“Immersing myself in the twisted, feral cauldron of Dark Evils Desecrate and its relentless assault, Tanin’iver appear hellbent on writing the most ugly, evil, and uncompromising anthems as possible to soundtrack a fiery apocalypse. Bells, whistles, and gimmicks are jettisoned for an old school underground sound converging in the dankest underground corners where raw black metal brawls with death and thrash influences.” Dark for darkness sake.
“While We Sleep’s cover art is creepy but striking. Even in its edited monochromatic form, this 1890s painting piqued my interest. Looking at the shadowy whispering figure with billowing hair and the wide-eyed woman, shrouded in darkness but with her face glowing, I expected While We Sleep to sound evocative and mysterious. This was largely wrong. Austria’s In Slumber plays “direct melodic death metal” (their words, not mine), the least mysterious of genres.” Blue clues.
“‘Just so you know I’ll be milking this for a long time.’ These were the first words out of my girlfriend’s mouth after acting willingly (albeit with trepidation) as a last-minute road trip and concert companion to see Watain and Deströyer 666 after the flu struck down two friends who were originally supposed to go. I knew that sitting through myriad episodes of Dr. Phil or Real Housewives of [Pick a Place with Pretentious Snobs Galore] was my price to pay for seeing one of black metal’s most entertaining live acts rampage through the excellent ‘Nuclear Alchemy’ and other great songs, and that was fine. I knew what I signed up for, and honesty is always the best policy.” Our word is our bond, until we break it!
“Okay, I’ll admit that what first drew me into Dangerous Days, the debut offering from Italian traditional metal act Hyperion, was its eye catching artwork. I don’t usually gravitate towards heavy metal albums, but I guess that, deep down, I’m no better than a toddler, drawn to bright colors, sci-fi spacesuits and cool-ass monster designs like my 1.5 year old son to literally anything he isn’t supposed to touch.” Free metal and candy.
“The extreme genres of metal are utterly obsessed with war, death, and violence, suggesting the view that the human experience is one of cruelty largely restrained, with all of us united by the cold embrace of death. Extreme metal seems to explore these ideas intently, attempting to find a certain beauty or, at the very least, excitement in the worst impulses of man. Art, at its core, seems to try and explore and express a particular facet of the human experience and imbue it with some sort of message or worldview. We’re naturally repulsed by death and destruction, but, like the story of Leonitus looking at corpses in Plato’s Republic, we’re also fascinated by it: ‘Look for yourselves, you evil wretches! Take your fill of the beautiful sight!'” Man Unkind.
“Sometimes an album comes along that progressively gets better listen after listen. With their debut full-length Ghostlands: Wounds from a Bleeding Earth, Swedish melodic black metallers Wormwood have constructed such an album.” Worms, wood, ghosts, what else could you need?
The lists keep coming and the choices are getting stranger. Now Mark Z. and Diabolus in Muzaka get the spotlight for their Top Tens. Follow along and take copious notes if you know what’s good for you.
![EP Edition [Things You Might Have Missed 2016]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Cuervo-2.jpg)
“Another year, another influx of new readers and writers at this mighty blog. Yet compared to those previously, this year has seen a significant growth in the consistency of our posts. A sad consequence of this is that EPs have increasingly fallen by the wayside as reviews of shitty full-length albums are summarily assigned to the probationary writers with reckless abandon.” We fixed the glitch.
If I’d thought further ahead, I’d have come up with a fantastic joke about the fact that we’re releasing this February edition of the Record(s) o’ the Month on the 29th of February—that’s right, a leap year. This seldom-occurring date is, of course, special in a lot of different ways and made even more special by the fact that I am once again delivering the Record(s) o’ the Month on time. Well, not just on time, but early. Despite everything—and literally I have so much to do because I spent nearly ⅔ of February fucking sick—I am bucking up and telling you what the best record o’ the month for February was. And you should probably have seen these coming…
“Crack a beer and get comfy folks, it’s storytime. Our tale is about a brave group of Swedes who decided to storm the castle of greatness, knowing full well the dangers and hardships they’d face. The lofty standards of age-old records loved worldwide would need to be breached. Our protagonists would need to deftly maneuver within clear and defined stylistic boundaries. These Swedes go by the name Hyperion, and the tome of their triumph is called Seraphical Euphony. Storytime!
