Mar 062024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the new album from Italy’s Hideous Divinity in advance of its March 22nd release by Century Media.)

A new Hideous Divinity album will loom large in the distance. We’re now well into the group’s career as a generator of overwhelming and unrelenting death metal, for those who might think that standing at the bottom of a mountain while a crew does avalanche preparation during snow season is a fun way to experience music.

Hideous Divinity started with the intensity of their music ratcheted way past the standard red line and have effectively stayed there. Somehow, with each album, they’ve found new ways to twist and mutate that intensity into something different and malformed every time, often with enough there to make those releases a different experience from one another.

Yet for just as much as the band play mad scientist with their musical compositions there’s still the theme of whether or not their vocalist or their drummer is going to pass out from exhaustion first as the group continually push themselves harder and harder. Continue reading »

Feb 292024
 

(DGR has left his usual comfort zones far behind, lured away by the Welsh band whose new EP is the subject of his review below.)

Sometimes in the process of wandering the decrepit halls and ancient ruins of metal, detector, pick-axe, and trowel in hand in the hopes of coming across something interesting that you can help spread out to a wider audience, you’ll come across something that you know isn’t directly for you, but boy howdy, do you know a whole lot of people who will absolutely be into it.

Those adventures are fun in part because you have the job now of trying to find someone on the site who may be interested in covering it or, the more likely option, you yourself get to go on an adventure of trying out something and seeing if it lands with you. Something may resonate with you, who knows?

That’s how we have landed at the doorstep of The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate, a name which floated across the proverbial – if not perpetually on fire – writer’s desk here approximately one time but somehow managed to grab attention based off of the album title alone. Because, even after fourteen-plus years of existence, how could we not be tempted to look into something entitled Church Music For Satanists? Continue reading »

Feb 272024
 

(Below you’ll find DGR‘s review of the newest solo release by the standout German musician Hannes Grossmann, which was released on February 9th.)

Hannes Grossmann‘s solo career has been one of the more interesting things to pop out of the many tech-death groups and scenes over the decade. You never realize just how foundational a musician is to a particular style until they’ve done five or so releases that feel like continual statements of ‘I can do this in my sleep’ quite the way like Hannes does with some of his solo stuff.

Not only that but it’s long since been proven that as a musician he’s an absolute machine, and while Gene Hoglan has long earned the nickname ‘Atomic Clock’ when it comes to drumming, Hannes is equally precise and reliable. You could hand him anything and it seems within about an hour or so he’d have a grasp on the whole setlist. There’s a certain guaranteed reliability to the guy that pretty much assures quality; any band he joins is in good hands and any recording where he sits behind the kit is probably going to be just as solid.

His solo career has afforded him affable room to explore as well, and while his first two releases felt a little like finding their footing, Apophenia and onward are adventures in their own right. Continue reading »

Feb 192024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the latest album by the Norwegian death metal band Blood Red Throne, which is out now on Soulseller Records.)

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have the book of death metal read to me. The classic chapters would probably be incredible, set in stone and defined by an era of wild experimentation, gore obsession, and studio production ranging from ‘what the hell were they thinking’ to ‘wow, that’s impressive’.

For a genre that has been around as long as it has, it remains to this day impressively fluid. Both an extreme sport by which modern athletes test their mettle but also one wherein people take that blueprint and mutilate it into many other forms. They twist, morph, contort, and absorb so much that at times the ‘death metal’ genre-tag becomes more like a filter through which other things are forced through than the starting seed.

The modern chapters that are still being written are the ones that would be most intriguing based simply off of ‘where do you even start to approach it?’. You have regional scenes, all with their own hallmarks, you have outside influences that have gone unacknowledged that simply become part of death metal, and you have the blastbeat vein that became its own throughline. and that’s just the starting part.

You have experimenters and vanguards alike, and over the course of an eleven-album career Blood Red Throne have shown themselves to be perfectly fitted into the ‘vanguard’ role. They’ve added their own sentences and addendums to the modern segment of death metal’s book over the years, recent attempts bringing their name well into the limelight in the world of brutality, and with late-January’s Nonagon, Blood Red Throne are finally sitting down to read those segments back to you. Continue reading »

Feb 142024
 

(We bring you DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Venetian band Obscura Qalma, which was released earlier this month by the Dusktone label.)

The nice thing about Italian symphonic death metal group Obscura Qalma is that they make absolutely no pretense of the style of music they’re going to make nor are they hiding who their influences are.

Obscura Qalma have been kicking around since 2018 and already have two albums and a few EPs – though one of each of those is the instrumental and orchestral version of songs from a previous album, much in the same way Fleshgod Apocalypse have taken to including the purely symphonic tracks as bonuses to their full-lengths recently. Adding to their name, all you need to do is look at a press photo of the band and you can tell there’s likely going to be a rich vein of SepticFlesh running through the group’s DNA.

