[ aquarius records — Metal Black Metal ]

WHISPERS: Pagan folk / viking metal, epic and black. LIGHT: blistering chaotic psychedelic BM. Ferocious and introspective.

MPEG stream: Journey Into Glory
MPEG stream: We Alone
MPEG stream: Beholding The Throne Of Christ
MPEG stream: Defeated Once And For All

Don't know much about this UK black metal trio, other than they have a killer, and nearly illegible logo, and an amazingly ridiculous 7" cover, and that their debut 7" was recorded by none other that Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers) when you hear what these guys have cooked up, a weird hybrid of primitive, grim black buzz, and blown out chaotic noise rock skree, the label suggests Ildjarn meets Harry Pussy, or Ulver crossed with Black Dice, and we definitely hear that. It's like the sounds are black metal, but the arrangements are noise rock, or vice versa, but either way, it's a pretty heady proposition, loose and chaotic, grim and black, and pretty twisted, a stumbling, lo-fi, damaged noise drenched sonic assault, that pairs relentless caveman pound with Mick Barr like squiggle shred, the sound abruptly shifting into a churning death march dirge, the vocals following suit, transformed from blackened screech, to monstrous gurgle. The B-side opens with some soaring fast picked riffage, anchored by some stiff, robotic drumming, the guitars and drums conjuring up a seriously tense backdrop for the hellish vokills, until the sound collapses into a twisted, droned out, static black buzz, guitar skree, double kick drumming, and growled vocals, all stretched out into some sort of knuckle dragging black metal minimalism, only to eventually erupt into some loping, knuckle dragging metallic churn, only to lurch right back into that cool droned out minimal noise/skree part, that we sort of wish stretched on even longer, but instead, the band finish off with one final stretch of filthy black buzz and pound. Killer stuff for sure. Can't wait for the full length. Pressed on blue vinyl, probably limited too, and housed in a nice thick sleeve with the aforementioned ridiculous and amazing cover art.

The return of White Medal. And that's MEDAL not METAL. There's nothing god fearing or white or light or positive or hopeful about the sound this grim horde spew forth. We had their 7" a while back, and it was a primo slab of blown out almost industrial sounding blackness. Like a black metal Godflesh, crossed with maybe some of the more raw stuff like Bone Awl or Ash Pool, but with a bit of post rock epic-ness mixed in. Not sure how all that stuff worked together but it did. We dug it big time. So now here's release number two, this time a super limited cassette / patch combo, limited to 100 copies, and finds the band going in a bit more of a raw, old school black metal direction. Beginning with an awesome washed out creepy ambient intro, all clean guitar shimmer and dark moody creep, the band soon launch into a full on buzzy pound, the guitars murky and muddy, the drums a buried in the mix plod, the vocals weirdly effected, the whole thing gloriously gurgly and lo-fi, almost d-beat sounding at times, with some cool languid and woozy folky interludes. The flip side is much more frenzied and furious and somehow even more-lo-fi, total washed out black buzz murk, everything wreathed in hiss and distortion and buried in an all mids and lows and no highs mix, making the sound almost sludgey and doomy even though the band is blasting frantically. So blurred and smeared, that the buzz and blast gets smudged into droning epic blackness, that occasionally slips back into crunch and chug, but more often swirls and shimmers, if the sound was even a tiny bit more washed out or even a little bit more lo-fi this could have ended up an awesome blackdrone record. Killer stuff. We definitely need to hear a full length from these guys one of these days. Comes with a cool cassette sized embroidered black and white patch, featuring the band name, the legend: Tread The Earth, and a cool image of a strange skeletal figure wielding a scythe over a garden of what appears to be body parts. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!!!! We got about 20, and after that we will not be able to get more.

Long overdue collection from this UK black metal horde, gathering up a bunch of various way-too-limited demos, as well as a handful of unreleased tracks, the sound raw and seriously lo-fi, melding lurching doomed creeps to punkish almost D-beat pound and the occasional bout of furious black buzz. But part of what we like about these guys (this guy?), is how stripped down and Spartan the sound can be, the drums are simple and workmanlike, the guitars buzz, but not blackly, more almost sort of jangly, check out the first track here, which begins as a haunting darkly melodic dirge, clean guitar melodies draped over murky buzz and doomy drum plod, before exploding into something much faster, but which in some weird way, sounds almost punk, or even noise poppy, minus the productions, and the demonic croaked vokills, this could easily be some weird indie rock outfit, but with the vox, and the swirling low fidelity buzz, it ends up being more melodic BM. And it's that mix that sort of defines the sound, and actually is a hallmark of much of the black metal we like, that stripped off the overt black metal tropes, could be some weird murky doom pop or some experimental noise rock. The second track here is a gloriously minimal murk rock blowout, that even with the vocals, still sounds more like some metallic cold wave oddity than pure black metal. The second demo here (starting at track 8), dials up the muddy, murky, dirge, and takes all that poppiness and buries it, at least on the first track, a lumbering monstrous black doom trudge that kills, and that sonic filth spills over into the rest of the tracks, the sound way more black and grim, but again, close listening, it's easy to hear the melody and more traditional songcraft that lurks beneath the surface, whether intentional or not. The two previously unreleased tracks are the blackest of the bunch, with the second of the two boasting some super sick vokills, and a soaring majestic arrangement that manages to be both dirgey and doomy, epic and intense. The final track is from some comp and is definitely the weirdest one here, with big booming drums, super distorted guitar buzz, belched harsh vox, the whole thing confusional and stumbly and gloriously chaotic. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!

MPEG stream: Agbrigg
MPEG stream: On't Borough
MPEG stream: An Evil Crop
MPEG stream: Nokthumbrian Tyrants

Killer split 7" from Aussie heavies Whitehorse, and Floridian thrashers Hot Graves. Whitehorse offer up another skull caving slab of extreme heaviness, churning, lumbering, groovy and sludgey, with some cool harmonized melodies offsetting the otherwise downtuned crush. The vocals are a demonic gurgle buried in the mix, occasionally exploding into banshee like howls, the sound creeping one second, swinging and Sabbathy the next, a killer jam, and surprisingly melodic/catchy. Hot Graves are new to us, and a quick glance online seemed to have them pegged as sounding like Swedish styled death metal, but to these ears, at least on this split, they sound way more old school thrashy metal, reminding us quite a bit of aQ faves Speedwolf. Loping, galloping metallic punk (or punky metal?), all classic metal chug, shredding leads, raspy throat shredding bellows, raw and fucking fierce, with wicked classic harmony guitar leads, and a cool second half, that slips into a mosh worthy breakdown with still MORE classic metal riffing. Definitely want to hear more... Probably limited, super swank silkscreened covers, and a printed heavy cardstock insert.

We always considered German black metallers Wigrid to be the true heirs to the throne of blackened buzz vacated by Burzum as he descended into neo-Naziism and fruity Peter And The Wolf keyboard music. The first Wigrid record was a frosty blast of Burzumic fury, a plodding midtempo swirl of fuzzed out riffs and primitive minor key droning depressing darkness. One of the all time BM essentials for sure. A lot has changed since then, and we're not sure what could have caused such a dramatic shift (is the band photo a clue? Sole member Ulfhednir, now sports short hair, a neck beard, t-shirt, tattoos, jeans and a chain wallet), although no matter how bummed out some of the more true grim BM warriors have been with Die Asche Eines Levens, we are loving this, as we imagine you will too. Sure it's still grim and buzzy, heavy and drone-y, but the sound is so much more post rock than blck metal it's a bit shocking. Think Mogwai, Slint, Godspeed, Kinski, My Bloody Valentine, Bardo Pond, Aereogramme, that epic repetitive slow building majestic sort of post rock, then add a bit of black buzz, some howling anguished vocals and you'll get a rough idea of what this new Wigrid sounds like. Gorgeously melancholy riffing, haunting arpeggiated guitar melodies, over that instantly recognizable Wigrid struggling, midtempo drum machine drumming, all wrapped up in a propulsive, emotionally charged cinematic epic slow burning post rock crescendo, stretched out over each of the five lengthy ten minute tracks. So gorgeous. We've been digging all those sludge metal / post rock hybrids lately (Conifer, Tides, Mouth Of The Architect, Pelican, Isis, Baroness, etc.) so maybe this is the next logical step, that most recent Deathspell Omega was pretty post rock too. Call it black post metal, or post black metal, or blackened post rock. Whatever you call it, it's fucking awesome! And even though this new Wigrid is maybe more Mogwai than Burzum, it finishes off with a not so subtle Burzum homage, a thirteen minute ambient synthesizer swirl (a la Filosofem?), delicate and crystalline, simple notes chiming and tinkling, a sweetly mournful haunting lullaby. While they last we have the super limited digipak version, once we run out of those you'll get the regular jewel case version (which might be a buck or two cheaper!).

MPEG stream: Erwachen
MPEG stream: Treibend Im Menschenstrom

Wigrid is a one-(Ger)man band that plays raw black metal definitely influenced by the notorious Burzum. Indeed, as you become enveloped in the depressive, distorted, plodding fuzz-forest of Wigrid's imagination, you'll be convinced that such unending grimness hasn't been inflicted upon the world since before the incarceration of Varg Vikernes, aka Burzum. Wigrid's massive, murky wall of fuzz, with desperate, screamed vocals lost behind it, marches slowly ever onward, with primitive, minor-key melodies subliminally effecting your soul. The sparse, pulsing drum machine hits are similarily buried in the repetitive guitar riff-stortion. Nothing fancy, or that original (the cover drawing even looks suspiciously like it was borrowed from Burzum's "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss"), but wholly satisfying if this is a mood that interests you. Submitting to Wigrid's monotonous yet majestic misery and cold, cold anguish is a release. It's trancey and hypnotic and ambiently ear-grinding. For fans of "Hvis..." / "Filosofem" era Burzum (duh), Weakling, and other troglodytic, minimal dirge metal.

