Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
After my recent survey of modern black metal, a death metal follow up was all but inevitable. Commercially speaking, death metal seems to be in a healthier place than black metal, with bands like Blood Incantation threatening to transcend the genre in terms of their brand reach. Tastes in death metal also seem to behave... Continue Reading →
Witch Wife in an Alien WorldOut 9th October on Cruz del Sur Music As the erstwhile darlings of the new wave of traditional lesser spotted heavy metal, this album is a bold move for Smoulder. Sure, aside from a clear pivot away from doom into faster classic metal stylings, the material is contiguous with previous... Continue Reading →
Book report - Melancology: black metal theory and ecology Dominik Irtenkauf: [black metal theory] seems to be more about speculative interpretations of a musical sub-culture than developing a coherent system of theory. Is that perception correct? Nicola Masciandaro: Yes. I recently had the misfortune of stumbling onto a debate raging across Substack between continental and... Continue Reading →
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 →
Why millennials can't grow up, and why this matters It’s a self-evident truth that young people do things incorrectly. As the young form their identity in adolescence their elders place them in a kangaroo court. Why does the millennial eat so many avocados? Why are they so preoccupied with representation in media? It’s a rite... 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 →
Apocalyptic SteelOut 26th June on Season of Mist Underground Activists Say what you like about Nargaroth, but the guy dances to the beat of his own drum. In his earliest period Ash was simply content to write Nordic black metal fanfic, resulting in a surplus of flat, bloated material that bored more than it enraged... Continue Reading →
I miss stuff. Stuff used to be everywhere. I watched The Lost Boys recently. It occurred to me that stuff clutters every shot of 80s films, trinkets, knickknacks, gumph, it clogs up the screen to the point of distraction when compared to the barren surfaces of modern television. All my life I’ve been told that... Continue Reading →
