Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
The World Down ThereOut 2nd November, self-released Croatiaโs 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 →
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 Novemberโs 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 →
Onslaught Kommand: MalignancyOut 18th October on Godz of War Productions Essentially a goregrind band with a blackened edge, Onslaught Kommand justify their rather limited existence by combining a playful package of classic grind riffs with an oppressively dark atmosphere, eschewing the cutesy play of goregrind at large. Riffs circle around the usual cocktail of early... Continue Reading →
King Crimsonโs โRedโ recently turned 50. And apparently itโs okay to broadcast oneโs love of prog now. No longer requested in hushed tones, served under the counter in a brown paper bag. People are poring over this lurid filth in full view of the public. โRedโ, โClose to the Edgeโ, โMirageโ, these were exceptions to... Continue Reading →
PolemicistOut 27th September, self-released The paradox of well known phrases is that, by virtue of wide usage, their meaning becomes unknown. The commonplace phrase goes unexamined. Melodic black metal is one such example. Prima facie an obvious, self-explanatory subgenre. But one that has thus far avoided re-appraisal or revision since the subgenre's solidification in the... Continue Reading →
Father Befouled: Immaculate PainOut 13th September on Everlasting Spew Father Befouledโs by now lengthy career of Incantation mirroring has evolved from the uncanny to the surpassing, as their material has ascending in tandem with Incantationโs descent into a dull autopilot. This latest EP does little to shift the formula. Although one can hear other influences... Continue Reading →
Flames of SamโลซโmOut 8th September on Dark Adversary Productions Black Funeral are perhaps the unlikeliest latter day acolyte for such staunchly conservative, by-the-numbers black metal. One of the USโs earliest adopters of the form, pillars of the third wave along with Judas Iscariot, Krieg, and Demoncy, their run of albums from 1995 to 2010 delights... Continue Reading →
B-tier black metal and the break of autumn Your tastes are not your own. Your moods are orchestrated by nefarious digital platforms. Everyone knows this now. โInceptionโ may have been right that the mind can always spot an idea implanted by a foreign agent. That we would somehow care, or not act on this idea... Continue Reading →
A life in death metal 1987-1997 By David E. Gehlke Death metal was rockโs first truly underground cultural artefact. One only has to look at the way it crumbled and fragmented whenever it sniffed the bright lights and fanfare of โmainstreamโ attention. Look at heavy metal by contrast. Perfectly comfortable with a little big budget... Continue Reading →
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