(Andy Synn prepared this trio of album reviews, catching up on recommended albums from last year.)
With a small (and rapidly closing) window in my schedule of upcoming reviews/releases, I’ve decided now is the perfect opportunity to cover three artists/albums from last year that, for various reasons, I didn’t get a chance to cover at the time.
So, without further ado… Continue reading »
Yesterday I leaned into black metal in adding to this list, and today I’m favoring doom — though these two songs are very different formulations of misery and gloom, both beautiful in their own way, and both emotionally wrenching, but there are at least as many differences as similarities. And of course I think both of them are intensely memorable.
MAJESTIC DOWNFALL
The new Majestic Downfall album was one I eagerly anticipated, and eagerly embraced once I heard it. As I wrote in a review on the day it became available for full streaming in early December, the four long songs of doom/death and one brief interlude that make up Waters of Fate are staggeringly intense and atmospherically immersive, and the melodies are powerfully alluring, but the music should also appeal to listeners with a taste for crushing heaviness and soul-splintering sorrow. There is tear-stained beauty to be found in the music, and passages of epic yet bleak grandeur, but this is an album that will dash your fondest hopes and smother your budding joys in their crib. Continue reading »
Par le Sang Versé is one of the most thoroughly entrancing and gloriously vibrant metal albums I’ve heard in years, regardless of sub-genre. It seizes ancient folk traditions and hurls them forward into the modern age, but without letting go of the intense devotion to the centuries-old well-springs of inspiration that gave birth to this record. I do think it’s impossible not to be moved in some significant degree by this fervent music, and likely that most listeners will simply be swept aloft and carried away, as I’ve been.
I wrote the preceding paragraph as part of an introduction to our premiere two weeks ago of a single song from this new album by the French medieval black metal band Véhémence. Since then, my conviction has only grown stronger that this record is a rare and marvelously multi-faceted achievement. At the time of that previous premiere, three other tracks were also available for listening, but today it’s our great pleasure to present a stream of all the music in advance of its February 18th release by the French label Antiq Records. Continue reading »
(This is Vonlughlio’s review of the new album by Disgruntled Anthropophagi from Pittsburgh PA.)
This time around I have the opportunity to recommend Disgruntled Anthropophagi‘s sophomore album, Violently Expunged, to be released via Lord of the Sick Recordings on March 15th.
I was lucky enough to discover the band in 2015 with the release of their debut album, entitled Rampage of Misanthropic Purge, which was a slab of the raw power of BDM with complex changes in the song structures. I became a fan right from the first listen, convinced by the violent energy they put into those 11 songs with such pure non-stop force. Continue reading »
As you can see, I decided to really load up today’s installment of the list, with four songs instead of two or three, and I also decided to lean into black metal for this one. I also thought these songs fit together in a way that would make for a good playlist, in addition to each of them being deserving presences on this list. As a bonus, two of these songs were performed at the Fire In the Mountains festival last summer outside Jackson, Wyoming, and I’ve included quality video of both of those, thanks to (((unartig))), as well as the album tracks.
To check out the previous installments of this still-expanding list, you’ll find them behind this link, and to learn what this series is all about, go here.
PANOPTICON
Without advance fanfare, or any preceding reviews, last April Panopticon released the extraordinary double-album The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness (I and II), one half devoted to atmospheric metal and the other half focused on Americana (though the division isn’t a rigid one, with some bleed-over going both ways). Austin Lunn shared the album with me in advance of its release, and I wrote a review, holding onto it (at his request) until the release date — and then I never posted it.
I felt that I owed the music something better than the words I’d cobbled together, which struck me as more emotional and stream-of-conscious in their ramblings than they should have been. And then, with the music out in the world, I just never got back to the drawing board in the hope of crafting a better homage. Continue reading »
As the title of Oldd Wvrm‘s new album suggests, the music is an exploration of dark and obscure dimensions, dimensions that seem beyond the perception of a mundane mind grounded in what passes for “reality”. It carries our imaginations into a desolate and haunted dream world where shape-shifting avatars of misery dwell, in the company of wraiths that have lost their memories, and any path that might lead them to another, more welcoming, place.
The album is composed of five unusually long tracks, and as might be expected of such extensive journeys, the feelings in the music change over their courses, revealing both moodiness and mounting tension, inconsolable grief and aimless anger, glimmering wistfulness and extravagant, even magisterial, anguish. The power (and volume) of the sound also ebbs and flows — dramatically, but fluidly — but never really shows you a way back to the waking world.
