Latest entry in God Is Myth's ongoing series of 3"cd-r homages to horror author H.P. Lovecraft, and this one was really a no-brainer, inevitable considering the mysteriously monickered Brown Jenkins in fact took his name from a Lovecraft story (as did about a million other bands, but Brown Jenkins is one of the stranger ones) and whose music is obviously influenced by Lovecraft's writing. And according to the liner notes, Brown Jenkins is also influenced by Joy Division, Burzum, Bethlehem, Voivod, Godflesh, Possessed, Morbid Angel, Slayer, Merzbow, Gang Of Four, etc. Sounds like our kind of metal band. And BJ is in fact our kind of metal band, as we've gone on and on about in past reviews of Brown Jenkins full lengths, all of those disparate influences wound into a dark and gloomy blackened metal, that hardly adheres to the strict tenets of BM, instead, stretching them to their limits, incorporating blissed out drones, odd off kilter chords, strange melodies, as well as shades of pop, new wave and goth, but all wound into something distinctly, if not traditionally, BLACK METAL.
So here, Umesh, aka Brown Jenkins, gets to honor the man who plays such an important part in his music.
The sounds here are not particularly Lovecraftian, the lyrics are though, the music itself is twisted and angular, obtuse chords, mid tempos, the guitar not so much buzzing as thick and layered with lots of finger picking, melodies and chords shifting, more loping than blasting, the Voivod influence is especially prevalent here, tightly wound, almost new wavish at points but more sort of dark and moody, washed out, black metal for sure, but more mathy than buzzy. The closing track sounds like a black metal Codeine, a moping slowcore wrapped in jagged shards of black metal guitar, a descending melody, melancholy and minor key, before slipping into something more propulsive but no less 'downer'.
Like the full lengths, this is challenging off kilter stuff, especially for the grim black hordes, but it's most certainly buzzy and black enough to push all those black metal buttons, while remaining melodic and moody enough to fit on that mixtape right between Codeine and Seam.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES. Already sold out and out of print. We got only TWENTY, we tried to get more, but that's all they would let us have, and like past installments these for sure disappear quick. Packaged in a normal slimline cd case, with black and white covers, liner notes and lyrics, and a sepia printed cardstock insert with a photo and a brief biography of Lovecraft.
Another strange sonic missive from this mysterious (black? doom?) metal outfit, whose first record was a big hit around here, the strangely monickered Uterine Acid Swishes, a confusional sprawl of clean post rock guitar jangle, downtuned noise drenched doomic dirgery and grim blasting blackness, all wound up into a seriously twisted chunk of outsider blackdoom metal weirdness.
Like Uterine Acid Swishes, Last Living Dream is made up of three ultra long songs, the shortest about 15 minutes, the longest nearly 27 minutes, and that half hour jam just so happens to be the opener, and begins with some spidery skeletal guitar (some slide guitar too it sounds like), a little piano, all wreathed in echo and reverb, melancholy and minor key, before the sound of birds leads us into the song proper, and explosive blast of frenzied riffing, pounding drum damage, and some seriously gurgled demonic growls, the melodies insectoid and buzzing, the track slipping from blown out and dense to more muted and melodic, but fierce at all time, lurching from frantic blast, to midtempo pound and back again. Dizzying and chaotic. About 7 minutes in, the track peels back in a chorus of shrieks, leaving some atonal clean guitars to drift over the echoey drum crunch and guttural vocal bellows, the vibe sort of twisted and poppy, but still blackened, leading into another blown out blast of black buzz, before finally stumbling into a funereal ultradoom plod, the distorted guitars dissipating, leaving just weirdly recorded drums, distant jangle and those vokills, only to burst into another wave of pounding fury, and finally unfurling with a weird abstract post rock jangle meander.
"Where Ghosts Go To Die (The Swamp)" is almost like a second part of the first song, a pounding churning blackness, laced with mesmerizing melody, the drums boomy and low fidelity, their strange sound only adding to the already strange vibe, this track too slipping from relentless blasting, to lumbering sonic death march, to cool tangled midtempo mathiness, with plenty of chug and grind and pound, finishing off with some creepy classical piano, before finally slipping into the final number, "Through A Tunnel Of Trees", swirling winds, strange percussion, spidery guitars, a tangled haunted ambience, almost militaristic sounding with those drums, the heaviness creeping in, a super sludgey doomy drift, the vocals and guitars spreading out in a black fog, over the pounding drums, minor key melodies drifting up from the deep, a few bursts of black blast and a few twisted bits of blurred fuzzed out guitar churn later, the track shifts gears and settles in a spaced out, Hypothermia like outro, all booming drums and chiming, crunchy guitars. The whole thing more polished and songy than the last record, but no less grim, twisted and doomy... black, bleak and HEAVY.
Another mysterious metal missive from the fringes, a record recommended to us by our customer Logan, from the strangely monickered Brulvahnatu, and an even more strangely titled album, Uterine Acid Swishes.
We weren't exactly sure what to expect, even after we threw this on, the opening is all chiming reverbed jangle guitar, we knew it was metal, but beyond that we were ready to be surprised, and surprised we were, the band kicks in and it's all epic majestic and melodic, haunting melodies over doomic crunch, and then the band switch gears again, and we're off, buzzing, blasting, a flurry of muddy, murky, frenzied riffing, the low end monstrous, wrapped around everything like a black cloud, the vocals a deep monstrous growl, the sound some warped black metal / funeral doom hybrid, slipping from spare, skeletal slo-mo melodic drift, to classic sounding melodic metal, to fierce grim buzz and back again, and that's just in the first song. The tracks are looooooong, none shorter than 17 minutes, the longest a whopping 26 minutes. The other two tracks tread similar ground, although "Autopsy In Mourning" gets WAY doomy, crushing, and heavy, before stumbling into a more stripped down murky plod, super moody and mournful and miserable, building to a chaotic climax, before lurching back into a sludgey death march.
The final nearly 30 minute track "Suffer Long", begins with just piano (or maybe it's dulcimer), haunting and melancholy, a funereal creep, with cool tangled guitar leads over the top, eventually launching into a lumbering doomic crush, and over the next half hour, the song drifts from weird sample laced dronedoomdirge, to pounding almost classic sounding doom, to abstract ambience, to churning riffage, ultra doom obsessives will be in heaven (or is it hell?!).
Killer stuff, and according to the back cover there are 7 more releases in the Brulvahnatu series, all released in the last 3 years, so if this pushes your black doom buttons, there's plenty more where this came from!
What is wrong with the world today? The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, babies are coo-ing, breezes are blowing, waves are lapping, clouds are drifting happily across a bright blue sky, but all everybody wants to listen to is hateful evil grim brutal downtuned miserable soul crushing anguished slow motion funereal death drone ultra doom. Not that we're complaining, but it is curious. There's been recent renewed interest in slow motion metal masters Earth, as well as a growing obsession with self-admitted Earth worshippers Sunn 0))), the massive ambient-metal explorations of Japan's Corrupted, the stomping garage psych meets doom drone of the mighty Boris, and a constantly growing roster of similar sonic sickos: Esoteric, Khanate, Asva, Fleshpress, Dot [.], Marzuraan, Ox, Rigor Sardonicus, Sons Of Otis, UFOmammut, Skepticism, Whitehorse, Planet Aids and now Bunkur. We've been trying to track down this cd for ages, and somehow ended up listing and reviewing the Planet Aids cd, a Bunkur side project, before we had even received the Bunkur discs. Well, now they're here and you won't be sorry. This Dutch outfit traffics in massive, miserable, impossibly lugubrious doom metal. This is a single 65 minute track, drenched in reverb and crackling amp buzz, crumbling distorted guitars howled vocals, very loose and spread out, the riffs exist in huge expanses of SPACE, a blackened vacuum of buzz and echo and the occasional trailing off of a vocal growl or a slowly dissipating feedback vapor trial. The kicker here though, and the thing that makes Bunkur so weird (and cool) is the drumming, stumbling lo-fi tripped out rhythms, that drift from plodding caveman pound, to spacious barely there accents, but most surprisingly hover in some strange alternate world of dub. Yep, you heard us, DUB. The drums often demarcate wide open spaces with a strange dubbed out, instantly recognizable: BAP BAP Bap bap bap bp bp bp bp .... a single snare hit that repeats, stuttering into oblivion. Giving the whole thing a weird hellish doom-dub vibe. Like Khanate recording with Lee Perry maybe? Okay, maybe not quite as extreme as that, but the dub is definitely there, whether purposeful or not. And it's really cool. Fans of dismal doom death drone and all things slow and sick will find this absolutely essential. Packaged in super cryptic metallic grey and black packaging with extensive liner notes in a completely unreadable rune font!
