A dark cloud is on the horizon. There’s a sense that a storm is coming. But while such imagery often suggests bad times ahead, with Holus Bolus (Blues Funeral Recordings), the latest record by brooding Folk-Rock four-piece Lord Buffalo, those coming rains could be a welcome release. Continue reading
Boezem (Prophecy Productions) is the debut from the Dutch quintet Vuur & Zijde. It is a moody display of blackened post-Punk, (post-Punk meets Black Metal to you and me), sung mostly in their mother tongue and in the little heard-of language Frisian. Continue reading
When bands make the grand announcement that their next album is to be their last this usually means one of two things. It won’t actually be their final record at all, or the end product will probably ending up being some lacklustre, contractual obligation full of second-hand riffs that never made it onto previous records. Continue reading
Over the past nine years since releasing The Dreaming, things changed for this band. Changed in the best way possible as Akhlys’ new album House Of The Black Geminus (Debemur Morti Productions) features a darker, more intricate layering of sounds, at least on the opening track of their new album. Continue reading
What Maudissez are able to do with instruments (at least I assume they’re instruments) is unsettling to the nth degree.
The anonymous and self-described anti-Christian blackened sludge-cum-Death/Doom entity doesn’t simply make music; the four tracks featured within Maudissez (Sentient Ruin Labs) are as raw as a mooing filet mignon. Continue reading
The answer to the question “What if Opeth were Brazilian and even more progressive?”, Rio de Janeiro act Piah Mater return after a six-year absence with the genre-bending Under The Shadow Of A Foreign Sun (Code666 Records).Continue reading
In a world where you can never keep on top of everything being released, we can be pretty confident that there isn’t anything else in 2024 quite like Malconfort and the band’s debut, Humanism (Transcending Obscurity Records).Continue reading
Have to come clean on this one: just haven’t been feeling the Black Metal love like I used to. Don’t know, something about the genre just seemed steadfast on refusing change, aesthetically or musically. The mandate seemed to be that everyone still must slap on the corpse paint and record something with the production and mix of a VHS bootleg. That’s without mentioning certain artists and labels being complete knobs on Twitter if you dare mildly critique them in a review. Continue reading
Dark folk is an all-around enthralling genre with a wide range of well-known names, from Vàli to Ulvesang, but recently, what especially has been catching my attention is the new release from Xasthur – namely Disharmonic Variations, out via Lupus Lounge. Specializing in Black Metal and avant-garde releases, the label has worked with various names of note, including Nachtmystium and Austere.Continue reading
Over the past decade, Oh Hiroshima have made a name for themselves in the Swedish music scene, taking inspiration from the likes of This Will Destroy You and numerous other bands in the Post-Rock genre, the band have made themselves stand out, and now four albums later, the band are once again looking to stretch out their horizons on the fifth album of their catalog, All Things Shining (Pelagic Records). Continue reading