With our sights set on the end of one year and the start of another, we are sharing End of Year lists from staff, bands, and some friends in the business. Ghost Cult scribe (and part of our new, expanded reviews editorial team) Matt Cook has great taste in metal, has the most luxurious beard on staff, and is a great dude. Check out his top picks for his Top Albums of 2023!Continue reading
Tag Archives: Downfall Of Gaia
Ghost Cult’s Album of the Year Countdown 2023: Part 1 (75-41)
2013 saw Ghost Cult crown Surgical Steel (Carcass) as our inaugural Album of the Year in a democratic aggregated vote process, untouched by editorial hands (other than the sliding of the abacus balls from one side to the other – or rather the logging of votes and the use of a rather rudimentary spreadsheet), a format we continue to utilise as the years pass, and the seasons grey. Our dedicated team of writers, editors, photographers make their submissions on demand following a month of much wringing-of-hands and profanities being aimed into the editorial mailbox.Continue reading
PODCAST: Episode 251: The Steve and Keefy Power Hour, April 2023 Edition
Time for another edition of The Steve and Keefy Power Hour! Senior Editor Steve Tovey joins Chief Editor Keefy, recapping March 2023 Rock and Metal Releases and previewing April’s essential new heavy music! Two white guys and music nerds pontificate on the music you love. Also, will we have new music soon from Ghost, Slipknot, Foo Fighters, and Iron Maiden? Shoutout to our amazing team of reviewers worldwide. Also, also, RIP Mat Davies as always. Hosted by Ojaay!
ALBUM REVIEW: Downfall Of Gaia – Silhouettes Of Disgust
At the time of writing a look out of the window reveals overcast and grey skies, whilst as quick a glance at the news is equally as bleak and miserable. It is hard to pay attention to the discourse in the world right now and not feel some combination of anger and hopelessness.
Watch The New Lyric Video From High Fighter – “When We Suffer”
High Fighter will release their brand new album Champain via Argonauta records next week, on July 26th 2019. The band has just shared a new lyric video for their track ‘When We Suffer’, featuring vocalist Anton Lisovoj of Downfall of Gaia on guest vocals. Watch the clip and pre-order the album now at the links below. Continue reading
Downfall of Gaia – Ethic of Radical Finitude
The most interesting bands are not the ones that come out of the box ready made to ingest. The best shift like a sea at storm, creating and destroying, adding and taking back what it wants. Downfall of Gaia too has continued to adapt and improve, pushing themselves and everything else outward with every release. After a few years absence, the band has returned again with their new album, once again aiming high as they can. Continue reading
November 11th, 2016 Heavy Metal Releases
Roadburn Festival Adds Minsk, Mount Salem and Worm Ouroboros To Lineup
Roadburn Festival has added Minsk, Mount Salem and Worm Ouroboros to their lineup for Thursday, April 9, 2015 at the 013. Goatwhore, Downfall of Gaia, Cortez, Fister and Moloch have been added at Cul de Sac.
However, Lord Mantis will no longer be performing and Fistula will be taking their place on April 11, 2015.
Curated by Ivar Bjørnson (Enslaved) and Wardruna‘s Einar “Kvitrafn” Selvik, Roadburn Festival 2015 (including Fields of the Nephilim, Anathema, Skuggsjá, Enslaved, Wardruna, Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin performing Dawn of The Dead and Susperia in its entirety, Zombi, Sólstafir, White Hills, Bongipper, Floor, Eyehategod and The Heads as Artist In Residence among others) will run from Thursday, April 9 to Sunday, April 12, 2015 at the 013 venue in Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Downfall Of Gaia Touring US in January, February 2015
Germany/New York post black metallers Downfall Of Gaia is doing a US Tour in January and February in support of their record Aeon Unveils The Thrones Of Decay, out via Metal Blade. The album was recorded at ’79 Sound Studio in Cologne, mixed at renowned Atomic Garden Studio in San Francisco and mastered at Audiosiege in Portland.