Second vinyl only offering from this low end subsonic super group, made up of Greg Anderson (SUNNO))), Southern Lord head honcho), Oren Ambarchi, and legendary black metal vocalist Attila Csihar (Mayhem, Tormentor, Aborym)�
For this outing, Ambarchi and Anderson are credited with sub bass death throb, while Attila is responsible for undead voices. And that's pretty much what it sounds like, sub bass throbs with haunting undead vocals woven into the heaving roiling mass. There seem to be some guitars in there too, maybe some electronics, but it's hard to tell, it's all smeared into a single swirling blackened mass. When we first listened to it, we played it at 33 (which we're assuming now is NOT the right speed, so hard to tell sometimes), and we thought, wow, this is even slower and sludgier than ever, but once we figured out it was meant to be 45, the sound reverted back, closer to the sound of SUNNO))) or the older records of their forbears Earth. Slow motion riffage, glacial and thick, massive and blown out and super distorted, muffled and murky, a sluggish sprawl of caustic crumbling guitars, the vocals barely audible, a haunting raspy growl way down in the mix, often just sounding like another buzzing bassline, hum and fuzz, dense and intense, all melted down into a viscous black crawl. Occasionally, the random bits of riffage and low end rumble coalesce into truly gorgeous harmonies, lovely and chordal, like some blackened church organ, but for the most part, this is the sound of guitar tones allowed to ring out forever and beat against each other, the air filled with oscillating overtones and strange tonal colorations, all beneath a patina of thick black buzz.
Amazing cover art as well, a gross out gutted worm picture disc, with a transparent skull and bugs insert on one side, and another sick silkscreened artwork overlay on the thick plastic sleeve, all courtesy of Mr. Seldon Hunt.
Recorded live, in January of this year, in Holland. And of course, you had to know this part was coming:
LIMITED TO 3000 COPIES!! And if it's anything like the other Burial Chamber record, it will sell out FAST.
A new installment of "oppressive necro electronics" from Burial Hex, aka Clay Ruby, who when not whipping up these abject clouds of filthy black ambience, spends his time rocking out psychedelically in Jex Thoth, getting filthy metal in Wormsblood, and creating all manner of folky weirdness in Davenport (besides running the kick ass Skulls Of Heaven label).
But Burial Hex is so far removed from Ruby's other combos, they barely warrant mentioning. Burial Hex is the sound of some ancient black ritual, some sick sonik sorcery, where, guitars wind around electronics, and are all smeared into thick heaving slabs of doomdronedirge. The first of two tracks here however sounds bit different that what we're used to, introducing vocals, a howled feral wail, that ends up making this sound like some post industrial blackened Oxbow, minimal guitar strum, bursts of static, fragments of electronic skitter, creepy and atmospheric but super ethereal and hauntingly tense.
The second track returns to more familiar territory, a long sprawling slow motion doomscape, downtuned guitars draped over fractured electronics, bits of shuffling minimal percussion, warm whirring church organs, samples and found sounds, all very mysterious, subtly folky, damaged and abstract, and very very cinematic.
Never heard of Zola Jesus before, but they're a good match for Burial Hex, countering with their own sort of blackened soundscapery. A softly whirling cloud of glitched out electronics, disembodied vocals, almost choral sounding, swirling swooping effects, shards of new wave-y synth, eventually transforming into a nightmarish industrial creep, doused in more effects, all wrapped in thick billowy sheets of downtuned rumble, slipping from spaced out otherworldliness to grim, blackened, doom drenched dronemusick.
Pressed on super thick vinyl and housed in gorgeous matte sleeves, all the text printed in clear reflective ink.
A few weeks back we gushed and gushed like crazy over this legendary doom classic, all gussied up and elaborately re-packaged and re-issued by the fine folks at Southern Lord. Well, we just got our hands on the Japanese version, now a triple cd instead of a double cd, the packaging very similar, the only real difference being that the Southern Lord pressing came with a download card, so you could download some demos and live shows, well, that's what's on the third disc here. So if you already downloaded those tracks, you don't really need this unless you want to own those tracks on cd. And if you somehow missed this the first time around, and the $42 price tag doesn't scare you off, then by all means grab one! It's worth it. And be warned, we only got a handful, so when we run out, be prepared to wait for us to get more from Japan.
FINALLY!!!! The reissue all DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM heads have been waiting for! The monolithic BURNING WITCH! For those of you that don't know, before SUNNO))), before Khanate, Stephen O'Malley, along with Greg Anderson at least in the beginning of the band, were digging a mass grave of tortured, drugged to hell, low as fuck, abstract blood smeared DOOM in the band Burning Witch. We're pretty sure most people knew that already and are eagerly awaiting this dark treasure. First off, this is probably my (Matt) favorite doom band EVER, so I'm biased, but this record changed me forever, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing. This record makes me want to hide in my room.
The sound of the Witch is everything you can hope for in a heavy band, BRUTAL guitars downtuned to the center of the earth, plodding, fucked up rhythmic patterns, twisted harmonics beating against each other, piercing feedback, noisy textures, and ANGUISHED vocals, courtesy of the ultimate goth, Edgy 59. The vocals range from high pitched, bamboo shards under the fingernail, tortured screeching, to low pitched, classic metal crooning, and even some death metal grunting to boot! All of these songs are structured in interesting ways, the sounds stretched out to the point of transcendence, spacious and demented, but strangely melodic. Every sound on these discs is allowed its own room to live and breath/wither and die, fully resonating in your cavernous skull, until your eyes glaze over, and catatonic fugue state is achieved.
This collection includes both the Towers... EP, which is more of a pummeling, savage slab of heaviness, and also The Rift.Canyons.Dreams EP, which is maybe a little darker and more abstract...both totally inhuman, both completely menacing, and essential to any fan of DOOM. Also includes some tracks from the Goatsnake split, which is loooong out of print, and also a third bonus disc with a killer live set, plus some never heard BW demo material. SICK!
The packaging is also AMAZING, This double disc set comes with a beautiful bound booklet, filled to the brim with cryptic occult iconography printed in stunning gold ink, and some appropriately scary band photos, along with some commentary from that fella Aaron Turner, you know that dude? Totally scary, completely demented, innovative, weird, HEAVY as all the laments of hell's dammed souls combined! Pretty much essential for fans of all things, uh, doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooomy!
RECOMMENDED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Who would have thought? A new Burzum record, after his release from16 years in prison. Has it really been 16 years? And who would have thought the new Burzum would actually be really really great?! Certainly not us, especially after the last two stinkers, the made-in-jail, all-synth Daudi Baldrs and Hildskjalf. And the last one of those was more than 11 years ago! And let's not forget Varg's prison conversion, becoming a neo fascist, a Nazi, spouting white pride rhetoric, hell, this record was even originally titled "The White God", not to mention that he's in fact a convicted murderer and an arsonist. But it's always been like that with Burzum, and much of black metal, but in Burzum's case in particular, we try to not confuse/conflate the man with the music, and to be fair, for some that's not possible, no one could fault a person for not wanting to support a musician who espouses reprehensible views, and one way is by not listening to their music, and not buying their records. But as we've posited before, your record collection would begin to get pretty sparse, once you eliminated records made by assholes, and by people whose politics you disagreed with, but again, it's perfectly fair to do just that.