Obscura Qalma don their lab coats and joyfully smash their death and symphonic elements together, cackling all the while, with lightning crashing in the background. Drawing heavily from the occult for lyrical inspiration – recently pulling large buckets up the well from the Aleister Crowley mines – Obscura Qalma are playing in a very wide musical sphere. The group’s latest EP Veils Of Transcendence punches in at four songs and a little under twenty minutes of boulder-heavy death metal with a huge symphonic and synth line buttressing the events and doing the melodic heavy lifting. Continue reading »

Feb 132024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Andorran band Persefone, which was released not long ago by Napalm Records.)

A guarantee with Andorra’s Persefone is that you are going to get a lot of music. Persefone have made a career out of albums hybridizing progressive metal, melodeath, and as wide a smattering of other genres as they could into a form of tightly controlled chaos with multiple vocal approaches serving as the icings on the cake.

They’re a full-album band and very rarely, throughout a surprisingly long career, have done any sort of single or EP as part of their discography. Persefone have always dealt in releasing densely packed albums, and as of 2022’s Metanoia were up to a grand total of six.

With all of those elements making up Persefone‘s career it is surprising that the band have seen relatively little change on the lineup front – especially since they really found their groove with 2013’s Spiritual Migration. Since then, other than a re-recording of their first album Truth Inside The Shades in 2020, the band have refined upon the eastern sprituality subject matter and massive keyboard-wall approach to their writing style.

Which is why it is both fitting and very interesting that the group’s newest release is just an EP but also has a ‘Part I’ tacked onto its name. Continue reading »

Feb 092024
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of a new EP by Creepsylvanian splatterthrashers Ghoul, out now on the Tankcrimes label.)

If you’ve been trawling around the underground long enough, you’ve likely crossed paths with the crazed crossover thrash and death metal hybrid that is Ghoul; they’re a name that probably needs little introduction at this point – having battled out a career for years that is combination tongue-in-cheek shock horror, community theater, public-access TV, pirate radio, and puppet show.

The band, in all their murderous muppety glory, seem to appear out of the ether at shows and crank out crazed sets before vanishing into the night. You’d never know that they’ve been subsisting on a series of splits and singles since 2016’s Dungeon Bastards and prior to that had been on a slightly more sollid rotating albums/eps collection every three or four years.

The upshot of this is that Ghoul have five full-lengths to their name already, but their most recent EP Noxious Concoctions is the most substantial collection of material – four originals songs, one cover, for a grand total of eighteen and a half minutes of music – that the masked madmen have cranked out in almost eight years. Continue reading »

Jan 222024
 

(DGR reviews the new album from Cognizance, out 26 January on Willowtip Records)

It wasn’t too long ago we were joking about how Cognizance were one of the better bands when it comes to the “riff-avalanche” style of album – the type of disc that generally picks one particular tempo and sticks to it, leaving the band room to just rattle off part-after-part-after-part atop the listener until, by the end of it, they’ve basically been buried underneath a pile of stuff.

It’s a difficult balance to strike because you can easily get lost in your own creativity and create big, overwhelming works that, by their very nature, are hard to maintain any interest in since everything is so ephemeral and fleeting.

And while Cognizance have remained a sleek and ultra-precise machine for over a decade since the release of their first full length – after having subsisted on a series of singles and EPs – they’ve also slowly hammered and forged their sound into something as fiercely creative and memorably groove-ridden as it is terrifyingly technically-proficient.

Their previous album, Upheaval, picked up where Malignant Dominion left off, and I’ll give you three guesses as to where Phantazein picks up as a starting point a little under two and a half years later.

Continue reading »

Jan 182024
 

(DGR sets out to discover what Vitriol have become on their second album, out next week)

It’s been four years and change since the release of Vitriol‘s stunning full length To Bathe From The Throat Of Cowardice and, save for an EP of re-done/re-approached earlier material from an embryonic form of the band released during the plague years, we haven’t really heard much from them since.

And while there have been other groups in the meantime that have attempted (and sometimes succeeded) to play at the same relentless firestorm level, what makes Vitriol in particular work is the perceived integrity and passion in their music.

You get a sense listening to them that they mean every word that they say and will only stop when whichever vocalist is on the mic runs out of a) space for words or b) breath to utter said words.

But constantly maintaining that level of intensity will, inevitably, burn anybody out… which brings us firmly back around to Vitriol‘s second full length release, because it’s not humanly feasible for a group to exist at that level of intensity all over again… is it?

Continue reading »

Jan 162024
 

(DGR takes on the upcoming new album from Exocrine, out 26 January)

The idea that Exocrine are on their sixth full length release with Legend is one that is mildly eye-popping.

The French Tech Death group have done extremely well for themselves with a very specific formula – one whose sheer violence and velocity is akin to lighting a pallet of Piccolo Pete fireworks all at once and just letting it screech until the neighbors call the cops – that they’ve re-forged and refined time and time again, album after album, but which is still recognizably “them”.

Credit must be given as well to the band for the fact that even as the Tech Death arms race has gone nuclear (and beyond) they’ve always tried to be something more than just a bunch of relentless speed-merchants from the massive slab of headbanging groove which underpinned Molten Giant to their willingness to be completely insane on discs like Maelstrom and The Hybrid Suns, as and when the need arises.

Well, apparently those last two albums weren’t quite big enough to contain all of the band’s insane intensity, and so we have Legend.

Continue reading »