Ghost Cult continues our “2021 End of Year Guest Post Extravaganza” with a slew of posts from bands, industry, PR pros, and more! We’ll be sharing lists, memories, and other shenanigans from our favorite bands, partners, music industry peers, and other folks we respect across the globe. In this edition, Alex Jones of Undeath! He shares his Top 20 Albums of 2021! Support the band via their Bandcamp page!https://undeath.bandcamp.com
In the first of an irregular feature for people with irregular music tastes, Ghost Cult plunges into the chaotic cyclone of abstract, dissonant and frankly horrible sub-underground Metal, Noise and Ambient.Continue reading
One of the best things about being an… ahem… “mature” Metal fan is finally being over all that anti-trend nonsense. If you’re still on the more idealistic side of twenty-five you might want to skip to the next paragraph, but the cold fact is that Extreme Metal is as vulnerable to fashion as any other kind of Pop music (it’s okay, they’ve already stopped reading), with the same references cropping up in rotation until the trend moves on.
Adorned with underground-cool pencil cover art, Ad Nauseam’s debut album can be explained entirely in terms of names with a lot of cool weight in Metal right now. Combining the dissonant, abstract thundering of Gorguts, Ulcerate’s near-ambient Death Metal soundscapes, the flailing freak-outs of Deathspell Omega and a touch of Portal’s nightmarish otherworldliness, on paper Nihil Quam Vacuitas Ordinatum Est (Lavadome Productions) reads like an essay on “How To Write A Cool Death Metal Album In 2015”. It is also a perfect demonstration of why none of that stuff matters and Metal fans should finally stop caring about whether something is trendy or not, because it is not only a genuinely excellent album, but a truly distinctive one.
There is a genuine sense of both depth and individual voice on the album which raises it above the vast majority of its peers. Refusing to restrict themselves to a single territory, Ad Nauseam are equally comfortable with savage violence, abstract experimentation and doom-laden dissonance, yet never sound as though they’ve lost a sense of what they’re doing. Yes, it’s possible to identify the bits that sound like Gorguts or DSO, but as a whole they mesh together into something entirely itself.
Ad Nauseam have come out of nowhere with some of the most over-used references in modern underground Metal, and used them to assemble what will almost certainly be one of the best Death Metal albums of the year. If you didn’t think there was any space left in your collection for another album that sounds like this, you were objectively wrong. Fill that space immediately.
9.0/10
RICHIE HR
Italian death metallers Ad Nauseam is streaming their recently released debut album via Lavadome Productions, Nihil Quam Vacuitas Ordinatum Est below.
01: My Buried Dream
02: Key To Timeless Laws
03: La Maison Diev
04: Into The Void Eye
05: Terror Haze
06: Lost In The Antiverse
07: The Black Veil Of Original Flaw
08: Superimposing Mere Will And Sheer Need
Lavadome Productions on Bandcamp
Lavadome Productions on Facebook
Italian technical death metallers Ad Nauseam is releasing Nihil Quam Vacuitas Ordinatum Est on March 31, 2015 via Lavadome Productions, and is streaming “My Buried Dream” below.
Nihil Quam Vacuitas Ordinatum Est was five years in the making and well worth the wait. The band has recorded and mixed the album in their own studio, even making some of its own equipment to capture the sound exactly as intended. The painstaking effort was driven by passion, energy, and creativity, collectively harnessed to ensure that mediocrity was crushed in the quest to create something relatively unique without abandoning familiar (and beloved) Death Metal constructs.
01. My Buried Dream
02. Key To Timeless Laws
03. La Maison Diev
04. Into The Void Eye
05. Terror Haze
06. Lost In The Antiverse
07. The Black Veil Of Original Flaw
08. Superimposing Mere Will And Sheer Need
Lavadome Productions on Bandcamp
Lavadome Productions on Facebook