RealAudio clip: Leere
RealAudio clip: Ort der Einsamkeit

You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz. We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too. But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch). So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear. So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean. Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones: THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs. WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM". Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!

MPEG stream: Smokelessfire
MPEG stream: Untitled 2

You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz. We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too. But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch). So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear. So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean. Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones: THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs. WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM". Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!

MPEG stream: Shamed

You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz. We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too. But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch). So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear. So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean. Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones: THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs. WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM". Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!

MPEG stream: Killing Your Whole Family To Make Your Last Name Extinct

As hopefully you fondly recall, just a few weeks back, we made a double cd entitled Might Of The Planet Eater, by this eccentric Finnish outsider blackened industrial / electronica act, our freakin' Record Of The Week. 'Twas a sprawling and utterly bizarre set, part Pan Sonic, part power electronics, part (ir-)rhythmic occult ritual, apparently what happens when a Finnish black metal weirdo does DIY industrial experimentation. Weird and primitive and (to us) utterly awesome. While we absolutely LOVE Will Over Matter, we'll readily admit they're, uh, possibly a difficult listen (but then, compared to some other things we sell, maybe not really). And fortunately a lot of you folks seemed to dig it! So, of course, we thought you'd want us to list this one too, an earlier album from Will Over Matter, also on Bestial Burst. This disc is actually the first WOM we ever heard, preceding Might Of The Planet Eater by a couple years. What happened, is not long ago one of us came across a Will Over Matter track on the internet somewhere, got kind of obsessed, and was happy (and amused) to find that we actually already had one of their albums in stock!! That was this one, 9 To The Moon, which we'd apparently ordered from Bestial Burst a couple years ago (2009) when it came out, but never reviewed. The next time we did a Bestial Burst order, we also got the newer double cd, and, our obsession growing, decided to make it Record Of The Week. So all of you who liked that one, you want this too! Again, outsider electronic electro-dirge, chock a block with squeaky squelchy static-y sounds, stuttering irregular rhythms, noisy glitchy distortion damage. Bloop zwoop zip zap. Buzzing electricity. Sinister analog synth. Computers gone haywire. The occasional disembodied, drugged out voice buried in the mix (heard on the plodding "No Waste Of Sorrow" and elsewhere). Yes, the blown out, black and white, lunar landscape (?) cover art is so appropriate for these alien, bleak, brutal sci-fi sounds, that are both confusional and compelling. To recap, WOM is a one-man band, a project of Harald Mentor from equally insane AQ faves Ride For Revenge, allegedly a "black metal" act. WOM is not black metal (though Beherit did dabble in this direction once upon a time) but anyone who really appreciates Ride For Revenge, as well as anything totally fucked up, ought to enjoy it. And the esoteric themes of these songs (they ARE songs) are as out there as any black metal weirdness ever. The song titles aren't even provided, but the internet knows what they are. While it's not a double disc like the other one we listed, there's 9 tracks, all of 'em long... with grand finale "The Burning Logic" building and building for over 8 minutes of crinkum crankum, industrial electro-dirge hypnosis. The whole thing is possibly dangerous headphone listening all right!

MPEG stream: No Waste Of Sorrow
MPEG stream: Geometric Law Of The Psyche
MPEG stream: The Burning Logic

We got this in on the day we sent out our last list, the latest from weirdo Finnish avant electronic surreal industrial outfit Will Over Matter, the solo project of the maniac behind damaged sort-of-black-metal avant rhythmic alchemists Ride For Revenge, and we were totally tempted to just list it then, with a review that simply said "This is so much better than anything on this week's list" and leave it at that. We wussed out at the last minute, thinking it a bit too flip, and like all records we love, we really wanted the chance to gush and get a bit more in depth, but it seriously only took a day or two of listening, before we were very nearly incapable of listening to anything else. The music of Will Over Matter, whose Might Of The Planet Eater double cd we made our Record Of The Week a few months back, is simultaneously infuriating and addictive, baffling and beautiful, a dizzying collage of primitive electronics, of abstract spaced out synths, of bizarre spoken word vocals and sprawling pulsing glitchy malfunctioning buzzscapes, like an Emeralds record if it was crafted by some strange tribe of interstellar cave dwellers, or Daniel Higgs creating primitive spiritual rituals post frontal lobotomy. There's definitely an Amps For Christ vibe too, the same sort of controlled chaos, disparate sounds and tones woven into songs both textural and strangely melodic. The opening track here is the perfect example, a 12+ minute of warped lo-fi kosmische exploration, sounding a bit like it was culled from samples of the Starship Enterprise, recorded on a handheld microcassette recorder, and then played back on a busted up old Casio sampler, a sort of spaced out industrial power electronics, but with the power rendered not so much in volume and intensity, but in depth and mystery, a hazy sort of pulsating rhythmic ambience, one that takes on more and more hiss and buzz as it goes, and it's not until about 9 minutes in, when all of the noise abates, leaving a jagged throbbing synth pulse, beneath which a strange voice intones some mysterious manifesto, the sounds gradually blurring until finally blinking out. Even though the above paragraph would seem to point to the opposite, this stuff is actually insanely difficult to describe, because it is so unlike anything else we've heard, a compelling bit of modern electronic industrial minimalism, with touches of cold wave, of classic old school industrial, hints of course of the rhythmic weirdness of Ride For Revenge, but here stripped way down, and presented as something much more austere and cold, the voice a Teutonic bellow, that only occasionally erupts unto a more black metal growl, while the music does all the heavy lifting, creating undulating stretches of analog synth, blown out bursts of gristly glitchy crunch, rhythms cobbled together from bits of hiss and thrum, skies full of skittery bleep, of old modem high end flutter, of white noise and pink noise and brown noise all sculpted into sort-of-shapes and almost-melodies, creating again, something that to many ears might be perceived as damaged and difficult and borderline unlistenable, but to us, and presumably many of you, that's part of what makes this so amazing, the fact that it IS completely and utterly whatthefuck bizarre, while somehow managing to be totally mesmerizing, and impossibly listenable, a warped chunk of avant outsider electronic industrial weirdness that has quickly become some of our favorite music ever, and even now, we're still fighting the urge to erase this whole review and just write "this is so much better than anything/everything else EVER"...

MPEG stream: The Enemy Collector
MPEG stream: Blades Sharpened Again
MPEG stream: The Risk
MPEG stream: From The Form

The awesomely titled Might Of The Planet Eater is the latest from mysterious Finnish one man band Will Over Matter, which just so happens to be the work of a fella by the name of Harald Mentor, who you might know better as the maniac behind avant outsider not-quite-black-metal weirdos Ride For Revenge. So if the low end rhythmic weirdness that is Ride For Revenge is one step removed from black metal, imagine Will Over Matter as about 5 or 6 steps past that. Not black metal at all, but more like some sort of outsider electronica. Our obsession with Ride For Revenge stems from the fact that over the course of their career, their sound has changed to the point where they are now totally subverting and transforming the idea of black metal into something much more primal and rhythmic, forgoing the buzz and blast and replacing those obvious BM tropes with looped mesmer and tribal pound, stripping the sound down to its essence, and then slowing it down as well, sounding more to us like Aluk Todolo than Beherit. Although the mention of Beherit, another Finnish black metal institution seems particularly apt here, in that Beherit are infamous for their non-black metal output, their experimental electronics, which is precisely what Will Over Matter is. If Ride For Revenge is Mentor's twisted take on black metal, well then Will Over Matter is his skewed attempt at power electronics, or industrial music, channeling the spirit of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Whitehouse, and all the rest, but filtered through some sort of cracked and damaged blackened Finnish lens. Will Over Matter combines the stripped down rhythmic minimalism of Ride For Revenge with experimental industrialism, melding lumbering beats to fields of spaced out static, wrapping sheets of Merzbowian noise around shuffling low end thrum and machinelike beats, adding distorted alien vox to squalls of glitched out electronics, or winding multiple streams of electronic information into strangely twisted sonic barrages. The opening track here is a bizarre soundscape of chittery electronics, of twisted feedback and growled super distorted vocals, pelted by grinding crunch and skittering squelches, a strange array of bleeps and bloops, and buried within, a sort of almost rhythmic bit of ever shifting static, which leads directly into the next track, a droned out stretch of pulsing electronic shimmer, which manages to sound spaced out and sinister at the same time, the tone and timbre switching constantly creating, again, it's own sort of psychedelic rhythm. It's not until "Read The Signs", track number three, that the various elements coalesce into what is really the core of WoM's sound, another fluctuating field of static, of strange space-y electronics, bits of glitch and hiss, but wound around a lumbering, skeletal beat, some sort of alien krautrock, before switching gears, and becoming a weirdly propulsive throbbing electronica, but with elements of kraut/post/space rock, at it's most propulsive sounding a bit like Bastard Noise offshoot and former Record Of The Week-ers Geronimo, and at its least, like nothing you've ever heard before. The track offers up strange electronic squiggles, sinister high end buzz, all in the surface of trailing behind that motorik beat, which itself is in constant flux, cymbals popping out of the mix, processed and all dubby, while the various electronics get more and more tangled and frantic. Then there's the sprawling 24 minute "Stone Cold Heart", a super spare and abstract stretch of blackened rhythms, and distant buzz and shimmer, that buzz, growing ever more insistent, the vocals here not so distorted, more ominous and intense, intoning some sort of ritual, over what almost sounds like a black metal Pole, minus the barrage of wildly buzzing synths, and primitive analog electronic tones. One of our favorite tracks is the gorgeously droned out and hypnotic "Forever Nameless" that seems to inadvertently channel John Carpenter and Goblin, into something much more dark and sinister, a totally mesmerizing rhythm, wound up in a thick, corrosive buzzing low end melody, while way off in the distance, a Burzum like synth melody plays out, again reminding us of a less noisy Aluk Todolo, totally hypnotic, the vocals here are almost sung, wrapped in a weird warped distortion, the end result like some sort of doomy drone pop slowcore or something. Throughout the remainder of these two discs, WoM stretch out strangely stiff rhythms, or pull apart robotic electro beats into weirdly metallic anti-grooves, which unwind lazily beneath hazy streaks of static, creating a series of tarpit crawls, often swallowed whole by heaving walls of electronic sound, that seem to emulate the sheer crumbling power of SUNNO))-like doomdronedirge, but are more often left to pulse, and pound, and throb, a strange alien death march, as the label describes these rituals, each ritual an "epic journey through inner knowledge, lunar madness and cosmic superpowers of satanic possession", the twisted bastard child of some dark forest, outer space ritualized mating of industrial music, black metal, power electronics and krautrock, brilliantly baffling and maddeningly mesmerizing, by now, it should be easy for you to tell if this is your cup of seriously spiked tea or not, and for most of you, we imagine it must be. Fans of Ride For Revenge, Aluk Todolo, Geronimo, Mammal, Bastard Noise, This Heat, spaced out ritualistic blackened electronics and fucked up Finnish weirdness, this one's for you...

