One good turn deserves another. Yesterday we premiered a fascinating new album by Forest Thrall being released tomorrow by Death Prayer Records, and today we’re premiering another fascinating Death Prayer release, also hitting the streets tomorrow.
This one is The Bigotry of Purpose, the second full-length from the Oregonian melodic black metal band Grave Pilgrim, which follows the band’s self-titled debut album in 2021, and a 2022 EP named Molten Hands Reach West. Continue reading »
Following up their 2022 debut album Apparitions of the Golden Horned, the New England-based black metal band Forest Thrall are set to release a second album entitled Amidst Pines on September 1st via Death Prayer Records, and we’re happily premiering it in full today.
Like a trip through previously un-visited ancient woods, the album follows a continually turning path that reveals unexpected sights, not all of them of earthly origin. There is a “backwoods” and “folkloric” quality to some of the music’s ingredients, but it also rakes the senses like rusted blades. Sometimes it sounds primitive and sometimes surprisingly elegant, sometimes diabolically deranged and sometimes spellbinding. The one thing the music isn’t is mundane or dull. Continue reading »
Weald and Woe, once a solo project but now a complete quartet, are based in Boise, Idaho, but in their music they have more than one foot planted in Britain and Europe as they existed 1000 years ago, give or take. Their current label, Fiadh Productions, puts it well in describing the band’s new album For the Good of the Realm:
“Weald and Woe combines the majesty of the medieval era with the ferocity of classic black metal inspired by Obsequiae, Véhémence, Darkenhöld, Immortal, Ensiferum and many others….
“The new full-length is both dreamy and intense, capturing bygone eras of courtly love and epic battles. The band’s music walks a fine line between triumphant and sophisticated choruses balanced with frigid, breakneck riffing that paints an often elegant but bleak soundscape as the listener is transported to a different time. Swords not optional!” Continue reading »
(Andy Synn rekindles his long-standing love affair with Canada’s Cryptopsy)
It’s an unfortunate truism that life often forces us to make difficult choices.
Paper or plastic? Ketchup or mustard? Which one of your children would you save in a house fire…
Ok, so that last one is (thankfully) much more rare, but my point is that some decisions often seem impossible.
Case in point, next week sees the release of new albums from two of Death Metal’s heaviest hitters and techiest titans, aka Dying Fetus and Cryptopsy.
But chances are I’m only going to get chance to write about one of them prior to their shared release date.
Of course, the more perceptive amongst you may have already worked out which record I chose to cover, but I want you to know, all the same, that the decision wasn’t easy…
(What we have here is DGRs review of a new EP by Worm Shepherd, which was released about 10 days ago by Unique Leader Records.)
We’ve covered the east-coast deathcore crew Worm Shepherd before but we would be remiss not to check in with them again now. The band, who have remained something of a fascination over here, are now two albums deep into a career that has seen them ensconced firmly within the rafters of the Unique Leader core-cathedral and their latest addition, The Sleeping Sun, adds an EP to the mix.
Partially due to having undergone some lineup changes between releases but also in search of a broader artistic vision, the Worm Shepherd that appears here is a different beast than it had been previously – now down to to two members handing near-everything in their writing. However, one of the other reasons we check in with the band is that Worm Shepherd are something of a bellweather when it comes to the deathcore scene as it exists at any particular moment. Continue reading »
We are very happy once again to premiere music by Heads for the Dead. It’s the kind of happiness people feel when they wake up from supernatural nightmares and realize the monsters weren’t really eating your guts after all, or those who get thrills from the chills of horror movies in which the undead bare their rotten teeth and demons pierce the veil between worlds.
Horror in many forms is the bread and butter of this multinational death metal band, whose discography has swollen since 2018 to encompass an EP and three albums, and now there’s another EP shambling toward us, with a due date of September 1st via the venerable Pulverised Records.
As signified by its title — In the Absence of Faith — all the lyrics in these five tracks were inspired by horror-related movies “that deal with the concept of losing belief or getting challenged in extreme situations”. Continue reading »
(Here’s DGR‘s review of the comeback album by Finland’s Before the Dawn, which Napalm Records released at the end of June.)
