Abigail Williams – Becoming Review
Abigail Williams // Becoming
Rating: 3.5/5.0 — Taint your wagon
Label: Candlelight Records
Websites: myspace.com | facebook.com
Release Dates: EU: 2012.01.27 | US: 01.24.2012
I’ve never been an Abigail Williams fan. Their debut was lackluster and derailed by metalcore underpinnings. In the Absence of Light had some actual potential but was far too generic. Needless to say, I had modest expectations as I sat down to examine their new album. Well, Steel Druhm was nearly knocked from his stately Chair of Metal Judgment [Metal Chair of Judgement? - AMG] by what he heard on Becoming. Gone are the tepid attempts to recycle left-over Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth riffs and horror movie symphonics. In their place is raw, shoegazey, post-rocky, contemplative blackness, loaded with doomy atmosphere, close in spirit to Wolves in the Throne Room and Agalloch, with elements of Aurvandil and Emperor mixed in. It’s a startlingly major change to be sure (even more so than their previous shift from black-core to Dimmu-worship), and proves there’s no wagon they won’t gleefully hop onto. Surprisingly though, their newest disingenuous switch works well and they may have found the style they can excel at. That is, if they can stop pursuing every new fad and trend (the technical term is “chasing their own fail”). Continue reading
Steel Druhm has become increasingly disillusioned with black metal over the past year or two. Apparently I’ve reached the saturation point where all the Dimmu Borgir wannabes started to sound just like all the Emperor wannabes and so on ad nauseum. There’s a clear stagnation in the scene and only the best are able to rise above the fetid swamps of mediocrity. Thankfully, into this dark morass comes a beacon of light by the name of Aurvandil with their debut Yearning. Hailing from France, Aurvandril is the brainchild and creation of founder and sole performer Aurvandil (although he apparently used a session drummer here). Mr. A is deeply entrenched in the traditional sounds and ethos of Norwegian blackness and Yearning freely references the great works of Burzum, Emperor and Enslaved while also offering a refreshing take on what came before. Its clearly a sound and style rooted in the 90′s but for whatever reason, the execution feels fresh, engaging and highly impressive. Equal parts punishing and beautifully melodic, it has a sweeping, epic atmosphere that one can’t help but appreciate. It’s good enough to partially offset my black metal malaise so he/they must be doing something right! 
So this is one of those bands that I really know nothing about. Back when I started reviewing I got the record Constellation of the Black Widow and I remember thinking it was pretty good, but it was a few months old at that time and so I never did a review of it. But in a world full of shitty black metal that bores me to tears by being repetitive and uninteresting, Anaal Nathrakh definitely appeared to be ahead of the game by, actually, not boring me to tears. I was reasonably interested to get around to reviewing Passion when I got it a while ago, but what with my busy schedule and everything I’d hardly even gotten around to listening to it until lately. And let me say, I’m impressed. 
One little-known, but easily knowable, fact about Angry Metal Guy is that he (I, I guess we’re going in third person today) is a big history buff. In other reviews I (OK, back to first person now) have frequently referred to the history of whatever it is that said band is writing about and I truly enjoy it when bands look backwards to their own cultural history for influence. Why form a band and copy the Norwegians and Swedes who did the same? Look at your own world, look at your own culture and build up from there! The band Yaotl Mictlan has probably not read this blog to get this idea, but they have the same idea that I do. Drawing on hundreds of years of history and hundreds more of oppression, Yaotl Mictlan is writing black metal with folk undertones that is strongly influenced by the history of the Mayans, the pre-Hispanic-conquest people of Mexico—who have never really disappeared, even if their ancient empire collapsed. 
