SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): SARGEIST, SIVYJ YAR, SVARTGREN

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Dec 252019
 

 

“Confrontation is expected, it doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas”. That’s a quote from a 28-year-old restaurant worker in the midst of a crowd exchanging insults with police today in Hong Kong, where protests continue without regard to the holiday. But when I saw that line in an article this morning it seemed a fitting introduction to this column too. We’re not shutting down either, so get ready for a lot of confrontational metal to blacken this holiday (divided into two parts).

SARGEIST

This is a rare SHADES OF BLACK in which every band here, in both Parts, is one I’ve written about before. And they’re here again because they’re all damned good. Of them all, Sargeist is the most venerable and venerated. Now 20 years into their career, and still led with venom and vigor by Shatraug, Sargeist gave us a new album last year, but decided to drop a new EP just yesterday. It caught me by surprise, and what a good surprise it is. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: MOTHER AUGUSTA, DECIMA, LVME, SVARTGREN, ANTRE, DE DOUĂSPREZECE STATUI ALE STĂRILOR DE UMBRĂ ALE SUFLETULUI

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  6 Responses »
Dec 012019
 

 

I think I made a mistake. Between Friday and Saturday I spent 6+ hours just listening to new music, at least half of which I devoted to individual tracks publicly released from forthcoming albums. That’s a LOT of individual tracks. Along with discarding things that didn’t grab me, I started excitedly assembling ideas for round-up posts organized around varying themes, and of course added to an already long existing list of ideas for the column you’re reading now.

Why was that a mistake? Because now I’m mentally suffering from the knowledge that there’s no way I’ll have the time to follow through on all the writing schemes I imagined, no way to feature everything I’d like to recommend. Even if I could, it would be too much music and too many words for any normal person to consume over the space of a few days, on top of other music you would be exploring from other sources.

Well, as they say, I made my bed and now I have to lie on it. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, here’s what I chose for today — which is a lot of music, but not nearly enough.

MOTHER AUGUSTA

If you haven’t done whatever you need to do to follow the Chinese label Pest Productions on Bandcamp, you ought to fix that post haste. The releases are stylistically more unpredictable than many labels with a black metal pedigree, and over a lot of years I’ve encountered very few that didn’t do something good for me. A Bandcamp e-mail alert just days ago is how I discovered that Pest had released Fragile, which is the name of the debut album of Mother Augusta. Continue reading »