Sonny's Reviews

Fear Factory were one of the first new bands I got into when I returned to metal fandom in the late 90s, playing the hell out of Demanufacture and Obsolete, then a bit later, Digimortal, yet for some reason I never got round to the band's debut. Coming to it so late and with the benefit of a huge chunk of hindsight, it is plain to hear that Soul of A New Machine is the product of a band that is in transition from an established genre to a brave new world as they explore interesting new directions for their sound. With this in mind, I would have to agree with those who say that Soul of A New Machine is more important historically than it is enjoyable, with the lack of any truly memorable tracks being the main case for the prosecution. That isn't to say that this is a bad record, because it isn't, but it does have the feel of a transitional piece with the band casting around for a solid indentity. I do hear what Daniel is saying about the groove metal element because one comparison that sprang to mind for me, particularly during the early tracks, was Sepultura's Chaos A.D. which was released a year later, although I would agree that it is only a secondary tag at best. Of course one of the main features of the album and the one for which Fear Factory would become synonomous is the industrial sound of the chugging riffs and the hard-hitting and machine-like drumming of Raymond Herrera. This is a sound that would be incredibly influential, for better or worse, on a new generation of bands like Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Rammstein. There are still some tracks that are more rooted in death metal or even grind, but these seem to be some sort of vestigial anachronisms left over from the earliest incarnation of the band, like some kind of musical appendix.

One aspect of Fear Factory's earlier output which cannot be overstated is the importance of Burton C. Bell's dual harsh / clean vocals. Bell is an accomplished death metal growler, but his clean vocals are so well-suited to the material with a soaring, disembodied feel that seems to contain the soul of the narrator when confronted by the solid, dehumanising reality of the more tactile industrial atmospheres and the effectiveness of this contrast between human and machine perspectives is what sets FF apart from other industrial metal proponents. There are a few samples scatttered throughout and I suppose if you are going to use movie samples then you can't really go wrong with Blade Runner and Full Metal Jacket can you?

Decent enough though this debut is, for me it will always be merely the stepping stone to the classic that is Demanufacture, but it is still interesting enough in it's own right as it does illustrate exceedingly well how a seminal band transitions from a trend follower to a trend setter. They would seriously up the ante songwriting-wise on subsequent releases and lack of memorability would no longer be an issue for them, as they sorted out where they wanted their sound to go and then were able to concentrate on songwriting as they were no longer exploring what works and what doesn't. Interesting rather than indispensible.

Wolves in the Throne Room (WitTR) were formed by and revolve around brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver in 2002. They are from the Pacific Northwest of the US and are considered to be the progenitors and prime movers of the niche sub-genre of atmospheric black metal known as Cascadian black metal (named for the Cascade mountains, a range that extends from British Columbia to northern California and which the band call home). They are also the first US black metal band that managed to make any real lasting impression on me. Sure I'd listened to a few prior to the Brothers Weaver - Absu, Agalloch and Nachtmystium had all been given ear-time, but none had really got their hooks into me until this 45 minutes of atmospheric black metal nirvana forced it's way into my CD player courtesy of a like-minded metalhead I worked with at the time.

Two Hunters is the epitome of what atmospheric black metal strives to achieve, utilising the savage and harsh sound of black metal in such a way, through repetition and subtle chord changes, that the result is something beautiful and even, dare I say, transcendental at it's best. The music truly does evoke the awe-inspiring and imposing might of the United States' northwestern wilderness (admittedly I have never been there, but I have watched enough National Geographic channel documentaries to have some idea of the impressive scale of the region). From the slow build of the opening post-metal instrumental, Dea Artio, right through to the ending of the eighteen-minute epic I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots and it's haunting female vocal, this album absolutely drips with an atmosphere that most others can only dream about getting close to recreating, despite many trying.

After the gathering thunderheads of Dea Artio's ominously building post-metal fade into the aether, the band launch into their trademark wall of sound, built from successive layers of bass and guitar and underpinned by the metronomic drumming and crashing cymbals of Aaron Weaver that signal the beginning of Vastness and Sorrow, a track that manages to convey a feeling of both vastness and sorrow quite sublimely throughout the entirety of it's twelve minutes. For the early part of third track, Cleansing, we are treated to the ethereal beauty of Jessika Kenney's clean, sirenic vocals over a ritualistic soundscape as Aaron's drums beat a primal rhythm to act as a gentle interlude and introduction to the track which ultimately explodes with full force. An interesting point is that on the double vinyl versions of the album, the introduction is greatly extended, taking the track from almost ten minutes to nearly sixteen and allowing an even more gradual build with a more ambient, choral opening.

After Cleansing we are treated to the album's epic closing track I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots, my personal favourite and one of the best titles for an atmo-black track yet written. This eighteen minute modern saga tells the tale of a future apocalyptic conflagration that engulfs the Earth, yet the song's protagonist, a woodland spirit of the natural world, takes refuge in his sacred grove, awaiting the time when he (or she) can return and begin the land's great renewal. Again, running counter to accepted black metal aesthetic, this is a track that ultimately has a positive outlook with it's theme of death and rebirth and the necessary clearing out of the old to make way for the new. Everything on this track screams epic, with it's heaving and melodic depiction of global disaster and the ultimate rebirth, signalled once more by Jessika Kenney's heart-rending final vocal as it heralds in the New Day.

Two Hunters is WitTR's masterpiece, one of the finest USBM album's ever commited to disc and is one of the absolute best atmospheric black metal releases, to be held up alongside the likes of Drudkh's Blood in Our Wells, Ulver's Bergtatt: Et eeventyr i 5 capitler and Burzum's Hvis lyset tar oss in the atmo-black pantheon.

As a postscript, aside from the extended version of Cleansing, the vinyl editions of Two Hunters have an extra track in side 4's To Reveal, another sixteen minutes of sublime black metal, very much in keeping with the rest of the album. I'm assuming that the vinyl version is the full Two Hunters experience as envisioned from the album's outset, as both the extra track and the extended intro to Cleansing sound fully integrated in this version and, presumably the original CD version was edited to allow for a less intimidating runtime.

The troglodytic german duo are back once more with more tales from the subterranean world of deep mining. From the album's title and the opening crackling of a Geiger counter, the theme obviously concerns the mining of radiactive materials (confirmed by quickly running the lyrics through Google Translate). This is related in the form of six tracks of melodic atmospheric black metal that is chiefly kept at a medium-paced tempo, with blastbeats being used only sparingly.

Initially Uranium didn't really grab my attention as anything particularly special. Yet repeated listens saw the melodies woven by Aragonyth's tremolo riffing lodging themselves in my brain and the dynamic between those melodies and Syderyth's frankly unhinged vocal performance revealed a very satisfying dichotomy between the positivity expressed by the riffs and the negativity expressed by the vocals. I guess in a way this musical tension reflects the trade-off between the dangers and rewards of mining such exceedingly dangerous, yet ridiculously valuable materials. 

This is ultimately a far more skillfully put together album than it initially appears and rewards time spent in it's subterranean depths with some fantastic black metal melodies, with penultimate track, "Wismut »Justiz«" even evoking the closing melody of Fear Factory's "Pisschrist". However, black metal should always leave the listener feeling somewhat disquieted and the agreeable melodies are given a sharpened and dangerous edge by the vocal performance, preventing it falling into too comfortable a space and nudging it back into a more disturbing headspace. I really like how the duo have produced the musical equivalent of the steel fist in a velvet glove here and made the listener work a little to uncover it's inner workings with deceptively adept songwriting.

Russian outfit Scald's debut album, Will of Gods Is a Great Power, is a somewhat legendary release in the epic doom canon. Unfortunately the band were never able to capitalise on it as the death of singer Agyl in 1997 inevitably led to the band calling it a day. 2019 saw them reform in order to perform at the Hammer of Doom festival with chilean vocalist Felipe Plaza Kutzbach of Procession stepping into the not inconsiderable shoes of Agyl. Things went so well that the band kept going, releasing a placeholder EP in 2021 and finally their sophomore full-length in this, Ancient Doom Metal.

Comparisons with the debut are inevitable, but aren't really useful as that was twenty-seven years ago now and times have changed. That said, whilst this is unlikely to overhaul "Will of Gods.." in the hearts of epic doom enthusiasts, it certainly doesn't tarnish it's legacy either and is a worthy release in it's own right. It gives off a lot of Solstice vibes, particularly later material like White Horse Hill and the Death's Crown Is Victory EP with the riffs and guitar tone having a lot of similarity to Rich Walker's work and that's a big positive in my book because anyone who knows me knows how highly I rate him. Those riffs are impressively huge-sounding with a satisfying solidity and depth to the tone, towering over the listener like the imposing walls of a medieval castle, which is really the requisite for any self-respecting epic doom riff. The riffs aren't the only game in town however, with dual guitarists, Ivan "Harald" Sergeev and Vladimir "Karry" Ryzhkovskiy, skillfully weaving some gorgeously melodic harmonies over the solid base provided by those looming riffs and when they let loose with their solos both guys soar high and far with uplifting and imperious instrumental work.

Naturally, vocalist Felipe Plaza Kutzbach is under the spotlight, as the replacement for the now legendary Agyl, but he proves to be a perfect fit for the band as his style is very similar to the former vocalist and his previous experience with Procession and Capilla Ardiente stands him in good stead and it is difficult to see how anyone else could have pulled this off better. I don't know when these tracks were written, whether they are partially written tracks from the initial incarnation of the band brought to completion or if they are newly-composed and I guess that indicates the consistency between this later collection and the original band's output which, considering the more than quarter century since the former appeared, is no mean feat. Obviously where this new release scores over the debut is in the huge improvement in the production values, with the original sounding almost demo-like compared to modern recordings. In some forms of metal this is no hindrance (and even a plus in some cases) but epic doom undoubtedly benefits from good production and that holds true here too with the increased depth of the sound giving the album a majestic quality that "Will of Gods Is a Great Power" can only really hint at.

Overall then, despite some initial apprehension for a follow-up to such a legendary release, I have to give Ancient Doom Metal a big thumbs up. The title is very fitting and it really does feel like doom metal that is reaching back through centuries of history to a time of mighty warriors, daring deeds and of blood and steel, in other words, all that great epic doom should be and the more I listen to it, the more I find myself falling in love with it.

