SHADES OF BLACK: OLD WAINDS, VALONTUOJA, CALCARATA, PAENIL ERA (AND MORE)

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Sep 292024
 

(written by Islander)

As I did in yesterday’s weekend roundup, for today’s column I’ve chosen a mix of complete new releases and advance tracks from forthcoming records. I’ve also consciously mixed up the musical styles, all of which use black metal as a touchstone but throw other stones at us as well. At the end I’ve also embedded three new videos without commentary; they’re all worth seeing and hearing, even though I haven’t tried to explain why.

P.S. In certain parts of the Christian world today is Michaelmas, feast day of the archangel Michael, who is celebrated for casting the Devil from Heaven. The Devil has had a celebrated career on Earth since then, as today’s music helps prove. Today is also probably the birthday of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote, which will always inspire its readers to continue tilting at windmills, which thankfully all of today’s bands are doing. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ARKONA, GROZA, GAEREA, AETHYRICK, SVRM, EZKATON

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 252024
 


Arkona

(written by Islander)

Yesterday I read a story about a recent lobster-boat race across Casco Bay along the coast of Maine. It was won by a man and his 14-year-old daughter, with his daughter at the wheel of their 32-foot diesel-powered fishing boat. The man summarized their race strategy to a reporter: “Point it and punch it!”

Today’s collection includes new music from black metal bands who follow a similar strategy, but it also includes music that reveals a different strategy, something more like “slow it and sink it” (and maybe set it on fire first).

What ties all the music together is the presence of emotionally moving melodies and often the achievement of a certain scale and sweep (vast). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GAEREA, HAR, HAMMERFILOSOFI, LAGO, CAGED BASTARD, THE SPIRIT, ARA SUBVERSOR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 182024
 


Photo Credit: Chantik Photography

I’m so far behind in pulling together roundups of new songs and videos for NCS that I can’t even think of an appropriate metaphor. Maybe like a marathon runner who takes an arrow to the knee just as the starting gun goes off and is still writhing on the ground when the last runner crosses the finish line — but I’m even more behind than that.

Another metaphor comes to mind, the one about a journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step. This is a journey I won’t finish, if finishing means catching up, but here’s a single step (actually 7 steps, to be less metaphorical and  more precise).

P.S. I decided to lean pretty hard into black, death, and blackened death metal on the especially incinerating and obliterating end of the spectrum, with something dark and hallucinatory more or less in the middle. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GAEREA, FUMING MOUTH, AKLASH, HYPERDONTIA, OMNIVORTEX, DYSRHYTHMIA, ÖXXÖ XÖÖX, PRIMAEVUS, PERCHTA, DEMERSAL, DOWNCROSS

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
May 022024
 

Tomorrow is another Bandcamp Friday, and I had enough time to get ahead of the game today with a few selections that might help drain your bank account tomorrow. Actually, it’s more than a few — new singles and videos from 11 bands, spanning a very broad spectrum of music.

GAEREA (Portugal)

We begin with an intense new stand-alone single from Gaerea. As the band explain, “‘World Ablaze‘ tells the story of a man who has lived all his life inside a cage. He knows that one day he will be set free and experience the world with its true colors. Unfortunately, he also knows that day will be his last hours alive. It’s a song about desire, hope and freedom. A dance between life and death, hope and despair”. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2022’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 7): GOATWHORE, GAEREA, GLOSON

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2022  5 Responses »
Jan 102023
 

Not for the first time, and it won’t be the last time, I picked today’s three additions to this list by focusing on song candidates by bands whose names begin with the same letter. That made the selection process less mind-boggling for me. It’s not a recipe for overall success, because I don’t have enough days left to cover every letter in the alphabet, and because not all letters are equally deserving in this context. But it worked well for today, when these three bands jumped out at me as I gazed at the Gs. Or, we could say I managed to find the G spot.

GOATWHORE (U.S.)

Angels Hung From the Arches of Heaven was another album where we could throw a dart at the track list and come up with a song for this list wherever it landed. As DGR wrote in his extensive review, it’s another testament to a level of consistency that has made Goatwhore a “cultural touchstone within the heavy metal music community,” providing “big riffs, big sections, and room-filling music matched equally in terms of heaviness,” and with “just enough surprise to keep things exciting”. Continue reading »

GAEREA – MIRAGE

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Sep 212022
 

(Andy Synn takes a look behind the mask with Gaerea‘s new album, Mirage, out on Friday)

What’s in a name, anyway?

Well, according to some people… not a lot. And according to others… a great deal. Especially when it comes to genres.

