Sonny's Reviews
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.
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.
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.
The black metal equivalent of Enya or an insufferable new age music CD that bored suburbanites play whilst doing fucking Pilates or some such shit. I can't even imagine who it's aimed at because those types wouldn't be able to stand the shrieking and black metal fans should hate everything else about it. I can smell the sandalwood and see the life-energy emitting crystals from here. Is this really where black metal has ultimately ended up. I thought that KFC ad was bad, but this is just ridiculous. I'm glad I listened to it at work, because if it had been in my own time I would have been REALLY mad! The one star is for the cover, by the way.
I am always suspicious of bands that are the darlings of the metal press, as Nevermore certainly were at one time. Mags like Kerrang!, Metal Hammer and Terrrorizer always seemed to be the bitches of the record labels and would schmooze whatever crap the labels were pushing at the time. This is why I spend so much of my time mooching in the metal underground listening to obscure shit no one else cares about I suppose. I have no objection to popular bands, I just like to discover them my own way, not have them pushed into my face by some music press hack at the behest of a record label marketing exec. Furthermore I had somehow garnered the impression that Nevermore were some kind of Dream Theater clone (which certainly didn't help endear them to me).
Anyway, encouraged by positive reviews on this very site, I took the plunge and so, This Godless Endeavor is my first experience of the band. While it is undoubtedly true that they are more Dream Theater than Dream Death, luckily they eschew the endless technical wankery I associate with that bunch of insufferable prog metallers. At first listen I wasn't all that impressed I must confess. Having approached the album from the perspective of a member of The Pit, I was expecting a lot more on the thrash front, but the album seems to contain very little true thrash. I would say it's more akin to the thrash-derived power metal of early Iced Earth. So I then came at it from a different perspective, with more of an open mind to the prog elements. Now my current yardstick for progressive metal are albums like Blood Incantation's Hidden History... and Venenum's Trance of Death, both of which exhibit a degree of visceral aggression which contrasts the intellectual progressiveness and gives a more complete experience in my opinion. This Godless Endeavor does exhibit a little of this primal aggression, but it feels stilted and constrained compared to the more cerebral aspects of the album, which are still the main focus. However, even I must agree, it is done very well, there are some quite memorable, well-written songs and the performance is excellent. I can certainly hear why many people are fans, but it doesn't quite hit the intangibles for me. Sure, I'll nod my head in appreciation at a riff, a solo or a vocal melody but at no point did it make make me want to shout "FUCK YEAH!!" and I think the very best metal should do just that.
An excellent, early ep from Norway's Aeternus, that isn't just blood and guts black metal, but a more subtle offering. Opener, Black Dust, is the stand-out for me. With it's Black Sabbath-referencing opening and brilliant blend of black, death and even doom, it's a glorious celebration of dark metal. Next up is Victory, with it's faster tempo it is a more typical mid-90's black metal offering. Third track, Raven and Blood, is another monster of a song, with a number of changes of pace as it switches from out-and-out black metal to a more death metal sound. The record then closes with a short folky passage that rounds the ep off nicely. Overall, the song writing is excellent, on a par with such BM legends as Enslaved and Emperor, and the execution is equally terrific, making it one of my favourite nineties black metal ep's and this from a time when there were some bona fide classics coming out, with which it justifiably stands shoulder to shoulder.
Metal is the object of much sneering from the elitist arbiters of cultural worth, probably due to it's blue-collar origins and appeal and general lack of liberal bias. In the past it may well have brought some of this dismissive attitude on itself, but since the turn of the millenium there have been a number of metal bands who are not content to merely rehash the same metal tropes and to elevate their work beyond a mere collection of songs, but rather to use their musical songwriting to produce pieces that can be considered as being actual art. Isis are one such band, emerging from the sludge metal scene, they began adding layers of atmosphere and more subltle sonic textures to the sludge-inspired heaviness, until, by the time of Panopticon, the album was more like an aural oil painting, composed of varying shades and textures of sound to make an imaginative and atmospheric whole that transcends the restrictions of the scene that originally spawned them.
