Jul 112018
 

 

On Monday of this week I began a two-part collection of music whose title was intended to have a dual meaning. Some of the music I chose was recognizably death/doom metal. Other tracks had very little to do with death metal, yet death loomed large in their atmosphere, even envisioning the extinction of all human life.

In this concluding part of the post, doom is still (in widely differing degrees) a through-line in the music, and visions of extinction still uncoil in the mind as the sounds flow through it. But as in Part 1, there’s considerable variety in the music.

I’m indebted to HGD, a faithful reader and a frequent source of recommendations, for urging the last three of these selections upon us, and for allowing me to use his own words as brief introductions to the streams. But we’ll begin with one choice of my own.

ORGAN

Eterno, the new three-track EP by this Italian band presents enormous contrasts of sound and mood. It is usually slow, and as heavy as anything I’ve heard this year — heavy enough to shatter granite boulders as if they were tiny brittle pine cones leached of moisture by the sun… massive, mountainous, megalithic music, and equally immense in the scale of its bleakness. Continue reading »

Apr 022016
 

Duplicate Records-An Alignment of Shrines

 

On this Saturday morning I’ve been struck by a combination of early slothfulness and (annoyingly) a subsequent need to deal with some internet service problems. I had plans to review two EPs for today, but since it’s already noon out here on the Left Coast and I haven’t written a word, I wondered what the hell I would do to foist music upon you. And then I received a Bandcamp alert in my e-mail and… Voilà!!!

That Bandcamp alert concerned a just-released compilation of sounds from Oslo, Norway’s Duplicate Records entitled An Alignment of Shrines. It includes tracks by 14 bands — four of them from forthcoming releases and the rest from Duplicate releases over the last year or so. I recognized the names of 10 of the bands, and it happens that I’ve enjoyed and we’ve previously written about the music of all 10 of those. Here’s the list of the bands and the names of the releases from which the songs were drawn: Continue reading »

Dec 072015
 

Organ - 1

 

(Comrade Aleks has interviewed Alessandro Brun of the Italian band Organ, who have recently released a debut album, and here is what he learned.)

The name of this band could be interpreted in many ways, but as I have a compilation of Johann Sebastian Bach compositions under the name “Popular Organ” it’s not such a difficult task indeed.

So this particular Organ was formed in Italian Belluno by four friends — Alessandro De Pellegrin (bass), Giulio Fabbro (drums), Luca Rizzardi (guitars, vocals), and Alessandro Brun (guitars, vocals). It’s said that Organ plays doom, but it’s only a half truth as their music has wider influences and a disturbing atmosphere, as if it’s the soundtrack for a Dario Argento movie. The band’s first album Tetro (“dark” or “gloomy” in Italian) was released two months ago and soon attracted my attention.

After listening to it few times, I made the decision to put a few questions to the band and clarify some things. Alessandro Brun was the one who answered my questions. Continue reading »