Vitriolic Sage: Enlightenment (2020) The current crop of black metal acts emerging from China seem to be marked by a committed grimness (before the word took on its present cliché meme fodder status), but supplementing these darker immersive tendencies with an overarching fragility worked into the melodic tendencies. The debut EP from China’s Vitriolic Sage... Continue Reading →

Uncertainty Principle: Sonic Terror (out 5th February 2021 on Xenoglossy Productions) Uncertainty Principle are a long running and mightily prolific industrial/drone/doom/noise outfit with a new album in the pipeline for February 2021; the significant beast of a work entitled ‘Sonic Terror’. As the basket of genre tags suggests, digesting this album is a venture not... Continue Reading →

Abigor: Totschläger (A Saintslayer's Songbook) (2020) There was a time when laboured artistic premeditation was the preserve of older acts, whose image and intentions were already deeply embedded in the minds of their fanbase. Beholden to the axioms of expansion, the next statement would have to be bigger, more ambitious, more novel, more thought-through than... Continue Reading →

Death thrash? Thrash death? Even my pedantry has its limits. If we’re talking in terms of pure extremity, then these artists exist at the borders of thrash, at least philosophically if not in actual output. There’s no quirky dissonance, the drums are sticking with straightforward bursts of energy that rely on their relentlessness over anything... Continue Reading →

Mongrel’s Cross: Arcana, Scrying and Revelation (2020) Brisbane’s Mongrel’s Cross return for a third LP in the form of ‘Arcana, Scrying and Revelation’, and – following the unceremonious dissolution of Absu – Proscriptor McGovern has joined the party for want of employment, offering his unmistakable vocal talents to the fray. And what – I hear... Continue Reading →

For all the lofty words we’ve dedicated to Burzum over the years, it’s easy to forget that the legacy of my boy Varg is far patchier than the actual music he gifted us. Usually the echoes of canonized artists of yore can be felt across a plethora of quality artists to follow; Black Sabbath, Slayer,... Continue Reading →

Tempestarii: Chaos at Feast (2020) Black metal as sentimentality; it’s probably one of the pivotal shifts in philosophy from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ school that has determined the creative decisions of each ethos. But of the old school, the techniques and traditions that set it apart from other forms of metal always did lend... Continue Reading →

Among counter cultures, metal has always been something of an enigma. Staunchly isolationist. Relentlessly oblivious (and sometimes outright hostile) to the ebbs and flows of the outside world. Yet conversely replete with complex codes of conduct, contested lore, and hidden shibboleths. For these reasons and more, its relationship to wider cultural and historical trends is... Continue Reading →

The initial motiviation for taking a look at back at 2010 recently was part personal retropsect, part aversion to the relentless best-of lists we are pounded with at the end of the year. The sense of finality they encourage not only limits our horizons, but discourages deeper dives into recent history. Tens years is not... Continue Reading →

Early industrial didn’t so much point out the warping psychological effects of synthetic totalitarianism as it did aggressively revel in it. There is an unsettling bacchanalian fanaticism to some of these early works that speaks of minds truly unhinged. The contradictions at the heart of urban modernity: living and dying in suffocating proximity to others,... Continue Reading →