SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ISKALDE MORKET, COLDWORLD, OMNIKINETIC, CRUSTY OLD TOAD

 SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Mar 232020
 

 

Here’s the second part of this week’s column, which I began here yesterday. As usual, I’ve been unable to write about everything I wanted to write about and have had to be (relatively) brief, but that’s because I have a couple of album reviews to finish writing — they will accompany premiere streams today, both of which will be worth your time.

All of the music you’ll find below was created by one-person bands — one from the UK, one from Germany, and two from Portland, Oregon. In these days of the virus, when most people follow the edicts of social distancing, we may come to increasingly rely on such one-person projects for new music. Not all of that will be as good as what you’re about to discover.

ISKALDE MORKET

This is the UK project I mentioned; its creator lives in Norwich. The album, Metaphysics of Mass Murder, was released on March 17th. The band’s thumbnail description of the music on Bandcamp is “Apex Dissonance. Labyrinthine Technical Black Metal”, and that happens to be not only evocative but also accurate — though it doesn’t go quite far enough. Continue reading »

TESTAMENT: “TITANS OF CREATION”

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
Mar 232020
 

 

The half-witted editor of this site (that would be me) didn’t realize until this past weekend that Wil Cifer had sent in this review a week ago. And thus it is purely a coincidence, and a very sad one, that it’s now being posted the day after we learned that Chuck and Tiffany Billy and members of Testament’s crew have tested positive for COVID-19, apparently contracted during the band’s recently completed European tour. Members of their tour-mates Death Angel and Exodus have also tested positive for the virus. We wish them all the best under these unfortunate circumstances. Titans of Creation will be released on April 3rd by Nuclear Blast. And now, on to Wil’s review…

 

Testament lurk just outside of the “Big 4 “ but, The Ritual aside, they have held their own against Slayer over the years when it has come to putting out quality heaviness. The New Order might have been the metal album of 1988. That year had some tough competition, so at least in the top five. The first song on this album, “Children of the Next Level”, feels like it is fueled with the same fire that propelled their glory days. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): PRISON OF MIRRORS, YALDABAOTH, DEPARTURE CHANDELIER, REVENGE

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Mar 222020
 

 

Maybe it’s because I’ve become a virus shut-in, but I’m finding even more than the usual quantity of new black metal that is appealing, and even a greater desire to spread it around. I’ve consumed a lot of time over the last 24 hours with those two Overflowing Streams round-ups (here and here), and want to at least make a start on today’s SHADES OF BLACK before I have to do something else (and surely there’s something else I have to do besides blog, though I can’t think what it is). So, I’ve divided it into two Parts. Depending on whether I think of something else I should be doing, it may arrive later today or be deferred until Monday.

PRISON OF MIRRORS

I first encountered this Italian band in 2017, following he release of their second EP, Unstinted, Delirious, Convulsive Oaths, whose sound I described as the feeling of being pursued by wolves in the dead of night: “Across all the changes in tempo, the atmosphere is pitch-black and ice-cold, and traces of dissonance in the hopeless melodies heighten the sense of frightening peril at your heels and sinister, supernatural forces at work on your mind. And the vocals are as ugly as a sin you’ll never purge”. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 2): GÖDEN, HEAVEN SHALL BURN, VREDEHAMMER, BYTHOS, SLAVES BC, DUHKHA, THE RITE, DERANGED

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Mar 222020
 

 

I’m still working my way through that list of 80 potentially interesting new songs and full releases that I mentioned in Part 1 of this big round-up. Of course, not all of those 80 are going to pass my smell test, and I couldn’t write about all of them even if they did. But there’s still a lot I want to recommend, and so with the exception of the first item below, I’ll just be offering brief impressions along with the streams.

If all goes as planned, there will be a Part 3 tomorrow. A SHADES OF BLACK column will follow this one today, whenever I finish writing it.

GÖDEN (U.S.)

