Genre: Black Metal, Crust

Darkthrone are one of the pioneering bands of the second wave of black metal. With three incredibly good albums (Transilvanian Hunger, A Blaze In The Northern Sky and Under a Funeral Moon) they helped shape the face of black metal to come. Wait why the hell am I telling you this. If you follow this blog of course you know who Darkthrone are.
Their later catalogue is sadly nowhere near as good as those three albums, however there are a few gems buried among the relative crap. A worthy ambassador of these oft-ignored records is The Cult Is Alive. At this time the band was combining black metal with liberal amounts of crust punk, which was always a fun listen. If you're not looking for anything deep or inaccessible, try this out. It's a great, catchy crusty black metal album because fuck you black metal elitists. Seriously this is such a cool combination. Black Metal-flavoured punk music with typical Darkthrone vocals is an imperious blend. If you thought black metal was already tongue-in-cheek in general, just check this out.

Also, lyrics are hilariously shit:

All right!
(I) first saw you at the graveyard
nice rack n' all
Creepy & lost in a fucked up head
aftershock dark woods and blurry lights
-"Graveyard Slut"
THRONE OF DARK

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Some punk is awesome. In fact, most punk is awesome. There are very few types of punk, sub-genres of punk, that are not, in fact, awesome. Do you know these genres? They are third-wave hardcore, a wave I just invented. Third-wave hardcore is DWEEDLE-JUN breakdown repeated 4 times a song. This one time, I was at a concert, and this local "hardcore" band played 13 breakdowns in 3 songs. I almost cried.

Thankfully, other genres of punk make up for this kind of ridiculous derivative pussy bullshit. Crust is just one of those genres, actually sharing more with metal than with punk itself, but still forming out of hardcore and thus identifying with punk. With Cursed's Chris Colohan and members of other infamous 90s hardcore bands (including a member of Left For Dead), you'd be pretty safe assuming this slays the fuck out of the girly sing-breakdown-scream crap they put out today. Well, you'd be right; this release is 8 songs of unstoppable brutality and then a (decently) disturbing outro track which is more or less skippable after the first time you hear it. Either way, get it right now because, just like Cursed, it destroys. Hard.

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