FYRNASK: “ELDIR NÓTT”

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Aug 132013
 

Like isolated wildflowers dotting a mountain meadow in early spring, one-man bands are scattered across the world of metal. Largely obscure, they chase their own visions or simply follow the foosteps of others to prove to themselves that they can. Creating music that more than a few handfuls of people want to hear is rare; in many cases, that isn’t even on the agenda.

I haven’t done anything like a  comprehensive study, but my sense is that there are more one-man projects in black metal than in most metal genres. Maybe it’s something about the purity of obscurity that seems to be one of black metal’s organizing principles — the fewer people who listen, the better. Or maybe it’s just easy enough to set the drum program on “blast” and let it run, while thrashing a repeating mass of tremolo chords and screaming like your throat is being slit, and dousing everything with distortion, of course.

There’s actually a lot to be said for that approach, if it’s filled with a genuine spirit of bloody rebellion, but it may not make the listener think twice after the initial adrenaline rush has spent itself. To create something that has a lasting impact? That requires a special talent, which is what Germany’s Fyrnask shows in spades on the band’s second album, Eldir Nótt. Continue reading »

PRESIDENT STREETWALKER: “PRESIDENT STREETWALKER” EP

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 132013
 

(DGR digs deep into the underground with this review of the first EP by a band who’ve named themselves President Streetwalker.)

Occasionally while surfing music you’ll come across a band right as they are getting their start. Such was the case with President Streetwalker, a group I found while investigating what another band I enjoyed (Khaozone) was up to. When I went to their page, I found a post about this band, only to discover that guys involved with one had split off to do this as well.

The group consists of vocalist Lucem Fero – who has been around quite a bit within the specific circle of Khaozone, Tyrant Of Death, his own solo projects, and this — and instrumentalist/vocalist Candy, who is responsible for all of the noise on top of the occasional vocal contribution. President Streetwalker pitch themselves as grind for the people, while being one of the most insanely noisy, chaotic groups out there and one that reaches far beyond the realms of their initially stated genre.

The Streetwalker EP is a four-track monster that begins with two songs that remain heavily in grind territory while incorporating some industrial elements — those are probably the closest I’ve ever heard a band come to intruding on The Amenta’s territory, something that I hadn’t thought possible. Continue reading »

LEPROUS: “COAL”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  4 Responses »
Aug 122013
 

(Well, we might as well start off the new week by confusing the shit out of people.  Here’s DGR’s review of the latest album by Norway’s Leprous, released in May 2013.)

Fair Warning: Tons of clean singing ahead, very few screams.

We in the metal community tend to use the phrases “prog” and “avante-garde” somewhat interchangeably to describe those situations in which the caveman side of the brain doesn’t fully grasp what is going on in the music. Either that or we call it “prog” when it’s soft music that we really like but don’t want to own up to it. Norway’s Leprous fall into the former camp, where even though things seem relatively straightforward at first glance, they’re really just a little off.

They have gained quite a bit of the spotlight since receiving Ihsahn’s blessing, as well as performing as his backing band for his discs and a bunch of shows. They’d been going for a good while before, but those developments coupled with the release of Bilateral really launched them onto a lot of radar screens.

Bilateral threw a lot of people for a loop. Nothing was really conventional outside of the instruments present. Every song had a strange, unnerving approach to it. When a song like “Restless” and its curveball of a music video was one of the most normal-sounding songs, who could imagine what oddities lay in the rest of the album? Bilateral was also incredibly difficult to describe and led to some stumbling examples of attempts to so – which proved amusing to watch.

Befitting their avante-garde/prog label, Leprous have returned with another album in the form of Coal filled to the brim with strange song arrangements, odd vocal approaches, and conventional instruments played in weird ways. Like Bilateral before it, Coal is incredibly difficult to describe. As before, the band have again deftly managed to avoid genrefication in any sense and have provided an experience that is all their own. Continue reading »

SATYRICON: “SATYRICON” (A REVIEW AND A NEW SONG — “OUR WORLD, IT RUMBLES TONIGHT”)

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
Aug 122013
 

(Andy Synn reviews the forthcoming, self-titled album by Norway’s Satyricon, and we also include a brand new song at the end of the review)

I can already tell that this is going to be a divisive record. Some will love it. Some will hate it. I don’t doubt that a few will simply have no interest in what it’s trying to say. And I doubt very much the band will care either way.

