“Never heard of Serdce? I can’t blame you. The Belarussian prog-death group has been tramping around the metalsphere in undeserved obscurity since 1997 and Timelessness is the fourth(!) LP to spill from their obscenely talented hands and the first to be released by the metal messiahs at Blood Music.” Did you miss this slab of prog-death in 2014? Well, fix that in 2015!
“Another year, another death metal band you’ve never heard tell of. Infra hail from Portugal (now checked off of the “Kronos’ global domination” list) and aim to please with groovy, dissonant blackened death that’s nearly as underground as the Earth’s mantle and comparably crushing.” Two songs, one Kronos.
“Through my own charm, genius and palpable immodesty, I have single-handedly, along with Grymm, convinced the Angry Metal Elders to grant me a big boy year-end list. My year’s tenure in the catacombs of AMG headquarters has proved fruitful beyond measure thanks not only to my brilliant colleagues and our dedicated readers…” Pretty much anybody gets a list these days. There goes the neighborhood!
“The goat’s head. The pentagram. The horns. Metal’s tropes know no death – unsurprising, given their occult origins. Yet one entity remains as persistent as the others, but far less well studied. The Sphere.” Sphere is the mind killer, but stick with Kronos and he’ll show you the only thing to sphere…is sphere itself.
“Yer Metal Is Olde was started to honor records that we’re 10, 20, or 30 years old. Kronos noticed, however, that we’ve never reviewed Fleshgod Apocalypse’s magnum opus and, not only that, but that Oracles has turned five in 2014! So in honor of one of the best brutal/technical death metal records ever made, here’s a Yer Metal Is (Not Particularly) Olde for this brilliant work of art.”
“Yep, this is one of those albums. There’s not a sphere to be had on that cover, much less a corpse, but it remains one of the more striking and subtly unnerving pieces of album art around. It’s not like other covers, and Dimesland is not like other bands. Psychogenic Atrophy is the Oakland, California quartet’s first LP, hoping to ride on the coattails of bizarre death metal bands like Gorguts and Pyrrhon that we all love so dearly. Yet Psychogenic Atrophy provides us with a plastic disc filled with a music that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike technical death metal.” No sphere to be had, but this is far from bad.
“Archspire are, first and foremost, fast. Everything about The Lucid Collective is tight, taught and percussive, from the brutal-death-leaning snare tone to vocalist Oli Peters’ inhumanly pummeling rap-growled vocal lines.” Kronos brings you another slab of rotting death you may have missed. Have at it!
“Being quite the Revocation fan, I was pleasantly surprised earlier this year to see that Dave Davidson’s partner in crime, Dan Gargiulo, was involved in a death metal side project. That band, Artificial Brain, released their first full-length, Labyrinth Constellation this February, and we unfortunately didn’t get the chance to review it. As some of our more kvlt readers pointed out, this was a mistake.” We missed it, you bitched about it, now we make recompense.
“Ghost Chorus Among Old Ruins is the last album out this year that I expect to give a shit about, and what a loose, worm-riddled mass that shit is. Baring Teeth’s first offering, Atrophy, is a must for those who want to understand the future of death metal – discordant, abstract, disturbing and forward-thinking as a Rodin sculpture strapped to a freight train. If that intro didn’t get you reading, there’s nothing else we can do.
“If you’ve never heard Beyond Creation’s début The Aura, honestly, what are you doing with your life? Are you happy with who you are? Because you damn well shouldn’t be. The Aura is, and I have no reservations in saying this, the best death metal début since Onset of Putrefaction. It also might be the best technical/progressive death metal album this decade has yet to offer. Out of complete fucking nowhere, a bunch of flaxen-locked French-Canadians self-released what might just be the pinnacle of modern tech-death. It’s brutal, it’s heavy, it’s overpowering, astonishing, and inventive, yet there also exists nuance, care, and maturity in the writing and performances that is completely unparalleled. The album is damn near perfect. This means, sadly, that Earthborn Evolution is doomed from the start.” Well, that seems pretty darn unfair!
