket made out of real maggots. To quote Kelly Bundy, “The mind wobbles.”

MP3: Nunslaughter, “Mother, Cunt, Whore”

Boris and Merzbow’s Sun Baked Snow Cave is still my favorite Boris record: totally rad cover art, lots of noise and effects, a mix that favors the low end and, overall, just a weird synthesis of two wildly different talents. And Pink — which I’ve owned and sold no less than four times — is still my least favorite, because I want to hear Boris doing the Melvins, not Boris doing Guitar Wolf. Decibel’s Brent Burton described it as “blistering blooz rock” in his eerily prescient review of the Boris/ Michio Kurihara collaboration Rainbow. Guess what? Boris sounds like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, but more blistering (and with more cowbell), on the new track “Statement.” The same team responsible for the pastoral, Borges-influenced video for 2005’s “A Bao A Qu” worked on this one, too, and the vibe is ’90s nostalgia all the way. Kind of “meh,” actually, but luckily for Boris, there’s always at least one person at Decibel who thinks the band can do no wrong.

Boris, “Statement”

Boris, “A Bao A Qu”

This week, Holland’s Displeased Records reissues the first two Master full-lengths: 1990’s Master and 1992’s modestly titled On the Seventh Day God Created… Master. Both are completely, um, re-mastered and each include bonus DVDs featuring a pair of bootleg quality (i.e. like, barely watchable once) live shows from each album’s particular era.

Call me a poseur, but I just never got into Master. Yeah, I know Master, uh, mastermind Paul Speckmann was a true progenitor of extreme metal via the unhinged thrash of early Master and the proto-death metal of Deathstrike, influencing both Terrorizer and Napalm Death on to grindy greatness. I can respect that. I could just never, you know, take the band too seriously. Maybe it’s because that—no matter how much of a protest song it may be—their death metal cover of the fucking “Pledge of Allegiance” (which also kicks off the self-titled record) still cracks me up:

Have you been reading the “Great Moments in Art History” series at Metal Inquisition? Here’s Sergeant D on the legendarily awful/awesome artwork that graced the cover of Obituary’s Slowly We Rot:

“The corpse of a lifeless hesher rotting in the street explicitly illustrates the album’s title. I like it when artists just get right to the point. There are no sociopolitical comments, it’s just a picture of a guy, rotting. Slowly, we assume.”

Total genius.

Lita Ford played guitar in the Runaways and opened for Sabbath in ‘82, but Joan Jett’s still on the road while she’s at home popping out Jim Gillette’s babies. Vh1 still plays “Close My Eyes Forever” a ton, of course, but sometimes it seems like Viacom’s contractual obligation to keeping Ozzy in the limelight is responsible for that. It’s easy to forget how successful Lita Ford was as a solo artist (especially after Sharon Osbourne stepped into the picture); don’t even pretend like the video for “Kiss Me Deadly” didn’t make you want to jerk off in a sock. Where’s the Shania Twain cover, and why haven’t any American Idol “rock” wannabes taken a crack at this one? Who knows, but how about Reel Big Fish, Damone (featuring cameo-whore Butch Walker) and sad sack Matt Nathanson instead? Thanks to the Deciblog, your weekend just got a whole lot cornier! Uh huh, it ain’t no big thing.

Reel Big Fish, “Kiss Me Deadly”

Damone w/ Butch Walker, “Kiss Me Deadly”

Matt Nathanson, “Kiss Me Deadly”