Sonny's Reviews
This is the Finn's debut album, released two years after 2018's fairly well-received two-track EP. It evokes the spirits of the natural world with it's blisteringly-paced, atmospheric, yet melodic, black metal. Lyrically it's themes are reverence and respect for the natural world, it's timelessness and unforgiving nature. The songs are moderately lengthy but never boring, with more than enough going on for even the most impatient metal fan. The vocals are savagely ragged as a counterpoint to the melodic nature of the music. Keyboards are used fairly sparingly and when they are they bring another layer of texture to the paganistic sound. I don't wish to give the impression that this is all atmosphere and somehow lacking on the metal front, there are some great riffs too - check out the pulverizing opener, Embrace the Eternal, for example. An extremely accomplished example of paganistic Black Metal.
Detroit's Temple of Void release their third full-length and, for me as a confirmed doomhead, it's their best yet. It's pulverising death doom is enhanced by influences from other genres such as space and psychedelic rock, although not in any glaringly obvious way, but more in a stylistic atmosphere, particularly through the subtle and organic deployment of synths that adds an additional layer of atmosphere to the album's sound without swamping it. Of particular note is the spanish guitar interlude of A Single Obolous that then leads into Leave the Light Behind, the track that most overtly displays additional influences, with it's spacey Hawkwind-style synths and clean sung chorus as it describes the transition from the world of the living to the world of the afterlife.
One aspect of the album that may well become ignored is that, despite the inherent heaviness of it's punishing riffs, it is, in fact, unexpectedly catchy for a death doom album, it's melodies being remarkably memorable. Mike Erdody (who is also vocalist with Acid Witch) is one of my favourite death doom vocalists and the way his voice drips necroticism on Self-Schism when he intones the line "Devour the hours until darkness is left" is guaranteed to send shivers down the spine.
A special album from a band who are bringing something extra to a long-established genre without compromising what makes that genre so great to it's devotees. As a sidenote, there may not be another album released this year with a more unintentionally apt title.
I'm gonna go against perceived wisdom here and say that I really enjoyed this thirteenth and latest album from the Bay Area veteran thrashers. When their contemporaries have basically thrown the towel in and either called it a day or pretty much dispensed with thrash metal altogether, Testament are still going strong and tearing out riffs like they're going out of style. Those riffs are groove-laden, medium pacers for the most part, but they're still great and couple that with the album's real strengths, the mesmerising and incendiary solos and Chuck Billy's still unbelievably vibrant vocals and you have a winner in my book. Sure, it's too long, a lot of the lyrics are hokey nonesense and there's a song about nuclear war (how much more 1980's can you get), but I just spent all morning listening to this, nodding my head, tapping my feet and with a big smile on my face, despite being in pandemic lockdown.
Dutch veterans Thanatos return with a brutal, high-powered album of thrashing death metal with a polemic against organised religion that will sate the appetite of any Possessed or Kreator fans looking for a shot of adrenalised metal to get them through these trying times.
Nearly two hours of blackened space metal from a couple of old pals in Spectral Lore and Mare Cognitum who present a modern metal take on Holst's Planet suite. Each planet has a track dedicated to it (except non-planet Pluto which has two) and each attempts to invoke the physical and mythological aspects of the planet it represents. Each band takes four planets, Spectral Lore having Mercury, Earth, Saturn and Uranus, with Mare Cognitum taking Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Neptune, both bands then coming together and collaborating on the final two-parter for Pluto (The Gatekeeper parts one and two).
Personally, I prefer Mare Cognitum's blend of visceral atmo-black and soaring post-metal to Spectral Lore's more avant-garde jazzy noodlings, but both bands are on fine form and this is a great example of an atmospheric and inspiring ode to the cosmos. Some bands make music and some bands write songs - this is most definitely the former.
I'm quite fond of Lucifer's first couple of albums, their blend of hard rock and heavy metal being a throwback to the heady days of the NWOBHM and particularly bands like Johanna Sadonis' countrymen, Warlock. I've got to say, though that this is a disappointing record, sounding devoid of any real passion or fire, it sounds like a band that has got very comfortable in what they do and are dialling it in a bit. The guitar sound isn't bad and the restrained keys are nice, but I'm just not feeling anything other than a band turning up to their day job and "putting in a shift". I'm sure the band would say "fuck off" to that and I'm sorry if you think that I'm being unfair, but hey, I hear what I hear!