At times meditatively calm and gentle, at others febrile and raging, the light and shade of human emotion are laid bare in musical form, this interpreting of the human condition being one of the central tenets of what makes good art. This, in common with the rest of Isis' work (and atmospheric sludge in general) is not really for the casual listener and is one of those albums where you get more out, the more you are prepared to put into appreciating it.
Now I'm not claiming this to be any revelatory work of unparralelled genius, in fact I actually prefer previous album Oceanic, but I think that albums like this can only enhance the reputation of metal music in the wider world outside the genre's diehard adherents and as such should be heralded as taking metal to a new level of cultural significance.
I have had an on/off relationship with Sepultura. Their Chaos AD album was my very first CD purchase and is an album I am still extremely fond of. However, their Roots and Against albums did little for me and I lost interest in the band. Beneath the Remains was released four years prior to Chaos AD and is a different-sounding record to that 1993 album. Based heavily on the Metallica / Megadeth sound BtR is classic 80's thrash metal with heavy, powerful riffs. A lot of people claim a death metal presence in here as well, but apart from maybe the vocals I'm sorry, I don't hear it. Igor Cavalera is a fantastic metal drummer and here puts in an exemplary performance behind the kit, propelling the songs along as much as Max and Andreas Kisser's riffs. The production was handled by Scott Burns and is excellent, Igor in particular benefitting from his expertise. Max Cavalera's vocals are powerful and are uniquely his own - being one of those singers you recognise immediately wherever you may hear him. The songs are fairly complex and the playing reasonably technical, but they still gallop along at a pace without becoming stacatto or disjointed as can happen with overtly technical metal. The 'A' side's four tracks in particular are exceptionally strong and the 'B' side doesn't quite maintain the momentum completely successfully, but this is just a matter of comparison and it's five tracks are still pretty damn good.
South America long remained a bastion for thrash metal even beyond the point where the rest of the world seemed to have abandoned it. Sepultura and this album in particular, are probably the main reason for that as bands from that part of the world attempted to emulate their local heroes and kept the thrash flame alive in the mountains and river deltas of the south american continent. That as much as anything pays testament to the value of the band and this album in particular.
When it was released in 1986, Slayer's controversial third album left Tipper Gore and the PMRC, along with other "moral arbiters", frothing with indignation at it's brutal and blasphemous imagery, but most especially because of one song, the opener Angel of Death and it's alleged glorification of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. I am of the opinion that this was purely a shock tactic used by the band, in the same way they utilise violent imagery on other songs like Piece by Piece and Postmortem and is no indication of any Nazi sentiments held by any member, as they have on many occasions attested.
Controversy and lyrical content aside this was at the time probably the most shocking and brutal introduction to any record up to that point. Initially the album flashes by in a killing frenzy, from Tom Araya's opening scream, via King and Hanneman's weaponized solos and Dave Lombardo's jet-propelled drumming, right up until the closing thunderstorm a mere 28 minutes later, leaving the unsuspecting listener breathless and stupefied, instantly demanding another listen to confirm that what you just heard was real. In an interview at the time I remember the band saying that during rehearsals the album was weighing in at around 34 minutes, but with the aggression and energy they put into it at the time of recording it ended up at just over 28 minutes! Despite the pace of the songs, the production allows every note to be heard distinctly and a large degree of respect has to go to Rick Rubin and Andy Wallace for such a brilliant job done.
Ultimately, this is one of those rare albums that defined what metal is and is firmly ensconced in the top few albums of most metalheads, or certainly those who were around at the time of it's release. Sure, with the explosion of extreme metal genres there are certainly more brutal and/or intense albums out there, but they don't have Reign in Blood's legendary status for a very good reason - the songs just aren't as fuckin' good. Angel of Death, the duo of Altar of Sacrifice and Jesus Saves and the apocalyptic Raining Blood. These are all-time classics and need no justification! Reign in Blood is an album that still sounds as vital and thrilling as it did over thirty years ago and that is no mean feat, my friends.