But for those of you who can in fact separate the music from the musician, then Belus is a pretty serious and solid return to form. Not so much Filosefem as Det Som Engang Var and Hvis Lyset Tar Oss. The same guitar tone, the same epic riffage, the same raspy vokills, for someone who was not allowed a guitar for the last decade plus, it's pretty amazing that in the space of less than a year, he somehow managed to come up with this. Granted some of these tracks are older, but for the most part this is a brand new record, could be that it was formulated over the past decade, the result of all that pent up emotion, this fierce and furious chunk of black buzz, weirdly melodic in places, very trancelike all the way through, with lots of spoken word mixed into the frantic riffing and blasting beats... The record is at its strongest when it's the most Burzumic, blown out buzz, frenzied riffing over loping midtempo rhythms, the riffing surprisingly layered and complex, check out "Morgenroede" with the relentless main riff shifting from fast picking, to dizzyingly looped arpeggiation, making the whole song swoon and warble, before lurching back into a buzz drenched lumber. The closing track, "Belus' Tilbakeomst (Konklusjon)" is pretty incredible as well, super intense and droney and atmospheric, the riffing almost static, building all sorts of tension, layer upon layer, various notes and overtones ringing out, the playing frantic and frenzied, but with very little forward momentum, almost like some weird sort of black raga drone, rendered in black buzz. There's lots of that sort of unlikely innovation going on here, every time we play this in the store, people come to the counter to find out what the heck it is, and then they can't believe it's Burzum. Or, rather, they might very well have thought it was Burzum, but can't believe it's the NEW Burzum.
It's too bad for Burzum, and for this record, that Belus will forever be saddled with so much non musical baggage, though it's his own damn fault, cuz once you dig through all the shit, get past all the politics, all the rumors and racist rhetoric, past all the expectations and the various scenesters and tastemakers, past the fact that he's really just a total fuckhead, if you can forget just for a second what led up to the creation of this record, Belus could very well end up being one of the best black metal records of the year.
NB. There IS vinyl, or rather WAS, but the first pressing is sold out, and the copies we got are long gone, but eventually they'll do another pressing.
The very first Burzum album, released in 1992, here coupled with the Aske ep released about a year later. This is seriously grim and brutal black metal. Super distorted, very inelegant stumbling buzzing, brooding black metal madness. Lots of folks consider this to be the ultimate Burzum record (the most 'true'). Perhaps because it is in fact the most immediate and openly furious, forgoing musical dexterity for a blast of pure and passionate hate. An all out attack on all things sacred. A gorgeously primitive and profane black metal document.
The first Burzum album recorded in prison. Not sure whether it was a conscious choice, or lack of access to instruments in prison, but the infamous Count Grishnack's Daudi Baldurs, finally released in 1997, utilized keyboards only. A classical / medieval / nordic concept album that sort of sounds a bit like "Peter and the Wolf" and lacks the unholy fuzz of his past recordings, but does manage to generate a wee bit of atmosphere and boasts some intense paintings on the sleeve, but ultimately not nearly as musically or emotionally charged as the more metal Burzum records.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
The first Burzum album recorded in prison. Not sure whether it was a conscious choice, or lack of access to instruments in prison, but the infamous Count Grishnack's Daudi Baldurs, finally released in 1997, utilized keyboards only. A classical / medieval / nordic concept album that sort of sounds a bit like "Peter and the Wolf" and lacks the unholy fuzz of his past recordings, but does manage to generate a wee bit of atmosphere and boasts some intense paintings on the sleeve, but ultimately not nearly as musically or emotionally charged as the more metal Burzum records.
Record number two from Count Grishnackh, and here we begin to see the seeds of what is to come. The sound is still raw and primitive, all buzzsaw distortion and howled inhuman vocals. Midtempo and stumbling like a three legged hell hound. But now there is plenty of creepy synths, and occasional swaths of instrumental dark ambience. Fans of the classic Filosefem, will find this much to their liking as well, just as creepy and haunting, but much less refined and much more raw and brutal.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
By now everyone should know Burzum, if not the music then at least the name, for some it's because you've been true grim black metal warriors from back in the day, for others it was just from being a lookieloo intrigued by the Lords Of Chaos book and all the hype in the press about the murders and the church burnings. But let's not forget, or let an overhyped scene, a jailhouse conversion to neo-Naziism, and a spate of truly terrible Mortiis style ambient records distract us from the fact that Burzum created some of the most important music in the last decade, certainly black metal, but so strangely gorgeous and otherworldly that it transcended the genre, becoming a music that was accessible to all fans of bizarre and beautiful music, not just metalheads. Setting the standard by which we measure all other black metal for sure, a swirling near ambient buzz, riffs that are so hypnotic and reptetive and thick with distortion and amp buzz that they become metallic drones, like brutal buzzing lullabies, fuzzy indistinct swirls of guitar around pounding midtemp drums and delicate ambient synthesizers. Burzum's masterpiece is of course Filosefem, if you don't have that, stop reading now and pick that up. It's the perfect melding of primitive black buzz and ethereal ambience. Definitely one of the top 5 black metal records EVER. This here rarities collection is more for folks who already know the joys of Burzum's buzzing black abyss and have been dying for more more more. And since Burzum has pretty much turned into a complete tool, with a musical output directly reflecting that change, there's no place to go but back! The first three tracks here are the original version of the Aske ep, a howling, buzzing pounding black metal classic, simple and harsh but again strangely hypnotic. It's the next handful of tracks that really make this essential, first, rehearsals from 1991, four tracks of super blown out, ultra distorted blackness, so thick and buzzy, that the speakers sort of seem to bend and stretch, the sound quality alternates between brittle high end scree and muted overdriven bass heavy throb, which only makes the tracks sound that much more intense and HEAVY. Then, three unreleased tracks from 1993, classic Burzum, but as if recorded through a tin can and twine, lo lo lo fi for sure, but again, it just adds to the bleak and depressive ambience, easy to hear how Burzum's legacy was carried on by Xasthur, Weakling and the like after hearing these super raw tracks. The last three tracks are taken from various Burzum records, "My Journey To The Stars" from the first s/t record, "Lost Wisdom" from Det Som Engang Var, and finally the brilliant "Dunkelheit" from Filosefem, maybe the greatest track Burzum ever recorded. So heavy and sad and melancholy and brutally beautiful.
This also happens to be one of those dual discs, so flip it over and you can watch the video for "Dunkelheit" (it's PAL, but all-region so your computer might play it ok), released years back as a VHS tape and long unavailable. The absolute perfect visual accompaniment to the songs bleak buzzing beauty.
Post-release-from-incarceration record number two from the infamous Burzum, aka Varg Vikernes, and just like Belus before it, this IS pretty goddamn great, most definitely harkening back to the good old days, as in: Filosefem / Aske / Det Som Engang Var. In our review of Belus, we went on at length about the man, his shitty politics, his questionable sanity, his storied history, his checkered past (and present), but odds are, most metalheads are getting tired of the whole "Vikernes is an asshole", "his music sucks cuz his politics suck" thing. If you do want to get into that or maybe aren't actually up on the whole Burzum controversy, well, check that review, or just do a Google search and you'll be all caught up.
The funny thing about his previous disc Belus, besides it A) being really good, and B) being a proper black metal record, considering the two records Vikernes made in jail were super cheesy, all-synthesizer affairs (although supposedly, that owed to the fact that he wasn't allowed to have guitars in prison), was that it was SO much a Buzum record, that even the most casual fan hearing a snippet from Belus, would have immediately recognized it as Burzum, which is remarkable considering it had been exactly 14 years since the last proper Burzum black metal record. And in fact Allan here named that tune in about 5 notes when he heard it playing in the store - "this must be Burzum!" Not sure what that says about Burzum and Belus, a return to form, or a retrogression? Regardless, it sounded great, and we ended up digging it big time.
Fallen, while in many ways a logical follow up, and again, hugely beholden to Burzum past, mixes things up a bit, so while still distinctly Burzum, it's also a bit weirder, and not so easy to peg. Opener "Jeg Faller" begins with a total classic Burzum riff, brittle and buzzy, droned out and repetitive, epic and majestic, the drumming buried in the mix, then that riff is matched up with some awesomely woozy minor key arpeggiations, and weirdest of all, some strange sea shanty style crooning, at first, it's a bit off putting, but a few listens and it sounds pretty perfect. And that's pretty much the template for the whole record, frantic classic Burzum style riffing, seasick waltzy midtempo melancholia, the usual guttural vokills, but interspersed with some monk like chanting (or some full on proper crooning, like the surprisingly heartfelt vocals on "Budstikken", there laid over some frantic blackened riffing, a weird but effective combo), all the songs laced with ominous bits of spoken word, the arrangements super simple, and spare, and the production not hugely heavy or buzzy, instead again, a bit brittle and cold, lo-fi, but in a good way, a vibe and atmosphere that definitely suits the songs, and the sound.