I’m pretty sure loads of people were waiting for this one with baited black breath. Well, the wait is over and Austrian black/death mongers Belphegor have exceeded expectations to unleash a truly monstrous opus of blasting and burning to blight and ravage all the lands. Prepare thyself for one of the more intense, epic and fucking GREAT blackened death metal albums to come around in a while. Taking the best of both the black and death metal genres and stitching them together into a tentacled, writhing mass of gelatinous evil, Belphegor has created one mercilessly heavy yet strangely melodic beast with Blood Magick and Necromance and in the process, eclipsed the entirety of their past works (no easy feat since their previous releases were very good indeed [note: very good (3.5) is indeed the rating I gave 
It isn’t often these days that I review something that I found on my own. In fact, given that the amount of time that we here at Angry Metal Guy for reviews has gone down immensely compared to the huge numbers of promos we receive, it’s probably irresponsible for me to do so. But this Angry Metal Guy is always worried that we’re still not getting every CD of golden worth and highest quality. Once again this fear has been vindicated—but fortunately for you guys, I still love metal enough that I actually go looking for shit that we haven’t received here. And because of that, I stumbled upon Winterhorde a melodic or orchestral black metal band from… Israel? Yeah, turns out, even Israel which lacks for snowy winters has black metal guys who think that snow is the ultimate eviiiil. But don’t let the silly name fool you, because Winterhorde is not just your average melodic black metal band and Underwatermoon, while excitingly ESL in name, is anything but lackluster. 
As world metal takes the stage, something that is happening more and more frequently these days, we’re going to be seeing more of these bands coming from places where metal just hasn’t ever shown its face earlier. Demonic Resurrection, as those of you familiar with Sam Dunn’s documentary Global Metal already know, are a band from India who play symphonic black metal. The third record in a trilogy The Return to Darkness is being released (as I understand it) as the band’s first international release via Candlelight Records. That Sam Dunn is a rockstar creating machine, it turns out. Though, when it comes to Demonic Resurrection, their music speaks for itself and if you give that music a stage that myriads of metalheads have access to, it’s not hard to see how they managed to break beyond their borders. 
One of the best parts about being a reviewer, honestly, is getting a hold of records that you’d've never thought to buy on your own and really enjoying them. 2010 hasn’t actually had a lot of those for me. The year has gone pretty much as expected (and a little worse for certain bands, unfortunately). But one of the big disappointments has been the number of bands that I’ve gotten who I’d never heard of that just never pan out to anything. Because obviously it’s newer bands that keep things going and some of my favorite records of the last few years have been from bands that I didn’t even know existed until I got the record to review (Istapp for example, or In Mourning). Gloria Morti is one of those bands that I’d sorta gotten wind of, but never really heard before. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I received Anthems of Annihilation but I was pleasantly surprised. 
This review is late. Nearly three months late in fact. But perhaps it is best to look at Darkthrone’s Circle the Wagons outside of the usual fervor surrounding an iconic band releasing new material, especially one that sets internet message boards alight as much as Darkthrone. Despite being considered the grandfathers of the True Norwegian Black Metal genre, Fenriz and Nocturo Culto have now become one of the more hated bands in extreme metal. Their drastic shift away from the sound that they pioneered; adopting a more crust punk, thrashy, rock ‘n roll influenced approach polarized their fanbase and turned their recent albums into records you will either love or hate.
musical maturity from Fenriz and Nocturno Culto and no fear of experimentation. I do wish they would push their experiments further though. After the first few numbers, I got to the title track and my ears pricked up. I had heard this song before. Roughly 20 minutes ago. “Circle the Wagons” follows almost exactly the same formula as the first song on the album. Sharp angular, choppy riff with upbeat drums and a melodic, punk rock styled shout-a-long chorus. “I Am the Working Class” (an eerily similar, unimaginative, but thankfully more prosaically coherent, song title) performs the same trick again, to the letter. This lack of foresight into the fact that three songs on an album start off in exactly the same way is rather frustrating, especially when faced with the glimmer of brilliance from songs like “Stylised Corpse” and “Black Mountain Totem”.
In its defense, the attitude on this album is electric! You can feel Darkthrone’s spirit and energy in every guitar chord, snare hit and snarled lyric. It is primitive, dirty, ugly and violent. Circle the Wagons feels like a call to the heavy metal of yesteryear, before it became glitz and glamor; world tours and photoshoots; razor-sharp production and auto-tune… Fenriz and Nocturno Culto are keeping the old-school ideals of metal alive and Circle the Wagons feels like a revolt against it’s roots; much like the initial black metal groundswell of the 90′s. Darkthrone love metal and hate you, and they are going to keep doing that because, quite frankly, there are few bands left who actually have any right to criticize black metal for where it has ended up! I believe Fenriz says it best in the chorus of “I Am the Graves of the 80s”, giving orders to those who remember the classic, true and primitive metal of nearly twenty years ago: “I am the graves of the 80s. I am the risen dead. Destroy their modern metal! And bang your fucking head!”