MPEG stream: Precautions
MPEG stream: Read The Signs
MPEG stream: Superficial Solutions Collapse
MPEG stream: Led By Instincts Alone
MPEG stream: Forever Nameless

Not Hill, Hell. The truest cult American black metal band we can think of. Windham Hell is the duo of Leland Windham and Eric Friesen, two guys, who when not scaling the glaciers near their small Washington town (where "Twin Peaks" was filmed, hence the song title "Glacier Walk In Me"!), hole up in a home studio and make unique, neo-classical black metal masterpieces. Dark, atmospheric, abyssic. Twisted obscure lyrics, cold soundscapes, and TONS of amazing lead guitar shredding from both band members. That's what really sets Windham Hell apart from their competition, why Allan's been a fan of 'em since the "Hell Is Here" demo way back in '89! An eccentric, homemade mixture of Bathory and Bach! Their third album in a decade. Recommended.

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

Debut 22-minute, five-song ep of dark and moody and mostly mellow post-black metal from Norway, featuring the proficient guitar soloing of Carl August Tiedeman (who's played on records by both Arcturus and Ulver). Atmospheric, almost romantic stuff (there's lots of piano synth), with clean, crooning vocals (similar to Sculptured). Black metal trainspotters should note also that Jan

RealAudio clip: An Eternity of Dreams

When we first got this disc in, we had no idea what it was. We never would have guessed it was the Winterblut as the new Winterblut was supposed to have original cover art by Wrest from Leviathan. But this disc was in a plain all-black slipcover. So we slid out the jewel case, and what do you know? The jewel case was opaque and black as well, with absolutely no text on it anywhere. At this point we still had no idea what the heck it was, until we pulled out the booklet, and lo and behold, there it was, Wrest's artwork, some seriously demented painted shapes grappling, a nude woman, a demon, way too many clawed hands... It's been four long year since we last heard from Winterblut, and at the time, the album Grund Gelenkkunst had just been released and found Winterblut totally transformed from a grim buzzing Nordic style black metal beast, into a twisted, convoluted SST meets Voivod sort of black prog combo, having more in common with Ved Buens Ende than Darkthrone, with a punk rock production, gnarled Greg Ginn riffage, super strange arrangements and some very un-black metal elements. Which of course meant we dug it like crazy. And played it to death, always expecting to hear more from Winterblut sooner or later. So it ended up being later, but finally here it is, Das Aas aller Dinge, and while a lot has changed in the last 4 years, much of the prog has been purged, and not all the riffing is angular and obtuse, Winterblut hasn't merely reverted to classic Norwegian style black buzz, although much of Das Aas aller Dinge is more blasting and buzzing than anything on Grund Gelenkkunst, instead it's apparent from the very first riff, that L. Hiver, the man who is Winterblut, still has a distinctly skewed take on black metal, with the tempo firmly set at mid, and plenty of Voivodisms still in place, right down to the vocals, in fact one can almost imagine this is what Dimension Hatross would have sounded like had it been a black metal record, lurching and mathy, woozy and sort of seasick, everything shrouded in reverb and black black distortion a killer groove, complex drumming, the guitars skeletal and spidery as much as buzzy and black. Even the second track sounds like a blackened Voivod, and part way through when it kicks it up into full on blast, the melody and riffing is still haunting and minor key, with a subtle sci-fi edge. The next few tracks are definitely heavier on the buzzing and the blackness, and more old school classic Norwegian style, but still the riffs are completely atypical, gnarled and just a little bit off. In a good way. It's on "Das Aas (Erloschen)" where the band get all weird again, a super slithery, slippery stop start groove with a main riff that warbles drunkenly up and down the fretboard, with big wide open spaces between chords, the drums a simple framework for the guitars to tangle themselves up in. A track or two later, there's the 15 minute epic "Das Aas (Sehnsuchtig)" a loping waltzy Burzumic dirge, that partway through transforms into a furious blast, and then unwinds into a killer serpentine progscape with impossibly off-kilter drumming, and strange tempos, everything still bathed in black, the vocals a raspy growl, but all strung along a lurching mathrock rhythm, the riffs following suit, a whirling relentless black space prog jam. The record finishes off with "Das Aas (Egnid Rella)" another track that meshes classic black with the twisted riffage and octopoidal rhythms that made us dig Winterblut so much in the first place. Obviously amazing, and essential, but even considering everything we just wrote, if you're anything like us, it could have been summed up perfectly in 4 simple words: "black metal Dimension Hatross." As mentioned above, packaged in a black opaque jewel case, in an all black slipcover, the booklet inside and the disc face features killer artwork from Wrest, the booklet also includes some seriously creepy band photos, as well liner notes and lyrics.

Black metal bands are notorious for their scarily complex and utterly unreadable logos. With this release, Germany's Winterblut take that unreadability to new heights -- by deliberately *blurring* their logo (and all other writing) on the front and back of this cd. If you squint at it from a distance, maybe you can make it out -- but then you have the ornate logo itself to contend with. And don't try to look on the cd spine for help (our technique, 'cause usually the band's name is printed in a normal font there) because the spine is totally blank. Cunning bastards. Anyway, the blurred logo is not the strangest thing about this album... We already liked Winterblut's previous stuff, total Darkthrone styled Nordic black metal, grim and true. We ended up liking this new album a lot too, but not for the reasons we expected. This more-or-less one-man band (a person named L. Hiver responsible for wretchedly bizarre vocals, guitar, and bass, assisted by various drummers) sounds less like Darkthrone than it does Voivod! More accurately, "Grund" sounds like an SST band circa '87, full of Greg Ginn guitar skronk, all gnarly and proggy and punkly produced. In the realm of black metal, we can only cite Enslaved and Ved Buens Ende as precedents. With Gore-like midtempo plod, math-rock twists, and some quietly atmospheric grooves, you'll forget this is supposed to be a black metal record -- then, whoomp! Hiver unleashes the evil. His vocals are as ever wonderfully wretched as before, but the music is a total surprise. MPEG Download: "track 1" [/audio/winterblut1.mp3] MPEG Stream: "track 1" [/audio/winterblut1.m3u]

MPEG stream: track 1
MPEG stream: track 5

For some reason, it seems to take German one man band Winterblut, about 4 years to write and record a new record, at least that's the pattern we've observed over the course of all four full lengths, and the interesting thing too, is that within that huge span of time between each record, the sound of Winterblut changes dramatically, 1999's Der 6. Danach was a fierce chunk of blazing, blasting grim Nordic style blackness, while 2003's Grund: Gelenkkunst found the band utterly transformed into a twisted, convoluted SST meets Voivod sort of black prog, and then 2007's Das Aas Aller Dinge found Winterblut returning to more traditional black metal territory, but dragging some of those post rockisms and progginess with him. So here we are ANOTHER four years later, with Von Den Pflichten Schones Zu Vernichten, and again, things have definitely changed, although right off the bat, this still definitely sounds like Winterblut (Allan named that tune within about 30 seconds of hearing this for the first time without being told wht it was!!), but the sound is much more raw, and primitive, and indeed grim, the opening, a lumbering atonal midtempo trudge, the guitars jagged and abrasive, the vocals a rasped croak, the riffs woozy and trancelike, eventually the song explodes in a frenzy of blasting blackness, only to slip back into warped dirgery, and that seems to be the new Winterblut sound, veering occasionally into bursts of black intensity, but spending most of its time at a wounded crawl, the Voivodness definitely rearing its head in those parts, sounding like Dimension Hatross at 16rpm, a sort of post prog Burzumic churn, a bit doomy, quite depressive, the riffs grim and frosty, the sound sharp and brittle, super atmospheric, the atonality and gnarled chordal shifts, giving the whole record a seriously creepy fucked up vibe, which sounds incredible and seriously twisted, and is making Von Den Pflichten Schones Zu Vernichten one of our new favorite black metal records, another killer chapter, in Winterblut's very slowly expanding catalogue of black buzz miserablism. So I guess we've got 4 more to revel in WB's immersive blackness, before it's time to check in again...

MPEG stream: Gewollte Gewalt
MPEG stream: Unheil Uber Alles
MPEG stream: Weltuntergangsmaschine

Record number two from these British neo-pagan black metallers, who along with Fen, Wodensthrone and a few others are fronting a new wave of British black metal, one that is lyrically concerned with nature and Anglo Saxon history, but that sonically is mostly concerned with crafting buzzing majestic blackened epics, which they do here big time. Even more fully realized than their debut, The Mercian Sphere offers up sprawling epic after sprawling epic, right out of the gate, a brief bit of chanting leads into some furious heaviness, soaring melodies, buzzing guitars and some intense and complex drum pound, the arrangements are serpentine and intricate, the band swerving from lighting speed blast, to loping midtempo march and back again, melodies spiraling skyward, the vocals powerful and gruff, not screechy like most black metal, and as this is pagan BM after all, eventually, the clean vocals come in, which can be embarrassing in many cases, but here it's masterful, moving and emotional, not that far removed from Enslaved or the like, but maybe even better and more melodic here. In fact, the sound of Winterfylleth is a bit like some strange melding of Enslaved, Negura Bunget, Ulver and Drudkh, but with their own Decidedly British bent. There are plenty of interludes, folky breakdowns, acoustic guitars, strings, haunting ambience, but unlike lots of bands, the atmosphere doesn't reside exclusively in the interludes, the songs themselves ooze atmosphere, the clean vocals, the chanting, over churning downtuned chug and crashing bombast, as moody and epic as anything. And beyond the blast and the buzz, Winterfylleth are capable of crafting some supremely sublime and melodic metal, "Defending The Realm" offers up what has to be the catchiest bit of black metal we've heard in ages, butted right up against some blazing flurries of insectoid buzz, "The Ruin" on the surface is all blackness and fury, but it's infused with all manner of melody and texture, pathos and anguish, the vocals especially tortured and intense, more like Neurosis or a band like that then typical black metal, the closing track perfectly encapsulating the power and energy of the band, beginning with a long stretch of warm folk strum, before a stretch of grim blasting blackness, only to slip smoothly into another impossibly catchy and melodic part, that is groovy and hooky, without losing any of its brutality or intensity, only to finally wind down with a mix of the two acoustic guitars, chugging riffage, and more of those gorgeous clean vocals. Epic, majestic and fucking great.

MPEG stream: Gateway To The Dark Peak / The Solitary One Waits For Grace (The Wayfarer Pt I)
MPEG stream: Awakens He, Bereft Of Kinsmen (The Wayfarer Pt II)
MPEG stream: Defending The Realm

Yay, at long last (five years!) the return of our/your/everyone's favorite Swedish retro-proto-metallers, Witchcraft! With this, their fourth album, they've moved on from their previous label Rise Above to a new home on bigger label Nuclear Blast. They've also altered their lineup quite a bit, though of course mainman Magnus Pelander remains at the mic (though he's not playing guitar anymore, for some reason, concentrating solely on vocals). Going through changes� without changing -too- much, as far as us listeners are concerned, thankfully. Even with a new drummer and two new guitarists, this still sounds of a piece with the Witchcraft of olde, certainly in part due to the distinctive, emotive, melodic vocal stylings of Pelander. We just love his voice, and he puts on a great performance here. He's got flair, the whole band does. Musically, Legend is maybe a bit more modern and slickly produced than previous Witchcraft outings, and certainly they didn't get rawer or heavier, no. The direction they took was onwards and upwards. But the influence of such vintage greats as Black Sabbath and Pentagram hasn't exactly waned, though nowadays we'd be more likely to describe Witchcraft as being their own psychedelic, doomy, melodic, proggy, heavy rock thing. Good meaningful music, well played, with lots of both light and shade - lumbering riffs, lovely vox, great guitarwork� Now, someone here thought that this new Witchcraft showed signs of being "success rock", whatever that means, and someone else here (Andee) thought some of it sounded a bit like Queens Of The Stone Age (meant, he assured us, as a compliment!), and yeah sure this is perhaps geared to appeal to a bigger audience than the record collecting '70s downer rock nerds that Witchcraft themselves once were (and heck, still are - after all, the likes of "Dystopia" here sounding like something off of one of Sabbath's final few Ozzy-era albums like Never Say Die). But, whatever. At the risk of sounding snobby, very few bands who get big are really all that great, but Pelander and Witchcraft definitely deserve all their success, so we won't hold it against 'em. Longtime Witchcraft fans, you have nothing to worry about, listen to "It's Not Because Of You" ferinstance and tell us that it doesn't sound like it coulda been on The Alchemist or Firewood. Once again, we're happily enscorcelled by this Witchcraft - and hope it won't be another five years between albums, again! Domestic vinyl version coming out later in October, fyi.

MPEG stream: It's Not Because Of You
MPEG stream: Ghosts House
MPEG stream: Democracy

Reports of the Necropolis label's demise were premature it seems, as they've bounced back with this new release from Sweden's top blackened rock n' rollers, Witchery! Their third full-length is yet another storming example of their ability to synthesize all

RealAudio clip: Omens
RealAudio clip: Wicked

This much hyped Swedish retro-rockin black/thrash metal combo (starring members of The Haunted, Satanic Slaughter, and Mercyful Fate) might in fact be the best thing on Bay Area black metal label Necropolis, or at least, the most fun. On this ep they pay homage to their roots, covering tunes by Accept, WASP, Priest and Sabbath (plus there's three new 'uns). Probably worth it for their version of "Fast As A Shark" alone, especially the clever intro.

Oh man is this good. Total classic riff heavy Swedish blackness, thrashing, chugging, blasting, from one of our favorite long running Swedish hordes, who seem reinvigorated, with this, their first record in more than 4 years, and their first with new vocalist Legion, he of the mighty Marduk (and the legendary Ophthalamia), which only adds to the group's already pretty bad ass musical pedigree: Satanic Slaughter, Arch Enemy, Nifelheim, Illwill, Dismember, Mercyful Fate, Bloodbath, Seance, the Haunted, Brujeria. And if that wasn't enough, on this album they've also enlisted a serious cadre of metal guests: Kerry King from Slayer, Gary Holt and Lee Altus of Exodus, Hank Shermann of Mercyful Fate, Jim Durkin of Dark Angel, and Andy LaRoque of King Diamond! Which all should give you an idea of what you're in for with Witchery circa 2010, super tight, ultra heavy, uber polished, blackened thrash, not raw or grim or fucked up or even kvlt, this is seriously well crafted heaviness, with incredible riffs, killer drumming, super memorable melodies, complex arrangments, BIG choruses, and some fucking fantastic guitar playing, from chugging churning black hole riffage, to soaring melodic leads, to total classic Maiden style harmonizing, and as much as we dug the old vocalist, Legion really cranks things up a notch, his hellish bellow, so powerful and intense, yet somehow still strangely melodic, not to mention how bad ass he looks in the band photo, complete with flaking rotting red skinned devil face and huge blood red devil horns. Needless to say the metalheads around aQ have ben LOVING this shit, but be warned, as mentioned above, this is in no way underground or ultra raw or really all that black, instead, it's just seriously well crafted riff-ed out heaviness, that totally slays, so if you're in the market for some kick ass metallic crush, and love big riffs and heavy guitars, and don't mind a bit of melody and a decent production, then dig in. Definitely a new fave!

MPEG stream: Witchkrieg
MPEG stream: Wearer Of Wolf's Skin
MPEG stream: The God Who Fell From Earth

A black noise project of unknown origin, Witchgrass could very well be some obstinant, apocalyptic cult of survivalist malcontents, shading toward animistic ecoterrorism and politically anarchic nihilism. In all likelihood, Witchgrass is the work of one dude with a crusty collection of pedals and maybe a monosynth; but it's way better just to let the imagination run with the who / what / where / when. So, we're going with Witchgrass as a cult. The aesthetics of the mysterious cabal is one that bridges the more corrosive aspects of the Cold Meat Industries agenda and a handful of bootleg copies of Broken Flag tapes (esp. those with Matthew Bower flying his fucking freak flag in the megaphone vocal department); but given this is 2013, Locrian's pall of post-black metal noise clings to the eviscerated distortion, sporadic rhythmic dirge ploddings, apparitions of raw guitar buzzsaw drone, and harrowing vocal caterwauling. Ritualized blood letting music, sure why not? We've told enough lies today; but it ain't no fabrication that Witchgrass have made one hell of a great tape in Sigil Infection for the equally mysterious Vaald Tapes imprint. Unspecified pressing, but probably out of print at the source already.

In terms of DOOM CRED, you really can't do much better than a split with legendary German doomlords Worship, and that's pretty much the only thing these Australians had on their doom resume before this here brand new ep. Two long-ish songs (the cd version adds a couple short tracks, an intro and an outro), not as bleak and heavy as Worship or lots of other doom outfits, instead Wither do a sort of washed out and weary melancholic blackened doom, falling somewhere between the abject plod of ultra doom, and the shimmery black drift of suicidal depressive black metal. It's a pretty nice mix. The guitars buzz and shimmer, raw and lo-fi and not at all heavy, instead, they drone in the background, beneath a skeletal rhythm, and a echo drenched rasped vocal. The pace is indeed glacial, or at the very least, on the low side of midtempo, the melodies are melancholic, miserable, forlorn, but also surprisingly pretty. Strip the vocals away, and you'd almost have something bordering on shoegazey, and definitely some nocturnal soporific dronemetal drift. The second of the two tracks is the blacker, the guitars a bit more jagged, the howls a bit more hellish, but again, it's dark and sorrowful and pretty in that looking-at-a-cloudy-sky-through-eyes-full-of-tears way. Suicidal black metallers (fans of Make A Change fer instance) will dig this big time, as well as all you depressive doomsters. The extra tracks on the cd are brief but lovely, the intro very Factory Records sounding, with reverbed clean guitars, streaked with high end synths, while the outro is all harmonized guitars, and majestic melody, stretched out into a sprawling albeit brief classic doom sounding instrumental.