The record finishes with a cool, minimal bit of ritualistic folkiness, all hand drums, strange percussion, detuned steel string strum, raspy wraith like whispers, and haunting mournful melodies.
We're sure there will be much debate about the merits of Fallen, the failings of Vikernes, the usual black metal politics and of course the degree of trueness or grimness involved here, but fuck it, at this point we're happy to just dig a record for the music, and we dig the music on Fallen a whole lot...
By now, unless you've been living underneath a VERY big rock, you know all about Count Grishnackh aka Burzum, Euronymous, Bard Faust, Mayhem, Emperor and all the killing and church burnings and suicides. If for some reason you don't know about all this stuff, go buy yourself a copy of The Lords Of Chaos, a book that covers all that stuff in great detail. The problem with all this drama, murder, satanism, whatever, you forget that the whole reason these guys knew each other, and the only reason any of us cared, was the music they made. And that music they made was black metal. A black metal that thanks to the decidedly non-musical drama, would soon make black metal a household name.
So when folks ask us to recommend some classic black metal, we always recommend Satyricon's Nemesis Divina, Immortal's Battles In The North, Emperor's Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk, and of course Burzum's Filosefem. Filosefem, originally released in 1996 holds a special place in our outsider music hearts, as the first black metal record to turn the whole black metal formula completely upside down. Count Grishnackh was the only member and played all the instruments, even the drums, which gives the whole thing a weirdly damaged droning swing. A rhythm that would define the rhythmic sound of later black metal legends like Graveland and Woodtemple. The guitars are a thick suffocating buzz, razor sharp and totally blown out. And the vocals are an anguished wail, some sort of primeval demonic incantation. But where Burzum stands out most is the addition of a creepy synthesizers that hover in the background of several of the tracks, a haunting melody buried beneath the swirl of fuzz and ultradistortion. Unlike other BM bands, the keyboard isn't a huge wash of strings to add some sort of epic quality, these tracks are already epic enough, here the keyboards are much more spare, a simple minor key melody is picked out, almost childlike, hovering briefly, before the next note follows. Except for one blazing blast of a track, Filosefem is mostly midtempo, lurching and heaving, stumbling down dirt road into a smeared grey landscape. But as the record nears the last few tracks, the record changes, beginning with the nearly half hour long "Rundgang um die Transzendentale Saule der Singularitat", a track that eschews any hint of metal, stripping away the guitars, the drums, everything, and leaving just the synthesizer, as it unfurls a seemingly endless Aphex Twin like four note melody. Forlorn and strangely compelling. And in the context of the whole record, as emotionally devastating as anything we've heard. The final track "Gebrechlichkeit II", brings back the guitars, but makes them nearly static, an endlessly blurry vacuum cleaner like riff, slowly shifting, as another haunting melody drifts wraith like in the background. Definitely one of the most essential and unique metal records of all time.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
The final Burzum album, another all keyboard affair, recorded in prison and again the sound is mostly atmospheric, swooshing keyboards, some simple drum machine rhythms, a bit of folky filigree here and there. Supposedly evoking the ambience of Nordic forest and Nordic Pride (a barely disguised white pride, as Grishnackh, now Vikernes, discovered his true Nazi self in prison) this is a mostly disposable dark ambient record, for only the true Burzum completists.
BE WARNED! THESE BURZUM LPS ARE EXTREMELY LIMITED!! ONCE THESE ARE GONE, IT'S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT THEY'LL BE GONE FOR GOOD. IF IT ENDS UP WE CAN GET MORE, BE PREPARED TO WAIT PATIENTLY!
The title roughly translated is "What once was," but Det Som Engang Var is more about what is to come, the perfect bridge between the grim raw primitive Burzum of old and the beautifully bizarre grim blackness / haunting electronic hybrid that Burzum was to become. Originally released in 1994, the year he was sentenced to prison for murdering Mayhem's Euronymous, Hvis is a buzzing droning black metal masterpiece. Which would have probably remained the most essential Burzum document had Filosefem not been released 2 years later.
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If you don't know the whole sordid story with this guy/band, let us refer you to "The Lords of Chaos" book... Here's some rare demo/rehearsal material from Varg, all early stuff recorded long before his incarceration. Very cult. The demo material is rough and super atmospheric, gloom drone metal supreme. This is the stuff for which the term "necro" was invented. This disc also includes other oddities, such as a rehearsal recording of a seemingly drunken Varg, along with guys from Mayhem, likely equally drunk, singing a Cliff Richard song a capella (this track is really more silly than necro). Then there's a long spooky track with vocals by the late Sveinbjorn Beinfeinsson, head of the Asatru religion, backed by Varg's synths (this might be of more recent vintage than the rest). For true fans. Limited (and numbered) edition of 1000 cds. We only have a few.
Members of German avant-jazz outfit Bretzel Killing Machine take their interest in horror films/music a step further by forming this two-man experimental BLACK METAL band! Yes, B.K.M. leader (and solo electronics artist) Bjoern Eichstaedt has finally delivered his his long-promised (threatened?) Caacrinolas project. Keyboardist/vocalist Bjoern, together with guitarist/bassist
It's definitely something for fans of Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra, Abruptum, Nokturnal Mortum, Potentiam, and similar avant-ambient-black-metal trips. Excellent! We look forward to their next recording, which we're told is already underway, entitled "Satan et les légions fantastiques tourmentant le Crucifié"...
From the same mysterious Russian otherworld that brought us the blackened genius of Ithdabquth Qliphoth comes the amazingly monickered Cadaver Yelleth At Amber Tower, which as far as we can tell is one of the many side projects that IQ mainman AL-LA-ShT-ORR employs to explore some seriously twisted and esoteric sounds.
And it doesn't get much more esoteric than this. Falling somewhere between the mysterious shortwave broadcasts of the Conet Project, and the disembodied ghostly blacknoise of Prurient, Code:Algeria is a strange sonic artifact, a manufactured lost transmission from the abyss, voices from some recovered black box recorder, broadcast from some other dimension, travelling through the atmosphere, gathering strange distortions and interference as it goes, a dizzying assemblage of beeps and hiss and warm buzzing textures, the voices speaking French? Arabic? Russian? Hard to tell, distorted as they are, 3 voices, 4 voices, the cadence and interplay almost musical, interrupted by bursts of hiss and sonar like pings, by the second track, some woozy warbly organ has joined the mix, the hiss sounds more scuplted, stuttering and skittering almost rhythmically, still wound around those strange voices, and the hiss taking on an almost Sunroof! like melodiousness, but those voices, continue to haunt and perplex, is it a military exercise? Is it something more sinister? Definitely sounds like it. Whatever it is, it's fantastic, and enthralling, and like the Conet Project, transcends its parts to become melodic and musical and surprisingly listenable. For field recording freeks too, especially ones into EVP and the Ghost Orchid and the like...
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This Italian metal band is hard to figure out: visually, they look kinda Marilyn Manson-eque with big boots, devil-locks and black vinyl trenchcoats. So we expected some sort of vampire industrial goth thing, maybe with female vocals...well it's got female
Latest full length from this long running experimental black metal one man band, masterminded by Andrew Curtis-Brignell, who has been doing Caina since he was a teenager, and who for this new record is joined by a pretty elite group of guests, Imperial from Krieg, Rennie Resmini from hardcore legends Starkweather, and Chris Ross from Blood Revolt / Revenge / Axis of Advance.
Like on past records, the sound of Caina is a tough one to pin down, fusing total shoegaze pop, to indie pop jangle, crushing downtuned doom to soaring epic post rock slow build, gloomy gothy drift to churning mathy almost-prog, and pretty much anything else Curtis-Brignell can think of. The opening track here is the perfect example, exploding right out of the gate with a chugging almost punky D-beat pound, with wildly bellowed vox, but laced with shimmery melodies, the vocals heavily effected, and insanely high in the mix, swinging wildly from speaker to speaker, eventually the song slipping to what sounds almost more like Mogwai, that sort of brooding, smoldering crescendo, building to an explosive climax, before fading into a bit of shimmery drift, hushed and softly psychedelic, a smeared expanse of woozy low end and hazy guitar glimmer, which leads directly into a burst of old school raw black metal blast, guttural vox, stumbling blast beat, murky frenzied riffing, but this is Caina after all, so it doesn't take long for the sound to splinter into something weirdly mathy and dynamic, and then transform into a dreamy melodic drift, hovering beneath some sick vokills, and again building slowly to something much more fierce and frantic.