Russian black metal that has an icy bite to it, reminiscent of it's Siberian home. Atmospheric, yet savage, like a long winter night outdoors. Not sure if the band's name translates well to English though - not really what you would expect a Russian black metal band to be called!
Agvirre are a "post-black metal collective from Manchester", that appear to be a trio, and this is their first full release. Comprising a short intro and a couple of twelve-minute tracks, this is not a lengthy album, but, despite it's short runtime it manages to pack quite a lot in. It is atmospheric black metal with suitably intense vocals, battering drum sound and buzzing black metal riffing, but what really sets it apart is the almost constant overlay of violin strings that add a melancholy and disconcerting atmosphere. Other curveballs are thrown by an almost choral section over the driving main rhythm during Muzzle & Mask, a song that also incorporates some gothicky electronics and Abandonment has a number of abrupt changes in pace and intensity and quite a melodic feel with an atypical clean-sung ending. If Subrosa played black instead of doom metal, then they may well sound similar to this, kind of reminds me a bit of Solar Temple too. I find it a refreshingly unique and stimulating release in the ever-expanding multiverse that is modern black metal.
Good old unpretentious, female-fronted doom metal with occasional male harsh vocals thrown in for good measure. Four tracks, all weighing in at the 9-12 minute range. The songs are well-written, although the production could be better. Avoids the "witchy" cliche of a lot of other f-f doom outfits and concentrates on just being damn heavy. Not bad at all for a debut and promises more for the future.
The Ghosts of Dunwich is the third album from Norfolk's self-proclaimed "progressive doom" duo Dark Matter. They take heavy, fairly simple, Sabbathian riffs and fashion them with a 1970's progressive sensibility, reaching it's apex on the 19 minute, three-parter, In a Fractured Land Parts I-III, that closes out the album. It's evident that this is a real labour of love, with an ambitious songwriting vision that maybe exceeds the duo's technical ability, none more so than in the vocal department. Saying that, the sheer enthusiasm and belief of the band shines through in every note and a band playing the music they want to play without any compromise is definitely something to be applauded.
We are all now familiar with the farcical goings-on surrounding Polish black metallers Batushka and their ridiculous legal wranglings, so I won't dwell on that any more than to acknowledge that they are happening. Anyway, going back to (presumably) happier times for the band, Litourgiya was released at the back end of 2015 to much critical acclaim. The reason for the album garnering so much attention was it's combination of clashing orthodoxies, savage black metal and Byzantine liturgical chanting. The question of the time was whether the band were believers combining their faith with black metal, or a black metal act committing an act of blasphemy by incorporating Eastern Orthodox devotions with unholy black metal. Unfortunately the band copped out and refused to elaborate, saying the album meant whatever the listener wanted it to mean, which is obviously bullshit as it's hard to conceive of the album being written without a definitive standpoint. Of course, there is a third explanantion that it was merely a novelty and a gimmick to garner attention, but personally I dismiss this idea.
The black metal on offer here is quite straightforward, with some variation of pacing and a number of damn good blasts, but if that was the sum total of this album then, in truth, it wouldn't stand out especially from the crowd. What does set it apart then is that one half of the dual vocals utilises Russian Orthodox chants which gives the music a dimension that sets it apart from the BM herd. It's effect is a little like The Omen using Orff's Carmina burana or The Exorcist and Tubular Bells, taking a benign and gorgeous musical idea and repurposing it by using it in a satanic setting to give it a more sinister dimension.
I was initially blown away by this, but time and subsequent listens have dulled the effect of the chants and what that leaves is a very good, but not great, albeit unique black metal album. It is, however, still much better than either of the Batushka's subsequent albums, but that is a story for another day.
Blut aus Nord were a band I never found easy to get into, finding the wilful dissonance of albums like the legendary Work Which Transforms God and MorT too much to take. Yet somehow I kept returning to them, as if on a subconscious level I realised there was something special here even if I didn't quite get what it was yet. I must admit to still struggling with TWWTG, the band's so-called opus, but in the Memoria Vetusta trilogy of albums I have found a vein I can really tap into with this band.