From 1989 to 1994 Winter released only one demo tape (Hour of Doom), one album (Into Darkness), and one EP (Eternal Frost), and nothing since then. But those recordings were enough to cement their place in the history of extreme metal and to become the jumping-off point for countless other bands in the doom and sludge genres for the last 30 years. And thus when Svart Records announced weeks ago that it would be releasing an album by a band it characterized as “a long-awaited continuation of what Winter would have been”, I sat up and paid attention. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 1): KATATONIA, WOLFHEART, KRALLICE, OLD MAN GLOOM, MÉSALLIANCE

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Mar 212020
 

 

After I finished today’s first post I spent almost two hours just going back through e-mails we’ve received over the last three days pushing new music upon us, and recent messages from some friends with their own recommendations, and then creating a list of links to everything that looked interesting. Some of these were new songs or videos and some were complete new releases.

When I counted up the number of links in that list, I found that there were 80 of them. Eighty of them, from just three days of new releases! I’m sure the Bandcamp thing on Friday (where they didn’t take their cut of sales) spurred a lot of this output, but even considering that it’s still insane.

Needless to say, I’m going to be resorting to the OVERFLOWING STREAMS format, in which I pare my own verbiage back to the bone (though I did include artwork this time). Also perhaps needless to say, I’ve barely made a dent in listening to those 80 items. But I’d like to get going with what I’ve found so far that I think is worth recommending, so here’s some of it now, and more will come in the next few days. (By the way, a ton of that new stuff was black metal, so I’ll have my hands full trying to figure out what to put in tomorrow’s SHADES OF BLACK column).

KATATONIA

Who would not want a new Katatonia album in these dark, isolated times? The timing is indeed fortuitous, because a new Katatonia full-length will be released by Peaceville on April 24th. The title is also fortuitous: City Burials. Continue reading »

STAYING IN TOUCH (BUT NOT TOUCHING)

 Off Topic  42 Responses »
Mar 212020
 


downtown Seattle yesterday

 

Like hundreds of millions of people around the world, I have a lot more time on my hands than I did even a week ago. I spend a lot of that new-found time reading the news every day. This hasn’t been good for my mental health, but I haven’t stopped. I began today by reading this global survey by the Associated Press of what”s happening with Covid-19 around the globe. It reports that, as of now, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University in the U.S., more than 275,000 cases have been confirmed globally, including over 11,000 deaths — but at least 88,000 people have recovered. In Italy, the country now being hit the hardest, 5,986 new cases and 627 new deaths were reported on Friday alone, bringing their total to at least 47,021 cases and 4,032 dead.

To varying degrees, people in the U.S. (where I live) are staying at home more than they used to. Governors in California, New York, and Illinois — home to 70 million people — have ordered their citizens to stay at home unless they have vital reasons to go out. Other state governors will surely follow suit within days. In my state (Washington), it hasn’t come to that yet, but the governor has ordered the closure of schools and most businesses and restricted gatherings of people to relatively small numbers, and has pleaded with everyone to stay home even without being ordered to do so. That may change. As of yesterday, there were 1,524 confirmed cases of the virus in Washington and 83 deaths, most of all those in the Seattle area where I live.

The economic toll of all these preventive measures has already been extraordinary, and will get much worse (on that subject, this Washington Post article today is sobering, to put it very mildly). The unemployment rate in the U.S. is spiking, soaring toward levels not seen since the Great Depression. Tons of small businesses have closed, and many will probably never reopen. Giant corporations are begging the government for stupendous sums of money. Vital medical supplies, hospital beds, and trained health-care workers are running short in most metropolitan areas, and the expected tsunami of Covid-19 hospitalizations hasn’t even hit yet. It’s all very depressing, and worrying.

I do intend to pull together a round-up of new metal later today, but since a large percentage of us are basically shut in now, with only limited face-to-face contact with other people (or no contact), I thought I’d start this Saturday by giving our visitors, both old-timers and newcomers, a chance to talk with us and each other here. This is what I suggest: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MEMBARIS — “MISANTHROSOPHIE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 202020
 

 

On March 24th W.T.C. Productions will release the long-awaited fifth album by the German black metal band Membaris. Eight years is indeed a long time in between records, and that’s how much time has elapsed since their last one, Entartet. But holy hell, the return they have made with Misanthrosophie is nothing short of spectacular.