Make no mistake, Kreator's second album Pleasure to Kill, has only one purpose - to Thrash you to within an inch of your life and to this end it's mission is immensely successful. PtK is a vicious and raw assault on the listener with an aggressiveness few thrashers have ever equalled, much like the previous year's Seven Churches, Possessed's proto-death album. In addition to Possessed's classic, the influence of tracks like Death Is Your Saviour and Pleasure to Kill can be heard throughout the early albums of Death, Morbid Angel and the rest of the first wave death outfits.
While I find it hard to look beyond Reign in Blood as the pinnacle of Thrash intensity, this is one of those very few that comes really close (Dark Angel's Darkness Descends being the other) with several songs that certainly wouldn't feel out of place on Slayer's masterpiece. The riffs are neck-breakingly savage, the drumming brutal and the solos are crazed, while Mille and Ventor's shared vocals are both sublimely suited to this more aggressive style of Thrash.
I have seen any number of reviews complaining about the lack of variety on offer, but that isn't really the issue here. As I said at the start of the review, this album's sole intention is to facilitate your attempt to try to break your neck in a headbanging frenzy and if you want a more nuanced and varied album then this was probably never meant for you anyway. A genuine Thrash classic and a headbanging masterclass.
Exodus' debut, released back in 1985, is their best by quite some way in my book (although I do have a bit of a soft spot for 2004's Tempo of the Damned too). Really pacy and dynamic riffing with some pretty hot solos and sing-a-long choruses put this up on a par with many of thrash's early classics. For some reason Bonded by Blood isn't considered as indispensible as other early thrash classics by everyone however. There are probably a couple of reasons for this, the drums are merely functional and Paul Baloff's crazed vocals aren't to everyone's taste, but the real reason is probably due to hindsight and the fact that Exodus' subsequent output reached neither the level of this debut or of their contemporaries' later releases (Master of Puppets and Peace Sells.. were still in the future back then, remember) and so the band as a whole are not spoken of in the same breath as the likes of Metallica, Megadeth and even Testament, although I think this is a better album than any Chuck Billy's crew put out. Bonded by Blood, Metal Command and Strike of the Beast are chugging classics that stand against anything from the time. But, goddamn... that cover is still fuckin' horrible!
I used to avoid Boris like the plague, but took the plunge with this album after seeing the constant raving about it - and now it's possibly my favourite drone metal album. Essentially a single 44 minute piece split into five parts, Part One is made up of the usual huge, droning, sustained chords most associated with drone metal before segueing into a very laid back second section (and the albums longest) that begins very post-rock and spacey-sounding then starts building in intensity (and volume!) before, finally, the vocals kick in. Part Three continues the theme and vocals of the end of Part Two, but also features an awesome, ultra-amped guitar solo before ultimately breaking down into the noise and feedback-drenched chaos of Part Four. The short fifth and final part heralds a return to the laid back theme from Part Two, albeit overlaid with residual feedback from Part Four. This is an album that is as much a sensation to be experienced as much as a piece of music to listen to, with it's changing and contrasting aural textures that seem to be intended to be listened to at volume. Anybody unsure about drone metal should probably start with this classic. If this don't do it for ya, then drone probably ain't for you!
As the godawful winter of 1984 was about to turn into 1985 my musical heroes were, quite frankly, starting to suck. Sabbath had released Born Again the year before, Brian Robertson had fucked Motörhead up, the stalwarts of the NWOBHM were fading fast, Priest had been in decline for ages and hair / glam metal seemed to be the only shitty game in town as far as metal was concerned.
Then, on a whim, I picked up a copy of a various artists metal comp called Hell Comes to Your House in the desperate hope of finding something on it that didn't blow. Most of it wasn't very good, but then I heard IT. IT being Metallica's Creeping Death and IT blew my fucking mind! That one hit of Bay Area genius was the heaviest thing I'd ever heard and was all I needed to turn me into a thrash junkie. Suddenly things were looking up!
Of course, I went out and bought the album that spawned this awesome song as soon as was humanly possible - infuriatingly I did have to wait until the next day when the shops opened and then, even more infuriatingly, another week or so because the crappy local record shop had to order it from the wholesalers (kids today, you've never had it so good with your fancy internet-thing!) So in the meantime I drove everyone nuts playing Creeping Death over and over again until I had the hallowed album itself in my now clammy, shaking hands.