When you follow music for a long time there are bands that after a while you figure are well and truly done — even though this is proving to be less of the case year by year — their logical conclusion reached or the fuel behind that particular project redirected into other forms.
When it came to Before The Dawn, it seemed like all of the energy driving the band had been redirected well into other directions when the group finally hung up its hat. Tuomas Saukkonen had multiple projects going at that point, and after Rise Of The Phoenix — which honestly is starting to feel more and more like invoking a curse, since naming your album something after a phoenix following a drastic lineup shift almost seems to doom future endeavors — closed up shop on nearly everything he had going and folded it into what would become Wolfheart.
However, after returning with Dawn Of Solace — another project that would’ve figured to be wrapped — in January of 2022, it seemed like the embers for all of those earlier projects hadn’t quite burned out like we thought. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn gazes into the abyss once more via the medium of the new album from Blut Aus Nord)
Why, you might ask, am I reviewing the new Blut Aus Nord album?
After all, you can already hear it for yourselves in full here, or simply wait until its official release tomorrow and form your own opinions.
Perhaps it’s because I just like to hear the (proverbial) sound of my own voice as I share my opinions online.
Perhaps it’s because I feel like I have something of interest to offer in my analysis that might help illuminate the album a little more.
Or perhaps it’s because, after listening to Disharmonium – Nahab so many times over the last few weeks this is the only way to purge these horrific visions from my mind.
One way to think of the Canadian band Augurium‘s new album Unearthly Will is as a tour through a potentially deadly wildlife refuge of arcane and even astral origins. It provides close encounters with a variety of musical beasts, some more extravagantly colorful than others (but still with teeth bared) and some more savagely hostile. By the end you might be relieved that you didn’t become a meal for the menagerie, yet electrified by all the close calls — and by the sweeping splendor.
Augurium‘s name is a Latin word for omen, and Omen was the name of the band’s 2017 debut EP, which was an omen of things to come but not entirely predictive. Adorned by an eye-catching cover of an intriguing young woman with hands ending in talons, and introduced by a sinister symphonic intro, it delivered a brand of death metal that was equal parts blistering, bludgeoning, and imperiously hellish, anchored by vicious tremolo-reliant riffing and berserk vocal monstrosity, and accented by melodies of cruel menace, pestilential terror, oppressive gloom, and demonic violence.
From there Augurium moved more in the direction of brutal death metal with their 2018 debut album Unhallowed Ascendance, but with more dynamism than is often found in that genre, even more fully embracing bombastic, thuggish grooves, the ugly distortion of eviscerating riffage, melodies of illness and agony, and bursts of obliterating mayhem. Yet still, the music had plenty of eerie, insidious, and sometimes surprising melodic elements that helped shroud it in an atmosphere that seemed genuinely infernal. Continue reading »
(Today we present DGR‘s review of the new album by the Finnish band Slow Fall, which was released a couple months ago.)
It is always toughest reviewing the straight-shooters. They have a tendency to gum up the brainworks factory when you least need them to. Most of the time it’s because those albums are generally enjoyable but you find yourself constantly stumbling about an empty maze searching for a better way to describe ‘why’ rather than just the part where the band happens to excel at pushing the buttons to unleash good brain chemicals.
While we tug at that same thread though, there is also that sensibility that some of those groups are scraping up against the glass ceiling of releasing something exceptional and you can already see the signs of it in your current subject, it just isn’t quite there yet.
The halls of those who are cramming up against that breakthrough point are increasingly packed, and it’s an area we’ve often trawled over the years as we dig through the underground. Sometimes we get lucky and get to watch a band shoot through to bigger things. As always though, it ties back into the part where you can see exactly what the band are doing at that particular moment in time. There’s no mystery to the blueprint they follow, only how well they execute it.
Finland’s Slow Fall are one such group, whose early-June release of Obsidian Waves is scraping up so hard against the pathway to greatness that you can almost hear the glass cracking. Straight-shooting as they may be, there’s always room for a little bit more keyboard-inflected melodeath in the world. Continue reading »