It would probably be a bit confusing to go track by track and try to describe every part of every song, needless to say, it's wildy varied, but never to the point of losing cohesion, it's an epic sonic patchwork, woven deftly into some super idiosyncratic avant black metal, infusing the usual blast and buzz and pound, with field recordings, swirling synths, strange samples, blissed out kosmische drift, tribal drum driven math rock, all manner of strange vocals, the sound constantly shifting from black metal blast, to depressive dirge, melodic jangle to drifty drone and back again.
It's probably too all over the map for the true grim hordes, but most aQ metalheads will find this stuff easy to get lost in, a wild sonic journey through some twisted epic black metal otherworld.
Included with the album proper is a bonus disc, featuring reinterpretations of four older tracks, remastered versions of the originals and a Nico cover, both the old and new version of the older songs definitely light on the metal, more jangly and atmospheric, darkly psychedelic, with the biggest surprise might be the re-done version of "To Pluck The Night Up By Its Skin", which is retitled "To Funk The Night Up By Its Shit" and is exactly what the title warns us it might be, a groovy, almost disco-y reworking, but insanely enough, it's actually pretty awesome, and ends up sounding like a slightly darker dirgier version of that whole Eurodisco Carpenter / Goblin worship that is so popular these days.
Sweet packaging too, full color six panel digipack with booklet packed with liner notes, lyrics and photos.
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SORRY. This is the first in a super limited series of 3" cd-r's dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft. This inaugural installment comes from UK one man black metal horde Caina, whose debut record indeed bore a passing resemblance to AQ faves, Lurker Of Chalice, the weirder side project of Leviathan's Wrest, but managed to be it's own strange black beast.
And if anything, I, Mountain is even stranger, with barely any black metal, in fact there's very little here that might be considered metal at all. But that in no way means this isn't dark, or mysterious or subtly heavy.
I, Mountain is an instrumental interpretation of Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness, and is an intense sonic journey.
The first five minutes are a blissy dreamy drift, muted acoustic guitars, glistening and shimmering, it's not until five minutes in that the tenor becomes ominous, with haunting crumbling production and mysterious minor key ambience. Then it's about halfway through before we get the first hint of anything resembling metal, and even then, it's thick clouds of noxious distortion, drifting in the background, a sort of black ambience, but this quickly gives way to a churning doomy sludge, downtuned guitars, thick waves, layer after layer, slowly shifting and pulsing.
Finally, with only minutes to go, the metal kicks in, but it's no black blast, instead a propulsive metallic dirge, thick guitars, and pounding simple drums with the occasionally splattery fill, trudging resolutely forward before the drums drift off, leaving dense peals of processed guitar to swirl and shimmer ominously before the dark ambience fades to black.
I, Mountain is tracked as a single 20+ minute track, although in the booklet, the sections are separated into movements. Packaged in a slim jewel case, with a 4 panel booklet and a thick card insert with a photo of Lovecraft on one side and an essay on the other. Nice!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! We got 20, and it's already out of print, so when we run out, we will not be able to get more...
The first we heard about this UK outfit Caina, was that they sounded a bit like Lurker Of Chalice, Wrest from Leviathan's more experimental black metal side project. And if you're anything like us, which we're thinking in matters Leviathan you most definitely are, then that was pretty much all we needed to hear. And it does definitely share some sonic similarities, although it is most definitely it's own mournful, melancholy blackened beast.
The opening track doesn't prepare you at all for the rest of the disc, it's a strange and murky, shimmering ambient soundscape, rich swells of epic sound, like an instrumental post rock Constellation band run through some sort of Jeck / Basinski / Tim Hecker filter rendering everything smeary and gloriously indistinct. Distant drums, bits of percussive skitter, all drifting below a sun baked expanse of glistening soft focus drone. Quite lovely. And the rest of the record is lovely too, just in a much more bleak and blackened way. The opening track has a definite shoegazer vibe that manages to stretch out and settle over all the tracks here. Thick reverby guitars, super primitive practice space drums, arpeggiated minor key melodies, strange little guitar leads spun out into the ether, ultra raw vocals way up in the mix, huge guitar chugs, lilting sort of sea sick rhythms, bizarre convoluted song structures, blast beats that seem to just sink into the mire, long stretches of caliginous dark ambience, gorgeous slabs of simple hypnotic guitar, the whole record wreathed in a dense funereal sonic fog. Dark and creepy and pretty but still so bleak and black. Lurker / Leviathan fans need this for sure. As does anyone into weird damaged blissed out black metal. And if you love stuff like My Bloody Valentine, Jesus & Mary Chain, M83, Phillip Jeck, Tim Hecker and the like, but can't really imagine what all those bands would sound like in a black metal context, look no further...
Latest from this one man UK avant black metal outfit, whose Temporary Antennae record on Profound Lore we raved about a while back, a four song ep that like Temporary Antennae, and most of the other Caina records, veers all over the place, taking seemingly disparate sounds and parts, and weaves them all together into something cohesive and compelling, mysterious and a bit bizarre.
The record opens with some sunshiney post rock, all warm sun dappled synths, simple drums, whooshing major key shimmer, epic and majestic and pretty, which only makes the second track that much more menacing, with it's overdriven crumbling guitars, its growled demonic vokills, its weird spaced out arrangement, more doom than black metal, until the song revs up and blasts blackly before slipping into something much more abstract, the vocals remain, but the music transformed into something more jangly and poppy, the sound once again shifting back toward something blown out and blissy, a soaring emotional coda that does not at all match the song's ominous beginning.
The third track is the most fucked up of the bunch, beginning with some plodding, weirdly melodic depressive black metal, before everything drops out leaving just the guitars, to unwind some folky fluttery melodies, over subtle bass throb, and warm synth swells, eventually dropping out completely, leaving just some sampled voices, which just so happen to be Jim Jones from the People's Temple recorded in Guyana, creepy and fucked up for sure, the music shifts to match, a lurching start stop that sounds a bit like the recent Funeral Mist.
The final track begins with some almost-cheesy Goblin-y soundtracky synth, laid over some simple shuffling drumming, spidery minor key guitar, post rocky and drifty and dreamy. About halfway through, some warped metallic chug gradually builds into a pounding math metal workout, again all very major key and epic sounding, gradually becoming less and less epic, as the sound shifts slowly toward a more raw and blasting blackness.
Cool stuff, definitely twisted and confusional, but we're beginning to think that's precisely why we dig Caina so much...
Canis Dirus is a black metal duo from the appropriately frosty land of... Minnesota? Well, it certainly makes sense if anyone has spent winter in the Midwest, they will no doubt be aware of how oppressive and life denying that shit can be. And when you consider that Canis Dirus is comprised of the heads of the God Is Myth and Ars Magna labels, you can safely bet that this is some grim, brutal, and seriously cult stuff. The album begins with "Choking And Drowning", a surprisingly gentle piece of slightly ominous acoustic beauty that goes against what you might expect from such a song title. Next up is the title track, and at this point we're in full winter mode, as the band rides forward on hypnotic midtempo Burzum-styled rhythm. The vocals are a hysterical shriek, the guitars are like a fuzzy blanket of concentrated evil, and the drums (machines?) keep things going deeper and deeper into the woods. "Joyless And The Self Fulfilling Prophecy" is an awesome piece of murky black metal that moves slowly but surely, stopping for a cool ambient middle part, before heading back into the dirgey midtempo beat. The cool, slightly phased guitars almost sound like Alice In Chains for a second, but before long, sour, pukey sounding leads come in, giving the song a very disconcerting feeling. The vocals pretty much sound like a witch being tortured and serve as the perfect foil to the spacious instrumentation. The album closes with "In Deep Waters", a piece that utilizes negative space and some field recordings, that bookends the album perfectly. Really cool stuff, not that you would expect anything less considering the band's pedigree.
