Mother of Graves
For the 20th Part of this still-escalating list ,variety is the name of the game, because I’ve chosen three songs that don’t have much in common. I guess you could say they’re all in sub-genres of death metal, but there the connection mostly ends.
Well, not quite. I’ll mention a few more connections: The first two bands both make their homes in Indianapolis; Todd Manning reviewed both of them for us; and all three albums arrived with eye-catching cover art. Continue reading »
(In late May Blood Harvest Records released the second album by the Indiana-based death metal band Obscene, and here we have an enthusiastic review of it by Todd Manning.)
It’s been a pleasure to watch Indianapolis-based death metal unit Obscene evolve from a scrappy and primal bunch of berzerkers on 2018’s Sermon to the Snake to the ruthless, well-oiled killing machine they are now. Their latest, From Dead Horizon…To Dead Horizon, finds these guys in prime form, with the underground theirs for the taking.
From Dead Horizon…To Dead Horizon sees Obscene taking their foot off the accelerator a bit and leaning into more mid-tempo material. In some ways, it’s a bold move in a genre that favors the extremely slow or the extremely fast, but it pays off.
In making my way through the continuing flood of new music over the last 36 hours I hit a stretch of high-energy, technically impressive music with pronounced melodies, albeit with a lot of different embellishments and stylistic intersections (most involving elements of death and black metal). I decided to put those together here, and then veered way off the rails at the end with a trio of songs that make me smile when I imagine your reactions.
LANTERN (Finland)
To begin, let’s consider “Strange Nebula“. You won’t need a telescope, merely your ears and an open mind. Continue reading »