(DGR has detoured off most of our well-beaten paths to bring us his review of the latest offering from the Norwegian band Gothminister, which was released late last week by AFM Records.)

I recently crossed the twenty-year mark of following Norway’s Gothminister, the result of an initial missing of the musical bus years ago and then a hurricane-force tour through their specific music scene way back in 2004 – courtesy of a gentleman I used to play Twisted Metal 2 PC online with. Having been sent “The Holy One”, it was difficult to not get hooked on Gothminister‘s hybrid of dancy-electronics and industrial metal.

It’s a hybrid that has held on strong too, even throughout a good-sized handful of lineup shifts over the course of the band’s career. They’ve become a comfort-food band for me, the music not overwhelmingly challenging and metal enough to scare the ‘normies’ among us but otherwise digestible near-pop in its assault. Sing-song worthy with a march to them, Gothminister have been a group that – for me anyway – are a tremendous amount of fun in their embrace of camp and caricature.

Since we have a little bit of free space in the release calender there was a goblin-esque part of me that declared ‘what if you did manage to get them on to the front of the site?’, knowing full well they’d likely be spaced in between death metal heavy enough to collapse buildings or black metal sharp enough to scrape concrete smooth. “What if…,” said goblin proclaimed, “we just reviewed the group’s most recent release even though there’s been little to no mention of them before on the site?”

“But it’s a sequel album,” I said. “We’ve never even covered the first Pandemonium“. “Even more funny,” stated goblin-DGR, “because now people have to wrap their heads around the idea of Pandemonium II: Battle Of The Underworlds with little to no explanation or context of what preeeded it”

And alas, here we are. Continue reading »