“The United Kingdom’s The River call their style of music “pastoral post-doom.” Pastoral; synonymous with idyllic. In landscape painting it means a pleasing mix of open vistas, farmland, rolling hills, maybe some lazily grazing livestock. There’s a point when “doom” becomes a misnomer. The River indeed inhabits this tenuous space.” Doom in quiet places.
“Of all the not-metal-but-metal-adjacent things we cover on this site, my favorites are easily dark folk/country or Gothic Americana releases. I’m always scanning the promo sump for those occasional gems like Henry Derek Elis or Lord Buffalo or Wailin’ Storms so I can snap them up before my mouth-breathing colleagues have a chance to whine “Hey! This am country! No like twang! Make riffs go ‘brrrrr!'” I won’t belabor the point, but if you want a window into my tastes, you can read the intro to my review of Tohu Wa Bohu. All this to say, the moment I saw the title of Dee Calhoun’s fourth solo record in the pit, Old Scratch Comes to Appalachia, I was on it like a fly on a cow pie.” Dip, dirt, country doom.
“Unfurl adhere to the school of posts—post-grind, post-death, post-hardcore—that also gives us such bands as Full of Hell and Wake, and Ascension is their third full-length LP. Grindcore is the base of their sound, but these knotted compositions can suddenly swerve into sludgy doom trudges or ethereal clean flourishes on a dime. A handful of genres can be heard at any given time, but Ascension is really a tale of two albums.” Fly the flag of grind.
“For someone who holds all forms of doom metal in high esteem, I must admit I’ve struggled to connect with anything of the stoner/psych variety ever since Italy’s Ufomammut put their amp fuzz out to pasture a few years back. As the oldest of all metal forms, predictability is baked into its very DNA. No matter how full of piss and vinegar a young band may be, if they play stoner doom, they fight the perceptions of a tired genre.” Tides aturning.
“Mirror Reaper expanded the scope of what doom could be, delivering a towering epic dedicated to the band’s original drummer Adrien Guerra, who passed away in 2016. Any reasonable human would look at this accomplishment and probably decide it was time to scale things back. Dylan Desmond and Jesse Shriebman are not reasonable. One wonders if they’re even human as they prepare to test the limits of attention span again with Future’s Shadow, a proposed tryptic of one-song records of which the 83-minute The Clandestine Gate is first.” Gate Reaper.
“Here at AMG and Sons LLC we have a strict “no promo, no review” policy which must be adhered to at all times except for when we don’t feel like it. Back in 2021, we received a promo for Hellish Form’s debut Remains, I reviewed it favorably, and it eventually landed on my year-end list. Imagine my surprise when I found out a week ago that the funeral drone two-piece had released their follow-up, Deathless without sending us a promo. In fact, they’ve released it with very little fanfare at all based on my internet sleuthing. First, Willow Ryan and Jacob Lee, if you’re reading this, click here. Second, you’re not getting away that easy.” Only death amd reviews are inevitable.
“Tanner Anderson, Carl Skildum and Matthew Kirkwood unofficially formed Majesties in 2016 with melodic death metal in mind and Gothenburg, Sweden in their hearts. It wasn’t until 2022, however, that their debut album, Vast Reaches Unclaimed, coalesced to present a classic conundrum for conscientious music reviewers: how do we talk about a really good pastiche?” Majesty and decay.
“It has taken some time for me to warm up to Big|Brave’s brand of noise/drone/doom. I didn’t love 2017’s Ardor, but it did pique my interest. Minimalist formalism in music doesn’t offend me the same way it does others, but their single-chord experiments didn’t resonate at the time. Still, the pairing of Robin Wattie’s waif-ish vocals with heavy drone was something new, so I kept an eye out for them. I warmed up to the stark elegance on follow-up A Gaze Among Them, but it wasn’t until Leaving None But Small Birds, their collaboration with The Body, that the appeal became revelatory.” Bigly braveness.
“How I came to pen this review is kind of a funny story. Upon entering our promo pit and undergoing de-lousing, this record was tagged as death doom. Whether that was an honest mistake or something more nefarious is an ongoing discussion. The advance material does tout a guest spot by Jaani Peuhu, briefly a member of death doom luminaries Swallow the Sun (more on that later), but Steel has also openly admitted he sometimes lays promo traps for unsuspecting writers to unwittingly claim metalcore. Spectrums, the debut full-length by Saudi one-man band Dusk, has nary a hint of death doom. I’ll give you one guess what it is.” Traps in the glooming.
“When one considers the state of Iowa, one is unlikely to think of black metal. Be-masked hard rock radio metal? Yes. Black metal, no. Likewise, Iowa conjures images of corn fields, wind turbines, college football Saturdays and James Tiberius Kirk. But the ocean? Not unless you’re a paleontologist. You see, the verdant rolling hills of all those Grant Wood paintings were once covered by an enormous prehistoric inland sea. As a result, the place is absolutely lousy with fossils of trilobites and giant sea scorpions. I wonder if this was at least part of the inspiration for Iowa City, Iowa’s very own crusty black metal quartet Dryad as they were writing their debut full-length, the marine-themed The Abyssal Plain.” Flyover seas.
