(Grant Skelton wrote this round-up of recommended new music.)
WITCHCRAFT
On top of what’s been an already amazing year for doom releases, 2016 brings with it the release of Witchcraft’s new album Nucleus, which will be available January 15 on Nuclear Blast Records. In advance of the album’s release, the first single “The Outcast” is available for streaming below. Continue reading »
(NCS writer Andy Synn has returned from Oslo’s Inferno Festival, held on March 27-30, 2013, and brings us a multi-part report of what he saw and heard, along with photos. Check out the previous installments here and here.)
Day 2 of the festival had fewer bands I was particularly dying to see, so I decided to check out some different acts I’d never seen before, so as to make better use of my time and to fulfil my journalistic pretensions a bit more.
We decided to have a later start to the day, arriving in time to see Aeternus hit the stage and introduce the crowd (if any introduction was needed) to their twisted take on the darker side of the black/death metal aesthetic. Drawing liberally from all the various spheres of the metallic spectrum, the group performed like a well-drilled musical machine, though their focus on slippery shifts between styles meant that their live stage presence was a little more unassuming than most.
Though the band last played here 11 years ago, there was very little rust to be found on them, as they bled their instruments dry of every hypnotic riff and spiralling, dissonant lead they could wring out of them. Continue reading »
(Here’s BadWolf’s review of the new album by Sweden’s Witchcraft, which is an Exception to our Rule.)
When I started writing for this website in 2010, I really believed in the title of this website—No Clean Singing. Looking back at that year, the best work in metal sat squarely on the extreme side of the spectrum (with a few exceptions, of course). Two years later, I’m in awe of the deluge of great retrospective metal releases coming out of the woodwork—much of its from relatively major labels. Case in point: diehard retro-metal band Witchcraft just released their fourth album, Legend, through Nuclear Blast.
So I suppose this is what certain other blogs would call vest metal—in the pejorative. And while this certainly has been the year for retroactive throwback acts, Witchcraft are in no way part of the femme-doom wave of 2012. Nor are they some sort of cash grab band trying to ride the coattails of Ghost. On the contrary—Witchcraft as a band go back nearly a decade.
I got into Witchcraft in 2007, immediately after the release of their third album, The Alchemist, which was my gateway into Pentagram, St Vitus, and other such baroque doom. After five years of silence, I thought they’d broken up—in fairness, the band go through lineup changes like a machinegun spits bullets. The only really consistent member is vocalist Magnus Pelander, who had gone on to record a solo record. The solo debut is still cooking, but Legend comes out of the oven with a sharper production job backing Pelander’s still-incredible voice through nine excellent tracks. Continue reading »