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 →
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 →
Décryptal: SimulacreOut 11th July on Me Saco Un Ojo/Rotted Life Attempts to forge links between the old and the new in death metal via a survey of muscular old school traditions through the crushing swing of the Earache crowd to darker 2010s caverncore. In this endeavour it retains a refreshing focus and coherence, marking it... Continue Reading →
Vomitum TempestasOut 30th June on Nuclear War Now Productions Texan death metal engages in a distant but often proactive dialogue with the genre’s macabre roots. Blaspherian, Condemner, Imprecation, all are muscular, direct, energetic iterations of death metal. But on closer inspection it becomes apparent that their raw physicality is a façade, a delivery mechanism designed... Continue Reading →
Hate Meditations 