Nov 012025
 


artwork by the legend Frank Frazetta

(written by Islander)

I hope those of you who celebrated Halloween got through it with all your fingers intact. Oh wait, that’s a different holiday. But the wish still holds, even if the risks of losing digits might not have been as great. It all depends on where you put them and what you hold and whether some masked goon is firing rubber bullets at your raised fists.

I got through Halloween with all my digits intact, and the three I use for typing have been busily pecking away at this Saturday collection. It comes later than usual because I got a late start and was really confounded in deciding what to pick.

I was pretty thorough in saving links and files this week, which meant there were a fuckload of them staring at me this morning, and I had only sampled a small number of them during the week. I would say that more than half of them were of the black metal persuasion, so I shoved off a lot of those candidates (but not all of them) for tomorrow, which is also therefore guaranteed to be confounding. And there’s a bit of a curveball at the end, of course.

On we go…. Continue reading »

Mar 282023
 

(Andy Synn takes a walk on the weird side with the debut album from Belarus’s Leprethere)

Right from the start, Tarnished Passion is not an easy album to pin down.

The duo who make up the band themselves refer to their sound as a mix of Dissonant Death Metal and Mathcore, and both those elements are certainly present.

But I’ve also seen them referred to as Progressive Metalcore, Technical Death Metal, and even Djent (though that one is really making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill in my opinion) by various different sources, so there seems to be some confusion about how to classify exactly what it is that Leprethere actually do.

And I can’t help but think that’s how they like it.

Continue reading »