On MV2 the dissonance is still present in the underlying riffs, but the clean, overlaid guitar work is gorgeously melodic and, along with the reedy-sounding keyboards, is extremely effective as a counterpoint to the pummelling of the meat of the tracks. Regarding the keyboards, BaN's use of them here is quite restrained and they aren't slathered all over the tracks in a way that overwhelms and undermines the sound, unlike any number of ham-fisted symphonic BM outfits who've watched too many old gothic horror movies. The melodies are instantly memorable and the interwoven guitar work is probably the most obvious aspect of the album at first, yet with every single listen MV2 reveals a little more of it's hidden depths - surely the sign of a truly great musical endeavour.
Despite the more melodic approach BaN take here, there is still plenty of aggression and dissonance on offer, particularly in the vocal department and I don't want to give the impression this is an easy listen, but rather it rewards the listener the more one invests into it. As with all atmo-black there is a level of repetition, but this isn't as pronounced as some, with plenty of tempo and tone changes along the way to keep the listener engaged rather than hypnotised.
The subtitle Dialogue With the Stars may sound a little grandiose, but the music does feel as if it is being projected outwards on some grand cosmic scale, in an attempt to speak to the very furnaces of creation themselves. With this album Blut aus Nord have created one of the classics of atmospheric black metal, celebrating the majestic beauty of the universe in a way few have got close to equalling.
Coldworld is the solo black metal project of reclusive German, Georg Börner, Melancholie² is his first full-length under that name and is a release that he will find it extremely difficult to better. This is an album of frigid, lo-fi atmospheric black metal, with tremolo-picked riffs and harsh, distant vocals that perfectly evoke the frostiness of the cover's snowbound landscape. And yet it is also much more than that, with a morose and melancholy air, provided mainly by the keys, that gives the album an additional layer of contrasting, yet complementary, atmosphere over the icy blasting of the guitar and vocals.
This melding of two very distinctive and differing styles of metal is not unique in itself, but has produced a uniquely bleak, yet reflective, album of unexpected subtlety that goes beyond the norms of nature-themed black metal to a more inward-looking place.
An album of wholly instrumental metal that draws on doom, drone and atmospheric sludge. Sounds to me like a hybrid of Isis and Bees Made Honey.. era Earth. Personally I found it quite dreary and just too laid back with very little to grab my interest for any length of time. It's not terrible but commits the, arguably, even more egregious sin of being boring.
Pneuma is the debut album from Italian duo Diespnea and takes the form of melodic atmospheric black metal that sure can blast, but equally, is not afraid to slow it down. Never quite becoming blackened doom, it flies pretty close occasionally. Opener Immortale starts things off in high-tempo mode with a viking metal chorus early Enslaved would be proud of. Nostos Algos is one of those slower tracks and is a bit of a builder to the mid-point when it really lets rip before desending back down the tempo scale. My favourite is Naufragio which has the doomiest section of any track on the album at it's beginning, before erupting in an all-out black metal blast that is reminiscent of early-days Darkthrone. Closing track Gorgoneion has a mournful air to it, despite the blasting, due to the morose-sounding piano that accompanies most of the song, before bursting in with an almost hopeful ending as the guitar soars and soars...
A black metal album that has plenty to offer any fan of the genre and serves as a calling card for a band that may well be worth keeping an eye on.
Nechochwen's four tracks that make up side A are their usual high quality atmospheric BM fare and I don't wish to dismiss them out of hand as they are damn fine tracks, but the really interesting part of the split is Panopticon's single track that takes up the entirety of Side B, Rune's Heart. This is obviously a deeply emotional and personal track for Austin Lunn as the lengthy and somewhat harrowing notes that accompany it on Bandcamp will attest. It is a song from Austin to his young son Rune (Austin refuses to publish the lyrics as they are personal between himself and Rune) after Rune spent many, many months in hospital due to a necessary heart operation and complications that arose from it. It is a fantastic piece of atmospheric metal, it's twenty minutes encompasses a number of tempo changes and tonal variation, from aggressive frustration to calm reflection and back again that proves once more (if proof is needed) that Panopticon is still right at the head of the atmo-black pack.