Their first record in three years, Norwegians Carpathian Forest return with their dark and primitve 'Misanthropic Black Metal' but with some new twists. Their overall sound hasn't changed too much, a noisy thrash metal assault tempered with the primitve buzz of
NOW ON VINYL!!
We got our first taste of this NY black metal horde on their Stones/Salt 7" from last year, a two song blowout of angular frenzied riffage, gnarled metallic crush, blasting beats, a distinctly weird take on black metal, one that owed as much to noise rock as it did to classic BM. And on this, their debut full length, that noise rock influence becomes even more evident, and makes Mounds Of Ash so much more than a run of the mill black metal record.
In fact, this sounds like the sort of record that could have existed outside of black metal entirely, sure there's insectoid riffing, and some blasting beats, and some soaring epic melodies, but hell, that stuff all existed in some form before black metal.
To these ears, this sounds like some noise rock metal core band from the nineties, super charged and a bit blackened, the more obviously black metal parts are separated by long stretches of loping moody post rock grooves, are churning, chugging almost metalcore heaviness. We've seen folks throwing out comparisons to legendary metal outfit Deadguy, and this does indeed sound a but like a black metal Deadguy, or maybe Kiss It Goodbye, which is for sure a good thing. There's also plenty of Neurosis going on, thick swells of roiling moody metallic bombast, a sort of metallic post rock slow burn that often builds into a flurry of frantic thrashing, but just as often sprawls into something more tripped out and psychedelic.
In fact, the more we listen to Mounds Of Ash, the LESS black metal it sounds, the production seems like the most black metal part, the music though, is just so dense and weirdly melodic, and crushingly epic, with swaths of woozy minor key weirdness, and killer harmonics laced brooding breakdowns that sound like a WAY heavier Slint or Bastro, which is about the raddest thing we can think of, and which is pretty much exactly what this is. Heavy, washed out, fucked up, a little bit black, way melodic, post-noise rock avant dirge metal, whatever you want to call it, this just might be our new favorite slab of grim and gorgeous avant heaviness...
The two members of NY black metal duo Castevet may have a pedigree heavy in grind and death metal, but their gnarled angular take on black metal owes way more to post rock and noise rock, these two songs sounding like two parts of the same song, that song an alternately pounding, loping chunk of Voivodian chug and primitive old school blast.
Angular and off kilter, tangled blackened riffs over relentless muscled pound, all wrapped around tortured anguished howls, the rhythm lurches and stutters, ferocious and heavy, but also weirdly moody and atmospheric, almost more like noise rock with a hint of blackness, flurries of double kick, some classic BM guitar buzz, eventually breaking down into some pounding old school black metal. The second side sounds like a part two, but the second part is much more melodic, with some woozy, spidery minor key guitar melodies and short stretches of muted post rockiness, even some Black Flaggy guitars here and there, but this side too gets more black as it goes, slipping into serious Darkthrone territory, before a dense mathy breakdown/outro that revisits that opening minor key melody.
Really awesome stuff. Can't wait for a full length. Cool packaging too, milky clear vinyl, no label, in a sleeve with a very spare insert, visible through the record, and one weird thing, the center hole is slightly too big, so be careful placing the record on the turntable, it's easy to get it off center, which makes the whole record sound even woozier than normal, which is actually kind of cool.
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Dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. No, we mean it. This is dismal, despairing, ultra doom. Not doom like Sabbath or Candlemass. No, this is mega doom. Or death doom. Or funeral doom. Or whatever you call it. But whatever you do call it, this is most certainly, dark and dreary and completely and gorgeously miserable. So slooooooooow and plodding, it threatens to grind to a complete halt. Guitars tuned unbeleivably low, riffs thick with graveyard dirt and the flesh flecked bones of the dead, haunting siren-like melodies, wrapped in tattered shards of ultra-reverb, and vocals that sound like tectonic plates slowly shifting and grinding against each other, thousands of feet below the surface of the earth. This is essential doom for those of you who bow before the dark art of Skepticism, Thergothon and Disembowelment.
Buzzing and drony primitive keyboard-flecked black metal from right here in the U.S. Released on The Black Hand (Rage of Achilles imprint). Really raw and hypnotic. Lots of midtempo, chugging riffs and haunting Burzum-y keyboards that occasionally evolve into
Hailing from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Catholicon spent roughly 15 years cranking out their own blend of blackened brutality before calling it quits last year. The band definitely existed within the realm of black metal, but that's only part of the equation. Not surprisingly, given their origins, you get a nice healthy dose of misanthropic hardcore sludge, Southern style, as well as some early Earache styled death and grind. And there's more, like plenty of spaced out synths and a dark electronic influence at times, none of which gets in the way of Catholicon's blasphemous metallic fury. So basically, there is nothing NOT to like here.
Of Ages Past serves as a nice summary for this prolific band, and the bonus audio dvd collects all the band's demos as well as some live recordings, unreleased tracks, and rehearsal tapes. The musicianship is spot on, everyone slays, but thankfully no one ever tries to grandstand. Instead, the band sounds like a dangerous metal machine intent on total destruction. At times, they're super burly and doomy sounding with vocals ranging from death metal barks to black metal shrieking. Everything is downtuned and sludgy sounding but often performed in the manner of early Carcass or Bolt Thrower, or maybe even Discharge if they gave it all up to Satan, but with a definite American vibe. The winding riffs are lumbering and hypnotic, and there are even some surprises, like in "Land Beyond The Stars", where an almost Middle Eastern sounding synth melody gives you an idea of what Omar Souleyman might sound like if he had been influenced by Burzum. Haha, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but you get the point: the band wasn't afraid to go at it by their own rules. Obviously, this is a good thing. Throughout it all, Catholicon just fucking rocks and will keep you headbanging into the next morning for sure. Highly recommended.
The genre of "pirate metal" (yes, there is such a thing) gets a bad rap, perhaps deservedly so. Maybe it was ok back in the day when Running Wild was the only band, um, running wild with it. But modern "pirate metal" acts like Alestorm and Swashbuckle, while good for a chuckle, are just too silly. You can't help but imagine 'em in frilly shirts and eyepatches, maybe a stuffed parrot on the shoulder or a fake hook on the hand. About as mean and scary as National Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrr!
However, underground Australian black/doom/death act Cauldron Black Ram, featuring a couple members of funeral doomsters Mournful Congregation, are more like what REAL, truly bloodthirsty buccaneers would have listened to, if they were into metal on the Spanish Main. Churning, rumbling riffage, punishing battery, blower bass, guttural vokills, truly vicious rockin' heaviness indeed! And, yes, CBR have a pirate theme, but their lyrics seem more derived from the creepy occult myths that pirates might have believed in, speaking of drownings and disembowelments, cannibals and caverns. The pirates of Cauldron Black Ram's fevered imaginings are like the ones from John Carpenter's The Fog, ghosts and ghouls back from a watery grave. Wicked (sea)sick.
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES, each one hand numbered!
Limited to 555 copies, each one hand numbered...
This is the debut full-length from Norwegian black metallers Celestial Bloodshed. Having only previously put out a demo and an ep, Cursed, Scarred and Forever Possessed (great title!) gives listeners outside of the utterly cvlt underground (who, like, don't live in Norway or trade obsessively over the internet) a chance to plumb their depths just a little deeper. Those lucky few already exposed to the charred sickness of these misanthropic underlords will recognize their place within the blackened realm ruled by bands like Burzum and Gorgoroth. Why do we mention those two bands specifically? Well, CB tend to go back and forth pretty solidly between both the more mid-paced buzzed out dirge of the former and the brutal blasts of the latter. At the same time, they've managed to incorporate some experimental soundscapery and some super cool and strange vocals, well beyond the usual black metal atmospherics. A gloriously grim, harsh and heavy collection of buzzing blackness, which will most definitely fit nicely in any serious metalhead's collection. Hail!
