Those of you who read this blog regularly (anyone out there?) may have realized by now that I’m generally a sucker for anything heavy metal and Jewish.
And this one, dear readers, takes the cake. Meet Salem — the Israeli black metal act formed in 1985 under the auspicious title of Axe Metal. The musicians of Salem were electric pioneers in the budding Israeli heavy rock scene, and have managed to stay together for more than two decades despite rampant anti-Semitic record execs, a mail bomb scare in the 1980s and the general death of mainstream metal in the early 1990s.
Both Salem’s music and lyrics touch on different facets of Judaism, smashed through with the bloody spike of black metal of course. The band employs typical Middle Eastern sounds into its hard rock shell, and its key concept albums Kaddish (1994) and Collective Demise (2002) recall the horrors of the Holocaust.
Its seventh studio album, Playing God and Other Short Stories, will be released on Pulverised Records on April 3, 2010.
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