Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
A Touch of EternityOut 16th December on Loud Rage Music (originally released in 1997) Given the reserved, no thrills demeanour of my native North of England, it’s always puzzled me that a variant of overtly emotive, randy, flamboyant death metal bubbled up here in the early 1990s. The drab poise of the Peaceville bands certainly... Continue Reading →
The riddle of steel So that was Christmas. The auditing fury of December gives way to new projects launched, ideals dusted off, promised resolutions, and a renewed drive to make life better, cleaner, more focused, efficient, slicker, or otherwise optimised. If you’re a hustler psychopath that is. For normal folk it just means a fucking... Continue Reading →
Words by Jason Kiss Preface It is evident that the new Mefitis release, The Skorian // The Greyleer, has faltered in terms of gaining underground traction. Despite the promotional machinery of Earsplit Compound and the substantial backing of Profound Lore Records, the Spotify listenership remains very meager, reviews are scarce, and I cannot help but apprehend... Continue Reading →
I went into shortlisting for this year expecting to barely scrape together twenty releases worth of calling out. Instead I’ve actually struggled to keep the list south of forty. 2024 has been a rare year where both the overground and underground seem to be in agreement on the uptick in quality (for entirely different reasons... Continue Reading →
Na utriniOut 27th December on Osmose Productions CMPT’s debut album ‘Krv I pepeo’ released in 2021 caught me off guard for its slick development of Burzum style black metal, dragging the form in a more expressively riff based direction whilst retaining the liminal, dreamlike atmosphere that seems so lacking in many paler imitations of Varg’s... Continue Reading →
FolkstormOut 25th December on Purity Through Fire With a release schedule as adversarial as its nature, a lot of black metal tends to come out in the latter half of December. As if to disrupt pundits keen on tying up their AOTY lists before Christmas. Gnipahålan, as a shamelessly traditional, lavish, opulent, overwhelmingly cacophonous outlier... Continue Reading →
Peccatum MortiferumOut 13th December on Void Wanderer Productions Energetic, warm occultist black metal with aspirations toward high melodicism, and subtle yet effective gestures toward epic narrative storytelling. The soft, pillow punching snare combined with a bass guitar lead and a generally strained and dramatic poise will inevitably invite comparisons to Necromantia, Mortuary Drape, or Master’s... Continue Reading →
Perdition’s Mire: Into a Dark HeartlandOut 13th December on Headkick Music At one point these impotent guitar lines were probably reasonable black metal riffs. Onto this framework is draped a tedious exercise in self-therapy. Because this band’s focus is on individualised inner struggle they have nothing useful to say beyond meaningless gestures on why life... Continue Reading →
Thunraz: Incineration DayOut 22nd November, self-released Sterile, mechanical, jagged death metal meets an undercurrent of dark gothic atmosphere on the latest album from this Estonian entity. There is a clear intent to blend the abstracted violence of death metal with a more grounded, artificial aesthetic. Despite the clear industrial current running throughout 'Incineration Day', one... Continue Reading →
The Skorian // The GreyleerOut 29th November on Profound Lore Records The existence of Mefitis within extreme metal is in many ways metatextual. They imbibe its raw materials only to churn it up into a cocktail of inuendo, subversion, duality of meaning that would go largely unnoticed by anyone not intimate with the legacy they... Continue Reading →
Hate Meditations 