#dark millennium

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The Dark Millennium of the United Arab Emirates

By NuclearVacuum - Middle East (orthographic projection).svg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7466795

A 'dark' period in history is typically one where there is a lack of any type of historical record once it had begun in an area. This historical record could just be archaeological remains such as pottery, stone tools, and burials, or a written record after the beginning of writing.

The area now known as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was first inhabited about 220,000 years ago when hominins first reached the area. Modern humans reached the area around 127,000 years ago through the 'Southern Corridor', or along a coastal migration routes between the narrow area of the Red Sea between Eastern Africa and the southern part of the Arab peninsula. This area would have been uninhabitable during the Last Glacial Maximum between 68,000 and 8000 BCE, which would have lowered global sea levels about 150 m from modern levels. This would have turned the Persian Gulf a 'broad valley with slow moving river systems and lakes', where hunter-gatherers would have lived, but left the UAE uninhabitable due to being too arid.

By Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC - https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/69015/united-arab-emirates, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29551

Around 8000 BCE, evidence of people living in the UAE returned to the area after the Holocene warming brought about the return of sea levels to modern levels. There have been about 60 population centers identified around this time so far. From this time frame, Arabian Bifacial and stone arrows, axe heads, and pottery belonging to the Ubaid cultures have been found, which show a connection between these settlements and those in Mesopotamia. There's also evidence of 'sophisticated flint tools, axes, spearheads and arrow heads by pastoralist people who also fished using both hooks and nets' found in Jebel Buhais, an extensive rocky outcrop near Madam in central Sharjah in the northeastern part of the UAE.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140196323000228

Around 4000 BCE, the evidence of the Arabian Bifacial/Ubaid period abruptly came to an end, a period marked by lakes lowering and dunes reoccuring in the area. This desertification and severe aridity pushed people out of the area west of the Hajar Mountains, resulting in nearly no human occupation of the west coast of the UAE while the east coast continued to show continuing human settlement. Even the spring at Jebel Buhais dried up in this time period, which resulted in a drastic decrease in the usage of a nearby necropolis.

By Gejuni - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45575554

An interesting and unique exception is a dugong bone mound, the dugong being a marine mammal related to manatees and Steller's sea cows, littered with jewelry and other artifacts dated to about 3500-3200 BCE found on Akab Island, east of Umm Al Quwain. The building is thought to have ritual or symbolic meaning as other sites of the type seem to have had.

Shortly after, around 3200 BCE, the Hafit, names for the site their beehive burials were found, began to migrate back into area, bringing the Dark Millennium to an end. They appear to have moved from the east side of the Hajar Mountains and had connections to Mesopotamia. They set up copper smelting and production, the first evidence of copper usage in southeastern Arabia.

[vinylspinning]

Brutality: Screams of Anguish (1993)

We're now so accustomed to a world in which all music can be sampled, if not "owned" (whatever that means anymore), via on-demand streaming services that I sometimes forget why I never heard this or that artist, back in the day.

I'll tell you why: because we actually had to BUY the fucking albums, that's why!

Brutality are a perfect case in point, being a secondary Floridian death metal band, the likes of which I've loved since the genre took shape in the early '90s, that simply didn't get a turn on my turntable because bigger names like Death, Obituary, and Morbid Angel were consuming my modest budget.

(In my defense, I flipped through several heavy metal reference books on my shelves and confirmed that Brutality were, in fact, omitted from ALL of them.)

Hailing from -- where else? -- sweltering Tampa, the group formed and recorded their first demo as Abomination in 1986; changed their name to Darkness in '87, then Brutality in '88, and cut four more demos followed by a pair of 7-inch singles, Sadistic and Hell on Earth, in '92.

Subsequently signed to Nuclear Blast, Scott Reigel (vocals), Don Gates (guitar), Jay Fernandez (guitar), Jeff Acres (bass/vocals), and Jim Coker (drums) then recorded their first full-length, Screams of Anguish, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

And, boy, am I glad I finally got my hands on this Svart Records reissue, which proved that nothing short of poor promotion and death metal market saturation stopped Brutality from reaching a wider audience.

Album standouts like "These Walls Shall Be Your Grave" and "Cries of the Forsaken" boast all the essential Floridian D.M. ingredients (savage roars, wicked crushing riffs, dive-bombing leads, plus blast-beats) set to an optimal balance of violence and technicality, judicious melodic content and devastating (natch!) brutality.

Oh, sure, to all of you extreme metal "deniers," it'll sound as chaotic and noisy as usual (see the relentless "Ceremonial Unearthing"), but trust me when I say these songs have, errrr ... class!

You just have to weather the storm on stellar tracks like "Septicemic Plague," "Crushed," and "Spawned Illusion" to appreciate their harmonic payoffs, usually over slower tempos, which I'd characterize as more musical than Morbid Angel, more complex than Obituary, but not as sophisticated as Death.

Unfortunately, Screams of Anguish, like many death metal LPs of the day, harbors a pair of unnecessary instrumental interludes -- synths for "Sympathy" and acoustic guitars for "Spirit World" -- but it is what it is.

