“Here is a sheer cliff face of an album; if you’re hardy enough to attempt the climb, please sign this waiver absolving AMG Industries of responsibility for injury or death. Mithridatum debuts with Harrowing, five tracks of dissonant death metal that dare the listener to keep pace as the trio scrambles ever upward. If any album demands artwork from the late, great Lewandowski, it is Harrowing.” Disso-dares.
“The black/death/prog polymaths of Ashen Horde are back with Antimony, their latest subgenre-surfing full-length. The new one is a concept album that explores the unsolved Victorian-era murder of one Charles Bravo. Experts agree that Bravo perished from antimony poisoning, but his story spins out from there to embrace a cornucopia of credible suspects and motivations.” Clue Town.
“The trio has hovered in the background of a reliably scuzzy death metal scene, falling short of even the modest notoriety achieved by fellow Danes like Undergang, Phrenelith, and Hyperdontia. Apotheosis consists of nine more loogies of old school death, hawked up at the aptly named Phlegm Studios and spat upon the sidewalk in front of your home with consideration for neither property values nor your delicate constitution.” BLEEAARGHH!
![Gorotica – Morbid Menagerie [Things You Might Have Missed 2022]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Gorotica_1.jpg)
“Your beloved Aunt Maxine passed away after a long illness, and now the family faces a choice between two admittedly less-than-ideal options. Is it better for necrophiles to take their pleasure with what remains of the old gal, or for ghouls to cook her up into a delicious fricassée? The corpsefucking cannibals in Gorotica answer this question with an enthusiastic “por que no los dos?”” Corpus delickti.
“Australia’s Woods of Desolation makes metal to metaphor by. The band’s evocative style of blackgaze, preoccupied with the natural world and the passage of time, provokes strong reactions from their small but passionate cadre of fans. The Falling Tide is WoD’s first album since 2014’s As the Stars. That one dropped during what can be called Peak Blackgaze, when outfits like Alcest and especially Deafheaven briefly captivated mainstream audiences and divided the backpatch set with their twinkling takes on metal’s trvest subgenre.” All star gazers.
“Four mighty contributors shaped Heavy Moves Heavy 2022. Ferox, Thus Spoke, Holdeneye, and Steel Druhm each chose the ten songs released this year that dominated our respective workouts. The resulting playlist is appended to this article. Play it straight through or set it to shuffle; HMH is designed to work either way.” Go heavy because there is no going home.
“The average age of all the cells in an adult human is somewhere between seven and ten years old. We constantly replace parts of ourselves, so that you are mostly a different person every decade or so. That means if you really, like, think about it, no band that lasts longer than ten years has any of its original lineup left. This is how I explain In the Woods… to myself. The outfit is in its fourth decade of shuffling through lineups and genres, with drummer Anders Kobro and the ellipsis in their name the only constants.” Lost among the trees.
![Morbikon – Ov Mournful Twilight [Things You Might Have Missed 2022]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/morbikon-cover.jpg.webp)
“Some supergroups stick close to home. An artist bursts with ideas in their chosen subgenre, and so–like Stephen King using the pseudonym “Richard Bachman” to crank out horror novels–the new entity produces something not so far-flung from the work that made them famous. Then there’s Morbikon. Ov Mournful Twilight sees Phil “Landphil” Hall of party thrashers Municipal Waste and Vrenth from blackened folk institution/oddity Finntroll join forces to birth a slab of frostbitten second-wave worship that comes complete with a deadpan v of trvth in the title.” Municipal Trolling.
“Along comes Stockholm’s Encryptment with debut Dödens Födsel, a title that translates from their native Swedish as… wait, give me a second with Google Translate… my goodness! “Dead Fetus.” That’s grisly, but fair enough–the Kingdom of Metal is a tough place to be an angel or a fetus. Dödens Födsel was a random pluck from the Promo Sump, and I half-hoped to let it go neglected in the crush of list season and day-job deadlines. Then I pressed “play,” and the album assaulted me with a half-hour of crusty, blackened death vitriol.” Womb raider.
![Heads for the Dead – The Great Conjuration [Things You Might Have Missed 2022]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Heads-for-the-Dead-The-Conjuring-01-768x768.jpeg)
Main Project Resorption (n): a phenomenon that occurs when a band’s side project grows so vigorously that it threatens to ingest the entity from which it sprung. I’m not ready to diagnose Sweden’s mighty Wombbath as being vulnerable to Main Project Resorption just yet, but 2022 was a banner year for the outfit’s spinoffs.” Absorb this!