To crib from some of the many words to follow in an introductory review, there is a theatrical quality to the album as a whole, like a fantastical Baroque pageant that seems to put the richness of humanity, in all its wildly swinging emotions — its madness and its never-ending grief, its joy and absurdity, its soulful poignancy and heedless cruelty — onto a grand stage. And to do this Membaris have seamlessly incorporated a wide range of musical styles across many decades, from both metal and rock, into their thorned framework of black metal. Every song holds wondrous surprises and thrilling experiences, every one of them fueled with undeniable passion and executed with tremendous skill. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NOCTU — “ISOLATO DA UN MONDO SENZA SPERANZA”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 202020
 

 

Settle in. Prepare to lose yourself, to be excavated from the inside out and left in terrible emptiness, with a thousand-yard stare, shivering with the affliction of ghosts.

The song we’re presenting is 32 minutes long, far less than the flight-time to Jupiter’s moons or a journey to the entrance of Hades (either of which might be the source of these sounds), but long enough to sink you deeply into the chilling visions of Noctu, to the point of no return.

The song is “Isolato Da Un Mondo Senza Speranza” — which eerily suits the current day, as its English translation is “Isolated From A World Without Hope”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AVERSIO HUMANITATIS — “THE WANDERER OF ABSTRACT PATHS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Mar 202020
 

 

Within the ever-expanding realms of black metal there are bands who will always be content to follow the old, well-trod paths, from the grim sounds of cold northern darkness to the vicious, thrusting revels that are fueled by hate and inspired by the worship of demons.

But there are others whose ambitions are greater, who seem to extend their reach toward vistas beyond our time and outside our tangible plane of existence, who seek to manifest visions that can’t be put into words, to channel forces beyond our normal perceptions, and to up-end the minds of listeners at the same time. To be sure, this kind of music may also be spawned by disgust for humankind and hatred for the chains with which some bind others, or with which we bind ourselves. But the music seeks not only to capture the dystopian terrors brought about by our own deeply flawed natures but also to cast off and transcend such imprisonments.

Which brings us to the new album by Aversio Humanitatis, and the song from the album we’re presenting today. Continue reading »

A DOUBLE REVIEW (PART 2): WOMBBATH — “CHOIRS OF THE FALLEN”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 202020
 

 

(Yesterday DGR turned in a double-review, but in his own inimitable fashion he wrote so many words about each of the two albums — one by Berzerker Legion and one by Wombbath — that your humble editor decided to split it in two, and now we present the second one. It may make some sense to read the other review first (here), since these were originally packaged together.)

Over the many years that we’ve spent in our comfortable little corner of the internet, one of the things we’ve learned how to get real good at is identifying genre-fare: the sort of musical red meat where it is clear the crew behind them just want to add to the overall cauldron that is their music of choice. Not necessarily the most ambitious or ‘paradigm changing’ — though the times where a group lands on that sort of lightning-in-a-bottle formula is always great — but music that is enjoyable for what it is, well-executed within the blueprint of its chosen genre.

One of the examples of this which practically fuels this website is the sort of rock-stupid, pulsating thud of death metal that gets by purely by appealing to the early cave-dweller parts of our brain, and another is the type of music that is so predisposed to headbanging guitar work that you can’t help but want to tag along, whether or not you have the long hair for it.

In this case it’s weird that these two albums feel like catching up a bit, since these two projects share a vocalist whom we’ve written about numerous times before and both of them are right in that wheelhouse described above. One is more modern and melody-focused despite its overall insistence on how world-ending it paints its protagonists in the songs, and the other is flavored with apocalyptic flair but with the chainsaw guitar aimed at a more old-school crowd. And thus we find ourselves catching up with Berzerker Legion and a crew more familiar to our site’s readers, Wombbath. Continue reading »

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