‘Your daily dose of self-loathing, self-pity, and existential dread is brought to you by Austrian nihilists Anomalie. Visions, their third full-length, is 51-minutes of lead-heavy post-black depressiveness that’s intensified by stretches of sparse atmospherics and solemn neo-folk.” Ennui for you and me.
“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?
“As the curfew tolled the knell of the parting day, I decided to wander through the dark remains of a graveyard near my home. A thick and heavy fog rolled in, illuminated by moonlight, as I stared into the well of souls. By this point, I was thirsty and miserable and I felt myself slipping further into the void. I was bewitched by the scent of death as the children of the grave emerged from the gloom and approached me. The children carried individual USB sticks that held copies of an album by the Irish band Dread Sovereign.” Mix Tapes of the Dead!
“Sweden’s Siberian – with their second full-length Through Ages of Sleep – have transferred the contents of their dream journals into the realm of post-metal. Through their music, they present consciousness in flux with the physical fading into the incorporeal. The question is: is there enough tangible tastiness here to give weight to the fluffy incoherence of the dream world?” Dreamy post-metal? Is this all a dream?
“Aleister Crowley: occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, and chess player. The shroud of the occult followed his blackened coat-tails like an obedient dog. Was he really a prophet sent to guide humanity? Was he really a spy working for the British government? Was he really one with the spiritual world or were the drugs he siphoned into himself just a tad too potent? Whatever your view, the stories and philosophies of Crowley and others of his ilk brighten up the dullness of our material lives; their obsessive attraction to the weird and wacky of this world has unearthed a plentiful abundance of material for musicians and writers to utilize.” Don’t play chess with the Devil.
“We’ve experienced the highs of weirdness with European stalwarts Dødheimsgard and Thy Catafalque but we’ve also experienced the very real lows with bands like Aborym twisting the weird nozzle just a bit too far. Mord’A’Stigmata, unwilling to release a plain-Jane of an album, have released Hope, a hopeless mixture of sullen atmospheres and ritualistic ominousness with the occasional bluesy lead. It sounds fantastically enticing on paper, but does the conceptual fantasy match up the aural reality?” Black metal hates paper!
“As touched upon by many publications, 2016 was a great year for female-fronted music. Bands like Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas, Darkher, Esben and the Witch, and Oceans of Slumber combined excellent instrumentation with dark and powerful clean vocals that weren’t gimmicky or soulless. The brooding and stark gloominess of these bands have drawn much attention in the metal-verse.” And now it’s becoming a regular thing.
“I first listened to Cosmoprism: The Theurgy – Act 1 just after midnight. As I snuggled into my unicorn shaped pillow, I allowed the ambient nightmare that Tome of the Unreplenished had created into my mind. I let it capture my imagination and I was rewarded with a listening experience that, honestly, seemed to transport me into another world.” Into the uni-verse.
“The stoics believed in ekpyrosis, the yearly destruction of the universe by an all-consuming inferno. They believed that life is a cycle of destruction and rebirth. Recreation out of chaos. Ekpyrosis embody ekpyrosis through their fiery homage to old-school death metal and Asphyxiating Devotion is the unrelenting debut record by this Italian four-piece.” Burning the way to rebirth!
“While Gothenburg’s melodeath bands dilly-dallied with their harmonic guitar lines and playful melodies the less harmonious and filth-ridden beasts of punky D-beat slimed their way around the city’s sewers. In the 80s and 90s Swedish bands like Anti Cimex and Totalitär funnelled the crusted hardcore-punk sound of Discharge and their British counterparts through even dirtier Swedish backwaters.” D…beat.
