Dan Swanö has a knack for rewriting the songwriting textbooks. He did it once in 1996 when Edge of Sanity released Crimson, and in 1999, Swanö did it again with Moontower. The heavy emphasis of the synthesizers as a melodic instrument is a huge boost to this album and it provides some remarkable counterpoint between them and the vocals. It had a way of reminding me of Jordan Rudess and the best keyboard moments on the early Dream Theater albums. The vocals are intense and are complimented by a strong backbone. Songwriting is less interested in full on aggression and riffs, focusing more on strong melodic leads and catchiness. "Encounterparts" is one of the best progressive instrumentals because of its insistence on returning to that primary prog hook from the beginning (Dream Theater could learn a thing or two). If this album had fewer harsh screams, I would assume that this was intended to be AOR. Reminded me a lot of the band Nightingale. Moontower, for me anyway, shows a level of maturity from Swanö that is seldom found in progressive music even today. Being able to show off your technical proficiency is one thing, but if you cannot do it in a way that is engaging with the audience, you just look like a try hard. Dan Swanö pulls it off beautifully on Moontower.

Best Songs: Uncreation, Patchworks, Creating Illusions, Encounterparts

For Fans Of: Edge of Sanity, Opeth, modern Amorphis

Croydon's The River formed in 1999 and released several demos before this, their debut album, came out in June of 2006. They have since undergone an evolution into an alternative slowcore / post-metal act, but this was unmistakeably, female-fronted doom metal and a pretty good example of it at that. Built upon highly distorted, rumbling riffs that present a huge wall of sound, even back then they had a degree of a shoegaze influence, an example of what would be called doomgaze, albeit with a bit more bite than I usually associate with the term. Deep basslines that follow the riffs and fairly sparse and wholly functional drumming (with guitarist Christian Leitch doubling up behind the kit) underpin the lethargic riffing and provide a deep and formidable foundation. Over this wave of distorted rumbling, singer Vicky Walters' clear, clean, but oh so melancholy, vocals describe heartbreakingly of a life trapped in a cold, abusive relationship and the hopelessness and despair such a life means for the victim. It is well worth the time to read and get to know the lyrics because it really does twist the experience of the album into a whole new dimension and is as affecting and, frankly, upsetting as any doom metal I have ever listened to. It is heavy stuff, but doom metal shouldn't be afraid to face real-world suffering if it is serious about exploring melancholy and loss, not just loss of others, but of self also. You cannot fail to have empathy for someone who has been stripped of any identity of their own and who are left feeling empty and invisible.

As I said at the start, the band eventually went in another direction, with Vicky Walters leaving around 2010, but with this debut they released one of the most profound doom metal albums it has been my privelege to hear and it still stands as one of my favourite female-fronted doom releases.

I have to admit that I hated the first couple of albums from Norway's Dimmu Borgir when I first encountered them during my mid-90's trade trading days & nothing has changed much in that respect. The experience left me feeling far less than enthused about continuing to follow the band through their creative evolution, however I believe it was Ben that alerted me to the drastic change of musical direction with their third full-length "Enthrone Darkness Triumphant" & it tempted me back to see what the fuss was about. I wouldn't say that my initial listens saw my interest doing a swift u-turn as I still found myself struggling to connect with the band's brand-new & significantly more symphonic approach, however I certainly found it to be more palatable than the clumsy, incompetence of records like "For all tid" (1.5/5) or "Stormblåst" (2/5). It's only now though, that I've realised what my main issue with "Enthrone Darkness Triumphant" was & started to finally come around to its charms.

Whereas Dimmu Borgir's early releases took an intentionally lo-fi & primitive approach to melodic black metal, "Enthrone Darkness Triumphant" is an altogether different beast, this time going for a huge symphonic sound full of gothic romanticism & grandeur. The lineup had changed a little with bassist Brynjard Tristan (Old Man's Child) being replaced by Nagash (The Kovenant/Troll/Carpe Tenebrum/Chrome Division/Covenant) while the other core members who recorded Dimmu Borgir's 1994 "Inn i evighetens mørke" debut E.P. were all still present. The prestigious Peter Tägtgren (Hypocrisy/Pain/Bloodbath/Lindemann/Lock Up/The Abyss/War) would be charged with engineering & mixing the album & had begun to make a name for himself as a talented producer over the previous 4 or 5 years. This would appear to have been a good decision as he certainly played a role in presenting Dimmu Borgir as a more exciting yet also more accessible option for extreme metal fans.

Upon revisiting "Enthrone Darkness Triumphant" for the first time in decades this week, I was immediately challenged in the same way that I was back in the day, only this time I feel that my increased patience allowed me to overcome an obvious failing that had previously tainted my vision of the overall album. You see, "Embrace Darkness Triumphant" begins with the three tracks that contain by far the most challenges for my personal taste & it had previously been hard to overlook them when assessing the holistic package. It's only with several repeat listens that I've come to this realisation & discovered that the remainder of the record is really pretty decent. The use of Stian Aarstad's keyboards in those earlier songs tends to veer into overblown & cheesy spaces while there is a lot more brutality & substance to the other seven songs, particularly the blast-tastic "Relinquishment of Spirit & Flesh" which very quickly drags things back out of the abyss after the disappointment of the opening trio & is easily my pick of the bunch. All of the remaining tracks are worth hearing although none of them quite reach essential status, generally being let down by a weaker section here or there. It's hardly surprising that the general consensus seems to be the complete reverse of my position on the tracklisting as I'm simply not the target audience for a record like this one. 