The six tracks on offer here all follow a similar structure - a gentle, almost dreamlike beginning that builds wave upon wave into an anguished and desperate cry to the heavens. Despite the similarity in the progression of the songs, they are just so heartbreakingly atmospheric that I can completely forgive any sense of repetitiveness and, to be honest, I feel like a right picky bastard for even mentioning it.
Déhà is an extremely prolific releaser of music under his various guises, Imber Luminis, Slow, Aurora Borealis, Clouds and many more and is one of my recent favourite artists. This is his fourth album under his "own" name that he uses to release material that doesn't fit into any of his band's concepts.
A fleur de peau is for and about those who don't feel comfortable or at home in the world and are unable to express why they feel this way. The music takes the pummelling of atmospheric black metal and combines it with doom metal in such a way, via a cavernous-sounding production job, to give the overall impression of a kind of savage funeral doom that, itself, is fairly unusual. A number of post-metal interludes delineate the various sections of the single forty-odd minute track and provide some respite from the relentless hopelessness Déhà wishes to convey.
I cannot help but compare this to Markov Soroka's Drown album released this month, that has a very similar feel to it, albeit of a less savage kind. The similarities between the two releases are quite striking (and both are very good indeed).
When it comes to atmospheric black metal, Drudkh can justifiably be considered one of the prime movers of the genre, despite a bit of a drop-off during the early part of the 2010s, and are one of the bands, along with WitTR and Winterfylleth, who really got me excited about this type of nature- and folk history-themed black metal. For me, this is Drudkh's finest hour (well, fifty minutes actually) and one of the greatest atmo-black releases of all-time.
Unfortunately Drudkh have been dogged by accusations of far right sympathies, despite professing to being apolitical, and dedicating the album to Stepan Bandera, who was head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (a group labelled as fascist by many historians) isn't going to discourage their accusers any. Personally I am only interested in the music, having no time for extreme politics and will approach it in the same way as with Varg Vikernes' Burzum and pay no mind to the political connotations either overt or implied.
Musically the album takes the form of an atmospheric wall of sound that towers over the listener like a great mountain range or gathering thunderheads, both expansive and airy, but also threatening and dark. The production is great and allows the music to fill every space, from the faint echoing on the drums and the rumbling basslines to the crystal-clear riffing and emotion-filled vocals, every members part is given life and allowed to shine, none to the detriment of any other. Most of the songs are around the ten-minute mark and, as is typical with most atmospheric black metal, they feature a fair deal of repetition, but that is not a criticism, the repetition feels as if the band are laying down a series of layers that build up the album's atmosphere. Occasionally there are some really nice melodies, as towards the end of Furrow of Gods that, I guess, are based on Ukrainian folk music. The album also features some excellent soloing that is unusual in atmo-black, although it doesn't jump out and take over the music but is still fundamentally a part of the whole, like in any good ecosystem. The lyrics are taken from poetry by well-respected Ukrainian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Oleksandr Oles and doubtless extol the beauty and majesty of Ukraine's natural landscape.
As I said at the start of the review, this is Drudkh's best album, but I would go further and say that it is, debatably, the best atmospheric black metal album out there.
Pretty decent atmo-black with really nice middle eastern-flavoured ambient interludes that kind of reminded me of Hans Zimmer's Gladiator soundtrack. Thematically it explores the Apocrypha, a collection of heretical texts written and hidden in the Middle East a couple of millenia ago. Unlike these texts this is unlikely to change the world, but it is definitely worth a few spins if you love well-done atmospheric black metal.
This is My Dying Bride's first album for five years, following a period of inactivity as Aaron Stainthorpe dealt with a family crisis and the departure of a couple of members. Now, I lay no claim to being any authority on MDB, but the songwriting seems to capture their essential gothic mournfullness, the doleful melancholy of their sound heavily accentuated by the violin of Shaun Macgowan and most effective when it is present.
On the negative side, the drum sound is sterile and the production as a whole seems flat, both the clean vocals and guitar being robbed of any passion or bite. In a genre where the atmosphere is key, here it seems to be sadly lacking, as if the feeling has been leeched out during the production process. Not until the second half of the album and it's two longest tracks, The Long Black Land and The Old Earth do the band seem to shrug off the shackles that the recording process has bound them with and allow their passion to show through.