Codex Tenebris will soon be released (on February 15th) the Irish label Cursed Monk Records, but you won’t have to wait ’til then to become ensorceled by the album, because we have a full stream for you now. Continue reading »
(Comrade Aleks is back! And he brings with him this interview of Christian Kolf from the German band Owl, whose most recent album, Nights In Distortion, was released last fall by Temple of Torturous.)
Owl is the Bonn-based project of Christian Kolf (vocals, guitars, synth) who created it together with Patrick Schroeder (drums, percussion) in 2010 in order to explore death-doom territory that he hadn’t crossed yet in his progressive death-doom band Valborg. Christian is pretty prolific. He also played atmospheric progressive sludge in Woburn House, some prog metal in Island, not not long ago he joined the black metal crew Absolutum, and he gained some experience in a few other acts as well.
Owl’s a strange creature, more so that owls seem to be. Their first two full-lengths, Owl (2011) and You Are The Moon, I Am The Night (2013), were experiments in the field of pretty proggy death-doom metal with quite complex and aggressive compositions, and the following EPs — Into The Absolute (2014), The Last Walk (2014), Aeon Cult (2015), and Orion Fenix (2018), show Owl’s development in another direction. The latest result of the band’s inner changes is the Night In Distortion album (Temple Of Torturous, 2018). It’s tagged as ambient doom metal, and this description is partly close to the matter.
I was impressed by this material and got in touch with Christian to ask him a few questions about Owl’s past, present, and future. Continue reading »
(Wil Cifer prepared this review of the new album by Pensées Nocturnes, which was released on February 1st by Les Acteurs de L’Ombre Productions.)
This French band’s last album was an eccentric mix of black metal and chaotic cabaret jazz. This time they are fully committing to a Circus theme. Seeing this report, I assumed this album was bound to sound like Mr. Bungle. In some ways, they don’t prove me wrong.
Where Mr. Bungle hinged heavily on the vocal power of Mike Patton, these guys instead invest more in setting the stage of a place back in time. The vocals are more of a chattering narrative and swing back and forth from operatic singing to growls of anguish. Blast beats are thrown in, against a sway of an angular waltz. This time around the sounds are more layered. It is this layering that paints the exotic sonic pictures. Continue reading »
With the weekend now behind us we’re resuming the rollout of this list, beginning the 6th week of the trek, with a self-imposed stopping point looming closer (by the end of this month, and possibly earlier — not sure which, since I haven’t finished compiling the list).
Almost every year I’ve shoe-horned music into this annual escapade that doesn’t really fit the label of “extreme metal”, and I’m doing it again today (and might do it yet again before I’m finished this year). Among other things, these two songs have plenty of (very good) clean singing. But although they may not be as extreme as almost everything else, they’re heavy enough — and they’re also damned memorable
KHEMMIS
I’m very happy to say that we’ve been backing this Colorado band since long before they became household names — and if they’re not yet at household name status, they can’t be far away, after three such exceptional and broadly appealing albums — Absolution, Hunted, and now Desolation. Among the core group of NCS writers, Andy Synn was the last to tumble to how good Khemmis‘ music is, though he tumbled pretty hard once he gave it a chance following the band’s performance last year at Maryland Deathfest. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn wants you to know that he took in another show. This time, Obscura, Fallujah, Allegaeon, and First Fragment drew him to the environs of London on February 8th, yielding this report plus video of the event.)
For whatever reason, possibly known only to the gods themselves, tonight’s show was one of three big package-tours plying their metallic wares in the capital all on the same evening, with Behemoth/At The Gates/Wolves In The Throne Room on at Kentish Town Forum and Psycroptic/Aversion’s Crown/Within Destruction/Hadal Maw/Hollow World making The Dome in Tufnell Park their home for the evening.
Thankfully, as I’d caught the latter tour a few days earlier in Manchester, my choice between the remaining two options was an easy one to make, as while I’m a fan of practically all the bands on both bills (to a greater or lesser extent), I wasn’t hugely taken with either of the most recent Behemoth and At The Gates albums, whereas I was very high on the most recent Obscura album (and, spoiler alert, the upcoming new Fallujah too).
So it was off to the O2 in Islington for me! Continue reading »