Oct 162019
 

 

I learned about Haustið just before Thanksgiving last year, thanks to a recommendation from Rennie of starkweather, who vividly compared Haustið’s then-latest demo to “a cross of Emanation and Wolok on a suicide mission”. When I wrote about that demo, Howling, the Sol Above, Nothing Below, I described “a surreal quality to the music as it flows along its twisting course, with outbursts of dark, dissonant, thorny permutations interwoven with soulful, gliding, and sinuous instrumental passages, both moody and mystical, that sometimes partake of traditions other than extreme metal”.

The next Haustið recording, released this past spring and also discussed here, was a two-track EP named Long Lost Ruins Cried their Black Soot. It was also a marvelously multifaceted experience, with both a “physically” powerful impact and a bitter and chilly atmosphere, delivering one changing experience after another.

Now we find ourselves in the midst of autumn, and Haustið (which is itself Icelandic for autumn, though it is the solo project of a Brazilian man who uses the name Draug), has prepared a new EP named Basking In Reflected Glory, and it’s our good fortune to premiere its tremendous title track today. Continue reading »

Oct 162019
 

 

Regular visitors to our site will be familiar with the French label Antiq Records, a label we’ve come to prize around here for exceptional releases by Grylle, Véhémence, Wÿntër Àrvń, Dorminn, and Créatures (to name a few). And now Antiq will be adding to that list with the striking debut album of the pagan black metal band Tan Kozh.

The name of the album is Lignages Oubliés, and it’s set for release on November 15th. Inspired by ancient Indo-European myths, the first part of the album (we’re told) “contains visions of the past and future wars and destruction, within the background the awakening of ancient pagan gods and the eternal turn of the wheel of time; the second part of the album is made of prayers addressed directly to ancient gods”.

What we have for you today is a stream of the album’s opening track, “Troisième Fonction“, which launches the first part of the record. Continue reading »

Oct 152019
 

 

In reviewing albums I usually avoid dropping the names of other bands as reference points, but in the case of the new record by San Diego’s Pissed Regardless, mentioning Ringworm, Integrity, No Warning, Darkest Hour, and label-mates Light This City is a good quick way of getting your head prepared for the album stream we’re presenting in advance of its October 18th release by Creator-Destructor. Just seeing those names all in one place is a significant tip-off to the variable ingredients Pissed Regardless have harnessed in Imperial Cult.

But it still probably won’t prepare you for just how crushing the album as a whole is, on multiple levels, or how electrifying it is to experience the band’s twists and turns as they take you through these ten tracks. Continue reading »

Oct 152019
 

 

I feel like there ought to be a death metal air raid siren that could be turned on when albums like Vultur’s Drowned in Gangrenous Blood are on the way, not so much as a warning (though some people probably should be warned so they can run for the hills) as it would be a rallying cry for addicts of thoroughly gruesome and brutally bludgeoning old school monstrosity. I can imagine the throngs coming on like the zombie hordes in World War Z.

This new album, which follows Vultur’s 2016 demo (Beak) and their 2018 debut album (Entangled in the Webs of Fear) really does display the kind of spirit and craftsmanship that is likely to cause slobbering hunger among fans of evil, diseased, and neck-wrecking death metal. These Hellenic hellraisers have learned their black art very well, as you’ll discover when you hear the track we’re premiering today in the run-up to the album’s October 31st release by Memento Mori. Continue reading »

Oct 142019
 

 

At the beginning of Unaussprechlichen Kulten‘s new album Teufelsbücher we hear a haunting piano melody and the swell of symphonic strings. The stateliness and solemnity of those moments is at odds with nearly everything else that comes after, and yet its mystifying grandeur is in keeping with the magnificence of the insanity that soon ensues and never really relents until the grandiose and sorcerous extravaganza of “Necromancy and Torment” brings the album to a close.

