Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
Iniquitous Savagery: Edifice of VicissitudesOut 22nd November on Willowtip Records The clutter of brutal death metal covers a tendency toward a simple binary of slam breakdowns and tremolo melodic blasts. But predictable is another word for reliable. Despite the somewhat limited phrasing, each theme is framed by tangents and ornamentation interesting enough to elevate this... Continue Reading →
For this video, I ask why, despite metal self-consciously embracing extremity and transgression, it goes to great lengths to conceal its politics, and why subsequent attempts to reveal or create a politics of metal have met with ideological and artistic failure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0S8aQgOFYo
In this episode we interview Condemner, their history, their latest album 'Male Patratis Sunt Atra Theatra Parata', what's in store for the future, and the health of underground metal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuyJ375AyFc
Auriferous Flame: The Insurrectionists and the CaretakersOut 8th November on True Cult Records/Stellar Auditorium Productions “The album explores the theme of revolution and delves deep into the complexities of resistance and change, offering listeners an intense and thought provoking experience.” Given the eagerness to share the complex subject matter that inspired this album, one might... Continue Reading →
Musicians are organic entities subject to the laws of nature. Bands are abstract concepts theoretically capable of immortality. Musicians get old. Retire. Die. Bands often endure in Trigger's Broom form, limping on, replacing discarded limbs. Until we are forced to ask: what even is a band? In the case of Cradle of Filth, Asphyx, or... Continue Reading →
The lads chat Deicide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZo_cY72zIE
The World Down ThereOut 2nd November, self-released Croatia’s Petrale return for another skirmish of suffocating, eerie, dissonant black metal. This latter descriptor is liable to evoke images of cold, clinical, sterile music replete with jagged edges, tempo change incontinence, and aspirations toward headier subject matter. None of which is completely absent from the world of... Continue Reading →
We're back (mostly), we're drinking (some of us), and we're chatting for far too long about what music we've been enjoying lately (amongst other things). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbrKCkKdgw0
Bridges to nowhere October opens the gateway to winter. Darkness makes inroads into our lives. The vestigial traces of summer ebb away by the end of the tenth month. Declining temperatures herald the arrival of November’s high autumn. This particular October has also brought with it a glimmer of the Northern Lights to my... Continue Reading →
Carmina Belli ApocalypsisOut 28th October on Black Mass Prayers Armed with a dark medievalist paint job, a murky atmospheric gloom, and a dynamic compositional package, this pleasing Italian oddity attempts a synthesis between early Satyricon and the suffocating malevolence of Demoncy. At times the results are about as unfocused as one might expect. Valadier have... Continue Reading →
Hate Meditations 