(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Boston-based Replacire, which will be released by Season of Mist on March 17, 2017.)
How do you like your Death Metal? Old-School? New School? Proudly Uneducated?
How about Prog, how do you feel about that? Positive? Negative? Oddly ambivalent?
How about a band which mixes the pummelling intensity of Dying Fetus with the proggy eccentricity of Leprous, along with shades of both Yattering and The Faceless?
Sound good? Continue reading »
(TheMadIsraeli reviews the second album by the Ukrainian black metal band Devilish Art, independently released at the end of January.)
I really love it when black metal meets the harshness and chill of the heavier side of industrial. Khonsu has done a good job of this, and of course there are bands such as Mysticum. Mysticum suffers, though, from that same rythmic stagnation issue I mentioned in my recent Cirith Gorgor review. There still needs to be dynamism, interesting transitions, and tasteful incorporation to really drive the elements home together in a way that feels alive and organic.
Devilish Art’s Temple Of Desintegration is my first exposure to them. They have a debut, but I haven’t listened. Devilish Art play a very riffy style of black metal that reminds me a lot of Naglfar and Old Man’s Child mixed with harsh industrial and electronic elements in an impressive cohesion. Engaging in both its hybridization and in its pure, singular stylistic moments, this is an album in the black metal realm that’s going to stick with me. Continue reading »
Examples can be found in the annals of metal and rock of unusually long albums that either seemed to be calculated displays of pretentiousness or were simply the result of laziness, with a lack of care and focus producing an experience destined to defeat its listeners through an attack of tedium. In the same ways, some books have been written that were so rambling, self-indulgent, and bloated that only students forced to read them in a class could claim the dubious distinction of reaching the end.
But some long works of music and literature earn the demands they place on our time; the length feels necessary, not only because the inspirations of the artists genuinely demanded it, but also because the pleasure of the experience for listeners and readers would have been materially diminished with anything less.
And that brings us to the music of Winter, the new album by FEN that it’s our pleasure to bring you today in advance of its March 10 release by Aural Music/Code666. Continue reading »
After a series of well-received shorter releases, Atlanta’s Death of Kings will be releasing their debut album Kneel Before None later this year on CD, with a vinyl pressing to follow. But before we get to that point, Boris Records will be bringing us a Death of Kings single on March 31, and we’ve got the premiere of its title track for you today: “Hell Comes To Life“.
Truer words were never spoken, because this song is explosively hellish, in all the best ways. It’s the kind of turbocharged, obliterating thrash ferocity that may make you want to destroy things, while it’s destroying you. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Boston’s Junius, followed by a full music stream.)
One thing I’ve observed over the years is how often people conflate the statement “I don’t like this” with the judgement that “this isn’t good”.
Sometimes it means that someone has decided that just because they don’t like something, that means it can’t be good… but it also often means that people get offended when you say you don’t like something, because they immediately think you’re saying it isn’t any good.
Which, obviously, isn’t necessarily the case.
Why am I saying all this? Well, it’s because even though I definitely do like this album (a lot), I don’t quite like it as much as 2011’s Reports from the Threshold of Death.
But… that doesn’t mean it isn’t just as good. Continue reading »
(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new EP by the Dutch black metal band Cirith Gorgor.)
I’m really picky when it comes to black metal as of late. I mean, I’ve always been picky, very specific about what I like to hear in any sub-genre of metal, and I have my own views about what I think works and doesn’t work musically. I’ve been on an avant-garde and progressive kick in regard to the blackened arts lately, but I also immensely enjoy straight melodic black metal that’s just fucking belligerent and relentless. Naglfar, Old Man’s Child, and Nordjevel are common staples in my black metal listening, when it’s not Dark Fortress, Khonsu, or most recently Lorn (whose new album I reviewed here).
Cirith Gorgor, Dutch blackened legionnaires, are damned good at writing scorching melodic black metal that provokes windmills and whiplash while knowing how to incorporate great, technically inclined, layered riffing that evokes that arcane sense of mystique that black metal has really leaned toward in the last few years. Continue reading »
We are very pleased to bring you a full streaming premiere of Atra Lumen, the third album by the satanic French metal band Corpus Diavolis. It will be released by ATMF on April 6 of this year.
Making music that has the feeling of ritual has become one of the traditions of black metal, at least within certain circles of the black arts, and Atra Lumen has that feeling. But not all ritualistic music is alike. Where some black metal might conjure images of cavorting witchery around a woodland bonfire or huddled figures drawing blood in the glimmering candlelight of a crypt, Atra Lumen brings to the mind’s eye the ominous grandeur and majestic might of a great ceremony of praise and summoning beneath the high vault of a gothic cathedral, a ceremony surrounded by the tangible presence of death. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn combines reviews of three 2017 albums by German metal bands.)
You know who’ve been absolutely killing it over the last few years? The Germans. Those guys (and gals) definitely know their Metal. From the Thrash to the Prog to the Black to the Death… and every permutation in between… our Germanic brothers and sisters have produced a significant number of my favourite albums over the last couple of years.
And, so far, it looks like 2017 is going to be no different, as the year has already seen a number of high-quality releases from across the metallic spectrum, some of which I’m highlighting here today, and some more of which I’m going to bring you in the next week or so.
So, let us begin, shall we? Continue reading »
(We present Andy Synn’s review of the new album by Portugal’s The Ominous Circle.)
Let’s be clear about one thing straight away. As band names go, “The Ominous Circle” is… not great.
Oh, it could undoubtedly be worse, and I’m sure that, when growled with sufficient gravitas from the stage, it probably sounds nice and evil, but when you consider that other, equally valid names might be “The Terrible Triangle” or “The Sinister Parallelogram”, well…
But, as the saying goes, a rose by any other name would still be as horrifically heavy, and I’ll be damned if these guys don’t deliver the goods on Appalling Ascension. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn reviews the wonderful new album by Violet Cold.)
The phenomenon of the “one-man Black Metal band” is certainly an interesting one.
On the one hand it really does mean that the band’s music will always be the product of a singular creative voice, and often results in said band maintaining a highly prolific writing/recording schedule, as there’s no need to arrange multiple schedules or to balance the writing process among a number of competing ideas.
But just because you CAN string together some hissy riffs, programmed blastbeats, and low-fi vocals about hating the world into a semblance of a song, doesn’t mean that you SHOULD, and just because you *love* Black Metal it doesn’t mean that you have anything original or interesting to offer the genre.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some truly phenomenal examples out there of solitary artists who possess the necessary vision and distinctive voice to stand out from the pack – such as Leviathan, Infestus, and The Clearing Path, to name but a few – but, by and large, the relative ease with which anyone can put together their own “one-man Black Metal band” has led to a glut of mediocre albums and EPs which do little more than recycle the same old sounds and the same old stories.
And then… there’s Violet Cold. Continue reading »