ALBUM REVIEW: Lord Sin – Confessions


Black metal is to thank for bringing the mystique back to music. This duo from Portugal cloaks themselves in black shrouds, we can assume they are not playing in, but instead of blast beats Lord Sin hits you with some creepy dirges on their sophomore album Confessions (Larvae Records). The graveyard stomp of the riffs allows darkness to possess their sound organically, rather than having to pull out all the Halloween decorations to convince the listener. Halfway into the first song, it’s easy to hear where they fall in the middle ground between doom and black metal. For a duo, they are cranking out a great deal of sound and care about writing songs, rather than just bashing out riffs.   Continue reading


ALBUM REVIEW: Leila Abdul-Rauf – Phantasiai


No matter how much you write about a record, you can never quite fully encapsulate the feelings invoked by the music. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Leila Abdul-Rauf’s (Vastum, Ionophore, Cardinal Wyrm, Fyrhtu) words about her new album, Phantasiai, go some way to explaining why this might be. She writes, by way of explanation of the record’s concept:

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K-X-P – IV


Ambient music is tricky. Get it right and you can create some of the most mind-blowing, expansive, forward-thinking art imaginable. Get it wrong and you’re left looking like a pretentious mess. It’s very difficult to ride the line of pretension and come out on the right side when making anything that forsakes a conventional song structure, but by album six, you’d think K-X-P would be pretty adept, right? Continue reading