You see, their part is effectively done. Satyr and Frost have spent their time away from the limelight experimenting, exploring, and re-evaluating what they do. Branching out into other areas (both musical and non-musical) has clearly given them a chance to clear their minds and sharpen their thoughts. It’s no surprise then that they’ve chosen to inaugurate their return – and indeed, a new chapter in the tale of Satyricon – with a self-titled album.

And what an album it is. Challenging. Difficult. Resolutely uncommercial, yet subtly, insidiously compelling. Continue reading »

KARNAK: “THE CULT OF DEATH”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Aug 112013
 

I’ve been listening to our advance copy of this little five-song offering from Italy’s Karnak once or twice a week for the past month. Not like clockwork, because the urge strikes me at odd times, but the urge persists.

I had certain expectations about the EP before hearing it. The ghoulish red-and-black cover art by the talented Marco Hasmann (Fleshgod Apocalypse, Vile, Vomit The Soul); the description I saw of the band’s music: Aleister Crowley Death Metal; the references in the accompanying press release to Incantation, Nile, Morbid Angel, and Krisiun; the EP’s name: The Cult of Death — all of those signposts pointed to a certain kind of grisly, heavy-riffed, old-school death metal.

Given my tastes, I had a feeling it would be appealing if done right, but maybe nothing more than a kind of solid musical comfort food — old recipes that might or might not be prepared competently, and nothing more than that. But it turns out that Karnak have created something distinctive and surprising with those old-school ingredients, while maintaining a dominant aura of brutality. Continue reading »

DUNKELNACHT: “REVELATIO”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 092013
 

Before beginning this review of DunkelNacht’s forthcoming second album, Revelatio, even before listening to all of it, I did some research about the band. I listened to a few songs from their previous full-length (2010’s Atheist Desekration) and read about the assortment of demos and splits that preceded it. If you’ve come across any of that music, I’d advise you to just forget about it in considering Revelatio, because this album is a very different beast. And if DunkelNacht are new to you, then you’re in the perfectly receptive place.

I can’t see the future, and so I can’t say that Revelatio is the culmination of a musical journey by the band’s principal song-crafter Heimdall. Who knows where he may go next? But he’s certainly in a different place than the ambient black metal that appears to have been the band’s earliest motif, or the scathing yet melodic trem-blast assaults that marked what I’ve heard of the last album. What Revelatio represents is nothing less than an explosion of creative exuberance, an extravagant combination of diverse styles that defeats easy summarization.

Believe me, I tried to come up with a neat, one-sentence summing up. I thought about saying, “It’s like a three-way orgy among Belphegor, Fleshgod Apocalypse, and The Black Dahlia Murder,” but that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Actually, that’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Continue reading »

MUMAKIL: “FLIES WILL STARVE”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Aug 082013
 

(DGR reviews the latest album by Swiss grind marauders Mumakil.)

Mumakil are a band that I discovered late into their career. The group have been active since 2004, yet it took a split with a personal fave Misery Index for them to land on my radar. But, it is proof that splits can have some success in promoting bands because what Mumakil got up to during the six minutes they occupied on that split grabbed me, and I then found myself somewhat enamored with the group’s 2009 release Behold The Failure – especially because it partially served as my entry and tutorial to more death metal oriented grindcore, as opposed to the usual short blasts and Napalm Death that was my previous exposure.

It’s hard to believe that four years have passed since Behold The Failure; and you sound like a crazy person when trying to tell people that you’ve waited four years for another thirty-five minutes of music. However, Mumakil are a band who have fused death metal into grindcore without morphing into full-blown deathgrind, instead creating the sort of ugly, angry grind that is fueled entirely by blastbeats. When you name your band after the giant war elephant of Lord Of The Rings fame, it’s a signal that you will be a representation of that thing during a war charge. It’s going to be loud, brash, fast, and all too reckless. If you aren’t doing that, then you’ve done a disservice to the mumakil name.

