“If your home country only has a whopping 172 bands documented on The Metal Archives, with roughly half of them split up or otherwise disbanded, there’s a decent chance that relatively few people have ever heard your particular take on metal before. Such is the case for Erdve, a fledgling four-piece emerging from the enigmatic Lithuanian underground.” Small scene, big sound.
“This January, the Angry Metal Gods saw fit to bless us with multitudes of favor during what strange, countless aeons of headbanging have typically proven to be the darkest of times for trve believers, and we all say thank-ya. February it may be, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to say goodbye to Jørnuary tidings, and it’s definitely not time to stop saying thank-ya. By the deity-defying powers of Muppets, France, and procrastination, let us bask in the revitalizing glory of 2018’s expectations-shattering induction for just a little longer. Friends, meet Viscères, the second full-length by Bind Torture Kill.” Fashionably late and brvtal.
“Italy’s Abysmal Grief have been doing horror-themed doomed things for 22 years. That’s a lot of time to be doing anything, perhaps enough that one might expect something downright brilliant from a band with such experience, but riddle me this: when’s the last time you encountered a brilliant 22-year-old?” Young, dumb and fulla doom.
“A long time ago, on a website far, far away, I stumbled across a trve underground gem: Pantheion, the punishing debut of South Africa’s Crow Black Sky. Their take on blackened death was unique and impressive, and though the website was deemed a complete failure and ultimately collapsed into obscurity, I never lost interest in Crow Black Sky. Years passed, proper whore websites rose to power, and albums came and went, all without so much as some light clucking from the promising act. My tiny, blackened heart-thing spent many long nights petitioning a Crow-less sky, lifting its skinny metaphoric fists like antennas to Jørn and praying for the call of the bird. Eventually my hope went the way of common sense, gone and pretty much forgotten. So it goes, yo. Then on January 17, 2018, Jørn sent me a miracle.” Well, he is the Crow King.
“I try not to expect much from you people, but I think it’s safe to assume that one or two of you just may have heard of one Philip H. Anselmo, and this being the case you may (the ‘may’ is silent) have an opinion regarding the man. I don’t particularly care about any of that, but he definitely does, and this is painfully clear on Choosing Mental Illness As a Virtue, Phil’s second full-length endeavor with The Illegals.” Philling in the gaps.
“Let me tell you something which you might already know but have most likely never heard stated directly: Master-baiting is incredibly easy. To set a Muppet trap, one only needs a handful of specific pearls to effectively get me off of one musical tangent and thrusted furiously into another. Slap the black metal tag on something, slather it in cvlt artwork and croon it to me in a foreign tongue and I’m about as sonically revved up as they come.” Muppets are cheap dates.
![Slow – V – Oceans [Things You Might Have Missed 2017]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Slow-Oceans-001-1-768x768.jpg)
“I’m no stranger to emptiness, I have used music as an outlet for my own struggles with depression for almost thirty years and my music library is positively littered with negativity. The sounds of being depressed have haunted my ears in varying shades of grey for as long as I can remember, but never before have I heard an album embody depression itself with the same level of unnerving perfection as Slow’s V – Oceans does.” I see a slow darkness.
![Cascades – Cascades [Things You Might Have Missed 2017]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cascades-Cascades-001-768x767.jpg)
“This might be difficult to believe, coming from an adult who pretends to be a Muppet and uses his free time to write about metal for $0.00/hr, but sometimes I make decisions which are… well, I won’t say ‘stupid’, as I’m a freakin’ genius, yo….But being of such mortal-mindset transcendence, I’ve been known to choose me a choice or two that made roughly zero sense to roughly everyone who wasn’t me. I walk the Oz-ian line of ideas most frequently when I’m out Bandcamping, where something as simple as a particularly fetching album cover can damn me to another week of poverty.” Live for art, not money.
![Pillorian – Obsidian Arc [Things You Might Have Missed 2017]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Pillorian-Obsidian-Arc-001-1-768x768.jpg)
“There is a river in us all. It flows a unique spirit through our veins, the life blood of individuality. It gives our identities health and life, and drowns the rest of the world. We float along our own rivers of inspiration, each current of catharsis unique to its respective sojourner yet universally binding us in our need to follow these fjords on a slow course to oblivion, until there is nothing left of us here. Dark is the River ov Muppet, not unlike the waves of Black Lake Ni∂stång which carried me through the falling snow of Maine’s dead winter days for years. What I’m trying to say is that I really, really miss Agalloch.” Join the club, bub.
“Oh, December. That special time of year, when the masses try to buy their way out of SAD, supermarkets become more unbearable than usual thanks to seasonal saccharine soundtracks, and even the AMG promo bin transforms into a smoldering heap of nope. Some blind themselves to the solstice’s sadness with festive lights, others drown it in nog, but let me assure you: there will be no happiness.”
