Cosmic Death “Universal Downfall” album review

Snagged Cosmic Death’s Bandcamp header because it looked rad.

Quiet down now, class, quiet down! I know I have a sporatic uploading time and I’m trying my hardest to fix it. I now break my silence with an actual music review, rather than a short-winded article. If that doesn’t make you happy, I don’t know what will.
Surfing the internet realm for new bands usually leads me to some interesting things (well, a lot of really shitty things before I find the good stuff). Luckily, I ran across some good ole Cali hardcore that’s worth checking out. Cosmic Death hails from San Diego and they know how to rip.

---

---

I’ll say this, Cosmic Death is nothing strictly unique, though I don’t mean that in a bad way. They’re kind of your typical metallic hardcore band, but they do the job really well. So if you’re looking for the next level of tech savvy djent death metal tunes, look elsewhere.Today, we’ll be looking at their release “Universal Downfall” which was released back in August.

---

---

Really solid, heavy guitar tone? Check. Thudding background bass guitar? Check. D-beats? Check. Grunting and vocal shredding screams? Check. They’ve got all of the necessary ingredients for a well-rounded metallic hardcore sound. The music they’ve put together sounds like time was put into it, so nothing sounds elementary level. I like that because a lot of modern hardcore bands sound like they don’t put much effort into writing music nowadays (unfortunately, the scene still eats it up). Another thing that jumps out at me is that every now and again you’ll hear a vocal style that reminds me of Spazz (followers of the hardcore/crust/etc scenes will know who I’m talking about. That’s super entertaining to hear.

---

---

---

---

Is Cosmic Death from San Diego worth investing your time on? I’d say yes. Metallic hardcore is a tedious genre, but I really enjoy that they’ve thrown a lot of the hardcore punk ethos into it. For a measly 5 buxxx, you can download the album straight from their bandcamp page. Or hit them up on Facebook, hopefully they deal in physical wares as well.

Cosmic Death on Bandcamp: http://cosmicdeath.bandcamp.com

Cosmic Death on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Cosmicdeath760

Mastodon has found themselves in a media frenzy with their new music video. What do you think?

Brann Dailor of Mastodon finds himself the target of negative comments since the release of the music video for the song titled “The Motherload“. There have been claims that Mastodon have represented sexist imagery through the music video, which features a plethora of women who are twerking.

In an interview with Loudwire, Dailor states “All those videos from the early ‘90s had that same look: some kind of esoteric imagery, sort of out of focus, something creepy or weird. Marilyn Manson, Metallica, Nirvana, they all had the same kind of look to their videos. We wanted to do that, and I guess I thought that maybe people would be concerned that it wasn’t very imaginative if it was some kind of sh—y ‘90s video. Then all of a sudden, twerking started happening, and it kind of went from there. I just wanted to make something that was bizarre—that would confuse people. I also thought to myself, what’s the most bizarre thing, or what’s something people would say completely does not belong in a Mastodon video? And the twerking was sort of what I came up with” (Source: http://loudwire.com/mastodon-brann-dailor-defends-twerk-heavy-the-motherload-video-sexist-allegations/)

What do you think about these allegations? I think that people are taking this way too seriously. Twerking has been all over the media, from pop and country stars to hip-hop and rap. I think the controversy comes because Mastodon happens to be a heavy metal band. All in all, people have thin skin and need to worry about larger problems.

Feel free to leave a comment letting me know how you responded to these allegations. I’m curious to see what the metal community thinks of this. Twerking and metal, who would’ve thought that these two things would create such a situation.