The six songs on Teufelsbücher are asylum dreams, hellish visions of menace and madness that also relentlessly challenge the listener’s own sanity. The ever-twisting-and-turning compositions are ecstatically exuberant and the performances technically bewildering. The music boils like an overheated cauldron of unchained creativity, un-tethered to trends and un-bowing to conventions. It’s as if the band, in the throes of a possession, succeeded in opening Pandora’s box, loosing upon the world, through the sounds of mutated death metal, a torrent of bat-winged and brazen evils, never to be sealed again. Continue reading »

Oct 142019
 

 

Diego Spezzoni‘s cover art for the new album by Nebrus seems tailor-made for the music. Meticulously rendered in the style of pointillism, it creates surreal visions of hellish creatures and moldering ruins, of glowering skies and crumbling columns, of burnt offerings on an altar wreathed in serpents, of foul sulphurous vapors and the dark forces they beckon forth. Dark Forces Reign is the name of the album, and dark forces reign in the music.

This is the third full-length by this Italian black metal duo — vocalist/lyricist Noctuaria, and  drummer/guitarist Mortifero (joined here by session bassist Sir VIII Coffins Mime) — and it will be released by Third I Rex on November 30th. What we have for you today is the premiere of a track named “π“, presented through a video that’s as spooky, as surreal, and as evil as the cover art — and the music displays all of those qualities too. Continue reading »

Oct 112019
 

 

As the title suggests, VI-Dantalion is the sixth album to be released by the Belgian band Slow (although the fourth album was separately released on three occasions in varying manifestations of sound). Now firmly ensconced in their own citadel of atmospheric funeral doom, Slow earn their name on Dantalion, but as you’re about to discover, the music is not only slow, it is shattering in the magnitude of its crushing emotional impact.

The means of discovery comes through our premiere of a track called “Géhenne“, which we present through a lyric video in advance of Dantalion’s release on November 8th by code666, a sublabel of Aural Music. Continue reading »

Oct 112019
 

 

With their self-titled debut EP released in 2014, the French band Mur (whose six-person line-up includes former members of Today is the Day, Glorior Belli, Mass Hysteria, Comity, and Four Question Marks) began feeling their way, searching for an identity for their music and beginning to establish one. When you listen to their new full-length record Brutalism, which will be released on October 25th by Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions, it becomes apparent that they have arrived, at a place where their confidence is strong and their identity (albeit a multi-faceted one) well-defined. It isn’t so much a sea-change in sound compared to the EP as it is a giant stride ahead on the path they began five years ago.

The album is a fascinating experience because it is such a dynamic one. It offers constant surprises, but does so without losing the bonds that forge all the experiences together into a whole, and without sacrificing the explosive, searing intensity that’s the main hallmark of the record. Today we’re presenting a new song from the album (“Third“) that in itself embodies dramatic change — as well as serving as a blazing example of just how devastatingly powerful Mur’s combination of hardcore and black metal can be. Continue reading »

Oct 102019
 

 

In March of this year Apathia Records released Espérer Sombrer, the debut album of the French band Vesperine. Through their integration of progressive, noise, and hardcore elements into a foundation of powerful post-metal, Vesperine created an experience that should appeal to fans of such bands as AmenRa, Cult Of Luna, Impure Wilhelmina, Neurosis, and Rosetta.

What we have for you today is a phenomenal video for one of the phenomenal songs on Espérer Sombrer, a track called “Nous, Si Photosensibles“. The combination of the surreal and visually arresting imagery and the emotionally shattering sounds makes for a sublime match, and provides an equally arresting reminder of Vesperine’s unnerving power. Continue reading »

Oct 102019
 

 

I first stumbled across the Swiss band Matterhorn in the spring of last year when they had two songs up for streaming in advance of Iron Bonehead‘s CD release of their debut album, Crass Cleansing, and came away very impressed. I had a tough time categorizing the music, describing it then as a stew of extremity that included elements of thrash, speed metal, punk, black metal, and death metal. I further wrote:

“The overall impact is electrifying, not merely because of the speed and explosive energy of the tracks, but also because of the band’s skill in shifting gears on a dime, which they do frequently. The intricacy of their movements and the songwriting skill on display here, coupled with their palpably feral ferocity, set this apart from the vast majority of debuts.”

Now, Crass Cleansing will be reissued on November 22nd by Redefining Darkness Records (U.S.) and Dying Victim Productions (Europe) on CD, and in a new vinyl edition that has been remixed and remastered. The new edition also includes two new bonus tracks (recorded live), as a sign of what the band have been working on for the second album. One of those bonus tracks (“Bydying”) surfaced in August, and today we’re premiering the other one. Continue reading »