Anyway, enough with the context and on to the music. Metallica's debut, Kill 'Em All was and is, a great, raw slab of break-necked thrashing mayhem. Ride the Lightning, however, showed a quantum leap in songwriting ability, providing more than just high speed riffs to bang your head to. Sure, if you wanted that, this had it - Fight Fire With Fire and Trapped Under Ice to name just two provided that in spades. However, with tracks like For Whom the Bell Tolls and Fade To Black, the band showed they weren't afraid to rein the rampaging tempo in and slow the tracks down to allow them room to breathe and exhibit how the foursome's songwriting was rapidly maturing.
The aforementioned Trapped Under Ice and Escape kick off side two and both are good songs, but in the context of the rest of the album, I feel they are a step down in class, but all that is completely blown away by the album's closing brace - Creeping Death and it's telling of a vengeful god's infanticide against the pharoah and his people, followed in short order by instrumental The Call of Cthulhu and it's reference to a very different god. These two tracks back to back still stand as the epitome of thrash metal to me.
Master of Puppets is a slightly more consistent album in terms of songwriting quality, but this record stands as a monument to the coming-of-age of thrash metal as a genre and, for me, a personal landmark on my road of metal discovery.
I've got a lot of time for Dave Mustaine. He is a seriously cynical bastard and I see him as a bit of a kindred spirit in that respect. Forming Megadeth after inevitably getting kicked out of Metallica (can you seriously see Dave taking shit from Lars for long, because I can't), he went on to release three or four of my all-time favourite thrash albums. Although almost everyone cites Rust in Peace as the classic Megadeth album (and a damn fine one it is too), this and it's follow-up, So Far, So Good... have a lot more meaning for me, coming out as it did while I was navigating a divorce at the tender age of 24 and, feeding into my somewhat jaded view of life, Dave's sneering cynicism really chimed with me, particularly on Wake Up Dead and Peace Sells - "If there's a new way, I'll be the first in line, but it better work this time" - too fuckin' right, Dave!
Most of the rest of the tracks' lyrics are based around the prevalent pulp-horror themes of 1980s straight-to-video movies, although the lyrics are of secondary consideration to how neck-wrenching the thrashing is. It's not all-out war like Slayer and it's not as compositionally accomplished as Metallica at around the same time (Master of Puppets), but almost every track is a classic to my ears (except the inevitable cover and even that's one of their better ones) and I will never, ever tire of this record.
The Ruins of Beverast are a solo project begun in 2003 by Nagelfar's ex-drummer Alexander von Meilenwald after the band split in 2002. This is his fifth album under that banner, released in 2017 by Ván Records and featuring six tracks with a runtime in excess of 67 minutes (but don't most doom-based albums nowadays?) It is an album that melds several styles into a coherent and natural whole, be it death and funeral doom, atmospheric black metal or ritualistic tribal ambient stylings. The songs aren't of the kind that feature, say, a doom bit here, some ambient there and a bit of black metal tagged on for good measure, but rather, AvM skillfully forges the disparate parts into a single unique entity that flows organically, in interesting directions. The lyrics involve shamanistic exhortations and observations and are emphasized by the paganistic nature of the musical compositions to create an atmosphere redolent with the ritualistic practices of human pre-history, particularly accentuated by the drum patterns and subtle synth work.
As the listener, this album made me genuinely feel that I had been transported to another time and place and witnessed practices no longer remembered by modern man but buried deep within the psyche of all of us, maybe waiting to be reawakened by just such a piece of music. Definitely one of the more interesting and unique albums out there that should appeal to any fan of paganistic black metal or extreme doom metal (or anyone who just enjoys originality in metal music).
I've got to admit to never having been a huge fan of My Dying Bride. Their whole Gothic Romantic persona never really did much for me, reminding me overmuch of Cradle of Filth's gothic schtick. Their doom seemed less based on mournful melancholy borne of emotional suffering and more of lethargy and world-weary boredom brought about by excessive debauchery, laudanum and absinthe intake, in the manner of Anne Rice's vampire Lestat.
