There are many injustices in metal. Popularity is no metric for quality, nor is critical acclaim; after all a vast chunk of ‘critics’ are clueless hacks with scant insight into the music they are tasked with dissecting, paid for by whatever shallow music mags are still feasting off the music as a monetised commodity. But... Continue Reading →

Karyn Crisis' Gospel of the Witches: Covenant (2019) Gospel of the Witches is an interesting little project headed by Karyn Crisis, formerly of Crisis fame. Interesting because it’s a kind of goth/alt-metal outfit that’s not shit; quite the opposite in fact. Debut LP ‘Salem's Wounds’ (2015) – which featured session performances from death metal royalty... Continue Reading →

Havohej: Table of Uncreation (2019) Paul Ledney finally returns with a new Havohej LP ten years after the ground-breaking ‘Kembatinan Premaster’ (2009). And if that album laid the groundwork for how the inevitable marriage of noise and black metal might actually work, then 'Table of Uncreation' moves us just a little further along this road.... Continue Reading →

Some call it war metal, but it’s really just a particularly aggressive strain of black metal that looks to speed and intensity before atmosphere. I guess its origins lie in the likes of Blasphemy, who fused the back-to-basics punk of early black metal with grindcore. But a particularly militaristic strain evolved with the likes of... Continue Reading →

Funereal Presence: Achatius The second offering from Funereal Presence swung off the vine onto my desk the other day: 'Achatius', released early this year. It is truly one of the more unique releases that I have come across in recent years. It revels in a primitivism of decades gone by, namely the older school of... Continue Reading →

Grindcore was a real game changer for extreme metal. With one foot in hardcore punk and one foot in death metal, it’s influence can be felt far beyond the obvious. It’s dual heritage also led to a bizarre binary choice for lyricists, politics or gore, and never the twain shall meet. But whatever limitations it... Continue Reading →

When I compare the canonized albums of metal gone by with those of the last ten years or so, I sometimes wonder if we learnt all the wrong lessons. We get bogged down in vague and subjective details, the feel of the music rather than the logic. As music evolves, specific aspects of a sound... Continue Reading →

Pressor: Weird Things (2018) After power metal and grindcore, stoner doom is one of the most limiting genres in metal. It's one of our worst kept secrets. But not all limitations are created equal. And where some see limitations, others see a challenge, an opportunity to discover uncharted creative spaces. There are a number of... Continue Reading →

The 2000s were a tedious era to be a teenager. Our youth was set to a backdrop of Star Wars prequels, that frog text alert, and Coldplay existing. It was a largely dormant zeitgeist, punctuated by terror atrocities, illegal wars, and economic collapse. For all the horrors the 2010s have witnessed, it has at least... Continue Reading →

It’s an agreed fact that genre saturation eventually leads to genre decline. It’s also an agreed fact that this happened to death metal by around 1993/4. But was this as simple as genre saturation, or simply saturation of subpar music? The risk – for the interested fan – is in simply sticking to the same... Continue Reading →