Founded in 2008 and having undergone several changes on drums, the quartet is now comprised of Dominik Goncalves dos Reis (guitar, vocals), Peter Wolff (guitar, vocals), Anton Lisovoj (bass, vocals) and Michael Kadnar (drums), who are respectively located in Berlin, Hamburg, and New York City. Although the group’s roots lie within the crust punk scene, they’ve become more closely associated with a sound that rather corresponds to the impact of an avalanche made from black earth, rock, and dirty sludge, while their lyrics poetically describe the dark side of living.
DOWNFALL OF GAIA:
Jan 23: Kung Fu Necktie – Philadelphia, PA
Jan 24: Mojo 13 – Wilmington, DE
Jan 25: Metro Gallery – Baltimore, MD
Jan 26: DC9 – Washington, DC
Jan 27: Strange Matter – Richmond, VA
Jan 28: 529 – Atlanta, GA
Jan 29: Will’s Pub – Orlando, FL
Jan 30: Churchill’s – Miami, FL
Jan 31: Fubar – St. Petersburg, FL
Feb 01: The Handlebar – Pensacola, FL
Feb 03: Dirty Dog – Austin, TX
Feb 04: Double Wide – Dallas, TX
Feb 05: Fubar – St. Louis, MO
Feb 06: Red Line Tap – Chicago, IL
Feb 07: Frequency Mansion – Madison, WI
Feb 08: Now That’s Class – Cleveland, OH
Feb 09: The Shop – Pittsburgh, PA
Feb 10: The Monkey House – Burlington, VT
Feb 12: TBA- Boston, MA
Feb 13: Saint Vitus – New York, NY
Downfall of Gaia – Aeon Unveils The Throne of Decay
It is during the fourth track, the abrasive ‘Of Stillness & Solitude’, a misnomer of a song-title if ever there was one, that you truly, madly, deeply get Downfall of Gaia. The Isis roiling builds into a chaotic clashing juxtaposition of rusted, raging black metal, vocal shrieks pained with frustration and defeat, and a draining feeling of epic repression immerses as the despotic union of sludge, post-metal and black metal, with a steady jarring relentlessness, wraps the consciousness.
Suspension of disbelief may have originated in the cinematic world, but it adequately applies to many albums – albums that act or behave as a soundtrack, or soundscape (vomits in mouth), if you will. With albums, it’s that creating of an atmosphere, that complete absorption into the feeling the band are creating, where you accept their alternate reality. The more cerebral will do this, guiding you on an aural journey. Cult of Luna excels at it. Early Burzum damned near perfected it. But take it from the hands of the Master Builders and put it in the paws of the less adept you get moments, like at the outset of ‘Darkness Inflames These Sapphire Eyes’, where apposite styles are forced together, when the brooding introduction hits cataclysmic rage in a ungainly segue, where it snaps you out of that false reality. It’s not contrast; it’s a cluster-fuck, as if a surgeon were to reattach a severed finger with a staple gun and gaffa tape.
If there’s a thin line between love and hate, there’s an even thinner one between tense and ominous and, well, boring and jarring, and it’s a line Aeon Unveils The Throne of Decay (Metal Blade) tramples up and down. It has the composite parts. It has the bleakness of Winter, the discordance and pervading opacity of Neurosis and the abrasiveness of Krallice. It has the mood bits, it has the caustic futile wrath, but it doesn’t always know how to put it together and keep it together. But when it works, when ‘Excavated’’s harrowing 8 minutes bleeds on you, Downfall of Gaia nail all the nuances of unsettling, bleak music and it is beautifully horrible. I get the attempts at contrast, I get the pervading mood of hopelessness, but I also get a lot of cut and paste, of not quite knowing how to blend it all together. There’s a lot to recommend about Downfall of Gaia, but this is not their masterpiece. Not yet.
7.0/10
STEVE TOVEY