Mumakil deal in spades with the sort of hammering grind mentioned above that just feels absolutely ugly. Everything about it sounds like a sweaty, roaring beast. It makes everything around it feel that way, so much so that one can only imagine a live show being a beer-fueled, swamping, swirling vortex. Continue reading »

CHIMAIRA: “CROWN OF PHANTOMS”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Aug 072013
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Chimaira.)

This album was really difficult for me to accept.

Chimaira have had their hooks in me since The Impossibility of Reason, back when that stupid “New Wave of American Metal” label was popular (or as I like to call it, the term for all the genuinely good metalcore that was more metal than core), and have had a sound that to me has been unequaled, uncompromising, and never imitated accurately.  Chimaira were a band with a mission, a real sense of what they wanted to do.  When they released Resurrection (one of those all-time favorite albums of mine), in an odd move unlike other bands Chimaira didn’t claim they were pushing the envelope, going to the next level, or any of that typical PR bullshit.  They openly stated Resurrection was their peak, and there was no use in trying to top it.  They just wanted to have fun.

We got The Infection, a far cry away from their thrashier inclinations but an excellent album that saw them experimenting.  However, when it came to The Age of Hell I think it was pretty obvious that the band as we’d known it were losing steam.  Original bassist Jim Lamarca and keyboardist/backup vocalist Chris Spicuzza left before the album was released due to simply getting tired of doing the band thing in the digital age of music, and this seemed ultimately to be what led to the departure of most of the rest of the band’s members, sans vocalist Mark Hunter.

You’d have to have been into these guys from the beginning to understand that this was a band that had a definitive lineup, a cohesion and persona all their own.  Dudes who’d played together since they were teenagers.  For all intents and purposes, this seemed to be the end for Chimaira, period. Continue reading »

TYRANT OF DEATH: “NUCLEAR NANOSECOND”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 072013
 

(DGR reviews the 2013 album by Tyrant of Death.)

Tyrant of Death is easily one of the most prolific guitar projects out there. At one point it seemed like every Wednesday we were posting something from it, and at one point the ToD project managed to crank out three albums in one year. The artist behind the project, multi-instrumentalist Alex Rise, has toned it down since then, but we still have managed to see at least one Tyrant Of Death project a year. Because of this, I have spent an inordinate amount of time with this project as well, having come across it around the time he released the Blood Lust disc.

It’s been an experience, as each release has improved upon the last, and it’s seemed like we all learned as he did. Compositions got more complex, guitars got more violent, and the drumming remained as insane as ever without moving into the realm of seeming inhuman.  I have found that across the Tyrant of Death catalog there are some very distinct moods, and they tend to create a pretty solid venn diagram of where future releases may land.

There’s the sort of loud, crushing, machine-like death metal insanity of discs like Dark Space and Macrocosmic Lunacy, albums that can at times sound like instrumental or heavily industrialized Anaal Nathrakh, and then there’s the moody, almost dirge-speed and heavily electronics-filled discs like General Bliss and Connect. A few discs have sat in between those, but overall this project tends to shift between one of those two, so you likely will know within the first song or two what sort of experience you’re going to be in for. Both approaches have worked incredibly well, alongside a very loud wall-of-sound production style that tends to scratch the itch for the part of me that worships at the altar of Strapping Young Lad’s Alien. Continue reading »

SIDIOUS: “ASCENSION TO THE THRONE OV SELF”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  5 Responses »
Aug 072013
 

(In this post Andy Synn reviews the new EP by London’s Sidious.)

Brutal intensity. Savage technicality. Pure, refined evil.

That should really be all you need to read. Go buy these UK blackened death metallers’ debut EP right now. You won’t regret it.

For those of you who want a little more information (I’ll call you “Cautious Cathys”) let me describe the Sidious sound to you.

Though the music is built around a visceral core of pure black metal poison, there’s also more than a hint of death metal in its punishing, mechanised rhythms, while the whole unholy package is wrapped in an aura of imperial symphonic melody. Ultimately, Ascension to the Throne ov Self is as majestic as it is misanthropic, as menacing as it is morbid, combining the best elements of both black and death metal with a sense of infernal ambition. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries