Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
Victimarum: Seitsemän soihdun valossaOut 11th October on Signal Rex This brighter iteration of melodic black metal manages to achieve a sense of activism and storytelling in a way that pushes back against the empty anthemism rampant in the genre since its 90s heyday. But despite the album starting strong, Victimarum are unable to sustain their... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
Lord of Two HornsOut 27th June on Nuclear Winter Records Drawn and Quartered remind us that – despite my growing cynicism – you should never write anyone off before their time. 2021’s ‘Congregation Pestilence’ was a tight but forgettable iteration of dark American death metal. One that led me to conclude that we could expect... Continue Reading →
Kill the bliss At the risk of sounding infantile, I’ve come to hate summer. Aside from the needlessly long, skin damaging days, the clammy, sleepless nights, and the ambient good cheer of outdoor folk, life seems to reserve its more challenging scenarios for the summer months. I usually turn to the suffocating activity of death... Continue Reading →
Vortex of the DestroyerOut 28th March on NoEvDi Records One could read Svartsyn as a direct descendant of ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas'. In the sense that this is one way of achieving a “post riff” form of black metal without leaning on ambience. Rudimentary riffs are still present and correct, but their existence is now... Continue Reading →
Clactonian: Everlasting PaleolithicOut 28th March on Prehistoric Sounds Clactonian return for another brief skirmish of dark war metal. Here we see them combine the violent intensity of early grindcore with the haunting darkness of Von. Pivoting on a basic, punk riff, hammered home with an almost ludicrous determination, with only brief variations in pitch or... Continue Reading →
Sadist: Something to PierceOut 7th March on Agonia Records If you want to understand the paradox of progressive metal, studying the career of Sadist can be highly instructive . The more influences the genre imbibes, the broader its expressive range, the march toward unchecked eclecticism, the more its core identity recedes into a distant memory.... Continue Reading →
Hate Meditations 