I hadn't heard of Civerous before Ben suggested their latest album, Maze Envy, for the Fallen feature, but a brief overview had me suitably intrigued. Chiefly, the Los Angelinos play an old-school death metal and death doom hybrid which can trace it's lineage back to the likes of Autopsy, but they also like to throw in some progressive tendencies that updates their sound into a more modern beast. And beast it is, the death and death doom components being pretty brutal-sounding with thick, towering riffing sounding at turns both threateningly ominous and bestially viscious. Yet this maelstrom of menacing violence isn't all there is to Maze Envy, there are also moments of beauty and calm reflection, such as that provided by the post-rock guitar work of interlude track, Endless Symmetry, the intro to Levitation Tomb and the sombre middle section of the progressive title track. Elsewhere the closer, Geryon (The Plummet), has a rich gothic atmosphere, reminiscent of My Dying Bride, complete with violin and keyboards, whilst the opening intro track is all dissonant violin work that feels like part of an avant-garde modern classical piece.

But, all that aside, Maze Envy ultimately lives and dies on it's deathly doom metal credentials. Luckily for all of us, these credentials are impeccable and Civerous know what they are about when it comes to old-school death and death doom metal. Think Coffins, but with more outside influences and atmosphere construction, their layering of fairly thin-sounding keyboards over the doomier passages being a big part of the latter. When they let loose, however, their delivery is devastating. Labyrinth Charm for example, is a brutal, ballistic, full-on charge that features a couple of killer guitar solos and Levitation Tomb is a throbbing chug that sounds like a battalion of battle trolls drumming fear into the hearts of their  enemies.

On the downside, one slight criticism I have is that the whole album seems to be a victim of the loudness wars, making it sound like it has been fed steroids to pump it up to unnecessary sound levels, a move that the band hardly need as the music itself is sufficiently aurally arresting without resorting to additional production techniques. On the whole, though, this is a great example of the evolution of the old Autopsy sound into a very modern version of progressive death doom metal, featuring technical skill and imperious songwriting technique, resulting in an album worthy of the attention of any death doom fanatic looking for something that stands out from the crowd.

My history with Whitechapel amounts to little more than a couple of dalliances with tracks on cover discs from metal mags like Terrorizer and Zero Tolerance a decade or more ago now and I can't say I had much time for them. Well, I guess my tastes must have broadened since those days because I actually quite enjoyed this album, even though it is likely that tracks from it were the very self-same tracks that adorned the covers of those mags all those years ago. Now, it is unlikely that Whitechapel will ever sit near the summit of my personal metal hierarchy, but I am genuinely surprised that I got so much out of this because, frankly, I wasn't looking forward to it at all.

The biggest drawback of metalcore for me is the vocals. Their "shouty" nature and general abrasiveness is something I struggle with to be honest. Whitechapel singer, Phil Bozeman, by utilising a lower register, death metal gurgle has provided a singing style that I find much more palatable than that employed by your average metalcore vocalist and which makes me much more amenable to everything else going on during A New Era of Corruption's forty minutes. I know little to nothing about deathcore, but I like how Whitechapel take a basic death metal sound and increase the intensity by utilising a metalcore approach. Technically this sounds very competent with a tight rhythm section and brutally effective riffs that have condensed their sound into a white-hot, focussed blast that hits like opening a furnace door and is liable to singe your eyebrows off! There is some decent lead work that isn't at all showy, but is effective nevertheless, but I get the feeling that that isn't what this is all about really.

I've given this several runthroughs now and I really have found it a great listen, but no one track particularly stands out and my impressions are more of the album as a whole than individual tracks grabbing my attention. That may well be due to my lack of familiarity with deathcore - I checked my ratings on RYM and this appears to be the first deathcore album I have ever listened to, so it's all kind of new to me. That said, if there are more albums like this then it won't be the last. If I really had to pick a favourite then it would have to be Unnerving, the keyboards initially make it stand out before the swirling riffing grabs hold in an almost vertiginous maelstrom of sonic violence. The brutal intensity is the one thing above all other I will take away from A New Era of Corruption and it's determination to give the listener a metaphorical kicking is perfectly realised. I would imagine that the pit at a Whitechapel show may not be the safest place in the world!

If the only thing I took away from my deep dive into the early years of death metal was my re-evaluation of Death and elevation of Chuck Schuldiner to the level of metal god, then it would have been a worthwhile exercise. Being a death metal numpty at the outset I had, even here on the forum pages of Metal Academy no less, expressed scepticism that Death were all that. Approaching the band's releases chronologically and in temporal context revealed that yes, indeed, they were all that and Chuck Schuldiner may well have been the most evolutionary of all metal songwriters. A question that begs some contemplation is where would metal be now if Chuck had lived a longer life, what the hell would he be playing nowadays and is there anything even remotely like it in existence? I think it is fair to say that Chuck was indeed the very rare case of a true musical visionary.

Where Death excelled is that although they constantly changed, literally from album to album, they didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater and always gave their existing fanbase a way into their new material by a process of evolution of their sound rather than a complete overhaul. There may never be a better example of a metal songwriter's evolution than Death's seven albums. It is almost as if with each release it is possible to trace the individual steps of Death's metamorphosis.

For Death's fourth album, Human, out went the rhythm section of bassist Terry Butler and the much-maligned drummer Bill Andrews (after a legal battle over the pair's use of the Death name on a European tour) and surprisingly, considering how big an impact he had on Spritual Healing, out too went guitarist James Murphy. Previously Chuck had written material with other members, but for Human he wrote all the tracks in isolation and, possibly realising he needed band members with the chops to do his new material justice, in came exceedingly capable musicians in Sadus bassist, Steve Di Giorgio, and Cynic members, drummer Sean Reinert and guitarist Paul Masvidal. This was an inspired move, as there is a greater emphasis on technicality on Human that is pulled off brilliantly by the four members.

The sound on Human has a greater clarity than previous Death albums and allows the multifarious riffs and more complex rhythms distinction in the mix that may have been lacking in the earlier albums' muddier production. Both Reinert and Di Giorgio's amazing contributions can be heard distinctly and their technical prowess in both maintaining the rhythms and adding interesting work of their own to the shifting soundscapes is obvious for all to hear. Paul Masvidal's lead work is excellent and he takes a jazzier kind of approach to his soloing than Murphy's more traditional heavy metal approach, and this increasing technicality and diversity seems to be one of the major reasons for his recruitment into Death's lineup. The solo halfway through Secret Face, for example, brings a spanish, almost flamenco-like flavour to the track which, especially in 1991, seems like an impossibility in death metal, but is pulled off here with aplomb.

Chuck Schuldiner had always written great riffs, but on Human they became more complex, seemingly evolving and mutating as each track progresses, like some kind of virus. Despite this increasing complexity and technicality Human still has some incredibly powerful death metal riffing - the main riff of Lack of Comprehension is an absolute killer that is as muscular as anything you could have heard at the time. Human is comprised of truly memorable tracks that stick in the mind well after the silver disc stops spinning and this is a huge plus for me as I often find a lot of technical metal is so focussed on it's own complexities that listenability is sacrificed at the altar of technicality for technicality's sake. Just when you think you have the measure of Human, though, they toss in instrumental Cosmic Sea, which is an insane piece of work that comes at you with pretty much everything Chuck could muster, atmospheric keyboards, soaring solos, weird, otherworldly dissonance and another brutally heavy riff all combine for one of the most interesting metal instrumental tracks you may ever hear. Then on top of Human's sublime instrumentation there are the vocals. Chuck Schuldiner is a seminal death metal vocalist and I think the main thing that makes his vocals so great is that they sound equally as horrified as they are horrifying, as if even he himself cannot bear the evil tidings he brings.

At 33 minutes the album is Death's shortest, but there is just so much to digest within it's slight runtime that it is hard to believe only half-an-hour has passed come album's end. This is as rigorous a workout as you could reasonably have expected back in 1991 and most bands would fail to get even close to producing a half hour of metal as genuinely awe-inspiring as Human.

I heard Black Winter Day somewhere (probably on a Metal Hammer cover disc) and was impressed by it's combination of death metal sensibilities and folky atmosphere. I obtained copies of Thousand Lakes, Elegy and Tuonela and they were all on regular rotation back in Sonnyville. 2001's Am Universum was a bit of a damp squib for me, however and eventually my love for Amorphis waned as I dived further down the extreme metal rabbit hole and I haven't listened to them a whole lot since the mid-2000s other than the odd track from Thousand Lakes, so this review will be a bit like catching up with an old friend and finding out what they have been up to since last we met.

Well, it would be wrong to say they haven't changed a bit, but I would have to admit that they have aged very well. I thought that by 2015 they would have become more technical and progressive than they actually were and I suspected that they wouldn't appeal to me that much, but I actually found Under the Red Cloud to be a very enjoyable and accessible slab of metal. Melodic death and folk metal are combined in an alchemical formula that shouldn't appeal to me in the slightest, but in the Finns' capable hands become an exceedingly palatable cocktail. I don't think I can praise the songwriting highly enough, for them to be able to combine genres I normally run a mile from into such an addictive release is testament to their songwriting skill. The folk metal element is quite prominent, but even so it never even hints at the cheesiness that so dogs the genre in other, less skilled hands, but makes complete sense in the context of this album and it is hard to imagine how it could exist without it. There are a couple of tracks where this element really transforms the melodic death metal skeleton of the tracks into something special, the oriental-flavoured Death of A King and Enemy At the Gates with it's exotic Middle-Eastern atmospherics and brilliant keyboard work. One track that made me smile was Tree of Ages, not because of any inherent cheesiness, but because the irish whistle featured sounds a lot like that featured in Aussie punk's The Rumjack's An Irish Pub Song - a track I love for it's vitality and catchy Irish theme. Amorphis have always been skilled performers and their performances on Under the Red Cloud are terrific, Tomi Joutsen's superb death growl / clean dual vocal attack, Esa Holopainen and Tomi Koivusaari's riffing and excellent leads, the layering of Santeri Kallio's keyboards and the faultless rhythms laid down by drummer Jan Rechberger and bassist Niclas Etelävuori underpinning everything the band does, are all absolutely top-notch.

