Amon Acid: Paradigm Shift (2021) From Hate Meditations’ hometown of Leeds comes the new LP from Amon Acid. To call ‘Paradigm Shift’ an amalgamation of Hawkwind and Electric Wizard would be simultaneously a great disservice yet entirely true. In the literal sense, Amon Acid have taken the slow, brooding doom of Electric Wizard, which rooted... Continue Reading →

Kjeld: Ofstan (2021) Dutch black metal seems to consistently offer a tight hammer blow of audial experiences that are at once rich with melody yet bound along with near infectious aggression. Kjeld are no exception in this regard. Their latest LP ‘Ofstan’ offers hyper-fast black metal constructed of forceful, upfront riffing contrasted with moments of... Continue Reading →

Was metal in its original form a fundamentally new phenomenon? The answer to this question will in part depend on when metal could be considered a fully autonomous form of music. And establishing this – as I shall argue – is not as simple as declaring “Black Sabbath” to all and sundry. Metal’s upbringing was... Continue Reading →

StarGazer: Psychic Secretions (2020) The latter-day saints of progressive extreme metal (those that have achieved some semblance of artistic success) tend to thread an understated needle between competing styles. I’m thinking of the likes of Norway’s Execration, Sweden’s now defunct Morbus Chron (Sweven doesn’t count), and Australia’s StarGazer, whose latest album sounds more like the... Continue Reading →

Yorkshire – and the North of England in general – is a fitting setting for melodic and gothic doom metal to have gained a foothold. Land of the perpetually downtrodden, self-assured yet hard done by. Boasting many proud cities that still embody the drab spectre of England’s industrial past. But also the gateway to the... Continue Reading →

Dipygus: Bushmeat (2021) “Dipygus is a severe congenital deformity where the body axis forks left and right partway along the torso with the posterior end (pelvis and legs) duplicated.” If nothing else, death metal fandom will expand your vocabulary. Following in goregrind’s proud tradition of obscure medical terminology and the lengthy samples popularised by Impetigo... Continue Reading →

Temple of Abraxas: MCMXXXI (2021) My curiosity for just how exactly Sleepwalker was going to follow up 2019’s ‘Temples Forlorn’ has finally been satisfied. That album presented unique challenges for the onward trajectory of the project known as Temple of Abraxas for a number of reasons. The most obvious being the intangible route to originality... Continue Reading →

Simon Reynolds’ book Retromania attempts to make sense of the nostalgia complex within contemporary music. Released in 2011, from our heady vantage point of 2021 the book comes across as both ahead of its time and premature. The aftershock (or more fittingly ‘lethargy’) of stagnation that gripped the 2000s so tightly can still be felt... Continue Reading →

Abyssum: Poizon of God (Reissued by The Sinister Flame 2021, originally released 2008) Abyssum gets a highly deserving reissue from The Sinister Flame, who have released the Guatemalan's second album ‘Poizon of God’ in January this year. As if to directly contrast with Relapse Records’ obsessive preoccupation with chucking out recordings of old Death gigs,... Continue Reading →