1994 saw Brutality touring Europe with Swedish death metallers Hypocrisy and delivering their sophomore LP, When the Sky Turns Black, at which point line-up instability kicked in and the band eventually split following a third album, In Mourning, in '96.

So when you next find yourself taking the present day's universal access to music for granted, spare a thought to those of us who still remember the torment of monetary (and geographical) restrictions imposed in the days of physical music products.

Oh, the Brutality!

More Brutality: When the Sky Turns Black.

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Bolt Thrower - Dark Millennium

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Dark Millennium - Ashore the Celestial Burden (1992)

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song of the day for 11/24/17: Bolt Thrower- Dark Millennium

[vinylspinning]

Gorguts: Considered Dead (1991)

It’s ‘Silver and Gold’ week here on VinylSpinning, though I have no good reason for this undertaking other than a fast-accumulating pile of reissues pressed on these ‘precious’ colors and it’s time to bring them ‘out of the vault,’ so to speak ...

As I wrote in this old survey of the ‘Top Ten Canadian Metal Bands’ for Loudwire, Gorguts’ moniker did a disservice to one of Montréal’s most imaginative and respected heavy metal institutions; in Spinal Tap parlance, it seriously “understates the hugeness of the object.”

Vocalist/guitarist Luc Lemay originally founded Gorguts in the Rock Forest–Saint-Élie–Deauville arrondissement of Sherbrooke, in southern Quebec, before relocating to Montréal with second guitarist Sylvain Marcoux, bassist Eric Giguere, and drummer Stéphane Provencher.

The quartet’s first cassette demos date from 1989 and eventually drew the attention of Roadrunner Records, which set them on the death metal equivalent to the Yellow Brick Road down to Tampa, Florida’s Morrisound Studios to record ‘91’s Considered Dead with (who else?) producer Scott Burns.

And, though I hesitate to call music of such speed, precision, and sheer power ‘generic’ (too much skill and hard work are required to compose and perform it), even a dedicated fan like myself must admit that Gorguts’ sound was anything but groundbreaking, at this stage.

This would change drastically later on, but, for now, familiarity abounds: “... And Then Comes Lividity” (also the name of Gorguts’ third demo) is your classic, classical guitar intro, and modest efforts like the title track and “Drifting Remains” hew too closely to contemporary death metal standards.

Why, even the cryptic (like, literally ‘crypt’-ic) cover art was painted by death metal artist-in-residence Dan Seagrave -- see also Carnage, Dismember, Entombed, Hypocrisy, Morbid Angel, Pestilence, Suffocation, the list goes on and on.

But don’t sleep on more successful creations like “Stiff and Cold,” “Disincarnated,” and “Waste of Morality,” which exemplify Gorguts’ competent  alternating of double kick-drum sprints with doomy grinds, punctuated by memorable dissonant melodies and comparatively melodious solos.

Speaking of solos, journeyman James Murphy (Death, Cancer, Obituary, Testament, Disincarnate, etc.) contributes one to “Inoculated Life” and, in a reflection of the death metal scene’s camaraderie, Cannibal Corpse frontman Chris Barnes lends a grunt and growl to the word-inventing “Rottenatomy” and a couple more tracks.

After the album’s release, to mostly positive but rarely effusive reviews, Gorguts joined Cannibal Corpse and Atheist on the Blood, Guts, and Gore tour, and then got to work on their sophomore album, The Erosion of Sanity, which raised the band’s creative and technical bar to new heights.

Unfortunately, the album still didn’t sell well enough to extend the band’s deal with Roadrunner, but a persistent LeMay would revive Gorguts with a new line-up five years later, and shock the extreme metal world with the technical death metal watershed, Obscura. 

After that album, no would underestimate Gorguts based on their childishly grotesque moniker, ever again.

p.s. -- A few of these words (but no more than one or two) originated in my All-Music Guide review of Considered Dead.

More ‘90s Death Metal: Amorphis’ The Karelian Isthmus, At the Gates’ The Red in the Sky is Ours, Atheist’s Piece of Time, Autopsy's Severed Survival, Brutality's Screams of Anguish,Cannibal Corpse’s Tomb of the Mutilated, Carcass’ Heartwork, Carnage’s Dark Recollections, Comecon’s Converging Conspiracies, Cynic’s Focus, Dark Millennium’s Ashore the Celestial Burden, Dark Tranquillity’s The Gallery, Death’s Human, Deceased’s Fearless Undead Machines, Dismember’s Like an Everflowing Stream, Edge of Sanity’s Unorthodox, Entombed’s Clandestine, God Macabre’s The Winterlong, Grave's Into the Grave, Immolation’s Dawn of Possession, In Flames’ The Jester Race, Malevolent Creation’s Retribution, Massacra's Final Holocaust, Massacre’s From Beyond, Merciless’ The Treasures Within, Morbid Angel’s Altars of Madness, Morgoth’s Resurrection Absurd, Necrophobic’s The Nocturnal Silence, Nocturnus’ The Key, Obituary’s The End Complete, Pestilence’s Consuming Impulse, Sarcófago’s The Laws of Scourge, Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains, Suffocation’s Effigy of the Forgotten, Tiamat’s The Astral Sleep, Unleashed’s Where No Life Dwells.