There are several guest musicians featured on Under the Red Cloud, all of whom's contributions add a sheen that raises the album above the crowd, not least the much-lamented Aleah Stanbridge who contributes female vocals to three tracks, most noticeably official album closer, White Night. The Österäng Symphonic Orchestra are also featured and I don't think their contributions can be underestimated either, lending the album a sumptuousness that lifts it above the mundane.

I did check out Gaza's debut, I Don't Care Where I Go When I Die, when it was a feature release a couple of years back and I fucking hated it. Consequently, this didn't fill me with a huge amount of enthusiasm for the sophomore and I can't lie, I nearly always struggle with The Revolution and it's metal/mathcore content. That said, I did get much more out of this than I expected to. I still struggle with the vocals as they (in common with so many whatever-core releases) often sound like a toddler having a temper tantrum in Tesco's (a steroid-fuelled, 220lb toddler admittedly, but still!) I did enjoy a large proportion of the musical content however, maybe because the sludge component is more prevalent here than on the debut, or maybe because it feels a bit more accomplished than the earlier release. Whichever way, I wouldn't go out of my way to obtain a copy, but if it was on I wouldn't switch it off either and I think I would enjoy it a whole lot more with a less shout-y vocalist (but I guess that is what The Revolution is all about). A couple of tracks grabbed my attention - the main riff of The Meat of a Leg Joint is brilliant and the epic-sounding, although short, instrumental piece that follows it, The Astronomer, is a gorgeous and portentious-sounding piece. The lengthy, unnamed closer, or hidden track if you will, appeals to my Fallen sensibilities with it's serene and measured build-up and is reminiscent of the likes of Neurosis, proving that Gaza don't have to be super-intense all the time, which is no bad thing (and it has no vocals). Overall, He Is Never Coming Back had some really good moments and I like the overarching structure with the instrumental interludes breaking up the super-intensity of the main tracks, so this is probably as good as it gets for me and The Revolution and as such I would probably have to call it a success.

It seems like this is the album that has grabbed everyone's attention as far as thrash metal goes in 2022 and I know little about it or it's creator, so check it out I must. The opening track sounds so much like Planet Caravan that I'm surprised Sabbath's lawyers haven't slapped an injunction on it, so it is hardly off to a genre-defying start. The title track follows and this is much more like what I would have expected and really hits the spot, until... what the fuck is smooth jazz elevator music doing here in the middle of an ass-kicking black metal track? Oh, but things get worse my friend as that snoozy interlude is followed by a migraine-inducing neo-classical guitar solo that is less than welcome in my earphones and I'm left scratching my head as to what is going on here and whether I even have the right album on! So I checked and yes, Spotify confirms that this is the record everyone is so stoked by. I'd better stick with it then I think with a sigh, but this could be a long hour. Luckily, the title track is the most egregious, although not only, example of Autonoesis wanting to be everything all at once so the low point has been passed and it should be plain sailing from here on.

Indeed, Raise the Dead is much more up my street with it's uncomplicated blackened thrash appealing far more to my palate. There is a short exuberant solo towards the end of the track, but it falls far short of the neo-classical excesses of that exhibited during the title track. Generally speaking I did enjoy the rest of the album, when it blasts and thrashes is when it appeals to me most, although the viking-ish instrumental Valhöll did manage to capture my imagination somewhat too. The washed out shrieking vocals were pretty decent and certainly sounded effective enough. I just get the feeling that there was too much of a concerted attempt to cram as many influences into the tracks as possible, which often sounded contrived and distracted from what should have been a fucking good blast.

As I have indicated often enough before, I don't like getting into discussions over genre minutiae, but I think if, for example, Moon of Foul Magics was to become The Pit release of the year then it would sit uncomfotably with me as I think it is much more of a black metal than a thrash record, although there are undeniably thrash elements present. Overall it is an interesting enough release, not always for the right reasons and when it is good it is very good, but there is just too much inconsistency of vision which ultimately I found frustrating.

Monolithe are not you typical death doom crew, it must be said. The Frenchmen have developed an increasingly progressive aspect to their death doom as their career has developed. They place great significance on song length - their first four albums were fifty-minute plus single track epics, 2015's Epsilon Aurigae and 2016's Zeta Reticuli both contained three tracks, each of exactly fifteen minutes duration, Nebula septem had seven, 7 minute exactly tracks and Okta Khora contained eight tracks of either 4:04, 8:08, 4:08 or 8:04 minutes duration. Kosmodrom continues this idiosyncratic tendency with, of it's five tracks, 1 and 4 are precisely ten minutes, 2 and 3 are 10:30 and the closer, Kosmonavt is exactly 26 minutes. Despite this significance that the band place on precision in track duration, I have never found it to be contrived or constrictive and their music never suffers as a consequence of forcing it into a strictly defined temporal space.

I think it is fair to claim that death doom is a pretty "earthy" style of metal. It often suggests abyssal subterranean chasms or huge, hulking mountain vistas. I know there are the lighter-feeling gothic exponents of death doom, but these still focus on quite primal emotions such as fear and loss. Monolithe however, look outwards and upwards for their inspiration and are one of the few producers of what I would call cosmic death doom. Previous album Okta Khora, for example, was a science fiction concept album about some highly advanced civilisation's unshakeable belief that they must force the universe back into it's original form by destroying everything in it. Not your usual death doom subject matter then? Kosmodrom takes as it's theme the early Soviet pioneers of space flight and the huge risks they faced and sacrifices they made to allow the human race to dream of attaining the stars - again, not exactly your typical death doom aesthetic.

This time around, though, Monolithe have leant more heavily on their earlier death doom style than was employed on their previous couple of releases, integrating the progressive elements within a death doom framework, rather than vice-versa. This may initially come off as something of a backward step, but the progressive elements are worked into the fabric of the tracks so intrinsically that the transition from full-on death doom to lighter, more progressive sections sometimes happens imperceptably, so there is, in reality, more going on within each track than may at first appear - Voskhod suddenly erupts in a clean, melodic riff with a throbbing, electronic feel, the twenty-six minute Kosmonavt takes includes a Cult of Luna-like building, post-metal section and during Kudryavka you suddenly realise you are listening to a Dave Gilmour-like Floydian section after it's hulking death doom beginnings and don't even remember how you got there!

If you are familiar with Monolithe's work to date then the opener, Sputnik-1, may seem to be a bit unexpected, it's heavenly female vocals (provided by Houston alt. pop artist London Lawhon) combined with Rémi Brochard's usual gruff growls, the huge, heaving, yet melodic, main riff and the overlaid keyboards may bring to mind My Dying Bride or the like and their gothic take on death doom and in truth I think it stands up to anything the Yorkshiremen have produced. However, rather than some corny gothic romance for subject matter, it's recalling of the aspirations of the people behind mankind's very first step into space exploration provides a theme I personally am more at home with.

As a whole package, Kosmodrom seems very complete and is so skillfully written and crafted that it throws a lot of recent death doom releases into the shade. Monolithe show that it is no longer enough to just keep knocking out slowed down death metal riffs and throw some deep growls on top to appease the death doom cognoscenti - there is so much more that the style is capable of and the Frenchmen, like those cosmic pioneers are forging onwards and upwards in order to expand the minds of the human race. Please don't misunderstand, Kosmodrom does not want for heaviness either. When it needs to be it is as heavy as you could possibly ever want, it just doesn't live or die solely on it's ability to shake the foundations. I would go as far as touting Monolithe as the death doom version of prime-era Opeth and that is heady praise indeed, so if you are in the market for intelligent, progressive extreme doom metal, then you really should give this a try.

I'll just start by stating that I've become somewhat disillusioned with black metal over the past few months. I'm not sure if it's because the inate frostiness of black metal doesn't sound the same in the sweltering heat of the summer months just passed here in the UK, or (and more likely) I've just become more disillusioned with the dilution of the core of black metal by any number of recent releases that subsume the inate ferocity and savagery of their black metal content, resulting in what, to my mind at least, feels like a gentrification of the genre. Thankfully October has seen a couple of albums cross my path that have re-stoked my inner fire for black metal. One was Behexen's debut Rituale Satanum (via the review draft game) and this, admittedly to a lesser extent, was the other.

Onwards to the Spectral Defile, at it's best, concentrates on enervating and energetic black metal that is loaded with aggression and a formidable fury. I wouldn't exactly call this raw as the production is a bit too meaty for that, but it is visceral and savage nonetheless and harks back to the best of early Gorgoroth or Marduk. I would have liked to have heard the drums a little bit higher in the mix because drummer Levithmong (not his real name I suspect) batters away with a controlled furiousness that impressively drives the material along despite his efforts not sounding as prominent as I feel they deserve to be.

This isn't exactly an essential black metal release by any means and the band's efforts to throw in some variety by way of more melodic or less frantic sections aren't consistently successful, but when they hit their stride there is enough fire and fury present to satisfy my old-school black metal cravings. I think I would have preferred them to have stripped-out the attempts at variation and to have doubled-down on sheer black metal beligerence and in so doing serving up half-an-hour of red-in-tooth-and-claw black metal, in the vein of Gorgoroth's first two or Panzer Division Marduk. Taking it as it is, though, leaves an impression of a band more than capable of delivering the type of black metal I delight in, but who are hampered by a need to inject some variation which results in a few less than satisfactory moments. The piano outro is one of the parts in question and is totally redundant to my way of thinking, having no relationship at all with what has gone before.

As I was previously unfamiliar with Cirith Gorgor, they have piqued my interest with their debut sufficiently that I feel I need to find out how they developed on subsequent albums and so will almost certainly return to explore their discography further at some point.

Although I am fairly familiar with Solitude Aeternus' earlier albums, specifically the first three, for some reason I have never listened to Alone before it's appearance as September 2022's featured release for The Fallen. Well, kudos to Ben for sharing this one because it has inserted itself, in short order, as my favourite Solitude Aeternus album and indeed one of the best doom releases of the 2000s.There will be an instant familiarity for anyone raised on Candlemass, Solstice and Isole with the songs sounding huge and immensely powerful, but here they take the epic doom of their contemporaries and imbue it with a degree of melancholy that feels like it seeped over from Warning's Watching From A Distance (although Alone was released a month before Patrick Walker's magnum opus, so this is mere fancy on my part, but the analogy still holds).

