BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART ONE: 50-41

 LISTMANIA 2024  4 Responses »
Dec 162024
 

(This is the first part of a five-part countdown by DGR of his 2024 year-end list, with each selection accompanied by his very extensive thoughts about the releases. Our plan is to roll out the rest of the installments on successive days until this week ends or falls into a sinkhole under the weight of his words.)

It feels like I blinked and suddenly a whole year had passed. Maybe it’s just the flow of life finally catching back up to me but this year moved in extreme fits and extreme starts and somewhere along the way I lost track of it among the deluge and wreckage that seems to be a daily existence. Among the piles of charred wood and still yet burning cars is another three hundred and sixty-five days of existence slowly signing its final paperwork and preparing itself to move on from the mortal coil.

At the very least, there was some sort of notification that this was coming. It feels like every year I open with some variation of ‘hey, this previous year sucked shit,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve taken a similar tack to open up a few of the previous year-end posts – if only some sort of dipshit had done an anniversary post whereby he might have easy access to all his previous years’ transgressions upon the internet and the collective heavy metal world at large –  so I’ll dispense with the usual landfill avalanche of thoughts pertaining to world events and the previous days gone by because, shock of all shocks, this year sucked.

Next year is likely going to suck too and the year after that will probably suck even worse. We’ll make the word ‘suck’ mundane through repetition, as if an ever-present shadow haunting our lives, by the time we’re done with this. Eventually, we will all lose all sense of what the word actually means and we will be permanently trapped in some sort of constant suck-vortex powerful enough that we’ll get dragged into court for infringement by Dyson and we’ll be numb to the common sense of suck surrounding us. We’ll have finally ascended into the boring dystopia I’ve bitched about that is coming for years. Just my luck I can’t even get one with decent Blade Runner lighting. Continue reading »

HALIPHRON: “ANATOMY OF DARKNESS”

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Nov 122024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the sophomore album by the Dutch symphonic black/death metal band Haliphron, which was released a few weeks ago by Listenable Records.)

Truth be told, I hadn’t expected to see a second release from Haliphron to go sliding across my desk so soon after the first album had hit. Of course, it is often said that you have forever and a day to write your debut, and sometimes you have people who can’t seem to stop writing once that initial spark has been lit, and they burn brighter than a star lightyears away. Sometimes you’ll have people join the band with a bevy of ideas already percolating in their heads, as in Soilwork and Aborted‘s tendencies to have someone join and release a new EP soon after. And sometimes groups will wind up with an excess of material and it would be a shame to let that go to waste.

There’s a multitude of the cases available with Haliphron‘s lastest release via Listenable Records, Anatomy Of Darkness, but picking one certainly does help to mentally square the fact that we’re looking so soon at a second album. Continue reading »

SWALLOW THE SUN: “SHINING”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 062024
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of Swallow the Sun‘s new album, which was released a couple weeks ago by Century Media.)

Listening to Swallow The Sun‘s newest album Shining, you get the sense that this is the sort of album every doom band has in them and one that they’d slowly been building toward for some time. In that sense, Shining is a fascinating release because after hesitantly testing waters more and more with each record, much of the material on Shining sounds like the band themselves were finally ready to make the jump.

Of course, with Swallow the Sun it is always going to feel like there is an overarching narrative because – credit to the band for being as brave as they are – they haven’t really been shy about personal struggles and tragedies over the years. Maybe, Shining is an album that Swallow The Sun needed to make, as a chance to escape and set themselves free of the artistic frost that they’ve long called home. Continue reading »

GAEREA: “COMA”

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Oct 292024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the new album by Gaerea, released on October 25th by Season of Mist.)

Portugal’s Gaerea are a smart band. Early on in the group’s inception someone within the band’s lineup recognized the value of both visual aesthetics and theatricality in their music. The group existed as part of a mid-aughts wave of black metal and doom metal groups that quickly took to the anonymization of masks and robes – so that even though the band could claim that the focus was to be put more on the music, you were more than likely drawn to the visual spectacle as well.

Gaerea have been perfectly positioned to both react to and become part of current trends within the heavy metal sphere. You could say there’s luck involved but many of their movements have been remarkably shrewd as well. They could be treated from an “every second tells a story” perspective, as both musically and visually there is always some sort of bombastic movement happening, the hand dancing and wild contortions befitting a Microsoft Kinect Game slowly evolving to hold just as much importance as the music itself.

And, while many bands can and have gotten by on just sheer spectacle and imagery – and have done so fairly well – it helps that Gaerea‘s music has long matched the lunatic puppetry taking place onstage. Continue reading »

HIGH PARASITE: “FOREVER WE BURN”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  No Responses »
Oct 232024
 

(This is DGR‘s review of the debut album of “Death Pop” by High Parasite, fronted by Aaron Stainthorpe of My Dying Bride, produced by Gregor Mackintosh of Paradise Lost, and released by Candlelight on September 27th.)

There’s an acceptance that comes with the idea that people aren’t required to listen to music the same way you do. You can bang the drum forever about how to experience something but in reality sometimes people just want to be able to throw something on and let it whip past them without a second thought.

The reality of which is perfectly fine. Not everyone needs to be able to fantasy-draft a death metal band together like Nader Sadek does with his releases. Not everyone needs to be able to fold an album over again, and again, and again, such that it eventually resembles a musical and intellectual rolled omelette. This of course being the long walk toward a simple question:

That being, have you ever listened to a release that has caused you to think about it way more than you could possibly justify any reason for? Thinking about it far more than the album might reasonably deserve? Because that may be what’s happening here with High Parasite’s debut album Forever We Burn. An album that has somehow caused the gears to turn here far more than one could intellectually justify. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE: OAK, ASH & THORN; FRACTAL GATES

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 172024
 

(This makes the fourth, and apparently final, installment of DGR‘s effort to clear out a backlog of reviews he’s been pondering for releases spread across earlier months of the year, clearing the decks for the year-end NCS orgy ahead.)

