(We present Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Norwegian black meal band 1349, which will be released on October 18th by Season of Mist.)
It’s been well-documented, on several occasions, that my favourite 1349 album is 2010’s Demonoir.
As you can imagine then, I was particularly excited when it was revealed that the band’s new album (released next Friday) was a pseudo-sequel (or is it a prequel?) to that hallowed record.
The only question is, could it be as good? Continue reading »
(TheMadIsraeli introduces our premiere of the new EP by the Norwegian band Fleshmeadow, which will be released via Bandcamp on October 11th.)
I try to avoid hyperbolic statements about how a new or new-ish band to the scene are paving the way for their style or how they’re the sickest fucking thing I’ve heard in forever, but Fleshmeadow are one of those bands to me.
I reviewed and we premiered the band’s debut album Umbra back in 2016‘s final days, and it was one of my favorite records that came out that year. Their uncanny mastery of technical black metal mixed with touches of ritualistic death metal and a bit of deathgrind really hit a note in my soul that screamed with feral ecstasy. I’ve listened to Umbra regularly since I discovered it and have eagerly awaited what I would hear next from these blasphemous Norwegian carnage mongers. Continue reading »
(We present Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Norwegian band Solstorm, released on October 4th.)
There is a pronounced tendency, in art, in literature, in cinema, to treat the apocalypse (and its aftermath) as something dramatic and thrilling. Something equally capable of generating excitement as it is terror.
But the terrible truth is that the end of all things… is just that. An ending. A time for, if nothing else, looking back on what has come before, because there is no tomorrow.
This is something that Solstorm first captured on their debut, self-titled album, way back in 2013, and which they return to here, on the succinctly-titled II. Continue reading »
(This is the third and final subpart of a fourth installment in DGR’s effort to catch up on reviews of 2019 releases he wants to recommend, with this 3-part fourth post devoted to melodic death metal. Today the subject is the third full-length by the Swedish band To Dust, which was released in March of this year.)
The presence here of To Dust comes courtesy of the random-band button at Metal-Archives, which has provided me with quite a few gems and discoveries over the years. I’ve gained a habit of just slamming on that button while on lunch break at work, with the endless flood of metal bands providing multiple cocked eyebrows in the form of ‘that looks interesting’ to ‘holy shit, are you kidding me? that qualifies here?’. To Dust were very much the former — even though their profile photo on that site is hilariously out of date.
For some reason the title of their latest album, False God Of Death, caught my eye, and the simply stated cover art somewhat sealed the deal, though I’d be bullshitting you if I denied that their being a melodeath band didn’t help give the group a boost. As stated before, although tech-death has become a comfort food, melodeath has become my bread-and-butter genre to enjoy.
False God Of Death was released all the way back at the tail end of March and bears a lot of the hallmarks of the melodeath genre: grand keyboard swells, hefty two-step-driven guitar work, and a snarling vocalist hovering in the mid-high range whose vocal delivery is as percussive as their drummer is. Continue reading »
(This is the second subpart of a fourth installment in DGR’s effort to catch up on reviews of 2019 releases he wants to recommend, with this 3-part fourth post devoted to melodic death metal. Today the subject is the debut full-length by the German band Fading Aeon, which was released on July 5th.)
At five songs and over forty minutes of material — with the Bandcamp download including an instrumental version of the title song if you really want to stretch — it was initially hard to place what exactly Fading Aeon’s A Warriors Tale was going to sound like. A Warrior’s Tale was released on the group’s Bandcamp in July, but became a victim of circumstance on my end and thus became a late-in-the-year discovery — one of the longer waits of any of these groups to become part of this review round up.
The three-piece could have been any number of things, with song lengths that stretched well into the nine-minute range, although their album art and logo suggested they probably weren’t a doom band. With a name like A Warrior’s Tale, my best guess would’ve been the sort of keyboard-and-guitar-interplay-heavy, folk-melodeath of a group like Wintersun. I seem to find one band every year that is really good that also really loves that particular slice of the melodeath scene and has absorbed heavy influence from it.