The band are on absolute top form and turn in a performance of unrivalled confidence, with special mention to vocalist Rob Lowe whose vocals are stunning and a measure of Lowe's impressiveness is that he was selected to become the new vocalist for Candlemass at around the time of Alone's release. Check out opener and album highlight Scent of Death and the ending of the track, where his vocals perfectly evoke a middle-eastern atmosphere, for an illustration of his ability to transport the listener to other realms solely with the power of his voice. I must admit, I do love to hear arabic or middle eastern vibes on metal albums and wish it was a direction more bands would explore. Here it also continues into the second track, Waiting for the Light, where the guitars trace a middle eastern motif during the earlier section of the track. The two guitarists, John Perez and Steve Moseley, both also turn in terrific performances, their thundering, ultra-heavy riffs being counterpointed by virtuoso soling that would make many a heavy metal guitar hero raise their eyebrows in surprise.

Overall, Alone is the whole doom metal package, with great, epic-sounding and atmospheric tracks imbued with a haunting melancholy that inspires both awe and sorrow simultaneously and is a superb illustration of why I personally love doom metal.

For my money, funeral doom metal is possibly the most primal of all metal genres. The immense crushing weight it conveys speaks of the unimaginably massive forces that shaped our world and, indeed, the universe itself back in the furthest aeons of time. There is also a form of funeral doom that is less heavy but, in a way, is almost spiritual in what it calls to within those willing to receive it. When I say spiritual, I don't mean in a, for want of a better word, "god-centric" way. This type of spirituality predates any man-made anthroporphism of the forces at work and instead speaks to an interconnectedness with the flow and essence of these inconceivable forces and energies that is buried deep inside all of us.

Until Death Overtakes Me's Prelude to Monolith is exactly one such release. It's iteration of funeral doom is not going to leave you gasping for air like an Esoteric or Ahab album, for it's touch is not quite as pulverisingly massive. Rather, it draws on dark ambient for inspiration and weaves it throughout it's sixty-eight minutes with the effect of leavening some of the sheer weight with lighter, more ethereal threads. There is a "booming" nature to the drum sound that is suggestive of tympani drums and that always adds an esoteric (small "e") atmosphere and that is reinforced by the sometimes barely perceptible rumble of the vocals. Overlaying this is a thin keyboard drone that is reminiscent of Thergothon's Stream From the Heavens. The whole effect makes for a remarkably relaxing-sounding album that cradles and croons rather than overwhelms the listener, allowing them to touch the infinite, if only for a mere heavenly hour!

As anyone who is remotely familiar with my ramblings will tell you, I am always partial to some filthy, cavernous, Autopsy-style death doom, so I had some decent expectations for this, Bog Body's debut album. Alas these expectations were just castles in the sky as the reality is not as great as the premise, which is putrid death doom that rejects six-stringers and let's the four-stringed beast lead the way, plumbing new depths of cavernousness. The truth is that the lack of lead guitar means zero riffs, thus robbing the tracks of the requisite heft that doom metal demands and replacing it with a muted rumbling that doesn't truly pack much of a punch at all. Add to that the muted drum sound and the distant-sounding vocals and you have a death doom release that lacks any sort of presence and just flutters about at the periphery of your attention, coming off like a glorified basement demo. The two guys from Bog Body can count themselves rather fortunate to have scored interest from a major metal label such as Profound Lore, especially with the huge number of unsigned acts in the current crowded metal scene.

Cryonic Crevasse Cult is not a complete loss as a couple of tracks generate some interest, Ice Stained Kurgan and the title track for example, but generally, even for me, it was a bit of a slog and seemed much longer than it's actual 33 minutes run time. The sad thing is that with a decent guitarist, comfortable in the Asphyx/Autopsy style they would have a decent LP on their hands.

OK, surprise, surprise Carnage are another death metal band whose existence I was completely oblivious to. It appears these Swedes had quite a short run, the band being formed by several members of Dismember who were joined by Michael Amott, future Arch Enemy mainman, originally playing grindcore. By the time of the release of their sole full-length, Dark Recollections, in March of 1990, they had lost their grindcore beginnings and produced an album of pretty lethal, out-and-out death metal. Now I have insufficient knowledge of the minutiae of death metal as to the differences between, say, the Floridian scene and the burgeoning Swedish scene (if someone could enlighten me then please do), but I can only assume this played a significant part in the latter (along with Entombed's imminent Left Hand Path debut album).

I love the guitar tone here, it's down and dirty enough but still has plenty of bite and the bass fortifies the sound as it seems to be prominently placed in the mix. Fred Estby's drum work, whilst being quite straightforward, is exceedingly effective and vocalist Matti Kärki has a great line in earnest bellowing. I have seen a number of complaints that this is merely generic death metal. Well, I disagree. There are some really nice riffs here and the lead work is rough but energetic, but more importantly, how can a death metal album that is one of the early examples, particularly of the Swedish scene, be generic? Surely the later albums these commentators are basing this judgement on are the generic ones.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that I am much better disposed to early death metal than the later, more technical or dissonant stuff that garners so much praise and this is a great example of youthful exuberance (the musicians were all in their teens still) made manifest. Sure it doesn't have the really memorable tracks of an Altars of Madness or any of the other releases from the big noises in the death metal scene of the time, but it does brutalise and batter with a relentless onslaught of dark and violent metal. And there is nothing at all wrong with that.

I hadn't heard Incubus/Opprobrium before this and was only dimly aware of the name (as Opprobrium). Well that appears to be a great shame because this debut full-length is serious slab of deaththrash. The band was formed in Louisiana in 1986 as Incubus by Brazilian-born brothers Francis (guitar and vocals) and Moyses Howard (drums). The trio is rounded out with bassist/vocalist Scott Latour. This is a serious deaththrash assault as the brothers Howard rip through eight face melters in thirty-seven minutes of unrivalled intensity - I mean, these guys really let fucking rip! Truth be told, this is definitely more thrash than death, but it is as intense a thrash metal album as you could ever hope to hear and has gatecrashed into the upper echelons of my personal thrash metal ranking list. This is exceedingly high-tempo thrash metal, with lightning fast solos and insane riffs that in all likelihood would leave even King and Hanneman in their prime lagging behind. Despite the crazy speed, Moyses is more than capable of keeping time behind the kit and turns in as impressive a performance as you could hope for and may well be the fastest thrash drummer I have ever heard. Without his technical ability the songs may well have degenerated into a mess and his contribution is one of the triumphs of the album. Latour's vocals are of the rasping, barking style that sits somewhere between thrash and death metal vocalisation and works very well within the context of all this velocity.

Admittedly the album is slightly front-loaded, the four tracks of side A being absolute killers and Side B struggling a little to maintain the intensity. Don't get me wrong, this is all relative, but the sheer adrenaline rush of side A is difficult for the B-side to replicate, even though it still has it's moments - the title track for example is ridiculously quick. Overall I would say this contains little actual death metal, but does illustrate exactly how near to it thrash metal could get without actually crossing the line. Oh and did I mention that it is christian-themed? No? Well it doesn't matter anyway, other than proving that the devil doesn't have all the best tunes.

I don't know if it is the revolutionary nature of the French psyche that is the cause, but the French have produced some of the most interesting black metal albums and acts, Deathspell Omega arguably foremost among them. Yes, they have stirred up a degree of controversy over the years, they embrace orthodox satanism and maintain an almost paranoid anonimity, but this is black metal and that is pretty much par for the course within the genre. Whatever anyone's thoughts on the band or any of it's members, there is no denying that they are one of the more interesting names in metal and a band whose every new release is worthy of note. The Long Defeat is the latest of these and is full-length number eight, following 2019's The Furnaces of Palingenesia.

I think that DsO take inspiration from the impressionist movement pioneered by French artists in the nineteenth century and transpose it onto black metal to produce a form of metal that is identifiably still black metal, but expresses itself in a much less conventional way. This is a million miles away from the orthodoxy of A Blaze in the Northern Sky or De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Their dissonant approach to black metal touches upon the progressive and the avant-garde at times, but these don't feel like the correct labels for what they do and therein lies the crux of Deathspell Omega - they seem to defy classification to some degree.

So anyway, on to DsO album number eight, which is apparently the first of the "third era" of the band. There is no elaboration of this point forthcoming, so I'm not entirely sure what this third era signifies. The album was recorded live in the studio, which is somewhat ironic for a band that spurns live performance like DsO do and appears to involve performances from guest vocalists alongside Mikko Aspa. I have seen Marduk's Mortuus and Mgła's M. touted as being involved, but have seen no actual confirmation of this.

Now I am not as familiar with DsO's entire back catalogue as many fans as I came to them quite late and even then struggled with them initially as I hadn't really listened to such obviously dissonant music before. This has the consequence that I am probably less coloured by what went previously, so please forgive any holes in my knowledge of the Frenchmen's earlier work. However, even to my ears I would suggest that this does indeed differ from their previous releases. Of course, this being Deathspell Omega, everything is relative, so any talk of melody or reduction of intensity must be viewed in light of such.

The Long Defeat feels like a much more conventional album than we may be used to from DsO and maybe this is to become a feature of the band's third era. As I stated earlier, this is relative, but it does feel like a less intense version of the band is being presented on the album and although there are still dissonant elements, the song structures seem a bit more straightforward and, dare I say, even hint at melody. The pacing is generally slower than usual and less wilfully dissonant, with a more progressive feel than the Frenchmen may have projected previously, the seething maelstrom of previous work being replaced by a more ordered tsunami of sound. The lyrics are still philosophically dense, opener Enantiodromia for example exploring the Jungian concept that the more extreme something becomes it eventually becomes it's own opposite. These lyrics are delivered by vocals that are still very ascerbic and confrontational-sounding whilst radiating a sense of arrogance.

One component that I must comment on is the drumming. The drums seem to set the tone for several of the tracks, whether it is the pounding rhythm of the opener, the militaristic tattoo at the start of Eadem, sed aliter or the blistering blastbeats that kick off Sie sind gerichtet! each of the tracks' basic character is shaped by the percussive endeavours except on closer, Our Life Is Your Death, where this function is filled by the bass as it kicks off very much in a post-punk style, to be followed by the most melodic of the albums riffs. The guitar still provides jangling, jagged dissonant notes, but by the bucketload rather than the barrowload and is just as likely to break into a cool-sounding melody as to try to hotwire your brain with some convoluted progression of notes. Production-wise this sounds fantastic, allowing the listener to concentrate on any or all aspects of the music equally with no one component muscling the others out.

