Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
What does the metalhead do on their day off and why is it ambient? I listened to all the โblack ambientโ releases from the 90s to find out. Black metal ambient (Partย I) In Part I we ranged through Central Europe, taking in the Austrian syndicate, on to the bonkers peripheries of Franceโs already bonkers Les... Continue Reading →
What does the metalhead do on their day off and why is it ambient? I listened to all the โblack ambientโ releases from the 90s to find out. If you were to press me on a pithy definition of metal, I would say it's music written through the organisation of riffs. This means it can... Continue Reading →
Mittags-Abgrund: Mittags-AbgrundOut 15th September on Darkness Shall Rise Productions True to the legacy of Russian black metal, this is a piece of impeccably landscaped material, conjuring a fully scoped out environment before our eyes, vast and inhospitable whilst compelling the listener onward, provoking their impulse for exploration. However, Mittags-Abgrund go further in populating this terrain... Continue Reading →
V baลพinรกch vฤdomรญOut 10th September on Me Saco Un Ojo / Dark Descent Records Itโs been a long time coming, but finally Czechiaโs Snฤลฅ deliver on the second album. The upgrades to the debut may be modest given the five year gap, most notably some cosmetic tweaks and slicker production values, but itโs enough to... Continue Reading →
Atomic Aggressor: The Occult ForcesOut 28th August on Hells Headbangers With a history stretching back to the mid-80s, Atomic Aggressor are arguably one of the first to enter Chileโs death metal race along with Pentagram. But following their reformation in 2007 this is only their second album, which may partly explain why they haven't receive... Continue Reading →
Rahaty: Bestial LustmordOut 28th August on Sentient Ruin Another attempt to bleed the deathgrind sponge dry without refreshing the underlying template. This time by taking things in a blackened direction in the Finnish mould. Although this album nails a certain cavernous aesthetic, the underlying architecture fails to trouble anyone accustomed to the extremity foregrounded across... Continue Reading →
Ceremonial Worship: Between Sleep and DeathOut 31st July on Eternal Death Undergoing something of an orchestral refit since their previous offering โSeven Gateways to Eternal Misanthropyโ, the promo blurb accompanying this Greekโs outfitโs latest offering makes a lot of theirโฆGreekness. And whilst they certainly do channel the intangible arcane sensation inherent to early Greek black... Continue Reading →
Hulder: VerbolgenOut 7th August on Season of Mist/20 Buck Spin Arranging the history of black metal into waves is a method as arbitrary as it is useful. The first wave being a retrospective concept imposed on a small group of early extreme metal artists who operated at the peripheries of the underground, only loosely related... Continue Reading →
Vafurlogi: Gneisti af eldi GuรฐsOut 26th June on NoEvDia/Oration True to the spirit of Icelandic black metal, this is a rhythmically informal, cyclically structured set of layered guitar chords defined by loose dissonance and overlapping main themes that seem to emerge from the background before casually decaying away. But unlike Svartidauรฐi or Carpe Noctem, Vargurlogi... Continue Reading →
Sepulcrum: LaceratorOut 24th July on Chaos Records Chileโs Sepulcrum land the second album with ease, delivering a near perfect elaboration on 2023โs โLamentations of Immolated Soulsโ without over stretching themselves. If anything they are an even more efficient beast than before, expanding their expressive range whilst keeping the runtime to a crisp thirty six minutes... Continue Reading →