Anyway I put this on my player and set off for a walk with my dog, finding myself ten minutes or so later in the local churchyard, dating back to the eighteenth century, the gravestones being terribly overgrown. I didn't make a conscious decision to go there and had been there a few minutes before the suitability of the setting to the music I was listening to dawned on me.
Now I don't know if this is some fanciful notion or not, but in this somewhat sombre setting I finally felt some connection to and appreciation of MDB's brand of doom. Obviously this is aided by the fact that this is evidently one of their best albums, with songs like The Raven and the Rose and it's energetic death metal vibe (possibly my favourite song of theirs) and the epic dichotomy of the title track. The album as a whole feels like some kind of subdued operatic tragedy and now my preconceived perceptions have been shed, MDB's poetic style makes much more sense to me. Consider me a convert!
Death metal pioneers Possessed return with their first album in a third of a century and, you know what, it's pretty damn good. Easily the best of the slew of new 2019 releases from 80s and 90s thrash and death stalwarts such as Exhorder, Destruction and Death Angel. This is probably a bit more of a thrash album than the band's original couple of releases, but it is high-powered and exhilharating thrash that occasionally allows it's death metal DNA to show through. Jeff Becerra's vocals aren't the best, but to be honest, they never were. However, the songs are memorable, the playing is energetic and the album has a vitality you would be hard pushed to expect from a band well into it's fourth decade.
An album so chillingly cold that you can almost feel the frostiness seeping from the speakers. The iciness is relieved only by the female vocals that are sparingly employed. Nice variation of tracks from blasting blackness to virtually funeral doom (Space Funeral). Closes with a haunting version of Bach's Air on the G String that sounds as if it's playing from an interstellar probe as it heads into the deeps of space.
Superb songwriting, faultless musicianship and excellent production make this album essential listening in the funeral doom canon, like a kind of funeral Blackwater Park. Managing at the same time to be both ethereally haunting and oppressively heavy, they strike a perfect balance, succeeding where so many fail. The album feels like a solitary, moonlit walk through long-abandoned, ancient ruins. Epic, without being overblown, this is a masterpiece.
When they came onto the scene with this, their debut release, Candlemass were mercilessly derided by the mainstream music press (and even by a significant portion of the metal press), at least by those who chose not to ignore them entirely, yet this album still stands the test of time and is one of the seminal doom records, along with Sabbath and early releases from the likes of Saint Vitus, Pentagram and Witchfinder General. This is the album, however that gave doom it's epicness, with huge-sounding classics like Solitude, Crystal Ball and Under the Oak rendered even more awesome by Johan Lanquist's brilliantly OTT vocals. Candlemass were also hugely influential in making Scandinavia a real stalwart of the doom scene.
If you can get the remastered 2CD set, the second live disc, recorded with Messiah on vocals in 1988 in the birthplace of Doom (Birmingham, UK), would be a worthwhile release in it's own right and makes this an unmissable album for any doom fan.
Witchrot are a four-piece stoner doom band from Toronto. They released a four-track, self-titled ep back in 2018 then underwent a bit of an upheavel, bassist Peter Turik moved to guitar and he and vocalist Lea Alyssandra Reto were joined by new bassist Cam Alford and drummer Nick Kervin. This lineup are responsible for the band's first full-length, Hollow. The album is a much more focussed affair than the psychedelia-laced ep and is much better for it in my opinion, the former sounding at times more like an extended jam session.
The album kicks of with my favourite track, Million Shattered Swords - the gentle intro with Lea crooning softly soon erupts into a mighty doom riff and we are off on a crushing journey of psychedelic heaviness as the band maximise both volume and distortion to debillitating effect, the vocals soaring majestically over all this sonic devastation. They take the (increasing jaded-sounding) female-fronted stoner doom template and feed it steroids, bringing in some real sludgy heaviness to add to the groove-laden stoner riffage. Lea Alyssandra Reto's vocals are especially powerful, reminding quite a bit of one of my favourite female vocalists, Mia Zapata of punk band The Gits. The engine room of the rhythm section is strong, especially the bass which often has a driving, kinetic quality. The drums, sadly, could be a little better produced, they sound a bit muted and muddy to me and often struggle to make an impression. Still, this is a pretty impressive debut effort from a band who are trying to put a bit more oomph into the stoner doom scene and to which end they have been quite successful.
