Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
Elsinore: The Vengeful Ghost/Tombstone HexOut 5th December on Caligari Records Brief but tight EP that reminds us that death metal, even in its germinal form, was always melodic in some sense. Explicit references to early Death sit happily alongside the journeying primitivism of Celtic Frost. The presentation is cleaner than the vintage implied by these... Continue Reading →
Aurë EntuluvaOut 27th November on La Caverna Records It’s been a while for Cóndor, but I feel that with album number five this Colombian outfit have finally made a listener friendly album. Cóndor articulate a form of ambient metal with tools normally associated with melodic death/doom. A liminal, veiled quality cloaks the music, as if... Continue Reading →
Verdadero PoderOut 19th November, self-released The second offering from this Chilean powerhouse of speed metal smooths off the rougher edges of the debut, seeing a more focused, weighty, yet no less frantic entity come into sharp relief. Letalis thread the needle of maturity by employing a fatter production, tighter songwriting, and a more intentional flow... Continue Reading →
Gloombound: Dreaming DelusionOut 21st November on Gruesome Records Scrapes together the more downbeat elements of death/doom as a means of conjuring up a foundation for self-indulgent, achingly tedious balladeering. Much like Ahab before them, the pacing and content of these compositions is a hollow façade, leaning on depressed tempos to contrive tension and drama where... Continue Reading →
Death Summer 2025 was not kind to metal. The death of Ozzy was every bit as a dramatic and stage managed as expected. Somehow surprising us all despite the very literal realisation of the inevitable. The suicide of Nisse Karlen prompted me to undergo a detailed re-appraisal of Sacremantum’s discography. Their set at September’s Cosmic... Continue Reading →
Depths of SufferingOut 31st October on Lavadome Productions The rough presentation of this album cloaks a well oiled machine of dramatic, borderline orchestral death metal. The music’s darkness emerges not from a drab, introspective melancholia, but from a pervasive, ambient gloom, as if we were in the presence of some unknowably vast presence, be it... Continue Reading →
SAD: Fullmoon’s Bestial AwakeningOut 31st October on Purity Through Fire SAD continue their quest to appropriate generic second wave black metal sweet-nothings into what is essential punky rock ‘n’ roll. Despite the length of this album, and indeed the considerable girth of the tracks within, there is little to suggest they have expanded into a... Continue Reading →
Christus VenariOut 12th September on Personal Records Choppy, frantic death metal channels the frenetic energy of early Deicide into an explicitly gothic darkness. Borrowing the aesthetic material accrued from more populist extreme metal strains in the form of early 2000s Behemoth, refocusing what was previously empty fanfare into an efficient, tight, yet no less diverse... Continue Reading →
(There are only four) Metal subgenres don’t exist. I think we’ve imagined them all. I’ve run the numbers, and by my count there’s only ever been four. “How could we have been so wrong about this?” you ask. I don’t know, but I’m going to expend considerable effort wildly speculating regardless. I curse my spare... Continue Reading →
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 →
Hate Meditations 