It is wild, staring at the review collective and realizing you’re down to the last two.

The best time to write one of these is not directly after one has woken up, I’ve learned. Something about the brain still trying to wander itself out of the fog with nary a static radio signal and flashlight for help tends to make one’s writing look as if it slid off the side of a mountain.

The artist’s curse is still a minor player at the poker table though, given that some of your best ideas usually arrive in the shower, the drive home from work, or the second before you hit deep sleep, so that’s not to say I still won’t be attempting to do so as if writing right after I’m waking up for the day is preserving some sort of the mental cacophony I’ve tried to piece together for the final one of this initial review pile. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE: WURM FLESH, EXORBITANT PRICES MUST DIMINISH, ORPHEUS OMEGA, SERPENTHEIR, COLACON

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 262024
 


Wurm Flesh

(As we’ve nearly broken into the final quarter of the year, DGR decided it was a good time to do some more catching up on reviews that have been percolating in his head, and so here are five of them that might collectively scramble your own head.)

While sifting through the pile of music that I’ve been gathering up over the years for these shorter, less officious and stuffy – my preferred writing style – review collectives I’ve found that I often have a small blockage of grind releases building up against the wall. There hasn’t necessarily been a particular overarching guide as to what gets written about and when with these, as it’s more of a panicked attempt to spread the word about a few of them before year-end season hits, and I lock myself in a closet with the laptop and a caffeine-fueled fit of pique and do so much writing that I end up having zero thoughts for a month afterward.

However, this bout is my attempt to help get a few of those out there, as well as to aim for something a little shorter and then round off with two releases from way opposite ends of the spectrum that I’ve been enjoying in between checking out the shiny latest and greatest that have come tumbling down the pipeline over the last few months.

Combining this with an absolutely fucked-up concert slate for my corner of Northern California and you can see exactly where the compulsion for coverage is starting to take over, with the sense that these things need to happen now. Continue reading »

WOLFHEART: “DRACONIAN DARKNESS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 102024
 

(Below we present DGR’s review of the new album by Finland’s Wolfheart, which was released on September 6th by Reigning Phoenix Music.)

Much as we joke about it – yours truly in particular has created enough material to 3-D print a house – Finland’s Wolfheart have become a hallmark of consistency on a near unchallenged level since their inception. Save for a brutal year-over-year album schedule a few discs ago, Wolfheart have been a band you could set your watch by. Every two years, without fail, ballpark eight or so songs and about forty minutes of music. In fact, it wasn’t until the band’s Napalm era that Wolfheart flipped their career paradigm on its head by putting out albums with seven and nine songs.

It won’t shock then that a discussion of Wolfheart‘s newest album Draconian Darkness is going to contain a lot of familiar shades to it, because with consistency comes familiarity, and familiarity leads to an odd approach in reviewing their discs wherein you almost reset-to-zero with them every time and approach a new album at face value.

Which is interesting, because in a lot of ways you could view Draconian Darkness as a double-album with the one that preceded it, King Of The North. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE, PART II: DARKENED, DAGOBA, DELIRIA, DARK TRANQUILLITY

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 032024
 

(Still catching up with releases earlier in this year, but edging closer to the present, DGR has compiled four extensive reviews in the following column, forsaking the rest of the alphabet and delving into the new albums by Darkened, Dagoba, Deliria, and Dark Tranquillity)

To keep the introductory masturbation short: why I’m doing this is largely covered in Part One of this catching-up series. Every year there are a shit-ton of releases and a shit-ton more coming. We do our damndest to try and keep up but as the seasons change so too must we often cut anchor and get the fuck out here and onward to other coverage.

There are a lot of releases, though, that I swear up and down I am going to write about, to the point where tardiness of said review doesn’t matter nearly as much to me as it does getting the name out to people and seeing what they think. The interesting part lies in the conversation that follows, not necessarily just how late I was to the bus – sometimes to the point of the city removing that particular bus route altogether.

This latest batch, at the very least, isn’t as determined to be stuck in the month of May, and I even managed to get one that could be described as almost recent! Almost. That doesn’t mean I didn’t drunkenly stumble my way into a theme anyway. Continue reading »

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE: “OPERA”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 202024
 

(DGR wrote the following review of the new album by Italy’s Fleshgod Apocalypse, which will be released this Friday, August 23rd, by Nuclear Blast Records.)

Given that Fleshgod Apocalypse have up to this point had a seventeen-year career and now six albums to their name, it’s surprising that the group have never had a straightforward self-titled release.

Often used as either the initial opening statement of a group’s career – the proverbial flag in the ground of “this is who we are as a band” – or, having become more frequent, a later-in-the-career platform for either reinvention or just outright reminder that they in fact still exist and are going strong, the self-titled does have a surprising amount of cultural cachet to it.

If you were to view the self-titled as the platform for reinvention, often the resurrection of a group or the crystalizing of a particular lineup, now would be such a time for it in Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s career, with only two of the members from the early days of their career still standing and three others now full-time members of the lineup, with a few of them having held steady in a live-lineup status since the release prior to 2019’s Veleno, and one having been such an integral part of the band’s sound and stage show that it was surprising they hadn’t been upgraded sooner. Continue reading »

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