Well, it's taken 28 years for me to finally get round to Earth's legendary debut. The reason for this tardiness on my part is that my introduction to the band was via 2008's The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull, an album which I found so extremely boring and tedious that the very name Earth became anathema to me. So here we are in 2021 and buried within September's Fallen playlist was the opening track of Earth 2, Seven Angels, which when I heard it for the first time made me realise that I had made a terrible misjudgement of the band, a mistake which I would have to rectify in very short order.
Earth 2 is an album that is virtually impossible to review without resort to metaphor and hyperbole. As these are my preferred modes of expression usually, I don't intend to depart from this norm. This is an album that is as much a tactile experience as an auditory one. I imagine the absolute best way to experience it is through a huge Marshall stack at bowel-voiding volume. I can't escape the feeling that there is more going on than you can actually hear, in the same way as the majority of what's happening in the universe is undetectable to the human eye: gamma radiation, x-rays, infra-red light and dark matter all being invisible to us humans, I suspect that there are sonic waves produced by this that are too low a frequency to be heard and instead are felt, just like when the hairs on the back of your neck inexplicably stand up due to some undetected and unsuspected stimulus. It's almost like the album is a black hole's event horizon that once breached, inescapably draws you further into itself, crushing with unimaginably immense gravitational force for the heaviest experience in the universe.
It is ironic that a band called Earth produce music that, better than anything else I have heard, replicates how I imagine the majority of the cosmos would sound if it wasn't in vacuum. Within it's grooves I hear the death of stars and the demolition of galaxies, for what I can only describe as a transcendental and meditative experience. I'm not sure that any other album has ever launched my imagination onto a more vivid journey than Earth 2. I am fortunate that I live on a north-west facing hillside and get to see some fantastic sunsets. I am already anticipating sitting in a garden chair playing Like Gold and Faceted as the sun begins it's descent below the horizon, and letting the track become the soundtrack to the dying of the day.
Drone metal is absolutely not for everyone and neither is Earth 2. This is atmospheric music that truly is as much sensation as sound. It is very simple and repetitive, but is particularly affecting to those who "get it". Are there any riffs? Not really - well there are, but they are so slowly realised that they appear only as single chords sustained and built upon to amass into nothing less than a natural force. I'm sure there are plenty of people, including fans of doom metal, who find drone in general and Earth2 in particular boring, but for me this album is one of the most profound musical experiences I have ever had. I'm just cursing myself that it took me so long to submit to it's gravity, but I suppose it's better late than never.
In the ninth circle of doom metal hell, where no light penetrates, only the most desperate and forsaken of doom metal releases reside. If you were to venture there, like some latterday Dante Alighieri, then you would find within it the likes of Burning Witch's Crippled Lucifer and Hell's III. These abyssal depths now have a new resident and that is Body Void's Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth.
This is an album of doom metal at it's absolute bleakest, shriven of any hope or even a ray of positivity. The riffs are tortuously slow, heart-bursting chords piled one upon another into a soul-crushing mountain of volume and feedback that makes every breath an effort and renders all other external stimuli mute, scattered sparingly with outbreaks of higher tempo violence. Willow's vocals have the tortured soul quality of only the most desperate-sounding doom metal vocalists with lyrics that berate the world's politicians for their self-serving betrayal of the remainder of mankind. Whether or not you subscribe to a similar view, this admonishment certainly feels heartfelt and Willow's frustration with the status quo is palpable. Edward Holgerson commits acts of intense battery upon his drum kit, sounding occasionally like he may be attacking it with actual severed human limbs and additional chaos is provided by Entresol who's electronics add another layer of noise to the already powerfully alienating nature of this sonic tsunami.
Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth seems to be very heavily influenced by Stephen O'Malley's previously mentioned Burning Witch project and if you are familiar with Crippled Lucifer then you will have a good idea what to expect here. This is true doom metal for the serial cynic and disillusioned soul who sees no reason to hope or believe and if this is you, then you are in for a treat.
Even prior to the release of So Long Suckers, Reverend Bizarre had announced their intention to split, so it seems that they decided to go out with an album that could be viewed as the last word in traditional doom metal. Everything about the album is exaggerated and drawn out to a point (or more accurately beyond a point) at the edge of comfort. Intro riffs are played over and over way beyond where you would expect the vocals to kick in (They Used Dark Forces), chords are held for an interminable amount of time (Sorrow) and there are passages of bass-led noodling that act as more of a buffer than an intro or outro that seem at odds with the track they are attached to (Anywhere Out of This World). Then of course there is the extended track lengths. For trad doom some of these tracks are historically long, three of the seven tracks are over 25 minutes long and the album as a whole weighs in at a hefty 130 minutes.
And you know what, I love every minute of it. Reverend Bizarre are one of my absolute favourite traditional doom acts and, for me, very few can hold a candle to the Finnish trio. So Long Suckers isn't a perfect album by any means, look to the debut In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend for that level of doom metal nirvana, but it is a great example of an album pushing a genre to the absolute limits of extremity whilst remaining wholly within it's confines, so no harsh vocals, blastbeats or synths are to be found within this two hours plus of no frills, fuck-you-if -you-don't-like-it doom metal.
The riffs are memorable and gargantuan, courtesy of Lord Peter Vicar (Kimi Kärki), subsequent founder of the excellent Lord Vicar and the drumming of Earl of Void (Jari Pohjonen) is on point and, despite the extended repetition of the tracks, he does plenty to keep it interesting. For me though, despite his vocal shortcomings, the bass playing of Albert Witchfinder is fantastic and the instrument's presence is stamped all over So Long Suckers in a way that is reminiscent of how Lemmy's bass would often dominate Motörhead's sound (and even more so, Hawkwind's), adding a real depth and heft to the material that takes it to a different level of doom-laden substance.
This really isn't an album for the doom metal newbie and deliberately so I guess. Reverend Bizarre have wilfully gone about testing the limits of Traditional Doom and the mettle of it's adherents with their swansong, in an attempt to go out with the last word in the genre. To this end, I would suggest, they have been singularly successful and have produced an album that may alienate some but will heavily reward those willing to go along with it.
Aussie funeral doom merchants The Slow Death have finally returned with their first album in six years. To my ears this is an improvement on 2015's Ark, it's four heaving slabs of funereal death doom being just what the doctor ordered (well he didn't, but he damn well should have!) Weighing in at over an hour this is no album for the impatient metal fan, but being funeral doom you knew that already, right? It's an hour of massive riffs, clean female and gravel-throated growling male vocals heaved along by a great, solid rhythm section with well-placed keyboards and piano to add layers to the atmosphere and is one of the better doom releases this year. It's not always super-slow, but it IS always heavy as hell, so give it a listen if deathly funeral doom is something you're even remotely interested in.
Skepticism's fifth album has been some time in the making - it has been thirteen years since the release of Alloy and there has been a lot of water under the bridge in the metal world since then (and also in the real world for that matter). It seems that Skepticism too have been changed by the past decade or so as Companion is a more multi-faceted release than we have come to expect from most funeral doom acts in general and Skepticism specifically. There is quite a variation in pacing, from the lethargic and seismic slowness of true funeral doom, through quicker, but still fairly slow death doom, to the medium-paced almost-death metal of Passage. It doesn't sound like much to the uninitiated, but it's a spectrum shift for a band whose previous work has focussed very much on glacial pacing. Each of the album's six tracks has a unique atmosphere and character like never before heard on a Skepticism album.
