Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
Pestilential HymnsOut 20th October on Memento Mori Thaumatrugy upgrade themselves from the competent but commonplace chasmic death/doom of the debut into a more holistic statement of extreme metal. Reinvigorating the increasingly murky territory between black and death metal with a clarity that can only come from a rigorous riff discipline. The demo phase of Swedish... Continue Reading →
Words by Jason Kiss Only Death is Real “Only Death is Real” is one of the most endearing slogans of the extreme metalunderground. The phrase was first brought into metal lexicon by Hellhammer, later reformed as Celtic Frost, in the track “Messiah” on their 1983 demo Satanic Rites. Since then, it has become a sacred... Continue Reading →
Victimarum: Seitsemän soihdun valossaOut 11th October on Signal Rex This brighter iteration of melodic black metal manages to achieve a sense of activism and storytelling in a way that pushes back against the empty anthemism rampant in the genre since its 90s heyday. But despite the album starting strong, Victimarum are unable to sustain their... Continue Reading →
Hadopelagyal: HaematophoryktosOut 19th September on Amor Fati If we were to regard this in terms of presentation alone we would come away with the impression that Hadopelagyal are interested in little more than showcasing chaos. The ethos of blackened grind inflicted on dirge ridden black metal riffing to conjure a sense of random, nihilistic violence... Continue Reading →
LoreOut 3rd October on Eleventh Key I often use the term “world building” when writing about music. It’s probably worth clarifying what I mean here. History may remember early 21st Century music not in terms of artistry, but granular developments in technological. Developments that may have seemed small and incremental in isolation, but at the... Continue Reading →
Isen: Zaklinani posledni zimyOut 5th September on Northern Silence Productions Basic, repetitive black metal achieves a sense of triumphalism through a gradualist development of riffs. Each one is treated more like a single refrain, repeated ad infinitum to create a sense of size and scope. This is subsequently forced through subtle shifts in emphasis and... Continue Reading →
MercatorOut 12th September on Redefining Darkness Records Heruvim locate the carefree bounce of Pestilence circa ‘Spheres’ within the dark chasmic setting of modern death metal, flattening off progressive nuance in favour of creating something more accessible from the raw material. Demilichian chromaticism is recruited as binding material, linking the progressive allusions with the nihilism of... Continue Reading →
Please read the following scenario carefully. A discussion will follow. Scenario One: Andrew Lee is an American of Chinese descent. He has a death metal band called Ripped to Shreds. Ripped to Shreds were booked to play a gig with a much older death metal band called Master, who were in the middle of a... Continue Reading →
Gruwelijk OnthaalOut 18th September on Folter Records It’s been ten years since Kaeck’s debut ‘Stormkult’. Where that album consolidated an austere reading of early second wave black metal into an aggressive, tight, yet atmospheric celebration of the genre, subsequent releases have – at least aesthetically – dramatically deviated from this foundation. 2021’s ‘Het zwarte dictaat’... Continue Reading →
Eldur: Rituals of Death and NecromancyOut 25th August on ATMF Combines the purposeful militarism of simplistic Swedish black metal with a mystical eccentricity borrowed from modern occultist metal. Whilst balancing these two competing forces occasionally pays off, Eldur lean into basic thrash or melodeath riffing to plug the gaps, thus rendering what could be quite... Continue Reading →
Hate Meditations 