As a result, I've really got to class The Ghost of Orion as a disappointment, despite the songs being well-written, the album is just too lacking in emotion, it's melancholy seemingly deriving from ennui rather than loss, although if the first half was as good as the latter, I think it would have resonated with me more.
A split featuring two of death doom's greatest underrated bands. I have been a big fan of Atavisma and their abyssal doom of death for some time now. The three tracks featured here marry an old-school death metal vibe and the frenchmen's signature, "rotting-corpse-stench" doom metal to whet the appetite of any ultra-morbid doomster. The last of their three tracks is titled Dread and that just about sums these guys up.
Void Rot I am less familiar with, but are very much in a similar vein albeit a little more uptempo. I swear I could feel the ground shaking during Necrotic Deity (come on, with a song title like that you must have a damn good idea of what we're dealing with here).
For me, bands like these are the real custodians of the spirit of death doom metal, without any of the gothic pretensions the more popular acts employ to sweeten their sound, and the true cadaverous heirs to the likes of Winter, Autopsy and Asphyx as they take death doom to a new level of putrescence. A great taster for both bands' expected new full-lengths.
A lengthy album of stonerized doom and sludge metal that veers from heartfelt longing to dissonant aggressiveness and back again. Mike Scheidt's clean vocals are on top form and are filled with emotional resonance, never more so than in the opener, Ablaze, the album's best track in my opinion, with it's epic, yet sorrowful atmosphere. This is followed by The Screen, a song dripping with aggressive, sludge-drenched dissonance and the album's most angry-sounding track. In Reverie begins with a solitary bass line, before erupting into life with huge, heaving riffs that shake to the roots of the earth. Lungs Reach appears, at first, to be a gentle respite before exploding into a short, desperate maelstrom. The album's longest track at sixteen minutes is up next. Beauty in Falling Leaves is one of the more melodic tracks YOB have ever written and has an atypically hopeful and even joyous atmosphere within it's doom riffing. After the more upbeat emotion of Beauty.., Original Face is the polar opposite, with a death doom vibe that is more savage in it's uptempo pacing than is usual for the band and acts as a bridge between the album's two longest songs. Closing the album is the title track, which is another doomy stoner epic, nearly quarter of an hour long, which builds and builds to a psych-guitar crescendo.
With some nice variety in the tracks, the album's seventy-odd minute length doesn't feel at all excessive. A great example of an experienced band that can continue to turn out interesting and engaging records, despite working in a genre with fairly tight conventions.
Spaniards, Proscrito, launch this, their debut full-length album onto an unsuspecting public and crush the life out of them with their super-massive black hole of death doom. Featuring powerful and abrasive doom riffs that owe more than a passing nod to Tom G. Warrior and Celtic Frost, with growling and howling deathly vocals tearing their way through the fabric of reality to haunt the waking hours of the poor misbegotten souls who happen upon this swirling maelstrom of death.
This eponymous album is the debut release for these Hungarian doomsters. Whilst taking cues from bands like Windhand, Jex Thoth and co, their female-fronted occult doom doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, but also manages to avoid sounding too derivative. Singer Stragessa has an effective and well-controlled voice, with a decent range and no histrionics. The riffs are medium-slow, trad doom with some decent hooks, but could do with a little more heft. Keyboards are very subtly applied and don't swamp the music, so it doesn't get too corny or overtly gothic-sounding. Most of the tracks are in the 8 to 9 minute range, so the band allow plenty of time for the songs to develop and deploy some nice melodies within the riffs.
Probably won't have too many new fans flocking to the female-fronted doom banner, but should please existing fans of the style.
Konvent are an all-female four piece from Copenhagen who play ultra-heavy, sludge-inflected death doom metal. Formed in 2015 and putting out a reasonably well-received four-track demo in 2017 the band now present their debut full-length album, Puritan Masochism, via Napalm Records.
Slow, heavily downtuned riffs with twin vocals combining deep, abyssal growls and harsh, desperate shrieks to provide a suitably ominous sound that has a vaguely unsettling effect. The production is perhaps a little too clean for this style of doom metal and the songs ultimately lack variety, but it is heavy as hell and, if taken for what it is, is food and drink for adherents to the death doom ethos - not every new release has to break the mould after all!
