“That night in my bedchambers, I had just changed into my dressing gown and settled before the fireplace when a song began playing, faintly, but growing louder until, alarmed, I recognized it as “The Hammer” by Skelator. “How?!” I cried. “Such drivel in my house?!” Just then, a ghostly apparition burst into the room and strut about like a pro wrestler winding up the crowd. I shuddered, for I knew its face.” Right in the Dickens!
![Cherd’s Raw Black Metal Muster [Things You Might Have Missed 2022]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/GravePilgrim-MoltenHandsReachWest-768x768.jpeg)
“There are two types of people in this world: those who appreciate raw black metal, and those who live fulfilling lives with friends and careers and family who speak to them at holiday gatherings. I’ve declared my love of raw black metal here before, and since the advent of Bandcamp, the kvltest of all metal genres has become infinitely more accessible. Every year I wade through acres of tape hiss and tinny treble, looking for the half dozen or so raw black releases that rise above the buzzing tangle of cobwebs to rarified, putrid air, and this year, I’ve finally decided to document my findings.” Colonel Muster in the basement with a spiked club.
“Submitting a new metal record for review in December is a hard row to hoe. The List Industrial Complex is gaining critical velocity, which means folks in our position are re-listening to the albums that most impressed us over the last 11 months and catching up on the highly regarded albums we haven’t yet heard. Unless you’re bringing your A game – or maybe the A game of a better band than yours – there’s a really good chance your album is going to be underwhelming by contrast. Dutch sludge doom band Gavran boldly present their sophomore full-length Indistinct Beacon this first week of December, the official start of EOY activity.” Indistinct scheduling.
“On the grind spectrum of death metal to hardcore, Houkago Grind Time skews heavily toward the former, with knuckle-dragging riffs and pounding drum fills played at double speed. Lee’s vocals are so deep and guttural that even with the lyrics generously provided on Bandcamp, it’s impossible to match sound to syllable.” Death, grind, and anime.
“Maurice de Jong has had a rough go of things within the hallowed halls of this website. Perhaps best known for Gnaw Their Tongues but involved in no fewer than 15 current projects according to Metal Archives, many of them of the one-man variety, the Dutchman has been reviewed here in his various forms eight times by my count. His scores? A shocking 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.5, 2.5, a 3.0 that our resident shark person has since demoted to a 2.5, and two presumably un-recanted 3.0s from former site writers long since missing under suspicious circumstances. Hagetisse is straightforward, riffy black metal and a far cry from the experimental blackened noise shenanigans de Jong is best known for.” The law of averages.
“As one of the primary reviewers of doom metal ’round these parts, I find it challenging to continue finding different ways to say “this music is unhappy.” I can only use adjectives like mournful, miserable, wretched or despondent so many times before I’m tired of typing them and you’re tired of reading them. Before me is the prospect of reviewing not just doom, but death doom, and not just death doom, but funeral doom in the form of The Weight of Eternity by Dutch act Angmodnes, and friends, I just don’t have it in me to google more synonyms for “sad.” For this post I propose a change. In the pursuit of more robust ways to say “unhappy,” I’ll employ metaphor.” Weighing the feelz.
“Salt Lake City, Utah’s Harvest of Ash have made the four stages of a migraine, prodrome, aura, headache (also called attack) and post-drome, the underpinning concept of their debut album Ache and Impulse. Fittingly, their preferred mode of delivery for songs about constant pressure and oppressive pain is a particularly chunky brand of sludge doom. Will Ache and Impulse split your skull in the best possible way, or will it make you want to lie down in a dark room until the pain stops?” Not tonight, honey.
“Hopelessness is both a universal and local phenomenon. It’s always the same handful of pressures that cause it; resource inaccessibility, environmental/health factors, power held by the unscrupulous, etc, but every place has its own particular aesthetic of hopelessness. Despondency in, say, Guangzhou, China will look, sound and feel different than it does in the American Midwest. Sludge/Noise band Chat Pile call their debut album God’s Country “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery,” and indeed their name itself comes from the piles of toxic waste, left over from an unregulated lead and zinc extraction industry, poisoning towns in the Sooner State.” American nightmares.
“I liked a lot about Wailin Storms’ 2020 album Rattle. Reading back over my review, I mention doom metal, post-hardcore, the High Lonesome Sound, haunted hollers and swamps and David Eugene Edwards. I called it “fire-and-brimstone snake-handling speaking in tongues nightmare music,” and friends, that’s practically my erogenous zone. The major issue with Rattle was a dearth of compositional ideas. Still, they’re one of the few gothic Americana acts out there with a metal heart, so I had high hopes for any potential follow up.” No steppy on snake.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret. Sometimes, before I write a review, I read the ones already out there for the album in question. This is after I’ve heard the album a few times, and I do it for a few reasons, curiosity being one. Now, there are writers who solemnly proclaim, pearls fully clutched, that they would never taint their process with such unprofessionalism. I get that. But I also get that you inconstant, two-timing jilts will also read those other reviews, and I don’t like being redundant with mine. So, having read a couple reviews for Wake’s fifth full-length Thought Form Descent, I’ve decided NOT to write an intro paragraph along the lines of “Boy howdy, these Wake bois sure do keep evolving, man alive.”” Thought form pieces.
