Roadburn Festival is sold-out for 2019! The fest has now announced its running order, so get your schedule right and try to avoid the clashes! You can download the handy day schedule from right here and save it to your phone for the fest!Continue reading
Roadburn 2019 is already sold out for the entire four-day weekend, but they have added another and final round of amazing bands. Craft (added by Tomas Lindberg to his curated event), Bosse-De-Nage, Street Sects, Glerakur, MJ Guider (Melissa Guion), L’acéphale, and Grey Aura have been added to the main weekend acts. Newly announced is the annual pre-party at 013, “Ignition” featuring Temple Fang and Hellripper. A third band will be announced soon!Continue reading
As their legion of fans will attest to, Swallow The Sun is not your average Death-Doom band. The inventiveness and melancholy melodies lift the Finnish outfit to another plain and, after 2015’s lauded triple album Songs From the North, any release from the sextet is anticipated with a relish akin to hero-worship. Single Lumina Aurea, all fourteen minutes of it, is a precursor to next year’s album When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light (all Century Media) and, although not a track from that album, is an eerie, monumental aperitif – a gateway to the full product.Continue reading
On the heels of their day tickets going on sale and one stellar horde of bands announced after another were added to the bill, Roadburn Festival is nearly sold-out for 2019. The fest made an announcement in the Facebook event page that all 3 and 4- day tickets are now gone, as well as Saturday and Sunday day tickets are now completely sold out. Only 50 tickets remain for Thursday and Friday, so if you want to go, now is the time. Get your tickets at the link below.Continue reading
Roadburn continues to add to its bill for next spring! 2019 curator Tomas Lindberg (At The Gates) adds more names to The Burning Darkness including Grails, Uran, Fontän and Hexvessel! Hexvesel will perform All Tree in full. Other notables include a Dutch black metal showcase commissioned project Maalstroom (members of Laster, Verwoed, Witte Wieven, Turia, Fluisteraars, Grey Aura, Terzij De Horde, Folteraar, Nefast). Aaron Turner, Will Brooks and Dennis Tyfus come together as Doolhof. Also added are Bismuth, Coilguns, Crowhurst, Crowhurst & Gnaw Their Tongues unite in Harsh Noise, Fauna , Fotocrime , Lucy In Blue, Pharmakon, Thor & Friends, Twin Temple, and Wrong. Single day tickets will go on sale on tonight – Thursday, December 13 at 8pm CET/7pm GMT/ 2pm EST. Four day tickets are sold out and the rest of the weekend will likely sell out soon too. Continue reading
Nottingham duo Bismuth, as its name implies, is renowned for its crushing, unflinching take on Doom and Drone. Sophomore album The Slow Death Of The Great Barrier Reef (Medusa Crush Recordings) is largely comprised of the thirty-two minute title track and is as moving as it is difficult, as absorbing as it is challenging.Continue reading
This torturously heavy UK trio Monoliths is so recently formed that I couldn’t dig up anything on them for weeks. Knowing that it was comprised of members from Bismuth, Moloch and Ommadon, however, enlightened me to my fate for the following half-hour.
Getting crushed by a Fuck-off monster of a traction engine. If our US cousins aren’t too sure what one of those is…well, it’s not an easy way to go. The first of two colossal tracks on début Monoliths (Dry Cough Records /Crown & Throne Ltd.), ‘Perpetual Motion’, begins and ends with a disturbing fuzz that leaves you in no doubt what’s coming and, in closing, what has just been. Tanya Byrne’s swerving bass thrum knocks you off your feet but, as the track ebbs and flows, nuances appear as mini-crescendos swirling around the mind. David Tobin’s solo breaks the Om-esque hypnosis which the terrifying riff and Henry Davies’ wondrously tempered drums hammer through the solar plexus, hardly breaking the lumbering pace yet bewitching the senses with its pulverising might. I’m not usually one for instrumentals but this carries me to far-off lands on the back of a yeti.
The monumental, everlasting pummel of ‘The Omnipresence of Emptiness’ takes a short while to move through the volume, and to that familiar bass bellow. Yet when the whole thing crashes together it is a life-ending implosion, carrying depth and weight suitable for the occasion. Missing the latent groove of its forefather, subsequently this is the harder track with which to find an immediate affinity until the most unnerving, horrifying roar introduces a shattering solo. It’s here where one realises the flattening power of the drums, while the other ingredients of this plundering sortie become so unfathomably heavy I completely lost where I was, bemused by the sheer weight yet moved by a scintilla of emotion.
Look, this is no epiphany. It is, however, a near-perfect slab of evil Doom and an excuse for lovers of this stuff to completely lose their shit. In making something usually so monotonous and pulverising sound immediate, occasionally moving, and unmissable, Monoliths prove themselves an essential addition to the Low-end canon.
8.5/10.0
PAUL QUINN
If Undersmile’s snail-like tempo is too slow for you, stop now. On debut album Unavailing (Dry Cough), Nottingham duo Bismuth coats that pace in a warm yet evil fuzz, every chord bringing the world crashing down around your ears with a weight similar to a Sea Bastard riff.
What the listener will find here is that the ingredients and tension build ever so gradually until the willing victim is uncomfortably writhing in their seat. Opener ‘Tethys’ does all of this yet closes with a delicate, lamenting final movement: extremely reminiscent of the aforementioned Undersmile, but with Tanya Byrne’s smooth harmonies more in tune with Windhand’s Dorthia Cottrell.
A sparingly picked, torturously slow acoustic riff leads the ensuing ‘Of the Weak Willed’, and for the first half of this sixteen-minute epic that’s really all that happens. Then comes the slightest change, a crawling increase in volume; and the hushed, singular drumbeat of Joe Rawlings that’s been whispering in the background for some time, alongside a mournful intonation, is suddenly very noticeable. Here is the magic of this hidden gem of a band: by the track’s three-quarter point, where the crushing mass and Byrne’s guttural screams are seamlessly and almost surreptitiously reintroduced, the increase in pressure has been so smoothly executed that it’s been with you like an old friend by the time you realise it’s there.
Following sinister, solitary drumbeats, the odd, sporadic bass notes of ‘The Holocene Extinction’ begin that building process all over again into a crawling, horrific echo: the riff city-levelling, the rasping howls a seduction into Hell. Closer ‘Solitude and Emptiness’ is the oddity of the set: its hypnotic beats and oscillating, pulverising pummel being of a slightly faster ilk and disembowelling from the off, the second period’s return to a slower template still crushing yet evoking the spirit of the track’s title.
Silence is often a great thing and, for us Low-end freaks, it’s an essential part of the listening experience. It augments this delightfully horrific album, another cracker from the Dry Cough stable and an exercise in creative perfection. Rest assured it will warm the cockles of those who love their riffs to be colossal and their aural terror to be slooooowww…
8.0/10
PAUL QUINN