MPEG stream: Metropolitan
MPEG stream: Anthropolitan

We've been dying for this one, the latest from German post rock avant metallers Woburn House, whose last Paradigms release Message To Ourselves Outside The Dreaming Machine totally blew us away, with its weird mix of black buzz, post rock drift, metallic prog and noisy discordant math rock. And while on first listen, it seems not too much has changed, as we get further into the record (heck, further into the first song!), it seems that Woburn House have indeed begun exploring a new sonic direction... It only takes a few minutes for this record to establish it's utter dominance, beginning with a drifty lilting spidery guitar melody, soft and jangly and minor key, before slipping into a lurching downtuned chug, all stop start crunch, before slipping back into the opening drift, this time accompanied by some skittery rhythms, and so it goes until finally the vocals come in, a warm ethereal crooned harmony, with a distinctly shoegaze-y vibe, way down in the mix, allowing the song to grow more jagged, and get a bit Voivod-y, before finally stretching out into a gorgeous looped sounding sun dappled post metal drift, all soaring chiming guitars, and those warm vocals, the track finally winding down in a swirling swell of epic sun dappled psychedelia. Wow. Okay, so yeah, things have changed quite a bit, in as much as WH have managed to expand their sound even further, and taken their metallic sound in a distinctly less overtly metallic direction. The more we listen, the more it becomes evident that this record is much more mellow and poppy, than it's more metallic predecessor, the core sound falling somewhere between the twisted blackened metallic pop of Lifelover and the grandiose doom pop of Katatonia, the result is awesome, emotional, intense, epic, with the songs often building to huge chaotic climaxes, but just as often loping along dreamily, and metalheads fear not, while it is poppier, there is still plenty of crushing heaviness, gnarled riffage, and lurching chug to balance the blissy mathy pop and haunting shimmery drift that makes up much of the rest of the record. "Globus" is some dark dreamy spacedrone, with its tribal drumming, dense fuzz bass, effects drenched guitars, all locked into a looped motorik groove that wouldn't be that out of place on a Expo 70 or White Hills record. "Transmitter" brings the metal back, but definitely drifts into some serious Katatonia territory, with some woozy drifty almost-prog, occasionally giving way to huge swells of metallic heft, and more of those warm crooned vocals, the entire song wreathed in a gauzy washed out sheen. And finally, there's the 23 minute closing track "Transformer", which opens with the most black metal bit on the whole records, a buzzing blast, peppered with warbly minor key melodies, and warm swirling drones, but at its core, this is pounding and thrashing and heavy, until before you know it, the band have shifted gears once again, unfurling a glimmery driftscape of crystalline guitar and warm blackened ambience, when the track does kick back in, it's in a whole new form, a cool, lumbering post rock tangle of metallic buzz and complex start stop arrangements, there's even a long stretch of that sort of blown out Jesu-style metalgaze, before everything drops off, and all that's left is a field recording of birds, and cars, the side of the highway presumably, people talking, all manner of ambient sound, eventually the song does drift back in, and finishes with a few minutes of woozy laid back slow core pop drift, hazy and weary and like much of the rest of the record, dreamy and melodic. Folks looking for lots of buzzing blackness or crushing chugging metallic pummel, might not find enough of that here, but for folks who love their metal infused with all manner of pop, and dig stuff like Amesoeurs, Katatonia, Lifelover, Alcest, and that sort of stuff, will definitely dig this a LOT.

MPEG stream: Omega
MPEG stream: Oil

We've long championed these German post black metallers (metallic post rockers), their sound most definitely heavy and brutal, but also moody and atmospheric, and with every record, their sound seems to continue to move well beyond the confines of 'black metal', the genre which is where they seem to be most often (and increasingly inappropriately) lumped with their more grim brethren. While some black metal tropes surface here and there, the sound of WH is more recognizably marked by clean soaring vox, intricate proggy arrangements, spidery Slint-like melodies, even the occasional synth. In the past we've compared them to Dutch instru-metallers Gore, even Voivod, as well as groups like Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky. This time around we're hearing Swans (mostly in the deep vox), lots of Slint, with those distinctive arpeggiated minor key guitar parts, there's also the brooding moody bombast of Katatonia, but don't let all those comparisons lead you to believe these guys are just a mess of conflicting influenced and purloined sounds, those are merely references, cuz with this record, maybe even more than last releases, the band continues to carve out its own truly unique sound, one that here is at it's most lush, layered and melodic. In fact this time around, the metal component is almost entirely removed, only vestiges remain, buzzing guitars, pounding drums, but even those elements, at their most metal, are defined by context, and here the band is capable of taking a blast beat, and letting it pound quietly beneath crystalline guitars, and haunting crooned vox, or taking very black metal sounding melodies, and transcribing them for acoustic guitar, and turning black buzz into some strangely alien pastoral folk. And the vocals, even more varied this time around, the deep Michael Gira like croon is present, but so is a super emotive raspy wail, not to mention so super cool (and strange) falsetto, all woven into the group's sprawling mini-epics, super dynamic, and emotional, and alternatingly epic and majestic, brooding and moody. At this point, we're not sure we'd recommend this to most metalheads. Especially black metallers, but hell, folks who dig Alcest and Amesoeurs and Les Discrets and Katatonia as well as the more metallic side of the post rock spectrum, and heck even prog nerds after something more far out, these guys might be just the ticket.

MPEG stream: Willow
MPEG stream: Shifter
MPEG stream: Sleep Summer Storm
MPEG stream: A Simple Man

Full length number two from this UK neo-pagan black metal horde, and like the first one, and much like their sonic brethren in Winterfylleth (they also share members with another aQ fave, Atavist) the band continue to be focused on nature and Anglo-Saxon history, and their sound is appropriately epic and sweeping and atmospheric. And while that sound hasn't changed too much since the first record, they've definitely honed that sound, and if anything, this new record is quite a bit heavier, more fierce, and dense, the keyboards still present, big time, but their presence in the mix is a bit more subtle, sweeping to the fore on the slower atmospheric parts, but fading into the background when the band are at their most brutal. The songs are super long, and almost proggy, ultra dynamic and constantly shifting, from explosive blasts of furious black buzz, to brooding, dense atmospheric sprawls of moody blackened psychedelia, replete with gorgeous clean vocals, swirling synths and tribal drumming, even some fluttering flutes here and there, and from midtempo classic metal majestic to shimmery, acoustic guitar flecked drift, the drums pummeling and intricate, the vocals shared now by the various members, so super varied, from demonic shriek to banshee howl, so surprisingly melodic crooning, the guitars shifting constantly from soaring fast picked flurries, to old school metal chug, to tranced out buzz, the band totally capable of laying down some seriously gnarled Deathspell worthy riffage, or Wolves In The Throne Room Cascadian epicry, but always returning to the atmospheric black buzz they do so well. As we mentioned in our review of the first Wodensthrone record, it's not that the music of Wodensthrone is super original, or twistedly bizarre or even really that radical, it's more that it's just so well crafted, so full of emotion and energy, so epic and intense, headbangable for sure, but also darkly introspective, it's easily one of the best modern iterations of that classic black metal sound, and much like when we got the first one, we find ourselves wanting to listen to little else! Recommended for fans of Wolves In The Throne Room, Primordial, Negura Bunget, Drudkh, etc.

MPEG stream: Jormungandr
MPEG stream: First Light
MPEG stream: The Great Darkness

Sometimes it gets pretty overwhelming with all the black metal we get coming through these doors, not that we don't love it, but it can become easy to lose track of everything. Which of course makes it really awesome when something just blows you away and reminds you why you got into black metal in the first place. Britain's Wodensthrone happen to be one of those bands. Not that there's anything mindblowingly original about these guys, it's just that Loss is delivered with a sincerity, not to mention an expert musical prowess, that really makes this one stand out among the sea of bands currently making the rounds. Featuring members of Atavist and Winterfylleth and recalling the majestic approach of bands like Emperor, Enslaved, Weakling, and Wolves in the Throne Room, Wodensthrone would be a pretty good example to explain what black metal sounds like to the uninformed. "Epic" would definitely be the word to use here, and this actually caught us a bit off guard considering how many bands have been taking a more raw approach as of late. Wodensthrone are one of those bands who will remind you that synthesizers can be used for more than creating Cradle of Filth styled ridiculousness, as the keyboards here are both cinematic and sprawling, adding essential atmospherics to make you aware of black metal's obsession with the natural world. While these elements could very easily suck in the wrong hands, here they fit perfectly in conjuring Britain's pagan past. The production on Loss is enormous, and it makes total sense that the band ventured to Romania to record with members of Negura Bunget at their studio. Like Negura Bunget, Wodensthrone expertly merge folk-inspired elements from the respective country with a gigantic metal sound. It's worth noting the pagan influence here, as the melodies and overall mood of the album appear to be a little more, shall we say "positive", when compared to the all out evil of satanic black metal. There seems to be a serious awareness of classic British folk with melancholy acoustic guitars, mandolins, and flutes all commanding a pretty significant presence here, even in moments of all out metallic fury, and it's really refreshing to hear this stuff done so well. Definitely a nice surprise here, and enough to ensure that Loss will be on seriously HEAVY rotation for quite some time.

MPEG stream: Leodum On Land
MPEG stream: Heofungfid
MPEG stream: Those That Crush The Roots Of Blood

Debut full length from this East Coast one man black metal band, and from note one, A Spell For The Death Of Man reveals itself as something not even remotely typical, a distinctly different, and surprisingly melodic take on the old blast and buzz. The opening minute or two of the nine minute "Solitude" is just guitar, all soaring mournful and minor key, playing out a distinctly post rock riff, unfurling lazily, wreathed in reverb, majestic and epic, sorrowful and distinctly indie, gradually growing slower and slower, before stick clicks bring on the blackness, a furious tangle of squiggly buzzsaw riffage and blasting beats, buried blackened shrieks. Somehow, even though on the surface the song seems to have switched gears completely, elements of the intro remain, within and beneath the roiling heaviness, lending the music a distinctly 'indie rock' vibe, especially when the track shifts again, and suddenly it sounds a a little like Superchunk or Seam, only supercharged and blackened and Satanized. Not to say this is super poppy and jangly, but it is, sort of. Once you hear it, it's tough to ignore, but then why the heck would you want to? Folks with a super limited musical scope, say, ONLY metal, probably won't hear it as much, especially if they're open to more melodic stuff like Alcest or Amesoeurs, but for those who maybe didn't grow up listening to only metal, as we're guessing is the case with Woe mainman (and only man) Xos. Just wait until the breakdown near the end, when that opening riff is wrapped around some muffled chugging, and some dense tribal drumming, suddenly it's equal parts Husker Du, Bastro and black metal. The rest of the record is a bit more traditionally black, but even then, with galloping rhythms and dizzying black riffage, the songs still manage to sound strangely melodic, and in some super abstract sense, kind of poppy. But again, all of this pop and jangle and post rock, is totally tangled up with some seriously dense thrashing and super heavy, blasting black metal. It's that unlikely mix that makes Woe sound so different, and makes this record so awesome, deftly balancing the grim and the kvlt with the moody and hooky and melodic. The record closes with an even less black metal number than the opener, strange angular midtempo minor key guitars, plodding drums, very postrock / mathrock, the vocals still in black metal shriek mode, but draped over a lilting almost dirgey slowcore groove, definitely pretty, and a bit woozy and mysterious, but still heavy, and just the slightest bit black. Fans of more melodic blackness will definitely dig, while dabblers and newbies might have just found the perfect black metal gateway drug.

