Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
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 →
Výstup k svätej KundeOut 29th August, Nomad Sky Diaries Porenut harness a wealth of competing strands both in and outside of metal to craft a surprisingly compact statement of uncanny black metal for this latest outing. Previous offerings were perhaps a little too whacky for their own good, but here these eccentric details are properly... Continue Reading →
Coronation of the GrotesqueOut 15th August on Dark Descent Records Modern death metal is often guilty of running away from itself. Either gesturing at lofty, pseudo esoteric avant-garde affectations, or else leaning so aggressively into its own cliché that it begins to behave like novelty music. Castrator’s latest offering is something of a breath of... Continue Reading →
Incinerated: The Epitome of TransgressionOut 14th July on BlackSeed Lifts the clustered melodic density of late second wave black metal (think Cirith Gorgor or Gorgon) with a thread of fatalistic lamentation, topographically similar to modern dissodeath but pivoting more toward traditional melody, rendered abrasive by the freneticism of the performances. The strained emotion, and indeed... Continue Reading →
Sacrilege InfernusOut 25th July, self-released Access to culture has never been easier. Deciding what to access and spend time with near impossible. People idolise the traditional underground for its asceticism. The implied discipline required to enter an obscure channel of culture. The music itself a challenge of dense, alien sounds born of a hermetically sealed... Continue Reading →
Lord of NightmareOut 25th July on Hessian Firm (originally released in 2006) Endless Dismal Moan, the brainchild of one Chaos 9, who sadly took their own life in 2008, was an enigmatic Japanese black metal entity that typified or even perfected the dark, urbanist turn the genre took in the early 21st Century. Hessian Firm’s... Continue Reading →
Hate Meditations 