Khazad-dûm's "Hymns from the Deep" is a musical journey into the depths of the dwarven mines of Moria from JRR Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring. The lyrics are from a poem based on the chapter "The Bridge of by Khazad-dûm" written by Myrddin Evans.
Khazad-dûm are a solo project of Dan Scrivener who plays all the instruments and sings the clean vocals, with help from Matthew Surry who provides harsh vocals which are supposedly from the Balrog of Moria. Slow, melancholy and cavernous as befits the setting of this part of Tolkien's epic, the majority of the album is funeral doom metal, with some dark ambient and even a little atmospheric black metal to add contrast. It successfully portays the morbid, dread atmosphere of the long-abandoned dwarven ruin and the malignant presence of it's most infernal inhabitant, taking Tolkien away from the folksy, hopefulness of Peter Jackson's movie portrayal and planting it firmly in the sphere inhabited by Lovecraft's eldritch, dreadful Elder Gods.
Raw and ascerbic black metal, verging at times on war metal levels of intensity, that fair pummells and smashes itself along in a real old-school style. Without wishing to seem condescending, this is an impressive release considering that the band are from Iraq, a country with a reputation for being a hotbed for any number of things, but black metal isn't one of them. I don't know what it takes to make a black metal album in a country as war-torn as Iraq, but I'm sure it can't be easy, making this an achievement in itself. The fact it's frickin' awesome too is even more kudos to the band. War metal by people who have had to live that shit!
Romans Suum play traditional doom metal in the manner of Scandinavians Reverend Bizarre and Lord Vicar and Aussies Rote Mare amongst others. With deep and resonant riffs that are mainly ponderous and doom-laden, but occasionally break loose with some uptempo, raging riffing such as on Creatures from the Vault, the guitar work is crunchingly satisfying. Vocalist Marco Veraldi is a veteran of bands like Bretus and has a sonorous voice, intoning his morbid, death-obsessed musings sometimes with a resignation of inevitability and at others with a howling railing agaist fate, he also does a reasonable impression of Lee Dorrian's Forest of Equilibrium performance on Reaper Looks In Your Eyes. The bass and drums are functional and provide the mortar that hold this whole pile of rocks together without ever being flashy or showy, as any good doom metal rhythm section should.
This kind of trad doom album seldom holds too many surprises, especially for the more seasoned doomhead, but there is enough here to give the listener a taste of the band's own character. The songs are solid and well-performed and, personally, I'm always up for being hammered by another slab of decent doom metal.
Markov Soroka, the main man behind Drown, is also the driving force behind atmo-black projects Aureole and Krukh as well as genre-bending Tchornobog. Drown is the banner under which Markov releases his funeral doom and Subaqueous is the second album he has released as Drown, following 2014's Unsleep.
It features only two tracks, but eack clocks in at over twenty minutes, so you are unlikely to feel short-changed. The album does have a concept as such, track one, Mother Cetacean, relates the sorrowful tale of a grief-stricken mother who has lost her son to the sea and, unable to live with her grief, decides to join him by wading out into the water and being dragged down to the watery depths, accompanied by a grieving whale whose young have also succumbed to the ocean's crushing weight. Second track, Father Subaqueous, tells of the ghost of the young man as he is imprisoned in the ocean's bottom and his horror as he perceives his mother's lifeless body dropping down to join him in his lightless grave.
The album does have a moderately quick tempo for funeral doom (although, obviously, these things are relative) yet it is still heavingly heavy, with thundering drums, cavernous vocals and distorted riffs, but there is also a lighter side to it with the chiming, melodiousness of some of the overlaid guitar work, especially on Mother Cetacean.
Markov Soroka is extremely adept at creating depressive and dark atmospheres and here he is aided by the production which was handled by Esoteric's Greg Chandler and successfully invokes the irresistible nature of the tidal ebbing and flowing of the oceans and the sheer weight of the countless fathoms of water, pressurizing the depths into a suffocating, airless doom.
Murg's 2015 debut album is raw and rabidly harsh black metal that really cuts to the quick. It comprises eight tracks, clocking in at around 35 minutes, of relentless, pummelling blasting for the most part with vicious riffing and ragged, shrieking vocals. Yet despite the aggressiveness it still manages to maintain a degree of melody to the songs and isn't merely an exercise in discordance.