I'm sure there are many long-time DsO fans who may be disappointed by The Long Defeat and they have every right to be if more of the same was what they wanted, but rather than "selling out" I wouldn't be surprised if the band have turned in such a departure of an album in order to remind everyone that they are never predictable. I must have listened to this a dozen times already and I get more out of it and more into it with every successive spin. I would just warn those rabid fans not to cut off their nose to spite their face as this is still a fantasic blackened metal album that would be the pinnacle of many a lesser band's career.

Leprous are a Norwegian progressive metal band led by Einar Solberg who is Ihsahn's brother-in-law and Tall Poppy Syndrome is their second album, originally released in 2009. Their music is very much like a heavier version of Porcupine Tree and, despite being fairly complex, is actually quite efficiently composed, with very little that is extraneous and redundant. The band are obviously extremely competent musicians but, luckily, don't feel compelled to prove it every two minutes and thus have eliminated any excessive wankery from their songs.

The album starts off quite strongly with the track Passing which undergoes several twists and turns, but does showcase one of the weaker aspects for me, which is the harsh vocals. They certainly aren't terrible, but they aren't the greatest either and I much prefer the cleans. As this is the only Leprous album I have heard to date, I don't know how this aspect develops on their later releases, but I would have liked to hear the harsh vocals done by someone more proficient, maybe a guest vocalist as, otherwise, Passing is a very good opener. Harsh vocals aren't a prominent feature of the album as a whole, so there isn't much damage done anyway.

The whole album is of a very high standard, but the final half an hour's three tracks elevate this to even loftier heights in my book. After opening with one of the album's heavier moments, Not Even A Name becomes a bit jazzy with tinkling piano and crooning vocals before the highly melodic (and somewhat catchy) chorus kicks in. It has quite a late-metal-era Opeth vibe, with Einar Solberg's clean vocals sounding very like Mikael Akerfeldt's although the harsh vocals are sludgy rather than death growls. The title track seems to be one of the lesser liked tracks, but I think it is my favourite. The heavy instrumentation and the spoken-word vocals combine to great effect as the band rail against the titular syndrome that society employs to keep talent suppressed and people in their place (a syndrome particularly prominent here in the UK sadly). No doubt the band drew complaints of being closet fascists or something for this, but any sane person knows that's utter bollocks. Me, I like a good bit of biting social commentary. Closing track White has a fair bit of the harsh vocals I dismissed earlier in my review, but the awesome guitar work and fantastic keyboards more than make up for that - I've always been a sucker for that Hammond organ kind of sound.

So in conclusion, I would say that initially this may not blow your socks off, but it has many hidden depths and requires several listens to get the full effect. The songwriting is stellar, with ebbs and flows, heavier and gentler sections gorgeously interposed with one another. Technically marvellous, both performance and production-wise this could proudly sit on my shelves between my Opeth and Porcupine Tree albums with no fear of being outclassed. Luckily the Tall Poppy Syndrome mustn't be in full force in Norway or this may never have seen light of day!

Shape of Despair return with merely their fifth album in twenty-two years and their first since 2015's Monotony Fields, but what they lack in quantity they make up for in quality. Now I don't think anyone can accuse Shape of Despair of being the heaviest of Funeral Doom acts, they don't focus on the sheer crushing weight of riffs as much as the genre's true heavyweights like Esoteric and Evoken, but they are imperious when it comes to expressing the melancholic, with a leaning towards the gothic. Return to the Void does feel a bit like glacially-paced gothic death doom in the vein of My Dying Bride slowed down by about fifty percent.

The music itself is actually quite simple, the chords and riffs, such as they are, are fairly repetitive with very few changes in tone or tempo, but variation is achieved through the vocal performances, which are pretty damn good throughout, whether it be Natalie Koskinen's hauntingly ethereal female vocals soaring over all like a lost love heard on the night winds, or Henri Koivula's crawling growls issuing from their abyssal depths along with his washed-out, world-weary cleans, the vocalists achieve an exceptional expressiveness and allow for an emotional connection to the tracks over and above that provided by the music itself. I don't mean to imply that the music isn't any good, because it is and, in fact, I think it's simplicity adds to the atmosphere the band are striving for. The keyboards and guitar leads still add to the melancholy air that permeates SoD's music in a way few can match, but those vocals are what truly set the atmosphere at another level. A track like Solitary Downfall for example, is just so fucking sad sounding it is almost heartbreaking to hear.

Funeral Doom Metal is, for me, at it's best when it's crushing weight feels like a natural and irresistable elemental force, but Shape of Despair consistently prove that there is another outlet for this form of expression and that is the inner force of depression and sadness that, in it's own way, can be just as powerful as the mightiest ocean current or volcanic upheavel. With Return to the Void, Shape of Despair once more prove themselves to be absolutely masterful in using what can be seen as quite a monolithic form of music to express the many nuances of human sadness and that is a skill not to be taken lightly.

Despite the melancholy beauty of the music on offer on Moonflowers, I found it one difficult album to listen to. Songwriter and lyricist, Juha Raivio, has channelled his grief over the loss to illness of his partner, Trees of Eternity's Aleah Stanbridge, into the release and it is a heartbreaking journey through mourning and grief that is genuinely affecting to anyone who has ever suffered the loss of a loved one. A lot of the album is filled with an overwhelming atmosphere of sorrow and desolation of the soul, expressed through quite simple melancholic melodies, clean vocals and ever-present strings with some extremely soulful lyrics that can really cut to the heart in places. Then sparingly, but all the more effectively for it, anguish is unleashed with huge death doom chords and growled vocals, becoming even more desperate and angry by the album's closing track, This House Has No Home, which erupts into black metal-led pummelling as Juha's anger and rage finally explode from the speakers in search of catharsis.

Opening track, Moonflowers Bloom in Misery, starts in gently mournful fashion, softly picked guitar notes, swelling strings and melodic clean vocals poignantly asking "can you die of a broken soul?" before exploding in anger with huge, enveloping death doom chords and savage growls replying "You cry through the fires of Misery! Bleed dry through the nights of Misery!" as if the pain of loss has just become too much to bear and anger at the injustice of it is all that remains. This, in common with much of the album, is more melodic than most of the band's usual output, but don't let that fool you, this is still powerful stuff and when it does explode it hits like a slap in the face! In a reversal of Moonflowers Bloom in Misery, the following track, Enemy, hits hard with anger and rage from the off and throughout the verse as Juha's lyrics tell of how he withdrew from the light into the darkness inside his soul, becoming softer and more melodic, returning to clean sung lyrics for the chorus as he recognises this darkness within himself.

Woven Into Sorrow is the most gothic-sounding of the album's eight tracks and, arguably, the most accessible as it eschews any death metal vocals and has only brief heavy riffing, at least up until the five minute mark when it unleashes a real gut-punch of a riff as once more Juha's lyrics are no longer able to contain the pain he feels. This is followed by my favourite track, Keep Your Heart Safe From Me, which I perceive as a genuine masterpiece of gothic death doom, expressing in music and lyrics everything that exemplifies the genre in a track that only a few of the masters of the genre can match with it's expression of misery and despair. Oceans of Slumber's Cammie Gilbert supplies female vocals on All Hallows' Grieve, as the lost love speaks to the bereft narrator in a duet that is as heart-rending as it is melodic. I will dispense with the track-by-track review, but suffice to say, the latter half of Moonflowers retains the ability to move the listener every bit as much as the first half, culminating in the aforementioned visceral savagery contained within closing track This House Has No Home as Juha's suffering becomes insurmountable and threatens to overwhelm him.

I think there is an authenticity contained within Moonflowers, as a result of Juha's personal loss, that gives it an edge over many other gothic death doom albums' expressions of mourning and sorrow, which are borne of the songwriter's imaginations rather than personal experience of genuine sorrow. Another important contributing aspect I haven't really covered much is the addition of the string accompaniment from the three ladies of Trio NOX which is present throughout the album and is considered so fundamental to the album's success that the deluxe versions contains an extra disc which contains the string versions of each of the album's tracks to be enjoyed in isolation. The strings add an extra layer of lushness to the sound and contribute to the sorrowful atmosphere in that way that strings do so well when accompanying certain types of doom metal.

This is, for me, one of the best gothic death doom albums I have heard in a long while and is deeply affecting on a personal level, as well as providing some top-quality songwriting and performance and this personal connection is something that is very hard to achieve but is deeply rewarding when it is successful and, as such, I consider this very successful indeed.

This is the debut album from Aussie death-thrashers, Sadistik Exekution and although it was recorded in 1988 various issues plagued it's release and so it didn't actually see light of day until 1991. This is a great example of 1980's extreme metal, exhibiting raw aggression and an irrepressible enthusiasm and combining it with decent technical ability for some pretty brutal stuff considering it's year of recording. The production of course is for shit, but that only adds to the charm for me, increasing the underground appeal and ensuring it's adherents remain poseur-free! Anyway, if you can get past the production issues (and I've certainly heard plenty worse) then there is much to appreciate here and a big plus from the production is that it allows Dave Slave's terrific bass playing to rise to the surface and get the notice it deserves, as well as, intentionally or not, lending the whole thing a kind of war metal vibe. It also seems like there is a quite noticable difference in the recording quality of some of the tracks, suggesting at least a couple of different sessions were involved in getting the album down on tape.

In founder and singer Rok I think I have discovered one of my favourite extreme metal vocalists. His savage growl is pitched just perfectly, somewhere between death metal growl and black metal shriek, and sounds fittingly menacing and evil and suits this material astonishingly well. The guitar riffs are another casualty of the piss-poor production, but the Kerry King-ish solos still cut through the mire like a sabre slash. The song-writing is pretty varied, the rules for extreme metal not being written in stone at this point and technically, underneath the murkiness of the production, they seem like a pretty proficient bunch with hints at early tech-death techniques, even employing some synth work for added atmosphere especially during the closing couple of tracks, the weirdly disturbing John Carpenter horror movie soundtrack-like ambient track Spirits Are Komming and the doomy I'll Kill Ya, You Bastard.