Celestial Sea is the unlikely collaboration between God Is Myth head honcho Todd Paulson, who is also responsible for Dormant, reviewed elsewhere on the aQ site, and Andrew Curtis-Brignell, of UK black metal one man band Caina. Not unlikely because of the folks involved, it's not hard to draw lines connecting Caina Dormant and God Is Myth, but more for the sound they produce. An epic cinematic post rock more influenced by folks like Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, Isis and Mono than any black metal or even metal in particular.
Granted the crossover between metal and post rock is pretty common these days with folks on both sides of the sonic divide borrowing freely from the folks opposite. And we're never ones to complain, we love both sounds, pummeling metallic crunch, and loping mathy instrumental jams, and the two together, well, you know where we stand.
So here we Have Celestial Sea, a (perhaps) one off, that finds the duo getting super spacey for the opening 5 minutes, simple minor key guitar figures unfurling over long drawn out drones, ratcheting up the tension, creating a brooding post rock ambience, that to be honest, we'd be happy to hear continue for the length of the whole record.
Instead, the band launch into the first proper song, soaring crystalline chords, breathless vocals, simple drumming, all swept up in a shimmering swell, building to a crescendo that instead of introducing crushing downtuned riffage, offers up some super proggy organs, but only for a moment, a few seconds later, the guitars drop, and the band is soaring majestically, and heavily through some epic major key chords, the drumming wilder and more chaotic, before blissing back out soon after.
Track three, "William Bentley's Grave" is another slow burner, with a definite prog vibe, lots of glistening shimmer, finally exploding in another epic climax, not crushing or heavy, just expansive and cathartic.
The closer, "Deep Inside The Cold" is the darkest of the bunch, and the most overtly heavy, sounding a bit like Opeth or Katatonia but more mathy and introspective. The guitars thick, ringing out, long passages of droning looped riffage, and finally the record's big payoff, high end guitars spiraling heavenward, the drums double time, a serious final blowout.
Definitely for fans of rock both post and math, and of course metalheads not averse to some sonic subtlety and lots of pretty pretty melody
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, housed in a plain white sleeve with a paste on cover and a printed insert.
There was a time where all you had to do was add umlauts to every vowel (heck how about a few consonants too?) to make your band name more evil. More mysterious. For glam rockers it simply meant changing s's to z's, BOYZ, TOYZ, NOYZE... oh and changing i's to y's, and double o's always helped... Bad Noose. But recently, there have been several examples of grim black and doom metal bands adding an extra 'i' for no apparent reason. When it was just French black metallers Mutiilation, we thought, okay, they're just French and little bit strange, or maybe it was a typo but they thought it was cool. We can dig that. But now with Minnesotan funereal doom lords Celestiial jumping on the double 'i' bandwagon, we're beginning to think something is going on. Something sinister. Er... siiniister we mean.
Anyway, we'll just have to keep our eyes peeled for more of the evil double 'i' but in the meantime, Celestiial has more than just the 2 i's going for them. They also have a gaggle of o's. that's right. Celestiial are definitely one of those bands who have earned the multiple o'd doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. They're in the tradition of bands like Skepticism, Thergothon, Disembowelment, Evoken, Winter and more modern practitioners of the ultradoom like Catacombs, Esoteric and the like, but Celestiial are no ordinary doom band, sure their songs are lengthy and glacial, guitars are nothing but black smears in a starless sky, the plodding drums are dropped reverently amidst a bleak and barren sonic landscape. Vocals growl and gurgle and float weightless like some dark wind. Celestiial's doom is even more spacey and blissed out than any of their influences. The guitars are thick and dense and tuned impossibly low, but they sound soft, like someone shaking out a huge black blanket and letting it settle over you, blocking out all light. The programmed drums are so dense with reverb, and the cymbals seem to sizzle endlessly, the percussion just turns into a wash of hiss and whir, that adds a strange fuzzy glow to the already murky and blissy sound. The other thing you can't help but notice, is the sound of nature, everywhere, in every song, crickets, wind blowing through the trees, frogs, whippoorwills, thunder, rain falling on leaves. You know how Skepticism sounds like it was recorded in a forest? This is like that too but it's not metaphorical, it really has forest sounds. It's almost like their is some black doom funeral procession, trudging through the forest, lit only by torchlight, the creatures of the night, gathered just outside the circle of fire. So intense and strangely serene, especially for a 'doom metal' record.
And the thing is it's not just for effect. Celestiial are from Minnesota and are quite possibly the first reflective, isolationist, naturist doom band ever. From the band's website: "Celestiial was created to mirror mysticism in nature. Its heart lies not in its medium but in its dreams. It is a reflection of astral light shown upon the earth--sinking into its soil--waiting and dreaming. It wishes to be the pulse of woodlands and water. Nothing more? Understand that funeral doom isn't always slow for the sake of being slow. It is slower than the beat of the human heart. Its pulse is dead. The pulse of CELESTIIAL aims at being completely parallel to continual motion in everything of this earth. From the seasonal changes to representations of myth."
Woah. But if you really listen, Celestiial's slow motion doom does sound perfectly at home amidst the sounds of nature. Like some living breathing shadowy doomic creature living among the insects and wild birds, lurking in tree tops and curled up upon soft piles of wet leaves. It's almost like a doom metal version of recent record of the week Osmose, by Ariel Kalma, but instead of synths and rainforests, it's doom and dark forests. And as if to further tie the music to the land, and the peoples of the land, Celestiial incorporate an unlikely selection of traditional instruments into their slow motion dirges, such as Celtic harp and Native American flutes.
All of that, strange instrumentation, nature sounds, the two i's, combine to make this wonderfully weird, hauntingly mysterious and quite possibly one of the dreamiest and most blissed out doom records ever!
It's been *how many* years that Celtic Frost fans have been waiting for this??? Well here it is! The first new album from Switzerland's extreme avant-garde metal pioneers since 1989's Vanity/Nemesis. We don't want to make you wait any longer, so we'll keep this review brief. What you want to know is, is this a disgrace to the hallowed CF brand name or did they manage to live up to their idiosyncratic and influential legacy?? Well, we think they have done the latter, and boldly too. (Besides, how can you disgrace the legacy when you've already made glam mistake Cold Lake like 20 years ago? though we hasten to add, Cold Lake is actually one of our FAVORITE Celtic Frost albums, perversely enough.)
Spinning Monotheist makes us think that CF mainman Thomas Gabriel Fischer has been listening to a lot of old Godflesh lately, not a bad thing! This has that uber-doomy industrial vibe to it, complete with feedback squeals and shuddering beats. Not dancey industrial, but factory/machine industrial. All that heaviness is accompanied by a large dose of melancholic melody. Add Tom's dramatic, almost Bowie-like spoken-sung vocals (and more than one instance of his famous death-grunt "uhh!"), and you've got a Teutonic, twisted, Type-O gothy, doom/industrial/prog/classical/black metal, non-rehashed return from Celtic Frost that's no disappointment at all. Uhh!!!
While supplies last, we've got the import slipcase digipack version with bonus track.
While Israeli label Total Rust may specialize in all things slow and sludgey, doomy and dirgey (see reviews of Tort and Lurk elsewhere on this week's list), they have been known to dabble in sounds buzzier and blacker as well. Which was most definitely the case with French black metal horde Hyadningar, whose The Weak Creation was a big favorite around here, which at the time we described as "a serious storm of grim, technical, melodic black metal, a strange mix of Deathspell-ish complexity, epic soaring melodicism, dour depressive miserablism, and even a hint of Viking metal here and there." And the reason we mention that, is the fact that Chaos Dei, is a new project featuring both the drummer and the guitar player of Hyadningar, and while it might not be as all over the place, Chaos Dei's Arising From Chaos, is a super varied, and super ruling chunk of grim noisy blackness. And not noisy in the sense of noise music, but more noise ROCK, the band seeming to have infused their black buzz with some classic noise rock tropes, whether it's the more mathy arrangements, or the vocals, which sound less black metal shriek and more noise rock yowl, the music too, slip easily from blazing buzzing fury, to mathy chugging churn, as well as some almost post rock sounding melodic stretches. The production too is strange, brittle and bright, which gives the music a distinctly different vibe than a lot of black metal, but when these guys do get all grim and spit out a blast of blurred blackness, it's fierce as fuck, and seriously black and brutal. C'mon, they're French, you know how we feel about French BM, and odds are you do too. So imagine that French blackness with some noise rock influence, and a distinctly twisted sense of melody and arrangement, and you'll get an idea of what's going on here. The sound is raw and furious, but at the same time atmospheric and experimental, it's grim and troo enough for the least discerning black metalhead, but fucked up and original and just twisted enough for the rest of us who are after something weirder, hell they even dedicate a RIFF from one of their songs to Simon Boswell for his soundtrack to Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre!