After a lot of listens to A Warrior’s Tale I can say that I was partly right, as Fading Aeon are an epic melodeath band, heavy on the keys and long song lengths — but not so reliant on speed as one might expect, instead favoring an approach that makes this trio sound massive, and with a pleasant surprise on the vocal front to boot. Continue reading »
(This is Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Arizona death metal band Gatecreeper, which has just been released by Relapse Records.)
I’ve been making my way through the Will Forte-led comedy/drama (dramedy?) series The Last Man On Earth recently, having missed out on it when it first aired.
This has very little to do with Gatecreeper, to be entirely honest, except to allow me to say that Deserted continues to prove that Death Metal is still “alive in Tucson”. Continue reading »
Archons
(DGR turned in a surprise 4th installment in his effort to catch up with reviews of 2019 releases after a personal hiatus. The first 3 installments are here, here, and here. However, our beleaguered editor (me) decided to cut this 4th installment into 3 parts, focusing on one album per day, beginning with this review of the comeback album by Archons.)
Hey, did you guys catch when the previous collection of these reviews was referred to as part three of three?
Ha. Oops.
In all seriousness this last piece is it. After this, I’m caught up, and for that some thanks are in order. Even though life derailed me hard for a moment and this review archive for the longest time held a title of ‘Review Archive Jan-Feb’, ever-expanding and at one point holding twenty-two releases that I had hoped to look at, I was finally able to get this done thanks in large part to the other writers on this site being understanding enough to pick up some of my slack, including reviewing releases that are pretty firmly in the ‘DGR wheelhouse’.
This collection absorbed releases throughout the year, and thanks to the rest of the crew for picking up on bigger releases that I would’ve wanted to talk about like Wormed or Hate, I was able to knuckle up and tackle these lesser-known bands and finally be done.
Just in time for stuff like In Mourning and Insomnium to hit…whoops. Continue reading »
We’re calling this a premiere, but that’s not strictly true. It’s more like a wake-up call to people who might have missed the album we’re streaming below, and an alert to both old and new fans that the record is being released today on CD for the first time by ATMF.
The album in question is Entropic Increase From The Omega Aeon, the second full-length by the formidable Chilean black metal band Xul ov Kvlten, which was first released as a digital download this past January. As one of the late-comers to the album, but now having become immersed in it, I am not a bit surprised that ATMF picked it up for a physical release. Continue reading »
Cognizance
(Andy Synn again turns his attention to albums released by bands from the UK, and this time has provided reviews of new releases by Cognizance, PSOTY, and Torpor.)
You may have noticed DGR’s sly little dig at me in Part 1 of his recent round-up series last week and, rest assured, there will be repercussions. Terrible, terrible repercussions.
That being said, it’s good that he’s catching a few things that slip through my net as, no matter how hard I try, there’s no way I can cover absolutely every album and artist coming out of the UK scene that’s worth writing about.
In today’s column you’ll find my thoughts on a highly-anticipated, and understandably hyped, helping of razor-sharp Tech-Death, some brilliantly melodic, emphatically emotive Post-Metal, and a grim and gritty slab of suffocating Sludge, each of which is well worth checking out if any of those genres is your particular cup of tea (or whatever your daytime beverage of choice is). Continue reading »
(This is the final installment by TheMadIsraeli of a series devoted to a retrospective chronological analysis of the discography of Slayer. Links to all preceding segments of the series are at the end of the writing.)
So here we are, the conclusion.
Ultimately, I gotta be honest, I still love this band. Despite, in hindsight, the inconsistency of a catalogue I used to think was perfect, the attitude, the envelope-pushing nature of their early material, their contributions to riff-craft on the guitar front of metal, are all things I can’t let go of and can’t dismiss as anything other than extraordinary. They’ve been such an influence on extreme metal, a pervasive one, that I feel like almost all the bands I’ve loved and a lot of my favorite albums were influenced by them, more or less heavily. Continue reading »