I may well be getting a bit carried away with this one and leaving myself open to accusations of being a tr00 kvlt, elitist arsehole, but if you are looking for some early technical deaththrash with proto-war metal leanings and some synthy weirdness - and who isn't - then I would heartily and unreservedly recommend this unto you (and you can call me what you want - I don't really give a shit!)

I have always been a bit of a WWI buff and consequently I was drawn to 1914 by their 2018 album, The Blind Leading the Blind. Their blackened death metal assault has been heavily beefed up by a production job that makes for an all-enveloping wall of sound and an auditorial overload that adds to the band's overarching theme of The Great War's debilitating and dehumanising effect on the men forced to participate in it's seemingly endless slaughter. The muscular riffs are heavy as fuck (check out the awesome death doom riff on The Green Fields of France) and the rhythm section do a great job of remorselessly driving the tracks along. Dmytro Kumar's vocals are powerful, lying somewhere between a death metal growl and a black metal shriek and the lyrics he enunciates are even more powerful still. From Vimy Ridge (In Memory of Filip Konowal) and Pillars of Fire (The Battle of Messines) with their common soldier's tales of slaughter that take no pride in victory only relief that it was they who lived and the enemy who died, through the balladic Coward (with vocals from Ukrainian folk singer Sasha Boole) and it's depiction of blind panic and summary justice for it's victim, to the poignant letter to the parent's of a lost artilleryman recited in ...And a Cross Now Marks His Place, these are lyrics that seem to authentically depict an horrendous period in human history and provide them with the gravitas they deserve. This is no stereotypical black metal glorification of war, but a sincere indictment of it.

The aforementioned ...And a Cross Now Marks His Place also features Paradise Lost's Nick Holmes who provides a few short but extremely effective vocal lines in what is an absolute beauty of a track and with it's accompanying video it may well be the song that propels 1914 to greater renown. This is as effective an anti-war song as I have ever heard. Anyway, I've had this album on almost constant rotation since the first listen and I've listened to other stuff, sure, but I keep coming back to this, so that must say something.

For anyone who is interested, Paysage d'Hiver's second official album continues the story of The Wanderer, who this time around meets beings from another dimension who he sees as ghosts. The kicker is that the extra-dimensional beings are us in our world and we are only able to contact The Wanderer through the Rites of Winter such as those practiced by a traditional mask cult from the Lötschental valley in Switzerland which, presumably, Wintherr is familiar with. One such mask is depicted on the album's cover and is indeed a fearsome-looking item. (I swear you learn all kinds of weird shit when you listen to black metal!)

This time around Wintherr has trimmed the length of the tracks, the longest, excepting the ambient closer, is under seven minutes, which is unheard of with this project. The style is much nearer to conventional black metal than the icily frigid soundscapes Wintherr usually conjures up. I would even go as far to suggest that at times it doesn't sound hugely dissimilar to early Darkthrone. I have a feeling this may upset some of the newly acquired fans that Im Wald garnered the project, but somehow I get the feeling that will bother Wintherr not one jot.

Despite the abbreviated track lengths this is still quite a formidable album, it's eleven tracks clock in at 70 minutes - a snip compared to Im Wald's two hours I'll grant but still a daunting duration for some not used to lengthy black metal excursions. Again, despite the shorter tracks, the album doesn't offer a massive amount of variety and heavily relies on repetition for it's effect so, once more, if you're not familiar with the style it may underwhelm and disappoint. For those of us more used to this style of black metal though, there is plenty to get your teeth into. The vocals are Wintherr's usual washed out shrieks that tear through the ether like a banshee wail and would freeze the blood were you to hear them during a nighttime forest hike! As mentioned previously the tracks really only serve as parts of a whole and it is the cumulative effect of the tracks' repetition and their more visceral savagery that is the album's real aim I would venture.

Overall, Geister is a brave move by Wintherr, released on the back of such a critically acclaimed album as Im Wald and yet deliberately moving away from what made that album so successful. While I must admit it doesn't scream "Masterpiece" in the same way as Im Wald, this is still a great black metal album and the day that a black metal artist like Wintherr starts doing what he feels is expected of hm then that is the day that black metal is truly lost. Luckily that day still seems a long way off.

Surprisingly I am not particularly familiar with Vreid considering that they were formed from the ashes of Windir (a band that I had a lot of time for) after the death of mainman Valfar. Consequently their ninth album is the first I have spent any time with. Apparently the album has an overriding concept which is based on tales and legends of their homeland in the north of Norway, hence the title Wild North West.

I must admit that the album caught me off guard a bit, there is a lot more variety to the tracks than I was expecting. Although the band's focus is primarily melodic black metal, that is mitigated by a number of other influences such as traditional metal, thrash metal and even gothic rock. Whilst this variety is welcome, it does affect the flow of the album and makes it feel a little bit fragmented. Dazed and Reduced, for example, sounds like it may have come from a completely different band with it's clean vocals and heavy gothic rock leanings and Spikes of God is a track seemingly of two differing halves. Shadows of Aurora seems to borrow a riff from Among the Living era Anthrax (think Skeletons in the Closet) and Into the Mountains has a layered chorus that, for me, doesn't work and to make matters worse has an electronic section that sticks out like a sore thumb. Back to back, these four tracks provide a strange and inconsistent heart to the album that I can't completely get behind.

The opening two tracks (the title track and Wolves at Sea) and the nine minute closer Shadowland (even with it's nice lone piano outro) are far more conventionally melodic black metal in nature and are, for me personally, the best tracks on the album (although I do like the thrashiness of Shadows of Aurora). Overall, an ambitious but fatally flawed attempt at a black metal concept album that just missed the mark a little too much for my preference.

I have only had a limited exposure to Nuclear Assault over the years. I did see them support Slayer on the South of Heaven tour in the UK and the main thing I remember about their performance was them taking the piss out of hardcore for about five minutes by making lengthy introductions to songs that only lasted ten seconds or so. Their Handle With Care was also one of the first of those new-fangled CD things that I bought in the early nineties and was one of those albums that was kinda OK, but didn't exactly blow me away.

Game Over was the NY thrashers debut released in 1986 and is a more immediate and vital release than Handle With Care. It obviously has a hardcore/crossover influence with quite short track lengths in the main and an urgent, punkish delivery that conjures up images of frantically flailing bodies hurling themselves into seething mosh pits. Consequently the tracks tend to blur together and the album does have a breakneck runaway train quality to it and I don't say that as a criticism. They occasionaly thrust their tongues firmly into their cheeks as presumably a track like Hang the Pope is not to be taken too seriously, or at worst was designed merely to bait the PMRC (no bad thing that).

The guitar tone is not the best, it's a bit harsh and, in all honesty is a bit hard on the ears. Conversely Dan Lilker's bass manages to underpin the tracks and the ex-Anthrax bass man provides a solid foundation upon which the rest of the band can wreak their nuclear-fuelled destruction.

I must admit I enjoyed this much more than Handle With Care, despite the mediocre production job and it's energetic thrashing is just the thing if you want to work out some aggression. The band's fascination with nuclear annihilation is in full flow on Game Over and the album's best tracks are those Mutually Assured Destruction-themed tracks - Nuclear War being my personal favourite, but Radiation Sickness and After the Holocaust are both very good tracks. Ultimately a pretty good debut that I enjoyed for it's unapologetic aggression from a band that are really only seen as peripheral in the thrash metal history books.

This is the first Saxon album I've listened to released after 1984 and I went into it with low expectations, expecting nothing more than a rehash of old ideas and a band into it's fifth decade of existence going through the motions because they don't know what else to do. Man, was I wrong because Thunderbolt actually kicks ass as seriously as anything the Yorkshiremen have ever put out. The band haven't stood still in the intervening years since last I encountered them, their sound has evolved in a more power metal-inspired direction and it really suits them. Their knack for writing anthemic songs has been reinforced with steel-edged metal for a heavier and, dare I say, more energetic sound. Sure, they still sound like the old Saxon at times - They Played Rock and Roll is reminiscent in many ways of The Bands Played On, but this is a more "metal-sounding" Saxon to be sure.

Talking of They Played Rock and Roll, I've got to confess to becoming a little bit emotional on hearing it the first time. As I've said before I was a HUGE Motörhead fan and I fondly remember the 1979 Bomber tour with Saxon supporting Lemmy, Eddie and Philthy. I attended that gig at our local venue with a number of fellow metalhead mates, a couple of who are now gone. We all had a fantastic night and the track kind of bought back memories of long-gone simpler times when all we had to worry about was how to get the money for gigs, booze and weed and fuck everything else.

I think the most surprising thing about Thunderbolt is how great Biff Byford's voice still sounds. The guy is seventy years old now and here he sounds better than he ever has. Studio jiggerypokery can only cover so many cracks, so the guy as obviously still got the pipes to deliver an impressive performance. Musically, Paul Quinn and second guitarist Doug Scarratt deliver some amazing riffs and the greatest adrenaline-fuelled solos Saxon have ever delivered are fired off with deadly precision. The production job is superb, with crystal clarity that certainly does the album no harm at all and brings out the best in all the band members.

Tracks such as Thunderbolt, A Wizard's Tale, They Played Rock and Roll and my new favourite Saxon track The Secret of Flight are as good as anything I have heard from the band previously and this is seriously challenging Wheels of Steel as my favourite Saxon album. Respect to such a veteran outfit for not resting on their laurels and still being able to go toe to toe with the younger bucks and not be left wanting. Colour me impressed!

For the last decade, since the release of Kentucky in 2012, Austin Lunn, in his guise as one-man project Panopticon, has been one of, if not THE most consistent performer in black metal, with six full-length albums and a number of eps and splits of absolutely stunning quality. He is also the only exponent of note in the niche sub-sub-genre of bluegrass and americana-influenced atmospheric black metal, probably because he is just so damn good at it that, even in these bandwagon-jumping times, nobody dares compete head to head with him for fear of being exposed as massively inferior talents.