The vocals of front man Shagrath (Chrome Division/Fimbulwinter/Nocturnal Breed/Ov Hell/Ulver) are a highlight along with the more frenzied drums parts of Tjodalv (Abyssic/Susperia/Old Man's Child) while the riffs of rhythm guitarist Erkekjetter Silenoz (Insidious Disease/Nocturnal Breed) often draw upon the influence of symphonic black metal godfathers Emperor during their stronger moments. Those keyboards rarely reach a level where I find them to be more than tolerable however they don't often leap over the borderline into theatrical shenanigans outside of those first few tracks, generally staying within spaces that I can at least deem to be acceptable even if I would prefer that they weren't there at all a lot of the time.

There's no doubt at all that "Embrace Darkness Triumphant" was Dimmu Borgir's best release to the time & took their careers to an entirely new level. For me though, their finest hour would not come until the early 2000's with records like "Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia" & "Death Cult Armageddon" when they'd toned down the theatrics a bit. It's easy to see how some of your more elitist black metal fans might claim Dimmu Borgir as "gateway" act off the back of a release like this one but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, we all needed an entry point & it doesn't immediately mean that Dimmu Borgir are entirely bad. They're not, They're just not the same animal as your Mayhems or Marduks.

For fans of Old Man's Child, Cradle of Filth & Carach Angren.

Counting Nostalgia Points

I never liked the earliest Bring Me the Horizon albums. Not until There is a Hell... [et al.] did I ever start to notice anything of value in this bands music. Once they kicked the deathcore out of their sound, their songwriting dramatically improved. So twenty years after the release of their debut LP, Count Your Blessings, BMTH (Bring Me the Horizon) re-recorded it and published it to the world. For what reason I have no idea!

The deathcore days of BMTH are long behind them and this blatant display of nostalgia farming is disappointing. I get it; the online metal spaces cannot shut up about how "bRiNg mE tHe hOrIzOn wERe sO mUcH bEtTeR wHeN tHeY wERe dEaThCoRe". But if you wanted to make a deathcore album in 2026, why the fuck was your first thought to re-record the old albums instead of just making a new deathcore album? It would have been just as bad as the old stuff sure, but that would have least required effort.

This album is not just performed bad, with all of the same tired tropes I've complained about in modern metalcore for years, but it's also performed with the atrocious songwriting techniques that made Myspace deathcore (i.e. Job For a Cowboy, Suicide Silence, Chelsea Grin, etc.) so unbearable twenty years ago! The guitar mixing is sloppy, the percussion has been amplified, mostly in the bass drum, creating that terrible wave effect in my speakers. Oli's harsh screams might be the best part of the album since they haven't shown too much rust in two decades (I was expecting them to be much worse). As for the songwriting, you know the drill; songs that cannot figure out what they want to be as they modulate in-and-out of motifs and riffs like a kid in a candy store, whiplash tempo changes, irritating use of the pinch harmonics and shout out breakdowns that you can predict from three songs away. 

I guess to wrap up the review I should probably talk about the actual new song here. "Dehumanized" proves my point. It still not very good, but because BMTH actually had to write a new song, it does have some modern trends from the band, as they try to weave their way through both the past and present. It sounds like a song that Make Them Suffer would write if they were still a deathcore act.

I see no purpose as to why this album exists. If a band wants to fully embrace the nostalgia and revert back to a sound that initially made them popular that's fine, but at least prove to me you're going to put in some effort for it. My review of Survival Horror: Nex Gen stands when I said this band is playing catch-up to the rest of the metalcore world. Except now, BMTH aren't catching up, they're falling backwards.

Best Songs: A Lot Like Vegas, Dehumanized

For Fans Of: Suicide Silence, Whitechapel, Despised Icon

The sophomore release by Brazilian based progressive/post-metal/death doomers Loneshore is a confusing record. That's not to say that I don't like it; the quality of the songwriting and unconventional structure sucked me in and would not let me go for the entire fifty-plus minutes of runtime. However, Nothing Left to Deconstruct is an album that feels more like an amalgamation of the sum of its parts instead of a cohesive unit. When the album begun with "Straylight" and "To Stride the Black Earth", I could hear the influence right away. Imagine if Tool wrote more heavy songs, with seven string guitars and more death metal howls from Maynard, something closer to that of The Ocean. And I really enjoyed it; "To Stride the Black Earth" in particular with its unconventionally short runtime. "Of Lost Waters" starts off with a neat riff that sounds influenced by "Windowpane" by Opeth. "Birth of a Mountain" and "Parhelion" are both good as well, and even have segments that feature Mastodon-esque sludge metal grooves. The main issue I felt was that even though these influences were indeed influential and not blatant rip-off's, I still felt myself getting sucked out of the experience. I really enjoyed the variety found within this album, but it kind of felt like too much at some times, which was odd. 

If the mixing of this album was worse, I would probably view this record in a far less positive light. The production is splendid allowing every note and word to be performed with expert precision. As the album shifts between styles and influences, so does the mix. Clean guitars on "With Nothing We Part" sound weighty even beyond their lowered tuning, while tremolo guitar leads are balanced with the vocals, creating some great counterpoint. The percussion is tight and draws the album forward even during its more contemplative and slower sections. The vocals of Luiz Felipe Netto take some getting used to, especially his death metal howls. They don't sound particularly dense here. A healthy dose of reverb and bass boost could have done wonders. The clean singing on the other hand is well done; Luiz shows a great vocal range and dynamic variety.

I wanted to enjoy this album more, but something about it just irks me. I can tell immediately that these guys have chops and their approach to songwriting is unique and very interesting. But as a whole, Nothing Left to Deconstruct also has the feeling of an identity crisis. Perhaps giving it more time will really bring it home, but I don't really want to have to deconstruct this album for another eight years to find out!

Best Songs: Straylight, To Stride the Black Earth, Parhelion

For Fans Of: Tool, The Ocean, Spirit Adrift