At it's most intense, this is scorching Irish Black Metal with searing vocals that may well set your speakers ablaze. However, it's not just an all-out frontal assault, as a contrast there are also times when the album is more introspective and serene, but fear not, another blistering blast-beat is never too far away.
Powerful riffing coupled with the barely contained angst and fury of Rae Amitay's vocal delivery make for an adrenaline-pumping half-hour that has barely been matched all year. The two or three short quieter interludes, such as the intro to Saprophyte and the piano break in To a Watery Grave only serve to highlight the aggression of the rest of the album. Definitely one of the metal albums of 2015.
Saturnalia Temple have been a favourite of mine for some time now. Their psych-drenched doom metal is as uncompromising as it is trippy and it is early days yet, but this may well be their best album so far. Recorded completely on analogue equipment, Gravity is a throwback to the heady days of late '60s / early '70s psych rock.
First track proper, after a short intro, is the eponymous Saturnalia Temple which, if you didn't know better, you would swear was a psych-doom song from about 1968. I can't really explain why, but I get a kind of doom Velvet Underground vibe from this track. Next is the nine minutes of organ-soaked fuzzy doom, Gravity, with it's cracked and croaky vocals, which suggests that man is pulled down by his failings like a huge mass exerting it's pull on his soul and, despite the warmness of the guitar sound, it feels like an ominous and threatening track. The repetitive, ascerbic Elyzian Fields with it's black metal-style vocals is a kinetic ending to side one.
Between Two Worlds begins side two and, after a chaotic intro, kicks into gear and hurtles along like a long lost Hawkwind track from their Space Ritual days with echoing vocals Bob Calvert would be proud of. The distorted hyper-fuzzy oscillations and cavernous, disembodied clean vocals of Bitter Taste are a little disorientating, particularly on headphones and could well be some kind of sonic experiment on the human brain! Oannes also features the same vocal style and a similarly repetitively hypnotic guitar sound as Bitter Taste, albeit with a warmer, more bassy tone and Alpha Drakonis is basically an ambient outro to end the album as it started.
Once more Saturnalia Temple prove they are one of a kind and are not content to plough the same doom metal furrow as the majority of their contemporaries. Gravity has a cataclysmically reverberating bottom end and properly disconcerting vocals to give the listener the impression of having heard something genuinely either profound or blasphemous. More successfuly evokes the imagery and atmosphere of HP Lovecraft than any number of albums that deliberately set out to. Original, unsettling and ultimately, an extremely satisfying doom metal record.
The album's opener, "Old Man Gong", is a twelve minute synth-heavy instrumental track, coming on like a killer Hawkwind/St.Vitus hybrid. "Pyramid in my Mind" is a piece of straight-up sludgy doom and is the only track on the album that features vocals. Next is my personal favourite "Wheelchair Druid". Opening with an amazingly heavy, yet melancholy, main riff which then gives way to a short, quieter interval before launching into an excellent, spacy guitar break, before returning to the heavy riffing for the remainder of this superb track. "Nephilim" has another powerful underlying riff, overlaid with a tasty synth and guitar icing. Closer, the thirteen minute "Entombed With The Pharaohs", is a bit more of a builder, starting gently and then amping it up steadily, this is probably the albums weakest track. Admittedly, this syle of space-inflected heavy doom has probably got limited appeal, but if it is your kind of thing, there can't be many better examples.
Greeks On Thorns I Lay have been at this a long time, more than 25 years to be precise and this is the first album of theirs to cross my path. The album's seven songs clock in at 45 minutes and are mainly comprised of melodic death doom with gothic undertones. Slow, heavy, distorted riffs, growling vocals with mournful keys and a smattering of strings and female vocals for an overall moribund gothic doom atmosphere any fan of bands like My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost should enjoy.
Blessed Death's second album is rough and ready thrash with speed metal influences. It certainly isn't the most technically adept nor original thrash albums you'll ever hear, but what it does have in spades is an infectious enthusiasm that is second to none. A significant number of the tracks clock in at less than three minutes and are belted out like Slayer on angel dust.
