Margaret Renkl wrote two days ago in The New York Times, in an essay about poetry: “[I]sn’t our own impermanence the undisputed truth that lurks beneath all our fears and all our sorrows and even all our pleasures?… Carpe diem is the song the poets have ever sung, and it is our song, too”. And then she quotes lines from “The Kingfisher” by the late, great Mary Oliver: “I think this is / the prettiest world — so long as you don’t mind / a little dying.”

Ah, but as Hamlet mused, there’s the rub: There’s always the dying, and we know not what dreams may come in the sleep of death, or if any will. Which brings us to the musings of vocalist Daniel Neagoe that accompany the new album by the funeral doom masters Aphonic Threnody, The All Consuming Void:

“There is darkness everywhere, in the serenity of our thoughts, deep encompassed into our very beings, on the endless canvas of our dreams. There is darkness inside the soil beneath our feet and in the heavens above us. A fading, tenebrous gloom enshrouded in suffering and mist, in the coming of time to pass once more guiltless and ignorant. There is a void, all-consuming and ruthless, an emptiness which expands to the very core of our souls, imploding, thundering and monstrous. An impending prophecy that stands the sands of time.” Continue reading »

I’ve been flying along with Golden Bats now for about seven years now. Even though I’ve become somewhat acquainted by long distance with Geordie Stafford, the transplanted Australian (now living in Rome) who’s behind the project, I’ve never asked him where that name came from. I think it’s because I’d rather not know, and instead rely on imagination, picturing from the music an immense supernatural beast overhead, fearsome and frightening, a harbinger of doom, capable of blotting out the light, but radiating a chilling yet mesmerizing shine of its own.

In genre terms Golden Bats is a sludge-doom leviathan whose music tends to be titanically heavy, built upon mammoth riffs that are as corrosive as battery acid, but also steeped in a kind of gothic gloom, and so haunting in its laments that it threatens to split the heart even as it’s splintering bone. Capable of emotionally devastating manifestations of grief and pain as well as humongous heaviness, the music has repeatedly hit home with staggering force on multiple levels.

And now we have another new Golden Bats creation, one of the best yet. It’s a new EP with the mystifying name Upstairs Power Skull Cave Protection, and we’re premiering it now on the day of its release. Continue reading »