“The sounds of Skam’s disease can be somewhat approximated by imagining the destructive Swedeath of Left Hand Path accelerated to the speed of Nasum and infused with the unhinged pandemonium of Anaal Nathrakh. Sounds of a Disease is a psychological pressure relief valve in the form of 13 tracks and 29 minutes of ferocious grooves, blasts, and screams.” Ill tidings.
![Nocturnal Departure – Cathartic Black Rituals [Things You Might Have Missed 2019]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Noctural-Departure-Cathartic-Black-Rituals-01.jpg)
“With a purple, black, and white/grey color scheme, Cathartic Black Rituals immediately calls Mayhem’s Live in Leipzig—metal’s best live record—to mind. It screams second wave black metal, and as a fan of that little niche I heeded the call.” Running into the Nocturnal.
“In Cleric’s own words, their second full-length is “Swedish-style death metal that mixes in the elements of doom that [they] used to play. Think Entombed mixed with Asphyx and pepper with a pinch of Candlemass.” If this is the recipe, boy oh boy, is it tasty.” Taste the Cleric.
“I think I’m finally coming around on this whole death metal thing. The gore and violence subject matter of the genre has been difficult for me to get used to. I started my life as a religious prude and possess a Constitution ability score that has me literally passing out whenever I give blood, so I’ve never gotten into horror films or their musical equivalents. Add to that the fact that I’ve responded to three “hammer smashed faces” in my relatively short EMT career, and the novelty of songs with such titles is somewhat lost on me.” A metalhead with a split personality. Chopping spree.
“Life kinda sucks. Or, I suppose more accurately, the realization that I have no control over how everything changes despite my every last effort to keep things stable kinda sucks. Unexpected alterations to my goals and plans abound. I question decisions I once thought sound, only to later circle back after realizing the alternatives were ill-fitting. Those close to me change in ways I fail to anticipate. Introducing further complications, I change and impact others in ways they can’t anticipate. It is because of the relentless fickleness of life that I appreciate the things that remain consistent. Thank the abyssal lords who art burning in the depths of hell, death metal is often one of those things. And Gravefields, an Irish/French/Egyptian (respectively, one guy from Ireland, one guy from France, and the band as a unit operating/recording mostly out of Cairo) death metal band supply ample evidence supporting this claim.” Death adds life.
“Of all the myriad concoctions of subgenre blends present in metal, few have the potential to be as heinous and vile as black and doom metal. The ominous gloom of the latter mixed with the foul malevolence of the former can make for some horrifyingly ugly textures, something I discovered when reviewing Vile Creature last year. Though I tend to stay away from black metal if I can, this particular cocktail has shaken and stirred something in me, and thus I had no qualm fetching Zohamah from the promo bin, a one-man Israeli band whose debut combines black, doom, and death metal into an unholy platter of terror. Or that’s the idea, anyway.” Burnt offerings.
“Let’s get this part out of the way. 1914 is a Ukrainian metal band that plays songs about German stormtroopers. What could go wrong? It didn’t take much effort to find an interview with founder and vocalist Ditmar Kumar in which he mentions that he’s often asked if 1914 is a Nazi band and drops this quote: “Fuck Nazis and all kind of totalitarian shitheads.” Subtle, but I think we can move on.” Remember the fallen.
“For all the heady emotions that metal might evoke—rage, introspection, euphoria, lamentation—sometimes your brain cells just need to fucking die. For those days, may I suggest Mutilated by Zombies? Messier than a six-year-old hopped up on Capri Sun and meaner than your local DMV representative, their third album Scripts of Anguish will take whatever petty emotion you happen to be feeling and make tapioca out of it (and your functioning grey matter). I hope you like it chunky.” Brains!!
“Though buried deep underground, the metal scene has been a constant fixture in Australia for decades. While no genre is shirked, death metal seems to be the one that spawns in numbers comparable to the infinite variety of Tim-Tams that clog our biscuit aisles. And it’s not the couth, be-speckled type of tech-death either. No, it’s the putrid, knuckle-dragging variety – foul, angry music that is violence committed in red and black. This hostile predilection is a curious thing, it seemingly runs counter to our laidback, “she’ll be right” attitude.” No Serenity now!
“A dear friend of mine winces at the thought of lasagna with mozzarella cheese. Hailing from Northern Italy, this man knows his cooking like I know ill-timed Plato references (ask my girlfriend, who I thought would appreciate it because she’s a few months more ancient than me), but is an utter purist in this regard. Here in North America, people from all over the world take their regional or national cuisine and update it, making it bigger and arguably better. Some experiments fail, but it’s the mastery of your influences and the will to proceed and get it completely wrong in the creative phase that allows for greatness instead of mere imitation.” Create death creatively!
