Panzerchrist: All Witches Shall Burn
Out 5th January on Emanzipation Records
Panzerchrist lean into their black metal selves on this early year afterthought. An artist that’s true in name and deed, this EP functions as a trope collector of martial black metal tendencies, by the numbers and highly efficient in its ability to bring together such a broad spectrum of genre dog whistles into a coherent thesis. Panzerchrist paint a satisfyingly fluid melodic picture. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the opening number ‘Sabbath of the Rat’, which manages to thread a consistent conceptual theme throughout the entire piece. But as the EP progresses, and taut composition gives way to placeholder riffs while we wait for something more interesting to happen, contrived theatrics function as a stand in for a lack of substantive ideas. A disciplined riff philosophy is maintained throughout, touching on slower drones alongside older, atonal influences. But that, alongside a consistently managed basket of melodic licks almost lyrical in their expressiveness, fails to elevate this EP from rank genercisim.
Engulf: The Dying Planet Weeps
Out 12th January on Everlasting Spew
It’s rare for someone to encapsulate so succinctly everything that’s wrong with modern death metal. The nostalgia train has finally left town, and a decade of OSDM tyranny seems to be abating. And in its wake the genre is confronted with another identity crisis. Jettisoning the most explicit retro affectations seems to have left us with the husk of death metal as it was in the early 2000s, albeit with an ever more overt tendency toward post rock/post metal redundancies. By accident or happenstance, Engulf’s debut articulates this up-to-press malaise with its confused technical lurches a-la Gorguts post ‘From Wisdom to Hate’, knock off turn-of-the-century Morbid Angel riffs, and endless pinch harmonic interjections to create the illusion of density, disruptive tangents that serve no purpose, and light dissonance marking it out from older, purely melodic or chromatic forms. The production may have internalised some of the last decade’s penchant for organicism as a way to contrive authenticity, but it remains fixed on precise, high budget sterility that hearkens back to the pre-nostalgia age of death metal as was in the early 2000s. Whilst this clearly serves a functional role, it gives us full view of how little is achieved with all this energy and technical ability after all, it also recapitulates the predictable uniformity that death metal worked so hard to escape from back in the late 2000s.
Voltumna: For Death is Fate
Out 19th January, self-released
Voltumna throw some slam riffs against orchestration that tries just a little too hard to please our desire for theatre (think camp more than eccentric), knitting the resulting clusterfuck together with some off-the-shelf blackened thrash calling cards when they seem at a loss for what else to throw into this questionable stew. Everything from Voivod to Arch Enemy show as influences, as Voltumna pick up one current of metal history only to drop it just as casually once they have no more use for it. Bare bones thrash riffs find greater staying power via jarring keyboard accents that do little to temper the utter stylistic chaos at play here. Stilted, staccato punches punctuate each track, making ‘For Death is Fate’ appear for all the world like djent with a sense of mythos. Voltumna look and behave like just another boring artefact of the ever growing intersection between death and black metal, but aside from the their antiquarian lyrical interests, this is a different beast entirely. One far more interesting as a subject of study owing to the utter cacophony of extreme and pop metal stylings they manage to gorge their way through in the space of a few measures. If I didn’t know better I would say this is a piece of satirical avant-garde theatre.
Unsouling: Vampiric Spiritual Drain
Out 26th January on I, Voidhanger
This artist understands how to write a serviceable death or black metal riff, but locating it in a wider tract of riffs that would add up to a coherent statement appears to be beyond them. Lacking the means to develop their voice beyond single, isolated sentences, the only recourse is to repetition, leveraging layers of “odd” guitar effects or uncanny keyboard lines layered atop the overworked husk as way to squeeze the mileage out of each idea. When this approach runs out of road, the fallback is generic rockist platitudes delivered with a drab gothic aesthetic, as though to thoroughly emphasise a dark pretence to the listener, just in case we missed it. Because one can here the cogs turning behind the creative process, the logic of these compositions is dictated by necessity and runtime as opposed to artistic will. ‘Vampiric Spiritual Drain’ fails therefore, as a musical statement on its own terms and as mere programme music offering the listener a means of escapism. Like a magician revealing their tricks, the experience offers mild intellectual curiosities, but is devoid of any significance beyond these vague talking points.
Hasturian Vigil: Unveiling the Brac’thal
Out 2nd February on Invictus Productions
Essentially a speed metal album wearing black metal clothes. Hasturian Vigil make a show of aping non-Nordic black metal by informing their music with a strong undercurrent of heavy metal. But they fail to grasp the spirit of formative blackened thrash and Hellenic metal in its tendency to leverage Dionysian joy and melodic euphoria with a sense of arcane heroism that wrested the surface level trappings of the genre from the clutches of banal party music. Here we instead have a concoction of flat black metal riffing punctuated by bursts of mawkish heavy metal material that leans into the domesticated facets of the latter genre over its grandiose aspirations. The result is a serviceable if tedious tour of galloping black metal with nowhere near enough substance or insight to justify the length of tracks offered here. This is supplemented by trite attempts by Hasturian Vigil to signal their loyalties to the spirit of heavy metal via mundane guitar leads and standard rock profanities.
Druadan Forest: Dismal Spells Part II – The Night Circus
Out 23rd February on Werewolf
Druadan Forest lean into their ambient selves for this latest instalment, a shorter sequel to the epic tome of 2019 by the same name. Shortform cosmic ambient is populated by a basket of familiar themes lifted from the dungeon synth milieu. The latter of which pivots toward a highly traditional interpretation of the form. No faux medievalism, no saccharine comfy synth pandering. All is sparse, minimalist, for the most part complying with the overarching dictates of drone but for a pronounced melodic inflection populating the lead refrains (explicitly so on tracks like ‘The Devil’s Gate’ with its basic but creative church organ variations). Most of the tacks, as with a lot of ambient composed from a black metal perspective, pivot on setting the scene with a rich and immersive synth line, which is in turn populated by simple but tense melodic licks, working in cyclical repetitions, with textures gradually layering up as the tracks progress. But all is austere, modest, the landscape never becomes too cluttered with rich orchestration or heavy handed string motifs. A welcome addition to the annals of cerebral dungeon synth, and a reminder that despite the amount of attention this micro genre has garnered from bearded coffee house dwellers in recent years, a degree of sincerity is still possible within this fraught, contested space.
Hate Meditations 
Klainmain91 _ You need at least two guitar tracks(example Metallica’s rhythm/lead,and how mindblowingly that worked),some bass,and a drummer and a vocalist,all playing together in unison like a ww2 full on mechanized army march and,at any time,according to their judgement,anyone of these perform,with a child’s joyfull disregard to others,deviating independently to play their very own song,whether it does or doesn’t stick to the whole at first listen.I’m sure the majority of music makers have as much patience and concentration capacity to read two or three lines of this text,let alone intricate full pieces like yours,and then have their attention drawn to something else,and sth else yet again,like,burying all past 5 or 10 seconds in oblivion,eventually remembering only,say,the bangs that leave scars,everything else,well,a soul crushing or sadistic ridicule worthy eternal present..
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