(Andy Synn gives his thoughts on the new Fuming Mouth album, out Friday)
To describe Last Day of Sun simply as a “post-cancer” album would be overly-reductive.
It’s more than just that, for sure.
But there’s no question that the knowledge of Fuming Mouth frontman Mark Whelan’s battle with, and recovery from, Acute Myeloid Leukemia definitely adds some extra thematic weight to the record’s metallic meditations on mortality and the fragility of existence.
(In this review DGR revisits an old favorite, the German band Distaste and their new album, released a few weeks ago by FDA Records.)
We’ve had a long history with Austria’s Distaste, as we’ve watched them evolve their form of blast-happy grindcore, relentlessly focused on short songs and straightforward hammering, to a blackened death-inspired group with a light sludge flavoring, to the current incarnation of the band obsessed with fury, hellfire, and portmanteaus of their chosen language.
Previously, Distaste had done pretty well for themselves with albums like Of Abyss-Hearts And Falsity and Black Age Of Nihil but they really started to come into their own along about the time of the Rotten Cold/Distaste split and the Todt EP. Adopting a strong guitar-lead segment did the group well, adding another element to the otherwise whirlwind chaos and well-spoken language of grindcore circle-pit throwdowns, and Deibel was a strong culmination of that. Continue reading »
Yesterday’s roundup was a very, very big one. With so much time on my hands this weekend, I planned to make today’s blackened roundup equally large, paying no attention to whether anyone would have the fortitude to go through a dozen entries yesterday and another dozen today.
When I woke up this morning I somewhat came to my senses and decided to cut this back from what I’d initially selected — providing seven recommendations instead of 12 — mainly because I didn’t think I’d have the time to get a dozen ready to go before I have to go. I hope to say something about the others in the near future.
PHANTOM WINTER (Germany)
I’m going to begin with a regrettably rare example of a great song presented through a great video, each one complementing the other. Continue reading »
Autopsy – photo by Nancy Reifert
Prepare for… a lot of sentences that begin “Prepare for….”
It’s a little way for me to say very little about what you’ll hear but without me feeling like I’ve done nothing to induce listening or to thank the bands.
The shorthand is necessary because the past week produced so damn much music I’d like to recommend, and because I got lots of suggestions from other people, including my compadres Andy Synn and DGR. Their picks and mine, which produced a mix of bigger bands and more obscure bands, are arranged here in alphabetical order by band name.
Prepare for… lots of twists and turns…. Continue reading »
The Australian band Hebephrenique chose a name that may contort the part of your brain responsible for making sense of letters and checking new words into the vocabulary library. We’ll make it easier, since we’ve already done a bit of research:
Hebephrenique seems to be the French word (without accent marks) for hebephrenic, which refers to a “disorganized” type of schizophrenia, one “typified by shallow and inappropriate emotional responses, foolish or bizarre behaviour, false beliefs (delusions), and false perceptions (hallucinations).” So says this source.
That this is what the band had in mind when they chose their name is guesswork on our part, but their debut EP Non Compos Mentis provides circumstantial evidence that we’re on the right track. Continue reading »
(In the following review our writer DGR takes a deep dive — a very deep dive — into the strange musical worlds created by the Dutch band Autarkh on their new album Emergent, which is set for release on November 10th by Season of Mist.)
One would suspect that a band like Autarkh are going to feature on heavy metal websites more due to their ethos of being as experimental and unapproachable as possible than their particular chosen instrument configuration. The wildly artistic group were founded on blurring multiple genre lines, and that includes the world of heavy metal, with large handfuls of other things – difficult to describe as they may be.
The group’s sophomore album Emergent walks further down that pathway, metal not just because the band like themselves a distorted guitar, or their history as being a branch budded off the tree that was Dodecahedron, or the fact that they’ve done a drone/doom set at the more high-minded world of Roadburn under the name Autarkh III – as far as I know, there is no Autarkh II: Autarkh Takes Manhattan out there just yet – but the band will also likely grab ears among metal’s crowd due to their usage of it as a style to further accomplish whatever strange and haunted otherworldly goals they may have had in mind. Continue reading »
On October 27th — tomorrow! — Ancient Temple Recordings and 7 Degrees Records will jointly release a new 7″ split by Seattle’s Great Falls and Brooklyn’s Radiation Blackbody, and today we’re presenting a stream of both bands’ contributions to the split.
The news of this release seized our attention mainly because of the presence of Great Falls. Even though Metal Archives hasn’t yet seen fit to include them, the band’s 2023 album Objects Without Pain is one of the most emotionally intense and stupefyingly heavy records you’ll find this year, and a worthy candidate as we get closer to year-end listmania.
At least for those of us around the NCS hovel, Radiation Blackbody was a new discovery — and, it turns out, a very good one. Continue reading »
(DGR has finally completed a review of the latest EP, released last June, by Tides of Kharon from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.)
Believe it or not we actually do have a history with Canadian group Tides Of Kharon. Up to this point we’ve covered every EP the band have released – no full-length albums as of yet – most recently the 2021 release of Titanomachy alongside British group Ghosts of Atlantis in a two-fer review collective. June saw the Greek-mythology inspired melodeath group unleash a new one in the form of Ancient Sleeper, closing out a two-year gap of silence from the band in exchange for another five songs and near half-hour of music.
Tides Of Kharon‘s chosen release method feels a bit like checking in with the band as they forge and hammer new material, working on their sound and experimenting with the wide vareity of approaches that the genre has available to them. Both expert and continual student, Tides Of Kharon absorb into their sound as much as they issue forth, all in service of the particular tales they have chosen to craft a song around this time. Ancient Sleeper then, could be considered the newest check-in with the band. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn offers some early insight into The Rime of Memory, set for release on 29 November)
It could be argued that I am, perhaps, the wrong person to be reviewing the new album from Panopticon (aka multi-instrumental marvel Austin Lunn), as my history with the band is somewhat mixed.
Like many of you, I fell in love with the seminal Kentucky the moment I first heard it but, unfortunately, I was far less taken with both Roads to the North and Autumn Eternal which – while both good albums in their own right (the latter especially) – just didn’t seem to speak to me in quite the same way.
However, just as I was beginning to accept that our connection was perhaps only a fleeting one, they released the ambitious and expansive double-album, The Scars of Man…, which swiftly rekindled my love for their forlon, folk-inspired sound, and then followed this up with the absolutely masterful …And Again Into the Light, which may well be the best album of their career.
Then again, perhaps this means that I might actually be the best choice to review The Rime of Memory, as I’m less likely than most to descend into unwarranted hyperbole and hero-worship and more willing to offer a mix of both praise and criticism, to whatever extent is warranted?
I suppose there’s only one way to find out.
“It’s hard to be optimistic in such a fucked up world. Because we witness violence and ugliness on a daily basis, we can’t help but make music that is aggressive and filthy.”
With those words, the French doom-sludge trio Peine Kapital have announced their self-titled debut album, which will be released on October 27th by the respected Sludgelord Records. And those aren’t empty words. As you’ll learn for yourselves today through our complete streaming premiere of the album, Peine Kapital is a truly harsh, harrowing, and immensely heavy experience. Continue reading »