MPEG stream: Solitude
MPEG stream: Alone With Our Failures
MPEG stream: Memento Mori

We were so obsessed with the first Woe record, A Spell For The Death Of Man, a black metal record that was strangely melodic, and peppered its blast and buzz with post rock melodies, and referenced Husker Du and Bastro as much as it did black metal. So not only were we thrilled that this one man band got signed to Candlelight, but that there was a new record on the horizon, which was revealed to be this, the enigmatically titled Quietly, Undramatically, which as you might imagine is neither. Much like the first record, Quietly begins about as unblack metal as one could imagine, keening guitars, pounding tribal drums, definitely way more math or post than black, but the slow building tension was gradually ratcheted up, some guttural vocal bellows, the whole thing so melodic and epic, and then POW, a classic metal break and the record explodes into some of the fastest most furious black buzz we've heard, constantly shifting into something almost punkish, or slipping in little bits of classic metal, but barreling along ferociously, peppering the blasting buzz with some incredible drumming and some twisted gnarled riffage. The title track is 8 minutes of pure melodic black bliss, exactly what we loved so much about the first record, sure it's heavy and the drums are blasting, but the melodies soar, and the harmonies are gorgeous, reimagined, this could have been some sort of indie pop song, but here it's something totally other, epic and majestic and so heavy, slipping into midtempo breakdowns that are just as melodic as the main body of the song, relentless but so catchy, 8 minutes is way too short. The rest of the record is also melodic, but not so obviously so, although "A Treatise On Control" definitely comes close, with its soaring melodies, and super intense crescendos, sounding almost emo at times, super passionate and emotional, a noise rock / screamo / black metal hybrid that totally slays, and while still definitely black metal, manages to elevate the usual tropes and create something distinctly unique. Lest the true black hordes be discouraged, the final two tracks are way more more furious and frenzied, but even at their most frantic, those songs remain infused with Woe's masterful melodic sense, and a pop element that seems to underpin the otherwise grim proceedings, although perhaps it's not so noticeable that it would distract the casual black metaller. But for us, it only further cements the fact that Woe is making some of the coolest, most distinctive and innovative black metal around, and thus this comes totally and unequivocally recommended to anyone who likes their black metal to not necessarily sound like all the other black metal out there.

Originally released as a super limited cassette in 2004, Badb is one of the first releases from Canadian black metal weirdos WOLD, and if you thought the other records were noisy and demented before, this one will blow your mind (and probably your speakers too). After a quick opening intro of whipping winter wind, that ends abruptly as if someone just leaned over and pushed stop on the tape player, the record launches into the title track, the first song in what is apparently a songsuite based on a the myth of a mysterious war goddess, and is an crumbling onslaught of superdistorted buzz and while there may be drums, if there are, they're buried WAY down in the mix, the vocals however are right up front, a wild demonic shriek over the churning roiling blackness below. And so goes the rest of the record, a twisted maelstrom of sound, a sonic blizzard of black buzz and harsh vokills, the guitars less riffy and buzzy as they are practically a Merzbowian wall of blown out white noise, that white noise seeming to be in constant flux, occasionally coalescing into an almost riffy churn, before splintering again into a blast of face melting buzz. The recording is super lo-fi too, which gives even the harshest passages a strange washed out and muted vibe, the coolest parts when the sounds seem to blur into one another and become a strange sort of pulsing alien rhythm. "Final Offering" might be our favorite, a murky monster of a track, with the most discernible riffing, and a cool murky swirl that envelops everything in its path, and when the vocals back off, the music becomes a weird audial illusion, like those paintings that reveal hidden shapes if you stare at them long enough, the wild tangle of buzz seems to unravel before your ears, the various melodic fragments and interwoven textures shifting and transforming, eventually seemingly melting into a blurry viscous pool of buzz and drone, that eventually fades to black, finishing the record the way it started, with another stretch of frosty winter winds. Awesome. And EXTREMELY noisy, fans of Wold know what to expect, and folks into other noise metal outfits like Nekrosov, Gnaw Their Tongues, Alkerdeel, Hallow and the like will definitely dig, but be warned this is less about THE RIFF and more about blown out blackness...

MPEG stream: Badb
MPEG stream: Nine Virgins Of Badb
MPEG stream: The Cold Wind's Grasp

Latest blast of twisted noise drenched otherworldly blackness from Moosejaw, Saskatchewan's Wold, fronted by mysterious sonic alchemist Fortress Crookedjaw, this mysterious duo offer up another slab of baffling brutality, that seems now more than ever to be almost completely loosed from the bounds of traditional metal, hell, any sort of metal at all, instead sounding like some sort of industrial / noise / power electronics blow out, the sound buzzing and hissing, looped churning squalls of white noise and grey thrum, the vokills an inhuman croak/whine, having just reviewed Sore Throat, and elsewhere on this list Anal Cunt, we'd posit that Wold's sonic orbit exists more in the realm of noise, it's not really until the third track here, "Free Goat Of Leviticus", the the sound takes on a shape even remotely resembling metal, and it remains REMOTE, the blasting and buzzing blown out completely, the sounds blurred and smeared into crumbling crusty murky swells, blistering blasts of buzz and hiss and rumble, even the vocals a garbled transmission from the depths, all wound into a churning caustic chaos. "Inner Ire" offers a little bit of a respite, dialing back some of the distortion, letting a murky pulse surface, even some barely-there melody here and there, but over the top, is laid a Faxed Head worthy melted tape on the dashboard blast of damaged metallic noise. "Dragon Owl Didacticism" too hints at the metal that must lurk below the surface, but considering the surface is a roiling black cauldron of howl and garble, grind and shriek, all muddied and muted and twisted into dizzying blacknoise streaks, that metal remains just that, a hint. The last four tracks though, change everything, sounding almost like a different record tacked on as a bonus, the almost cold wave sounding "Dry Love", with it's programmed beat, cold machinelike groove, buzzing clinical angular melodies and strange detached vox, or the new wave blacknoise of "Working Tools For Paris", with a bloopy electro beat buried beneath a swaggery snarly whining vocal and some hazy melodies, and when the super distorted vox drop out, what remains sounds almost like it could be some coldwave rarity unearthed. "Free Eyes" is crusty punk via black metal filth filtered through warped power electronics, with the main 'groove' downright mesmerizing, and then finally, the nearly 11 minute title track, seems to channel aQ beloved Will Over Matter, with another stretch of super distorted blackened murky electro-noize, replete with haunting spoken word vox, and another bloopy beat, one that becomes more and more blown out over the course of the track, until the whole thing is a thick undulating sprawl of rhythmic hypno-noise bliss. As always, utterly confusing and totally whatthefuck, and as always, we can't stop listening. Baffling brilliant outsider electro-noise black metal genius for sure.

MPEG stream: SDL
MPEG stream: Free Goat Of Leviticus
MPEG stream: Freermasonry

Woah, didn't expect to get another round of these super limited (300 copies to be specific) cassette anthologies from Saskatchewan's favorite (only?) black metal noise terrorists, the mighty WOLD. Imperator serves as a good introduction to the truly insane sounds of WOLD, combining tracks from each of their three awesome full lengths, and more importantly, impossibly rare tracks from various cd-rs and cassettes released in tiny batches that less than 100 people would have ever gotten their hands on. It's hard to actually describe a band like WOLD. Sure, it's black. You could call it "metal", but these boys whip up some of the noisiest, most out of control sounds ever committed to tape, seeming to owe more of a significant debt to industrial noise merchants like Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle than any black metal band we could think of. Whatever you want to call it, WOLD's brand of chaos is truly unique. Sheets of uncontrollable white noise, an industrial strength throb, and the unbelievable witch-like shrieks of Fortress Crookedjaw (best black metal name ever, methinks) all merge into a hellacious brew of unrestrained evil, with amazing lyrics (none of which are printed here, so good luck) and perhaps most surprisingly, melodies that are both beautiful and catchy. Of course, said melodies are buried under multiple layers of windy tape hiss, crumbling distortion, and overblown electronics, and what you get out of a WOLD track depends on how well you are prepared to listen, preferably under a pair of headphones at maximum volume. It's like taking a wild ride through a barren wilderness of ice and fog, both disorienting and exhilarating, and noisy as fuck. Released as a professionally printed, smoky black cartridge on the very cool cassette label Rotting Chapel, this is probably the only chance you will ever have to get this little bastard from us. We got about 10 (yes, TEN) copies, so act fast!