The factor that may be a problem for a number of people is vocalist Larry Portelli who's performance is insane, from the deepest of growls to the highest of shrieks sometimes without warning. However, I found his vocal performance strangely endearing, as if you can tell that he was really putting his heart and soul into it. You can just picture him completely losing his shit on stage and giving it his absolute all. It's a shame the band aren't better known, especially considering how well-regarded several less passionate outfits are.
Worm were originally a one-man outfit, hailing from the swamps of Florida and playing straight black metal, the band later expanding to a duo before releasing their debut album Evocation of the Black Marsh in 2017. This their second album, takes cavernous death doom combined with elements of funeral doom and desecrates it with evil black metal shrieks or growling demonic utterances. The production is a bit muddy and while this isn't always a problem with death doom, it does seem to rob this of a little of it's efficacy at times. The riffs are filthy and fetid, as they should be and the drums have an echoing resonance that contributes mightily to the abyssal atmosphere. Rotting Spheres of Sentient Blackness is a definite highlight with it's lethargic, corpse-ridden doom of death vibe and malodorous vocals that may leave the unwary gagging! So if you're a fan of doom metal that sounds like it's been disinterred after about three centuries then this should appeal.
Godthrymm were founded by respected UK doom metal guitarist Hamish Glencross, ex-member of Solstice and My Dying Bride. This is the band's first full-length album after releasing a couple of well-received EPs, particularly 2018's A Grand Reclamation. The guitarist's sojourns in both bands have left their mark all over this album, combining the sorrowful mourning of MDB with Solstice's epic doom sensibilities, resulting in an album with one foot rooted firmly in the past of UK doom metal and the other reaching for the future and although it's sound echoes from the 90's it's influences combine to form a modern release nonetheless. Glencross' vocals have the requisite mournfulness, but also have a strength to them that suggest a spirit tested but not broken by the sorrows heaped upon it. Occasional female vocals add another layer of epic mourning to the atmosphere. The huge riffs convey a dark power that is infused with a sense of dread and yet a determination to prevail. All in all an impressive debut album from a seasoned doom metal warrior's latest incarnation that should appeal to any and all fans of UK doom.
It is with some trepidation I approach an attempt to review Master of Puppets. I mean, what can I add to the volumes rightfully heaping praise on one of metal's all-time greatest releases? I have related elsewhere how I discovered thrash metal through Metallica's previous album Ride the Lightning and so when MoP was released I was looking forward to it with great excitement. Even that didn't prepare me for how awesome a record Metallica had laid before the metal world. The progression from RtL to MoP was every bit as impressive as from the debut to that classic.
Bookended by the two most straight-up aggressive tracks, Battery and Damage Inc., the album was a masterclass in jaw-dropping metal songwriting and flawless execution. Complex songs with one of the absolute tightest ever metal performances committed to record, this album single-handedly took metal to a whole different level. Master of Puppets itself may be the single best metal track of all-time, a perfect storm of controlled aggression and meaningful songwriting that is one for the ages. The crawling menace of The Thing That Should Not Be and it's Lovacraftian imagery of unspeakable evil should set your neck hairs on end. Welcome Home (Sanitarium) closes out side one and is as sorrowful a song as Metallica ever wrote, the despair and helplessness of the song's protagonist laid bare for all to see.
Side two kicks off with Disposable Heroes, it's galloping main riff has always been one of my favourites and Cliff's bass-playing here is fantastic. It's anti-war sentiment is also atypical for a metal band and yet another thing that set Metallica apart from the herd. Next up is Leper Messiah and despite still being a good song, I feel it is the album's weakest link. Orion is one of the great metal instrumentals, it's throbbing riff is a great foundation for the guitar work of Hetfield and Hammett. In light of future events, the bass line halfway through the song after the first pause brings a metaphorical tear to my eye every time I hear it, particularly when the mournful-sounding guitar solo kicks in over the top of it, almost like a portent of things to come. Damage Inc. closes out the album in violent style, both musically and lyrically.
It's easy to knock Metallica in hindsight and they rightly deserve a lot of the kicking they get, becoming a complete joke in later years with their rock star crap. But no matter what, they will always have made this album and no amount of Some Kind of Monster or St. Anger bullshit can change that. The sad passing of Cliff Burton had some bearing on the direction Metallica went in later years, of that I am sure, but this is as fine a memorial to that legendary human being and metal musician as it is possible to have. R.I.P Cliff. You have been missed.