His latest full-length, ...and Again Into the Light, has well and truly got it's claws in to me and is easily my most played album of recent weeks. As the man himself points out, this is Panopticon's darkest and heaviest release so far, even withstanding the gorgeous melancholy of the folk-centred passages. Austin explains in an interview on Bandcamp "This album is intensely personal, dealing with many different subjects but all related to loss and trauma" and continues, "The album is full of atonement, apologies, and growth. Like many things in life, the process is ugly, but the hope is to arrive at better versions of ourselves in the end." This accounts for the sadness that permeates the folk sections, but also for the brutality of some of the heavier parts as the ugliness of the process he describes is leant a voice by his powerful riffing and savage vocals (although the latter are somewhat buried in the mix).

The album begins with the gentle sadness of the title track, the violin that is prevalent throughout the album only serving to increase the wistful melancholy of the track's atmosphere as Panopticon ease us unsuspectingly into second track Dead Loons which, after a pensive first three minutes, suddenly transforms into an almost funeral doom-like dirge before really letting loose and exploding into a pummelling, pounding runaway train of a black metal riff and features some of Austin's most flamboyant soloing, although true to the man's humility, it is buried a little in the mix almost so as not to detract too much from the song's effect.

Rope Burn Exit and A Snowless Winter are amazing wall-of-sound epics that blast and heave and threaten to blow you away with sheer aggressive force like some almighty sonic hurricane. Then comes Moth Eaten Soul which is probably Panopticon's single heaviest track to date, drawing on death metal influences to increase the aural savagery that the music visits upon your now battered eardrums. This is an almighty beast of a track that opens up a new direction for the band as he explores a heavier and more brutal side of his musical persona. This savagery is followed by the album's gentlest couple of minutes as we take a short breather with As Golden Laughter Echoes which leads into the album's most heartfelt track, The Embers at Dawn, featuring clean vocals from Erik Moggridge, fresh from his collaboration with Bell Witch, and harsh vocals from Waldgeflüster's Winterherz. The build-up is gorgeous and the release as the wave breaks is almost orgasmic in intensity. The album closer Know Hope is an epic that begins as savagely and aggressively as other tracks here, but eventually resolves itself to embrace the hope of the title and to end the album on a positive note.

This is an album from an artist who is absolutely at the top of his game and who has an uncompromising view of what he wishes to convey in his music, having the confidence to embrace new modes of expression as well as honing his more usual methods to an absolute cutting edge. If I hear a better album released this year then I will consider myself very fortunate indeed.

Grand Magus are one of my absolute favourite metal bands (I have physical copies of every one of their albums) and are also one of the world's great underrated trad metal outfits, continuously losing out to the next over-hyped darling that the metal labels or music press want to foist on us. The Swedes' consistency since the turn of the century has been exceptional and their run of albums from 2008's Iron Will, through Hammer of the North to 2012's The Hunt would stack up against any three-album run in my book. They make fantastic, hook-laden and memorable metal tunes that I often find come unbidden into my mind and end up with me singing them along to myself (and thoroughly enjoying it too)! - I, the Jury, Mountains Be My Throne, The Lord of Lies and At Midnight They'll Get Wise are all sing-along classics for me.

GM's downtuned guitar sound often has them associated with doom metal, but they have not really played any doom outside of 2001's self-titled debut, although it does have an influence - particularly from bands like Gates of Slumber. JB Christoffersson's vocals are great - no histrionics, just decent, solid, metal singing with a decent range where, unusually, every single lyric can be heard. None of the trio will probably ever be singled out for their technical skills (although they are all extremely proficient) but GM's strength lies in their ability to craft memorable heavy metal tunes and their tight performances. With these guys there is no showiness, no unnecessary gimmicks, just honest, fist-pumping, horns-in-the-air exhortations to the Elder Gods of Metal. Most of the tracks are medium-paced, but when they do speed things up, such as on I, the Jury and At Midnight They'll Get Wise then they have a real 70's Judas Priest vibe. The lyrics on Hammer of the North are very Scandinavian - tales of mountains, sea-raiders and ravens are staples of scandi-metal and should appeal to any red-blooded metal fan. The production is crisp and allows the songs to shine with a clarity that is to be applauded.

I don't listen to a huge amount of modern trad metal, to be honest, but Grand Magus are one of those bands whose latest album I would buy blind, because I know exactly what to expect and just how damn good it is likely to be. Unfortunately the band are largely ignored by most metal influencers so don't really get the recognition they deserve, but those in the know realise just what a great band they are - one of metal's best kept secrets.

This seems, upon a first listen, to be quite a complex black metal album with it's strange song structures, their stop/start nature, the chants, the disparate array of percussive elements and the keening guitar soloing, but under all this dissonant chaff there is actually a real old-school beast of an album that harkens back to the likes of early Mayhem and Darkthrone with some killer 90's BM riffs (the one in the middle of Wherein a Messenger of the Devil Appears was a real "gotcha" moment for me). The fact that this crazed, schizoid black metal concept album is the product of a single person (Bestial Devotion, drummer of Gainesville's Negative Plane) is amazing, as it sounds far more like it has the kind of dynamic that can only really come from a full band.
The album is comprised of four tracks, each weighing in at a length of eleven to thirteen minutes, that tell the story of Christian martyr St. Achatius, who was tortured and beheaded in Byzantium during the early 4th century for refusing to recant his faith. The busy nature of the tracks, the lo-fi aesthetic and heavy distortion, does invoke an atmosphere that illustrates the relentless nature of the venerable saint's trials at the hands of his torturers, not allowing a moments respite, similar to the modern tales of unrelenting torment meted out in places like Abu-Graibh. The interspersing of the tracks with occasional chants and (more frequent) bell effects suggests the poor Achatius steadfastly clinging to his faith despite this onslaught against his soul from the more dissonant elements.
At first listen I wasn't exactly over-enamoured by this, as it seemed like it was wantonly disjointed and felt like an attempt at some kind of avant-garde black metal collage, but subsequent listens have allowed me to recognise that underneath it is quite a primal black metal record that hasn't actually strayed all that far from the genre's earliest roots. I've bought in to it's jagged, sharp-edged structure and the disconcerting effect it has on the listener, like a painting or picture that is viewed from a weird perspective. The result of all this is a real one-off of an album that I have heard very little to compare with (this of course may be a failing of my own and perhaps there are loads, but I don't think so). Yet another album that proves black metal is still a long way from having run it's course and can still turn out original releases of exceptional, thought-provoking quality.

First off I've got to say the production on this album is first rate - the sound is crystal clear and every instrument can clearly be heard - in particular there are a couple of early moments when the bass shines throught to great effect, at the end of opener Falling Fast and during the chorus of Reborn in Flesh. The guitar sound is crisp and the drums have a great "snap" to them.
The songs themselves are fairly aggressive death/thrash, borrowing heavily from the Kreator template and in this comparison is sowed the seeds of TA's destruction, because compared to the Teutonic giants this will always come off second best. The songwriting is decent, if not earth-shattering, but to be honest it's virtually impossible to sound original playing a fairly limited style of metal like thrash after nearly forty years of the genre's history.
The vocals, whilst being mainly well-suited to the style are just too similar on every track. A slower track like the first half of Dead Souls for example, would really benefit from a different vocal style - Daniel Altwegg's delivery seeming to limit what is the album's standout track. In fact Dead Souls is the track that gives me some hope for the band as technically the members are all exceedingly proficient, but it seems like the songwriting (along with the vocals) are limiting them. However Dead Souls proves that they have it in them to write excellent thrash metal and if they can produce more in this vein then they can yet put out a great album.
As it is, this is good, if somewhat predictable, aggressive thrash metal from a band I feel are capable of more and I seriously hope they manage to take that extra step up.

The first thing that strikes me about this album is the somewhat unconventional tone of the guitars for a black metal album, sounding more akin to the tone of old-school death metal such as Autopsy, even down to the "looseness" of the playing. Add to this the ritualistic rhythms of the drumming in many places that give the album a genuine occult atmosphere and you do indeed have a unique black metal experience that, despite this, is still very much in the realms of black metal - the vocals in particular are especially tortured and unhinged-sounding (the deranged howls during The Passion of a Sorceress are indeed something to behold). In fact vocalist Urian's performance is possibly one of the most disturbed and disturbing I've heard since Silencer's Death Pierce Me - from demonic growls to piercing shrieks and the afore-mentioned demented howling this sounds like an artist on the edge (of sanity!)
There is a nice variation in pacing of the material, the creeping, crawling of Vintage Black Magic owes as much to doom metal as it does black metal and as such it adds an extra level of heaviness to the song. In fact the album as a whole feels more like a bludgeon than the usual sabre-like slashing and slicing of conventional black metal, even on the faster, more feral-sounding tracks like Festival of Devotion.
Overall this album is a great attempt to do something a little different with black metal that feels like the band have stamped something of their particular personality on the recording that goes beyond mere entertainment and into the realm of genuine self-expression (and presumably some kind of personal catharsis). What's particularly great about it for me as the listener is that I can't for the life of me pick out one particular favourite track - they are all brilliant, each in it's own way.

My Threnody are the solo project of Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Jefferson Brito. This, his debut album, was recorded in his home studio and, to be honest, it sounds little better than a demo recording which, for this type of symphonic metal, is really going to adversely affect how successfully it comes across. An anomaly of the production is that the numerous gentler sections actually seem to sound louder than the heavier parts, which detracts from the effectiveness of both. It seems to me that Mr. Brito's songwriting ambitions are considerably greater than his ability to deliver them. He seems to be one of those doom artists who think that the best way to express loss and mourning is to throw the kitchen sink at it, keyboards that are laid on with a trowel, obtrusive sound effects, simulated classical instruments, variations in vocal style and gentle/heavy transitions that feel forced rather than organically flowing one into another. It's almost like the guy has too many ideas and wants to cram as much as possible into his hour's runtime without allowing any to become fully formed. With so many ideas, there are some that actually sound like they may make for a decent song if allowed to develop a little further and it's a shame that they are crowded out. I feel that sometimes these solo projects would be better as a full band where they can bounce ideas off each other and allow for a bit of self-editing. Sometimes less really is more.
Ultimately, I am no big fan of this type of symphonic doom even when it's done well, so this shoddy-sounding morass of competing ideas and underdeveloped songs really doesn't move me like good doom metal should and in a crowded field this has too many superiors to warrant too much attention.

