Apr 192018
 

 

I’ve been meaning to do this for about a week, and finally found time. I came across all of the following music in the course of surveying new releases for a SEEN AND HEARD round-up here at our putrid site, and thought it would make sense to package them together for extra catastrophe.

The music ranges from catastrophic funeral doom to catastrophic death metal with a heavy doom component, to something doom-centric but less easily describable at the end. I arranged the music in a way that would provide a bit of back-and-forth flow, so your blood doesn’t completely congeal and your heart doesn’t completely slow to a stopping point.

While I was writing this I thought about Andy Synn telling me that he’d come across a metal forum in which NCS was criticized by one or more idiots people for concentrating on “mainstream” metal. Yeah, right. Mainstream this right up your bungholes:

ZEIT

I’ve written frequently about this German band, who’s usual stock-in-trade is an amalgam of sludge and black metal (and some other ingredients). But for their latest EP, null., they decided to give the funeral-doom treatment to two of their previously released songs, and I’ll be damned, it turns out they’re just as strong in this other genre as they are in their main line. Continue reading »

Dec 242014
 

 

Rumor has it there’s some holiday tomorrow, with lots of talk about happy and jolly. I’m not feeling it myself. I’m more in the mood for head wreckage. I found these new songs over the last 24 hours that do the job nicely — music that’s full of power and passion, and no joy.

DEVOURING STAR

Last month we had the pleasure of premiering (here) a new song by a Finnish horde named Devouring Star from their forthcoming debut album Through Lung and Heart, on the Daemon Worship label. Since then two more songs from the album have been revealed, the latest one just this morning. Austin Weber described the song we premiered as “an apocalyptic ode to true worshipers of the dark arts, teeming with sourness and bitter pain and delivering a bludgeoning and a sense of horror comparable to few.” The new song is no less decimating.

“The Dreaming Tombs” is an unmitigated onslaught of percussive hammer blows, howling riffs, and wretched vocal extremity. The music swirls like a cyclonic vortex, broken in places by a massive doom-drenched stomps. It’s bleak, black, brutally ferocious music that very effectively creates an atmosphere of calamity and collapse. Continue reading »