It’s staggering that a city supposedly renowned for everything that is good in life produces such harrowing music in abundance. Maestus’ sophomore album Deliquesce (code666), the full-length extension to their 2017 demo of the same name, is the latest slab of darkness to emerge from Portland, Oregon, and it paints a picture of bleak desolation.Continue reading
Tommy Stewart, lynchpin of Doom outfits Hallows Eve, Bludy Gyres and Dyrewulf, is not a man to allow moss to sprout betwixt his tootsies. After last year’s mammoth Bludy Gyres contribution to Rope Enough For Two (Black Doomba Records), their split with Dayglo Mourning, comes Negative Wall: a new project formed with long-time cohort Dennis Reid and guitarist Don Cole.Continue reading
Horror has played a large role in Metal for decades with eerie and creepy imagery being one of the quintessential elements of some of the largest acts in the genre. The Ghost Next Door’s sophomore release, A Feast for The Sixth Sense (Ripple Music), demonstrates this in swathes.Continue reading
It’s a curious business when an album isn’t bad, isn’t great, or isn’t even average either. How to review it? Give it a proper slagging? This is the challenge Vol. 6 (Artofact Records), by Vancouverian Doom Metal peddlers Seer, poses this critic. In a sense, it’s hard to fully categorize. Listening to this album is like appraising a beautiful ice sculpture, only it’s a little too far away to see, it’s snowing, and you’re only wearing your underwear. This is a roundabout way of saying that the album is very easy to admire, but very hard to actually like.Continue reading
With The Onlooker (Season of Mist Underground Activists) Ukraine’s Windswept has issued an open invitation to any and all Black Metal releases this year to challenge them for the throne. And maybe time will prove my assessment to be wrong, but several listens into The Onlooker its hard to imagine another Black Metal release as sonically satisfying as this anytime soon.Continue reading
York natives, InVisions are Metal. InVisions are Hardcore. InVisions are outright heavy and they are coming into this year with a blistering sophomore record, Between You & Me (Stay Sick Recordings). While they may possess those familiar tendencies that are all too similar with a host of core bands throughout the scene, they are keeping things consistent with some pleasing tracks along the way—their own way.Continue reading
Since leaving Battle Beast in rather acrimonious circumstances in 2015, Beast In Black guitarist and songwriter Anton Kabanen has done everything possible to challenge his former, more established bandmates, and with 2017s debut album Berserker (Nuclear Blast), he succeeded in no uncertain terms. With the two acts releasing stellar albums within a few months of each other, it would appear that Helsinki is definitely big enough for both bands, and that any bad blood that may remain between them is at least being channeled competitively into something creative and positive.Continue reading
Sometimes you just know what you are going to get with a band’s new release, before you have even heard a note. It is the notion of a band knowing what they are good at and having no need or even desire to deviate, also known as doing a Motörhead. Case in point is German Death Metallers Deserted Fear, a band who have proven dogged in maintaining their sound for over a decade now. By knowing what to expect the latest album Drowned By Humanity (Century Media) to sound like, the flip side to that coin is that you also know you are in for a raucous time.Continue reading
To say that Ambient Blackened Doom Metal is a touch inaccessible is like saying Brexit’s not going brilliantly. No band entering into the realms of this niche sub-genre does so with ideas of fame and fortune, simply a desire to create oppressive and expansive art. It’s in this jagged world that we find Euclidean and Quod Erat Faciendum (Division Records).Continue reading
It’s a curious spelling but when you realise that Yerûŝelem is the new project of Vindsval and W.D. Feld, high priests of French dark experimentalists Blut Aus Nord, nothing else is expected. As mystical as they are, and as profoundly dramatic and volatile as the city which gives the band its name, debut album The Sublime (Debemur Morti Productions) is both an enthralling and a nerve-tingling experience.Continue reading