I've recently been extensively revisiting Anthrax's earlier stuff and whilst Spreading The Disease and Among The Living still retain their classic status for me, I have had a huge about-face with the subsequent two albums, State of Euphoria and Persistence of Time. I was originally much better disposed towards State of Euphoria with it's catchier choruses and less so to PoT's denser material. However, I feel time hasn't been too kind to SoE, whereas Persistence of Time has aged much better. Neither are as good as the previous two albums and I feel the main reason for this is the fact that there are less by way of backing vocals (particularly Scott Ian) that helped to beef up Joey Belladonna's performances on those earlier releases. Joey is a perfectly fine singer, but lacks the  vocal presence to carry off such aggressive thrash in isolation, sounding a little weak as a result.

SoE comes across as a bit throwaway now and, to be honest, in places a little silly, fuelled I'm sure by the "success" of I'm the Man. PoT, however, whilst not having as many great songs as Among the Living is much more akin to the 1987 classic and songs like Blood and Gridlock wouldn't feel out of place next to tracks like A Skeleton in the Closet and Imitation of Life. There is some filler and I think it peaks with Gridlock - Intro to Reality, H8 Red and One Man Stands failing to match the preceding highs and sounding a bit vanilla. It does go out strong with Discharge, but overall the latter half is ordinary.

It is a more mature-sounding album than State of Euphoria, but just doesn't have enough killer tracks to justify higher ratings. Would have been much better if they had trimmed the length to about 40 minutes and lost some of that Side B filler.

Dread Sovereign were formed in 2013 and are the brain child of Primordial frontman A.A. Nemtheanga, who plays bass as well as providing vocals, the trio being completed by guitarist Bones and Conan drummer Con Ri (Johnny King). Musically, Dread Sovereign inhabit the borderland where doom metal meets traditional heavy metal that is inhabited by the likes of Cirith Ungol, The Gates of Slumber and Grand Magus. They alternate between doomy, slower material (She Wolves of the Savage Season, Viral Tomb) and uptempo anthemic metal (Nature Is the Devil's Church, Devil's Bane) all wrapped up in occult imagery and lyrics. The songs are strongly constructed and this album contains some of their most memorable material to date - the promo track Nature Is the Devil's Church, for example, is almost impossible for any red-blooded metal fan to get out of their head after hearing it even just once. There are some nicely integrated solos that aren't merely an excuse for Bones to show off, but really add some great atmosphere to the tracks and Nemtheanga's voice is perfectly suited to just this style of metal. The production on AW is also a big step up from the muddier sound of their earlier releases and provides an increased depth that seems to make the tracks more immediate. Disappointingly, the album closes on a cover of Bathory's You Don't Move Me (I Don't Give a Fuck) that is remarkably similar to the cover of Venom's Live Like an Angel, Die Like a Devil that closed the previous album For Doom the Bell Tolls and isn't really necessary.

Firstly I've got to say, I don't feel that Gorgoroth ever get quite the credit they deserve, possibly with good reason in later years, but there was a time when they were a thrilling and devastating proposition and worthy of mention amongst any of the second wave. This, their fourth album, is the product of a band in transition, each track utilising a different lineup, four different vocalists being used for example - Gaahl providing vocals on the opener, Pest, the singer on the previous album singing on four of the remaining tracks, mainman Infernus on a couple more and Malignant Eternal's T-Reaper on The Devil, The Sinner and His Journey. Despite the variety in each track's performers, it doesn't result in a disjointed release as you may expect, rather it is an album that absolutely has an overarching theme and mood and that is one of blistering chaos and nerve-shredding antagonism that feels like the band were trying to produce the most evil-sounding record released up to that point. It sounds to me as if it was heavily influenced by Mayhem's EP of the previous year, Wolf's Lair Abyss, which was also a release that heralded a change in direction.

This time around Gorgoroth's songwriting utilises passages of sheer noise, occasional slowing of tempo and savage, soul-shredding shrieks for vocals in the most part. Despite the noise elements and the savagery on display, underneath there are actually some quite melodic riffs, but they are well-disguised among the intended cacophony yet they enable the tracks to remain in the memory rather than just becoming a dissonant blur. I actually think Destroyer is a great album in it's ability to make an undoubtedly intentionally chaotic-sounding album memorable and like the band that spawned it, it is mightily underrated and should be lauded amongst Nineties black metal afficianados.

First, let me put this album into some kind of context. In 1979 I finally got my first motorcycle, a Suzuki T250 Hustler which, with a top speed in excess of 100mph was a bit of a beast for a 17-year-old kid. Now this new-found freedom just happened to coincide with one of the most exciting things to happen so far (after the acquisition of said motorbike) in the life of that 17-year-old heavy metal fan - the onset of what later became known as the NWOBHM (we didn't call it anything, it was just our lives!) Anyway, I'd regularly hop onto that bike and, with a few mates, take the 15 mile trip to the nearest hall that allowed metal and rock bands to play, to see the bands I was familiar with - Sabbath, Priest, Motorhead, UFO, Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy and the likes. It was around this time that these big(ger) names started being supported by bands not much older than ourselves that were actually pretty exciting, bands like Angel Witch, Girlschool, Marseille, Samson and (to finally get to the point) Saxon. These young bands were generating some real energy and doing an absolutely brilliant job as warm-up acts, pushing the headliners all the way. The problem was that after witnessing them live and in their element, when you got hold of these new band's records they actually seemed a bit flat and sadly disappointing, with a very few exceptions - Angel Witch's debut, the first two Maidens and this underrated gem.
The first Saxon album is, in all honesty, a bit crap and I know the majority of fans prefer Strong Arm of the Law but, along with the other three albums I mentioned, this is the absolute essence of what the NWOBHM meant to me as someone who was there. I mean, how can a budding biker not be taken by the opener, Motorcycle Man and the entire album has a feeling of freedom that really resonated with me at the time and I still have a strong emotional attachment to. Where it scores over the other Saxon albums is that it manages to capture the energy that I remember from when they used to open for Motorhead (they were one of the new bands Lemmy took under his wing) in a way their others didn't.
There's some great riffs on display here (Wheels of Steel is absolutely killer), Biff Byford never sounded better, Pete Gill and Steve Dawson propel the songs like a supercharged V8 and Paul Quinn and Graham Oliver are devastating. There are some genuine classics, the title track, Machine Gun, Motorcycle Man and, of course, one of the first heavy metal singles to get airplay on daytime Radio One in England, the superb 747 (Strangers in the Night) with it's searing intro and oddly affecting tale of a plane about to crash. Seriously, if you're a metal fan and have never heard this album, do yourself a favour and remedy that as soon as possible. Anyway, thanks for indulging an old metalhead and his reminiscences and really, check this out.

This EP, released as a single-sided 12" of 500 copies on Rise Above was only for sale at the Rise Above Records 20th Anniversary Show on Dec 13th 2008. It's single, eleven-minute instrumental track is a big departure for Electric Wizard as they dip their toes into the waters of ritualistic drone, particularly coming as it does in a fairly conventional period for the band, between Witchcult Today and Black Masses. There is very little variation throughout the entire eleven minutes, it's stand-out features being the heavily ritualistic-sounding drums and the eerily ominous organ. Jus Osborne's guitar is present, but very heavily buried down in the mix, so you have to work a little to hear it.

This certainly won't be to everyone's taste and has divided even die-hard Wizard fans, but I quite like the way you can get lost in the track and, to such end, it's eleven minutes may even be a bit short. It makes sense for the band to release this as a stand-alone EP rather than part of an album, although I think it would have made a great intro to Black Masses. Probably more likely to appeal to metal heads who dig on drone than straight-up stoners, but you never can tell!

I love MSW's releases under his Hell banner and a proportion of this album is in very similar vein. This latest album was written over a period of five years and is a very personal album for him as it deals with his brother RAW's ten-year fight with addiction and the toll it has taken on the wider family. What we have here then is four tracks of visceral emotion in which MSW lays his (and his family's) soul bare.

Opener "O Brother" is instantly recognisable to any fan of Hell, but with a twist as it initially features a female vocal section before MSW himself takes over in his usual anguish-ridden vocal style. This is followed by the short instrumental "Funus" that is a gentle piano and violin piece of only three minutes duration. "Humanity" begins in brooding style with a gently strummed guitar before a heaving riff kicks in with accompanying soaring vocals. The song then dips and soars from introspection to fuming anger, superbly dragging the listener along with it on this emotional rollercoaster. The final, eponymous track is almost twenty minutes in length, although I hesitate to call it epic as that implies a certain bombast and that's not what this is about. The sorrow, helplessness and bitterness felt by the loved ones around and affected by a person dealing with addiction are laid bare for all to hear, from the resignation and sadness of the tracks post-metal first half to the seething resentment of the sludge-drenched latter half.

This is metal that is at once vulnerable and vicious, as MSW  illustrates musically a spectrum of emotion from concern and compassion to frustration and resentment and in so doing has released an exceptional album and one I wasn't expecting at all. The already well-respected (by me anyway) MSW has gone up even higher in my estimation after this incredibly powerful release that really speaks from the heart and should resonate with anyone who has had any experience with addiction or the addicted.

The first five star album of 2020 for me.

Holy Moses were formed in Aachen in 1980 and featured soon to be husband and wife Andy and Sabina Classen on guitar and vocals respectively. As such they were one of the very earliest of the teutonic thrash / speed metal acts. Between '80 and '86 they put out quite a few demos before releasing Queen of Siam in May of '86 on the newly formed Aaarrg Records.

Queen of Siam is quite a fun record with it's thrash still retaining some of the NWOBHM stylings that was a feature of the very earliest thrash and speed metal releases. Obviously Sabina's vocals are a focal point with female singers being such a rarity in the male-dominated world of thrash. Her vocals are of harsh nature with a creditable growl and she even comes up with a pretty convincing impression of Lemmy on Roadcrew, a song that is a tribute to Motorhead.

Musically it doesn't do anything flashy, there's not a great number of solos or guitar hero histrionics, the rhythm section is solid enough and there's a variety in song tempo from the slower NWOBHM influenced stuff to the full-on thrashers. They even successfully repurpose one of my all-time favourite riffs, the killer from Bad Brains' Big Takeover, on the track Queen of Siam.

As I said earlier, it is a fun album and it does have a place in the Teutonic Thrash story, but it certainly isn't essential and by the time of it's release the rest of the German scene was of a far more aggressive and energetic nature and had mainly moved on into more extreme territory.