“Pinpointing the core sound Eye of Nix conjures proved difficult this last week and change. On one hand, I recognize the elements that compose the content within Ligeia—black metal, doom metal, opera, post-metal, a twist of psychedelia—but I struggle to come to a concrete solution as to what this record is.” The naming game.
“It’s only been thirteen months, but here we are. A new Firelink record. For those who missed it, The Inveterate Fire burst out of nowhere in May of last year, searing the ground with each blackened step through the burgeoning field of Dark Souls-themed metal. Melodic, devastating, and deceivingly mature, that first Firelink shrine blazed high up my year-end list. Needless to say, my expectations for Firelink reached unreasonable temperatures immediately after first learning of its release.” Fi-YAH!
“I don’t know what happened to me, but all of a sudden I started to like thrash metal sometime in the last year. Granted, the barking vocals endemic to purebred thrash still grate my senses, but when black metal or death metal is thrown in the mix I get sprung as hell. It’s for this reason that I absolutely love bands like Antiverse, whose vital combination of death metal and thrash metal kicks my ass on a regular basis. You know what else kicks my ass on a regular basis? This fucker right here.” Thrash in a blackened space.
“This is the last time I pick up something that more respectable reviewers wouldn’t. Steel Druhm, in his infinite wisdom, decided he had some other unfathomable thing to do besides review Hermeneutics, the fifth LP by Italian-Swiss symphonic prog-metal band Blut.” Blut force trauma.
“Wolves Den, a German blackened death quartet, unleashed an unsung monster of a record back in 2015 named Deus Vult. While it wasn’t genre-defining or anything like that, I often question why it gets such little fanfare. Perhaps with their sophomore full-length, Miserere, they can establish some kind of foothold in the heart-voids of our fair metal community.” Misery loves running with the pack.
“Yep. That’s a band name. Killitorous. Say it a couple times and soon you’ll see what they did there. Tasteful, right? I’ll be honest, it took me way too long to find it (ayyyy), but by that point I was already four listens into the Canadian supergroup’s sophomore record The Afterparty and was having too much fun to care about the silly double-entendre anymore. After all, we did give high marks to bands with such respectable names as Fvneral Fvkk and Shitfucker, right? So who am I to judge?” Tech-deathicus for the rest of us.
“Last year saw the first industrial record that I genuinely loved by Ascend the Hollow, and since then I’ve wondered why nobody else could seem to put together anything remotely as adventurous as that.” I can think of one reason.
“The brainchild of Frozen Crown’s Federico Mondelli and Sleeping Romance’s Federica Lanna, Volturian prioritizes fun over all. These tunes will get stuck in your head, you will kind of hate that they get stuck in your head, and you will be powerless to stop it if you give it the smallest opening.” Activate earworm lock!
“Once again, I picked promo for an irrelevant reason. German/Irish blackened death trio Khôra wound up in my review queue because their name sounds like the name of one of our cats (Kora). I feel like that’s a perfectly reasonable justification for album selection. If it isn’t, well, then I guess I don’t care. Khôra doesn’t care either, and put out whatever the hell they want regardless of what your tastes or expectations are.” Cats and jammers.
“If a sonic description of Greece’s Fallen Arise you require, too bad. The genre has been so deeply saturated since 1998-9’s Oceanborn that if you, dear readers, don’t know what you’re about to hear right now, it’s your own fault.” No enigmas here.