The keyboards and especially organ, in typical Skepticism fashion, play a key role in generating the album's atmosphere. It's there, full-on in your face straight out of the gate with opener Calla where it weaves an atmosphere that I would weirdly have to compare to a Saor track in it's sweepingly panoramic scope. The track sounds initially like it should accompany open-skied vistas of the Old West or the Caledonian Highlands - how un-funeral doom can you get? This is a great intro to the album however and gives a nice taster of the band's current direction. Second track, The Intertwined, has a gothic death doom feel to it that is quite reminiscent of classic era My Dying Bride and although I sometimes have my issues with gothic elements they aren't laid on with a trowel here and are subtlely enough applied to enhance the track rather than detract from it. The album's longest track, the ten minutes of The March of the Four, is probably the nearest to a traditional Skepticism track, but even this is delivered with a bit more "bite" than we have come to expect. The organ on this one, particularly during the intro, really does sound as if it was recorded as the mourners file into an actual funeral.
At the mid-point of the album Skepticism change up a gear to a previously unimagined tempo with Passage, a track that feels like it wants to explode into full-on death doom territory in the style of Winter or Autopsy. It also contains a breakdown with a swirling organ sound that feels like it should be the soundtrack to a descent into a psychotic episode from an Alfred Hitchcock movie like Vertigo. The Inevitable, like The March of the Four is more akin to previous Skepticism work and is, for me, the least remarkable track here. The Swan and the Raven however, begins in menacing fashion with a string intro that says "something evil this way comes" and once more has a kind of cimematic feel to it, which seems to be a recurring theme. This closer may actually be my favourite track - it is definitely the one where the guitar work shines through best and the synths feel alternately menacing and expansive.
Overall this is a terrific album that cements Skepticism's reputation as one of the premier funeral doom outfits who have decided to strike out in a new direction, not with a quantum leap but with an incremental change that shouldn't alienate their fan base.
Vouna is the funeral doom alter-ego of Yianna Bekris, guitarist of atmospheric black metallers Eigenlicht. Atropos is the follow-up to her 2018 self-titled debut and is a much more substantial affair with it's four tracks (and short interlude) clocking in at almost an hour. The debut, whilst showing promise, felt underdeveloped for a funeral doom release. I feel funeral doom is a genre that needs to be luxuriated in, where the music allows the listener to be overwhelmed and smothered and duration does play a part in that experience, so the debut's half an hour featuring five tracks, whilst presenting some nice ideas, didn't allow them the development they deserved.
However, Atropos is by no means your stereotypical funeral doom release, it's generally a little bit pacier than normally expected and Vouna does a nice job of incorporating several different elements into the mixture. It's apparent from early on that she has a background in atmospheric black metal as it's influence features prominently at various points, particularly during the fifteen minutes of the album's best track Vanish where she even at one point resorts to a harsh black metal vocal and once more illustrates my view that there is much common ground between funeral doom and atmospheric black metal. The connection to atmospheric black metal is further strengthened by the addition of guest vocals by Wolves in the Throne Room's Nathan Weaver.
There is an emphasis on synths and piano within the album's doom context along with guest contributions on violin and harp that add layering to the tracks and introduces a pronounced darkwave influence, as if Vouna has taken the doom aspect of Chelsea Wolfe's Hiss Spun album to it's logical conclusion. By weaving in elements of atmospheric black metal, darkwave, dark ambient and gothic metal she has produced an album that feels mournful and yet warm, as if the artist provides solace to the listener through the shared experience of the music, the ethereal and soaring vocals in particular lending a calmness to the recording, despite it's melancholy nature, as if to say "we are all one and everything will be OK in the end". I say this despite even a cursory glance at the lyrics revealing a deeply sorrowful and painful undercurrent to the album. "Existence is anguish, Suffering and torment, How will I go on with the pain of what now is" from What Once Was doesn't exactly convey a hopeful message, but I still feel a sense of comfort is to be gleaned from the music itself and that ultimately there is a ray of light shining into proceedings, even if that is only provided by the release of death itself.
No matter what, I will always have time for monolithic and unrelentingly bleak funeral doom, but the variation in Atropos' tracks and the incorporation of other genres, in much the same way as Skepticism's new album Companion, seem to be helping to take funeral doom in a new and less predictable direction.