photo by Levan TK
(Abigail Williams released one of our favorite albums of 2015 — to read our review of it and check out the music if you haven’t already, go HERE — and today we bring you a year-end list by AW’s Ken Sorceron.)
In no particular order:
Akhlys – The Dreaming I
(For yet another year, our old friend SurgicalBrute has delivered into our greedy hands another year-end list of favorite releases, and one of the most extreme underground collections we will post this year.)
I listen to too much damn music, that’s all there is to it. All year long I feel this constant desire to dig through as much metal as possible because there’s always something new and enjoyable to discover and I want to hear it all. It’s one of the reasons I’ll never understand people who say things like “it was a bad year for metal”, because as far as Im concerned, its never a bad year for metal (hell, as I type this out, there are less than 30 days left in the year and I’m still finding great new bands).
Of course, everything has a downside… December has rolled around once again and now I have to figure out how to narrow this massive list down to something far more reasonable. Fortunately, using my scientific method of cheap Scotch and a dart board, I came up with twenty albums (as well as five EP’s) that should be on any metal fan’s year-end list (and just in case you don’t notice, these are in alphabetical order). Continue reading »
(Austin Weber presents our full streaming premiere of the new EP by Dendritic Arbor.)
As strong a year as 2015 was for both established and new metal groups, I don’t think anyone had as impressive a year as Pittsburgh-based black metal noisey grinders Dendritic Arbor.
While I’d been tipped off to their existence prior to this year, for most people they came out of nowhere and shot right up to a fairly high amount of name recognition and warranted praise. In today’s crowded climate, that’s especially impressive. Continue reading »
Although rolling out our year-end LISTMANIA extravaganza has been a nearly all-consuming endeavor, I’ve stolen fragments of time here and there over the last week to explore new music. Especially because time has been short, I’ve resorted (with some guilt feelings) to the harried person’s old stand-by: Listen to the first track of an album stream; if it grabs you, listen to more; if it doesn’t, move along. The first tracks of the albums and EPs featured here all grabbed me. The first and last songs in this collection are single advance tracks from albums that aren’t out yet. They grabbed me, too.
As the post title signifies, all of the music is connected in some way to black metal (though perhaps more tenuously than is usually the case in these posts). Despite that loose connection, no two bands sound alike.
TEITANFYRE
The first song in this collection is by a Russian band named Teitanfyre and it comes from an EP labeled Anno MMXV that’s projected for release by Inferna Profundus Records in February or March of next year. Metal Archives lists five Teitanfyre releases since 2008, including a 2011 debut album (Morbid Death’s Scepter), but this song has been my first exposure to their music. Continue reading »
It’s Sunday, and that means it’s time once again for a backward glance at the metal of the past. I will undoubtedly get some eye-rolls at today’s selection, but I have some personal nostalgic reasons for doing it.
Static-X was founded in 1994 by vocalist/guitarist Wayne Static after his previous band Deep Blue Dream dissolved following his bandmate Billy Corgan’s decision to concentrate on his other band Smashing Pumpkins. Static-X signed with Warner Bros. Records for the 1999 release of their debut album Wisconsin Death Trip, an album that went platinum in 2001. Five more albums followed, but in my humble opinion none of them was as good as the first one. Continue reading »
This is the second part of a two-part round-up of new music I discovered over the last 24 hours after taking a break from our year-end LISTMANIA orgy (which will resume on Monday, in case you want to shower and freshen up before the fluids start flowing again). You can find the first part of today’s round-up here.
CURSE / STYGGELSE / WAN
On December 27, the Russian label Satanath Records, along with Black Plague Records (USA) and The True Plague (USA), will release a three-way black metal split entitled Necroholic. — and one song from each band can now be heard on Satanath’s Bandcamp page for the split. All three are really strong. Continue reading »
Obviously, we have been in the throes of LISTMANIA, and a lot more lists are coming next week. Between working my gnarled fingers to the bone getting all the lists ready for posting and writing about songs and albums we premiered last week, I haven’t had as much time as usual to peruse new songs and videos. But I did some of that yesterday and this morning, and of course I found a lot of new things I thought were worth throeing your way — excuse me, throwing your way — so much, in fact, that I’ve divided these recommendations into two parts. The second one will come later today. I’ll also have a Shades of Black post for you on Sunday.
I will tell you at the outset that I haven’t heard all of the albums featured below, only a few songs from each one. I’m writing about them now because I fear I’ll never get around to writing a full review. Also, there’s faster stuff and slower stuff collected in this two-part post, and I decided to arrange the music so you go back and forth between the two speeds.
VADER
In 1996, Poland’s Vader released an album entitled Future of the Past. That was the third album for a band that had already been in existence for more than a decade, and it included covers of 11 songs by other metal bands whose names are household words. Now, nearly 20 years after the release of that album, Witching Hour Productions has just released Future of the Past II – Hell in the East. It’s a musical celebration of what Vader refers to as “the biggest bands of the Polish metal underground of the ’80s and ’90s”. Continue reading »
(For the third year in a row, guitarist and songwriter Jesse Zuretti of Binary Code contributes to our LISTMANIA series, providing lists of favorite albums of 2015, both metal and non-metal.)
METAL
1. Leprous – the Congregation
Sometime soon we might roll out a list of our most anticipated releases scheduled to occur in the early part of 2016, or at least ask you to tell us yours. If we make a list, the new album by Ihsahn will be on it. Its name is Arktis, and Candlelight Records will release it on March 4. Today the first advance track from the album — “Mass Darkness” — became available for streaming. Before we get to that, here are a few more enticing pieces of info about the album:
It will include ten songs and it will feature guest appearances by Einar Solberg (Leprous), Matt Heafy (Trivium), Jorgen Munkeby (Shining), Tobias Ornes Andersen (Shining, ex-Leprous), and Norwegian author Hans Herbjornsrud. The graphic elements were created by Spanish designer Ritxi Ostariz. Here’s a statement by Ihsahn about the album: Continue reading »
(At this time of year, I remember the importance of displaying fealty to the Gore-Stained Axe-Tribe from Hirntodia, and so once again I have invited A Band of Orcs to share with the filthy human readers if our site their ideas about the year’s best albums. I am pathetically grateful to Cretos Filthgrinder, provider of lead and crunchy guitars and utterer of gutturals and growls, for accepting our invitation to share with us his year-end list. HAIL GZOROTH!)
Marduk – Frontschwein
This album is the best of 2015 to show beauty (only next to Cretos sexiest Orc) through Orcdor! By Orcdor I Cretos mean battle file and making lines to attack the enemy. Frontschwein captures all enemies slow or fast. Cretos fascinated with themes of war, and Frontschwein does very good since the last war efforts of Marduk’s Iron Dawn EP. HAIL MARDUK! Continue reading »