Wold are an ultra mysterious outfit from the barren land to the north (Canada, Saskatchewan to be precise), who play the weirdest and most weirdly recorded black metal we've ever heard. Imagine some old radio serial, or some snippet from an old black and white film, sort of scratchy and fuzzy and otherworldly, then smother it in guitarfuzz and blown out distortion, add some keening guitar melodies and blast beats, and you've got what we can only describe as a black metal Philip Jeck. The warm and warbly keyboard melodies and timeless cinematic snatches of sound are so hypnotic and dreamily repetitive. It's almost like a black metal band doing their own blackened version of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. Kind of hard to describe, but Wold somehow take the drone-y aspect of BM bands like Graveland and Nargaroth even further, adding a creepy and scratchy looped mesmer beneath a wash of almost My Bloody Valentine like guitars. Or an even more abstract analogy, imagine Persephone in Hades, the goddess of Spring who was kidnapped and spirited down into the depths of hell, all these little ribbons of Springtime and loveliness drifting in the cold and grim underworld, a bleak and miserable expanse of sound with brief glints of color and sunshine, glimpses of a world that once was, looped like a rotting old filmstrip, repeated over and over and over, head nodding, thoughts drifting, eyes closing, spirit shifting, soul blackening. As if the music weren't weird enough, the band is fronted by the curiously named Fortress Crookedjaw, and backed up by his cohorts, Operationex and Obey. And then of course there's the band's manifesto: "Wold embraces the Mytho Poetic; the communication is expressed through our music, and theoretical as well as practical work done through our Woldclan brotherhood and our lodge, the L.O.T.M.P.. "Wold venerate our ancestors and cultures through myth and existence, and remain open and reflective to other effective metaphors. "Wold promote awareness. "Wold strive for honor and dignity above materialistic lies and novelty culture. "Wold solemnly swear to adhere to the law of the Self." It takes a lot for a record to so completely kick our ass and to so confound us musically. Definitely one of the coolest and weirdest black metal records we've heard in a long long time!!

MPEG stream: Invocation Of Fire
MPEG stream: Invocation Of Water
MPEG stream: Invocation Of Earth

Seems kind of foolish to continue to proclaim different black metal bands the "weirdest ever" or "the most fucked up we've ever heard". We're quite tempted to take that route again with this bizarre Canadian horde, but the truth is, they were barely black metal to begin with, more a sort of Jeckish, Basinskian ambient blackness that bordered on the downright dreamy. Well, if anything the band has moved even further away from traditional black metal and into a distinctly, more damaged and significantly noisier world of sound. Fortress Crookedjaw, Obey and Opex, the trio who make up this ensemble, have taken the strange scratched, looped sepia toned smear of their first record, and torn it apart, doused it in white hot sheets of crumbling guitar and damaged feedback, offering up an even more obscured black metal, a metal turned inside out so we can see the squirming guts inside, malfunctioning electronics everywhere, coating every single riff, every growled lyric, every snatch of barely audible drums, in a crackling sparking field of sonic solar flares. Like listening to Jeck's Surf on a busted car radio, where it's mostly static, but you can -almost- hear bits of melody in there somewhere. Or more accurately, listening to some old skipping 78's on Masami Akita's custom sound system, while Malefic from Xasthur sings along. Some tracks are almost pure noise, the riffs and drums and anything else discernible as actual music, buried beneath an avalanche of Merzbowian skree, usually the vocals hovering atop, like another harsh jagged layer of sound. But occasionally, the noise abates, and we get a glimpse of some melancholy melodic murk inside, or a brief blast of black riffing, but more often than not, those bits are quickly subsumed and the record becomes a roiling chaotic black swirl once more. A few tracks, like "The Field Hag", harken back to the first record, with the noise reeled in, and a haunting muddy soundscape allowed to drift and shimmer ghostlike, beneath a thick layer of fuzz and grit and a glass gargling demonic screech, and theoretically, every track on Screech Owl is like that, just some are more obscured and obfuscated than others. Tracks like "Windmill" and "A Sword Becomes Red With Fury" are so distorted and blown out, that they become Pan Sonic style glitch and buzz scapes, pulsing short circuited rhythms, spare and skeletal, with almost no trace of melody, metal or otherwise. Like that busted car radio when you go through a tunnel, all distorted and choppy with only little bits and snippets able to surface through the distortion and static. Screech Owl weaves chaotically from blown out dreamscapes doused in furious fuzz, to crumbling damaged black loopscapes, to Whitehouse style noise, to soft focus looped ambience to ultra lo-fi black metal buzz, often in the same song. Distortion, noise, processed feedback, every track a delicate balance between huge pulsing flows of fuzzed out electronics, buzzing black metal madness and dreamy fuzzy drone and whir. Baffling and fucking brilliant!

MPEG stream: Ray Of Gold
MPEG stream: So That No Sword May Strike Him Down
MPEG stream: The Field Hag
MPEG stream: A Sword Becomes Red With Fury

One of two black metal / noise hybrids on this week's list, the other, from Australian one man band Nekrasov, this one, the latest from Canadian duo WOLD, whose discs of noise drenched outsider black weirdness have held us in their thrall from the very first listen. But much has changed since L.O.T.M.P, which was an impossible hybrid of Philip Jeck like turntable warble, and walls of blacknoise, classic black metal buzz filtered through sheets of haze and warped shimmer, well, okay, maybe not that much has changed, if anything, the biggest change is how much noisier Wold have become, and how much more they hew to traditional black metal, albeit appropriately skewed and cracked and fractured and WELL fucked. For those new to the strange world of Wold, they are a duo (formerly a trio), from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. They are called Fortress Crookedjaw (best black metal name ever?) and Obey, there's a picture in the new cd of two really regular looking dudes, not sure if it's Wold, but if it is, never has there been more of a "but they were such nice boys" in black metal. Because the sound of Wold is anything but regular black metal. There are riffs, and harsh screeched vocals, there doesn't seem to be drums very often, none are credited in the liner notes, and you can't really hear them, except on one track, where a primitive drum machine spews out a stuttery waltz, and often even when they're NOT there, we still feel like we're hearing them, the duo unfurl sheets of white hot guitar hiss, walls of crumbling distortion, that seem locked in some sort of static sprawl, kind of looped, but also wavery and warbly, due no doubt to the recording quality, as well as the composition. Tape hiss is much of a part of their sound as the guitars, maybe more so. An array of electronics also add layers of grit and glitch, the sounds grind and scrape, piled on top of each other until often it's a seemingly impenetrable wall of sound. But the wall is cracked, and all sort of fucked up sounds ooze through the cracks. Some tracks are super abstract post industrial ambient scrape-scapes, all grinding rhythms, and swirling hiss, others get dangerously close to classic sounding super raw primitive black metal, but as you listen, they seem to change shape, the riffs, the vocals, a glancing listen reveals nothing untoward, just some killer blasting lo-fi buzz, but once you settle in, the music drags you kicking and screaming into some jagged harsh buzz drenched, off kilter chaotic noise infested blackened sonic underworld. If we had to pick bands to compare Wold to, it might be Ildjarn, Akitsa, Bone Awl, that sort of super raw, blown out in-the-red underproduced fury, but then add some Faxed Head, for the two share a similarly skewed and totally demented aesthetic, but where Faxed Head do it for laughs, Wold twist it into something sinister and frightening. Certainly Merzbow, as NOISE is a major component, but even when Wold are spewing sheets of what appear to be white noise, the sounds are not that simple, they churn and twist, and hide layers upon layers of sonic weirdness underneath. In fact, on first listen we were a bit put off a bit by the sheer noise level of Stratification, gone were all the warped buried 78 sounds, and in their place even more hiss and buzz and skree, but headphones changed everything. Revealing amidst the harshness an incredible array of strange sonic weirdness, buried melodies, obscured loops, bits of prettiness, almost invisible through the haze and murk and blur and NOISE, but which manage to subtly change lead into gold, turning something almost too harsh and abrasive, into something impossibly mesmerizing, and for the adventurous ear-ed, a veritable sonic wonderland of noise drenched beauty.

MPEG stream: Sleigh Ride
MPEG stream: The Frozen Field
MPEG stream: The Auld Tree

The return of Canadian black metal weirdos Wold, and another batch of completely blown out, noise drenched, abstract, lo-fi, ultra raw, frosty grim heaviness. Although with these guys, heaviness is not necessarily accurate. It is heavy, but more in the sort of Neil-from-the-Young-Ones kind of 'Heeeeeaavy', totally psychedelic and tripped out, and a blurred, washed out swirl of sounds that only really loosely approximates black metal. Most metalheads would find themselves diving for the eject button, but for the rest of us, who are willing to dig deep into outsider sounds, Working Together For Our Privacy is as rewarding as any of the other Wold records, a hidden world of sound, melodies, and textures, riffs and beats, almost entirely obscured by swirling whirling clouds of crumbling distortion and FX drenched white noise. On the surface, this is the sound of a million TVs between channels, a symphony of AM radios out of range, broadcasting nothing but static, but like when you stare at snow on a TV screen, images surface and emerge and change and disappear, the same thing seems to happen listening to this Wold record, from the chaotic skree, all sorts of sounds and song fragments surface, revealing something almost pretty lurking beneath the violent and abrasive surface. All three songs here, long ones, seem cut from the same cloth, each an explosion of industrial crunch, and blurry buzz, heaving and roiling, not even black so much as WHITE, white noise, white out, a cloud of particles and sonic fragments, a barrage of crunch and crush and pummel, that can almost completely block out the songs themselves. Almost. In a weird way, this stuff is hypnotic, mesmerizing, entrancing, if the conditions were right, this sort of thing could definitely lull you to sleep, but cranked through your shitty old speakers, it could also induce embolisms. Such is the magic of Wold. Another winner from these mysterious Canucks, one where the prizes remain a banged head, ringing ears, blown speakers and a head full of buzz....