Case in point, there are some people – by no means a majority, I should point out right away, though often the loudest and/or most obnoxious – who would balk at the very suggestion that Gaerea are a “true” (or “trve”) Black Metal band due to the fact that their sound is too “polished”, their visual aesthetic too “clean”, and so on.

And yet, for every one of them (I think of them as the Black Metal equivalent of the Amish – zealously convinced that a certain time period was the only “righteous” one, and that any progress beyond that should be shunned) there’s at least a dozen more for whom the very idea of questioning the band’s right to “belong” to the genre (of which they are so clearly and obviously a part) is patently ridiculous.

But the thing is… while much digital ink (and the occasional bit of non-digital blood) has been spilled over this argument, and many like it over the years… it’s obvious that Gaerea themselves don’t really care what you call them. They know who they are. And it’s the music, and not the labels which others put on it, which defines them.

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (WEEKDAY EDITION): PANZERFAUST, GAEREA, TOMBS, DARKREVERIE, MO’YNOQ, HETROERTZEN, SPECTRUM MORTIS, HERBSTLETHARGIE

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Jul 122022
 

 

In the dozen years of this site’s existence we’ve had fewer than a dozen days (including weekends and holidays) when we posted nothing new. Yesterday was one of those. I’ll spare you the excuses, which were numerous, but I still felt guilty about it. So I’m trying to make up for that void today.

In gazing upon my long list of songs I wanted to recommend, it occurred to me that most of them were variations of black and blackened metal, so I decided to focus on those and leave other genre variants for another day.

There’s a lot here, all of them tracks from forthcoming releases, and so I’ve truncated the introductions and mostly omitted the usual artwork. I begin with bigger names and then drift into more obscure ones. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2020’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 15): …AND OCEANS, GAEREA

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2020  No Responses »
Feb 012021
 

 

This is the day on which I originally planned to end the rollout of this 2020 list, but I’ve revised my plans, mainly because I wasn’t able to make a new installment on a daily basis during January. The days I missed have left me with too many songs that I still want to include.

The 2019 edition of this list included 60 songs, which was a lower number than in the preceding three years. If you’ve been counting, you know that this year I’ve only made it to 42 so far (including today’s two tracks), so I really feel compelled to keep going. When will I stop? I haven’t quite figured that out yet, but I’ll let you know when I do.

…AND OCEANS

…And Oceans‘ 2020 record Cosmic World Mother was a comeback album, the group’s first full-length release since 2002. As my friend DGR wrote in his review, it was also one of the more blistering releases to come out last year, a symphonic black metal assault that was “absolute hellfire in song form”. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t contagious. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: NECROPHOBIC, DEMONICAL, PROFANITY, GAEREA, APPARITION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 092020
 

 

This is pretty much a DGR round-up, since it was he who urged the first three new songs and videos in this collection. They’re all from bands who’ve been around for a long time, from 14 years to more than 30 years (but are still kicking ass). To justify my own existence, I picked two more, one from a more obscure band than those first three but whose name is rising fast, and a second from an even more obscure name that I suspect will soon become better-known.

I have approximately 53 other new songs I’d also like to share with you. Maybe later. There’s a fly that’s making the rounds on the morning news interviews, so I need to check that out.

NECROPHOBIC

“Devil’s Spawn Attack” is the closing track on Necrophobic’s new album, Dawn of the Damned. I smell a review simmering in the NCS mess hall that questions the wisdom of that choice — not a question about the quality of the song (which is damned good), but about its position in the running order. But I’ll let that writer speak for himself in due course; maybe he’ll change his mind. Meanwhile, I’ll speak my own mind. Continue reading »

GAEREA: “LIMBO”

 Album Reviews  16 Responses »
Jul 222020
 

 

(This is Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Portuguese band Gaerea, which is set for release by Season of Mist on July 24th.)

Isn’t it funny how the human brain unconsciously and involuntarily makes connections between things?

Case in point, I can’t think about, or listen to, Portuguese powerhouse Gaerea without also thinking about their cousins in Selbst and White Ward.

The connections between the latter two are quite obvious, as both bands released their debut albums within one month of another back in 2017, meaning they’re always going to be inextricably linked in my mind.

But Gaerea didn’t release their first album, Unsettling Whispers, until almost a full year later, making their relationship to the other two a lot more tenuous and complex.

Perhaps what it comes down to is the fact that, to me at least, these bands, both collectively and individually, are potential new standard bearers for Black Metal, both cognisant of the genre’s roots and rich history, but not limited by established traditions or old boundaries.

White Ward, of course, have already proven themselves with the release of Love Exchange Failure just last year, and the new Selbst album (set for release in a few weeks) looks set to do the same for them.

What then should we expect from Gaerea’s new album? Sophomore slump, or soaring new standard? Continue reading »

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