From the grim frosty twilight of Tennessee, comes this amazing disc from Chaos Moon, a mysterious duo whose black metal, on first listen at least, is a thick smear of classic Norwegian buzz, but on closer listening reveals all sorts of stuff going on, a whole 'nother dark soundworld, where traditional black metal is spread out into expansive soundscapes and infused with all manner of distinctly non-black elements, resulting in a sound that is super unique while remaining troo and grim.
After reviewing so many black metal records, and sure this is probably true of any genre, but especially with black metal which has such a predescribed core sound, it gets tougher and tougher to describe the sound no matter how original it is. We often find ourselves wishing for a black metal thesaurus. A customer once emailed us to let us know that in one review we used the word 'buzz' 20 or 30 times. But what can you do, when a music's main element is the buzz, and it's how a band creates and shapes that buzz that makes it special.
So Chaos Moon, who are also obviously masters of the buzz, and this, their second disc is rife with buzz, furious washed out dense slabs of grinding guitarfuzz, shaped into alien insectoid riffs, and spread over thrashing blast beats, and some of the most awesomely anguished vocals we've heard in ages. So yeah, that would be enough for us to dig this disc, proclaim it worth owning, and give it repeated listens. But thankfully it's a lot more than that.
The core sound of black metal, that buzzing blast, is just such a perfect sound, we sometime wish a band would surface that just played one riff, with the drums locked into a looped blast beat, and remained that way, static for the length of a disc, of two discs, ten discs!! So when we talk about black metal and buzz, we're biased cuz we just love that sound, but some records truly do take that buzz and reimagine it, reinvent it. And those are the records that stand out. And while parts of this record are pure old school black metal buzz, the rest of the record, blossoms into something totally new and amazing, using that buzz as it's anchor.
The opening track is furious and fast, like older Satyricon, super dense and complex, spread out to fill up a whole disc we'd be sold big time, but even here, the songs is laced through with dense gnarled tangles of melody, and weird almost post rock sounding breakdowns, long tripped out dronescapes, seasick melodies, and some subtle but serious hooks.
But it's about halfway through where Chaos Moon transform into something entirely new, thick glistening smears of synth spread out into gauzy dreamscapes, drifting and shimmering, a constant fuzzy backdrop to the buzz and blackness above, often threatening to subsume the metal component entirely, and the two distinct melodies, engaged in some complex harmony, the rapidfire jagged guitar lines and the smooth flowing synths, somehow blending into some impossible dreamy buzzy swirl, separated by long stretches of hushed muted murmur, and barely there soft focus drones, even some cool, Godspeed like post rock interludes, the guitars a clean jangle, strings soaring, the drums loping amidst this epic sonic swoon. Even the pure black tracks are swathed in thick layers of high end synthesizer whir, and washed out whirls of minor key melody, turning what might have been just some moody melancholy black metal into glorious, super dramatic, emotional black metal epics, like Godspeed and Sigur Ros backing up Leviathan, or Immortal scoring a Coen Brothers film, or an alternate black metal score to some super intense harrowing tragedy, just gorgeous chunks of complex, cinematic black metal post rock majesty.
You can probably tell we've been doing some spring (summer?) cleaning, as we've been digging up some killer blackened artifacts that somehow managed to slip through the cracks and remain hidden for far too long. One of those artifacts is this, Origin Of Apparition, one of two albums from 2007 by Southern black metal horde Chaos Moon (which sort of sounds like the name of Sailor Moon's arch enemy), and it's a glorious slab of blown out buzz drenched USBM, a one man band who whips up thick walls of crumbling distortion assembled from anguished tortured wails, angular riffing, minor key melodies, and some blown out frenzied drum programming, the sound often slipping into some woozy depressive doominess, rife with swirling synths, all very haunting and dramatic, eerie and esoteric, the slow parts will definitely have you thinking of Xasthur, while other moments offer nods to the maniacal blackness of Silencer and the blissed out buzz of Velvet Cacoon. Really good stuff, fans of grim bedroom blackness and darkly depressive black buzz will dig big time. LAST COPIES!!!
We've long been fans of this mysterious outfit from Indiana, whose witchy blackened atmospheric black doom doesn't sound so much Midwestern as it does like it was conjured up from some other realm, via some mysterious ritual that involves much bloodletting, torches, robes, goats, a full moon, and probably some virgins, but as we mentioned in our review of record number two, Charnel House's sound seems to gradually be growing more atmospheric and witchy, and less overtly metallic. The debut was a murky muddy sprawl of doomy riffage, noise drenched creep, and furious blasting blackness, but even back then the haunting ethereal vocals gave the music a seriously witchy, ritualistic vibe, and if anything, that sounds has moved completely to the fore on Black Blood, just check out the opening track, which pairs buzzing sinewy bass and loping minimal drumming, to very minimal guitars, no riffing or buzzing really, more sort of swirling and atmospheric, with everything dropping out occasionally, leaving just those hazy vocal incantations, and a skeletal rhythmic backdrop, and when the sound does shift into blasting blackness, the production is so strange, that it doesn't even really sound heavy, or necessarily black metal, instead, it's a strangely frenzied rapid fire skittery blast, none of the music changes, just the drums, blasting lo-fi beneath the wraithlike vocals, and gauzy atmospheric drifts, freaky and far out and super cool.
Here's where we might say, and so goes the rest of the record, and while much of the rest of the record does involve the same elements, the structures and arrangements are all over the place. "Atavism" launches immediately into a pounding, blasting, noise rock churn, but there seem to be no guitars, just buzzing bass, and those ever present witchy vocals, it's a super strange combo, and again, the production is bizarre, brittle, space-y, we're reminded at times of Aluk Todolo for sure, the same sort of occult rock vibe, but Charnel House are much more chaotic, a little ramshackle, lurching from chaotic noise rock crush ("Of The Sea") that minus those vocals, could be some weird band on Load, to wild chaotic drum heavy blowouts like "When You Become", that sound a bit like a dialed down Lightning Bolt performing some sort of arcane sonic ritual, to the almost post rock meander of "Sewn Shut", the haunting spectral vocals tying them all together into some sort of otherworldly blackened avant psychedelic occult rock ritual, that is deeply and darkly mesmerizing.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!! Beautifully silkscreened fold over sleeves, the back half revealing the lp inside, each one hand numbered, includes a download code as well!
Along with the insanely limited tape-and-bones-in-a-wooden-coffin from blackdoom horde OS (which is most likely already sold out), we also have this, the lp debut from Charnel House, a similarly blackened and doomy offshoot of the OS mothership, but with an added witchy element in the form of some demonic priestess vocals...
The sound though is not hugely removed from that of OS, the riffs are murky and muddy and doomy, the tempo, at least at first is a slithery, lumbering creep, the percussion on the opening track doesn't even sound like drums, instead it sounds like a field recording of a passing freight train, which only makes it that much weirder and cooler, the result is some sort of abstract slowcore minimal doom, but those female vocals, definitely add another element, transforming it into something much more haunting and melodic instead of just sludgey and crusty.
But CH are much more likely to erupt into full on blasting black metal, albeit a BM filtered through their own particularly cracked and filthy take on the sound, which renders the blast and buzz more washed out and chaotic, blurred and smeared, the beats, when you can hear them, either sound NOT like beats at all, like the freight train rhythm of the first track, or they're mostly buried under the roiling blackness above.
And so it goes, the band shifting from that murky black crush, to more crusty minimal black doom plod, the drumming getting super strange and abstract when you can hear it, otherwise just adding to the general chaos, the slower bits are rife with soaring melodies and deep sonic swells, sometimes, leaving just ghostly ambience and those witchy vocals, just as often transforming into a murky cinematic warped and woozy drone-doom, or exploding back into another stretch of blasting chaotic blackness.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, each one hand numbered, housed in cool folded textured paper silkscreened covers.