MPEG stream: The Secret
MPEG stream: Lovey Dovey

Young Swedes playing traditional heavy metal, a pretty great debut. No Hammerfall-like pop silliness, just heads-down, raised-fist, speedy Iron Maiden/Riot styled METAL with decent-enough (not too) high pitched vocals, and plenty of ripping guitar work. And the production, courtesy of Peter Tagtgren (Scandinavian metal producer of the moment), is super. Take the likes of In Flames or Soilwork, add real vocals and make the songs a bit more catchy, that's Wolf. And they should get props for the incredible Richard Scarey/children's book-like cover art (by famed European illustrator Hans Arnold), a cover which has been universally but unjustly slammed in all (otherwise positive) reviews that we've seen of this album. It's great, and it harkens back to the album covers of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal which weren't afraid to be weird and not-blatantly metal for metal's sake. Anyway, we applaud the band for their unafraid aesthetic choice. More importantly, we also salute them for making such a great record!!

The newest slab of blackened wyrd doom-folk from the misty moors of... Texas? Poland? Mordor? Well, wherever main-mangler Smolken makes his home these days. Smolken, also the man responsible for the equally dark and fucked up Jandekian "black metal" of Dead Raven Choir, always has had a skewed take on his favorite subgenres of music, in the case of Wolfmangler entering the realm of doom metal riding a swaybacked country-folk steed, but eschewing the cinematically Western wide-open spaces that Earth has been roaming of late, to plow deeper into the muck and mire of the direst of wagonwheel-sucking mudflats... There's 14 doleful and dirgey tracks here, Smolken sawing away on some classical-sounding stringed instrument like an uber-depressed, one-man chamber music outfit. Besides those suicidal strings, this is sparse and skeletal, there's not much more here... some background ambience, clanking percussion, and creepy whispers... all of which work for us in a Dead Raven Choir like fashion. But then Smolken airs some almost-spoken, sorta-theatrical clean vocals (on tracks 12 and 13 fersinstance) and we're not quite as into it. For DRC fans surely, but maybe not doom metallers this time out (unlike Wolfmangler's earlier split with Moss).

MPEG stream: track 4
MPEG stream: track 13

Back in print and back in stock at a slightly cheaper price. But still just as warped and wonderful and weird as before... The return of Wolfmangler, aka Smolken, who also just so happens to be the man behind Dead Raven Choir. Hot on the heels of a split with UK ultra doomlords Moss, Wolfmangler continue to explore the dark world of doom in their own truly peculiar manner. With bass, electric bass, drum, flute, trombone and bassoon (each band member is also credited with things like umber bulk, water nymph, floating eye, tengu, trapper and of course leprechaun) the Wolfmangler ensemble create a truly unique doom, woven together from wheezing woodwinds, throbbing low end, simple occasional drum beats and weird grumbled growly vocals. The result is not so much a massive doom sound as a creepy ancient court music, plodding and funereal. You can almost imagine some black clad procession trudging along the winding cobblestone streets within some walled fortress. Kerry though it sounded like punk rock slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down. Texturally it's unlike anything we've ever heard. The closest reference might be Skepticism, the way it sounded like their music is being heard through the floor or from a building next door. Wolfmangler's sound has a similar timbre, a bit like some high school marching band dipped in tar and forced to march through a desert of black sand, or maybe like holding a stylus in one hand, and a scratched up 45 of Fleetwood Mac's tusk in the other, and trying to manually play the record by dragging the needle along each groove. Warbly and dizzyingly warped, Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves is some sort of hellish circus music, the soundtrack to a Fellini film, showed one frame at a time, a New Orleans Funeral Jazz band 78 played at 16 rpm on an old dusty victrola. So gorgeously slow, so pretty and creepy and dreamily doomy.

MPEG stream: Dirge For A Viking Asshole
MPEG stream: The Last Elegy

Yet another mysterious missive from the dark forests of Poland (via Texas of course) courtesy of doom folk trio Wolfmangler, featuring the one and only Smolken, aka Dead Raven Choir. While Wolfmangler have been know to lay down some serious doom (c'mon, they shared a split with Moss!!) albeit in their own uniquely skewed fashion, these two tracks are not so much doom as they are doomy, the band embracing their foresty folk side, but shot through with a healthy dose of mourn and misery. The sound here is some sort of funereal campfire folk, simple plodding percussion, moaning violin, fluttering flute, very tribal, and primitive, almost old timey, like some strange pirate sea shanty. Growled ghostly vocals crawl menacingly over what at times sounds like a very gnarled and twisted version of Peter And The Wolf. The second side is a bit slower and creepier, even darker and more lugubrious, the flute, instead of flitting and fluttering is stretched into long drawn out melancholy melodies, the vocals a ragged whisper, the strings now weaving a surprisingly lush minor key backdrop. A nice little slab of creepy crawly doom folk for sure. Packaged in super swank silkscreened sleeves. he cover image, a wolf and what appears to be a river of blood, and a drowning body. Nice!

Smolken has always been a confounding personality, the man behind both Wolfmangler and Dead Raven Choir, releasing records on proper metal labels, but also on weirdo avant free folk microlabel Jewelled Antler, mixing black metal, folk music, country, bluegrass, whatever the hell he feels like really, the results sometimes brilliant, often baffling, but always weird and wonderful in their own way. They Call Us Naughty Wolves marks the return of Smolken as Wolfmangler after more than two years of relative inactivity, and to be honest, we were approaching this with a bit of trepidation. It was after all a record called They Call Us Naughty Wolves, and according to the label was blackened burlesque chamber music, a sort of channeling of pop from yesteryear, not to mention that some of the cds come with a pair of Wolfmangler undies (really! more on that in a second). But really, conceptually and sonically, this is no stranger than past Smolken projects, so we threw it on, and were pleasantly surprised, if one can find this sort of music simply 'pleasant'. The sound is creepy, and dark, and creaky, and mysteriously ominous, strings moan and groan, a slow lugubrious chamber music, transformed into something much blacker and creepier, the melancholic gloom and string laden dirgery accompanied by a blackened croak, vokills that gurgle and growl, although they are sometimes accompanied by an angelic female counterpoint. The guitar or bass is more a fuzzy blur, a droney rumble, that underpins the strings, cellos or violins driving the tracks, creating the muted melodies, and it's that weird guttural vocal and string combination, that can't help but remind us of those groups like Xynfonica, Shevelreq, Gluttony, Thursar, the twisted metal vox with gnarled guitar synths emulating exotic instruments. So right off the bat, if that stuff is to your twisted taste, then this will definitely hit the spot. But Smolken's vision isn't so damaged or demented, it's definitely rooted in sounds more traditional, a sort of blackened doom chamber folk, which will appeal to fans of dark slow low moody weirdness. Although some of it is definitely WAY weird. The band occasionally slipping into some strangely jaunty jig like Renn Faire folk music, but for the most part, it's just some seriously brooding, surprisingly beautiful, freaked out and fucked up outsider darkness, like Tom Waits' Black Rider blurred and muddied and blackened into some woozy warped soundtrack to a filmic fable of wolves and woods. Two lucky aQ customers who order this, will also get a companion pair of red (riding hood), women's panties, with a screenprinted image of a wolf dressed up like grandma on the butt, They Call Us Naughty Wolves after all, it'll be totally random, so cross your fingers...

MPEG stream: Flying Shoes
MPEG stream: Lullaby Of The Leaves
MPEG stream: House On The Ocean
MPEG stream: Lili Marleen
MPEG stream: Carry Me Urn To Ukraine

When we reviewed the first record from these French black metal freeks, easily one of our favorite weirdo black metal records ever, we reprinted their particularly twisted manifesto, just to help shed some light on what these guys were all about. No manifesto tucked away in record number two, but the line-up and instrumentation is somewhat revealing: E: Abnormal guitars, odd bass, weird sounds abuse, mortuum tunes L: Eerie and bizarre vomit parts, vaporous incantations C: Ethereal drums, wraithlike mix tasks, noise suffocation And the rest of the liner notes go one to describe most everyone and everything involved as repugnant. So yeah, think repugnant, abnormal, odd, weird, eerie, bizarre, ethereal, wraithlike, noisy and suffocating, and you'd definitely be close to understanding the sort of gloriously sick blackened metal damage Wolok produce. Caput Mortuum is tighter and more well produced that the first record, while simultaneously being somehow more fucked up and warped. All it takes is a listen through the first song, and you'll know if you've got the kind of fractured and freaky constitution to withstand this sort of aural punishment. Skittery effected chants give way to woozy tangled riffage, chaotic relentless blast beats, raw sick processed vokills, the whole thing convoluted and impossibly gnarled, with lurching start stop arrangements, a moody melodic breakdown, that gives way to a chugging churning drone drenched anti-groove, which in turn gives way to a lumbering, stuttering fucked up, almost industrial sounding bit of buzzy stumbling blackness, alternatingly pounding and blasting. ALL the sounds wreathed in strange effects. Think Blut Aus Nord or Spektr's fucked up inbred offspring. It all makes a little more sense when you realize one of the three responsible for this unholy damage is also responsible for the raw primitive filth that is Zarach'Baal'Tharagh. But Wolok, like their elder statesmen in Spektr and Blut Aus Nord, are mired in black metal, but obviously are giving it all they've got to transform regular old buzz and blast into something else entirely, and fuck if it didn't work. Warped and woozy minor key dirges give way to impossibly frenzied freakouts, noise drenched doom is gradually transformed into strangely melodic avant doom pop, before exploding into some seriously Naked City worthy stop start whatthefuck, like listening to a Lifelover record melt, while someone spins a Deathspell Omega record manually with their finger. In fact, much of this record sounds a bit warped and warbly, as if while the band was recording, someone, a band member or otherwise was constantly fiddling with the tape speed, and various other things in the control room, adding all manner of indescribable weirdness to the proceedings, but all that strange shit wouldn't mean much if the band couldn't play, and songs and riffs weren't amazing, it would be just a cool sounding mess, instead, this is in fact a cool sounding mess, but a dense, super technical, gloriously freaked out and frenzied, moody, otherworldly, twisted and seriously, geniusly fucked up mess. And while we hate to say it, this definitely joins the new Katharsis in the running for black metal record of the year!

MPEG stream: Bacterium Dei
MPEG stream: In Vacuo
MPEG stream: Transubs(a)tantiation