Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
DecayOut 25th September on Relapse Records Hellfest 2010 was a pretty special festival. John Garcia got 75% of the band back together as Brant Bjork and Nick Oliveri took the stage for a few numbers during his Kyuss classics set. Immortal, Asphyx, and Carcass were all in their post revival pomp, affording a younger generation... Continue Reading →
What does the metalhead do on their day off and why is it ambient? I listened to all the “black ambient” releases from the 90s to find out. Black metal ambient (Part I) In Part I we ranged through Central Europe, taking in the Austrian syndicate, on to the bonkers peripheries of France’s already bonkers Les... Continue Reading →
What does the metalhead do on their day off and why is it ambient? I listened to all the “black ambient” 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 →
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 ‘Seven Gateways to Eternal Misanthropy’, the promo blurb accompanying this Greek’s outfit’s latest offering makes a lot of their…Greekness. 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 →
Sepulcrum: LaceratorOut 24th July on Chaos Records Chile’s Sepulcrum land the second album with ease, delivering a near perfect elaboration on 2023’s ‘Lamentations of Immolated Souls’ 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 →
Sallow Moth: Hydrophilous BroodOut 24th July on Willowtip Records Surrealist brutal death metal redrafts elements of ‘Obscura’ and post 2000s Suffocation, but as with most contemporary avant-garde progressive extreme metal, it conflates stylistic incontinence with a density of ideas. Sure, for solid stretches of this album Sallow Moth work the Rubik’s Cube of tightly packed... Continue Reading →
Death is the Master of this WorldOut 8th July on New Era Productions From the mind of Jan Kruitwagen of Sammath and Kaeck fame comes this new dark ambient project. Split neatly into two fifteen minute segments, in essence what we are presented with is a re-evaluation of ambient black metal. Paradoxically by removing any... Continue Reading →
A hundred death metal albums not from the USA Between 1993 and 1994, death metal popped its head above the underground parapet to peek into the mainstream. From airplay on MTV’s Headbangers Ball, to Morbid Angel being the first death metal band to get major label backing with a signing to Giant Records, to bloody... Continue Reading →
