“With a name and origin as mysterious as the chilling introduction of their eponymous debut EP, Nameless Void is the astral black metal duo of SN (music) and RM (vocals). Based on their description, Nameless Void draws similarities to noise/dark ambient black metal bands like Gnaw their Tongues and the terror noise-metal of Vessel of Iniquity.” I’ve been through the void on a horse with no name.
“I slink out of the Double R Diner booth I’m seated in and saunter over to where Audrey Horne is swaying in the center of the restaurant. Eyes closed, head back, fingers loosely splayed out, I join her in an unhurried groovy dance and lose myself to the music. I watch as a wash of color on the back of my eyelids slowly morphs with the ebb and flow of the music. The soundtrack to our dance, however, is strangely not Angelo Badalamenti’s jazz instrumental but “Muted Shifting of Space,” the hypnotic opening track on BIG|BRAVE’s new fourth full-length album A Gaze Among Them.” Stranger, louder things.
“I’m naturally drawn to tags that promise something slow and heavy, so when I saw “blackened doom” next to the name Nibiru, you’d forgive me if visions of another Indian danced in my head. In reality, Salbrox, the sixth full length by these Italians, would be better described as spoken word noise/drone metal. This curve ball may have knocked some reviewers off balance, but bitch, I went to art school.” School is way out.
“Sunn O))) is not well received around these parts. When AMG’s distinguished editors and contributors were given the opportunity to review these droning doomsters, it was met with such reactions as GardensTale‘s verbal bitch-slap “I’d rather stick my hand in a blender” or Mark Z.‘s sick burn “Can I just review my washing machine running for two hours instead?” Love ’em or hate ’em, we can all agree on one universal idea about drone: it can be boring as fuck.” O)))) Boy.
“A certain thespian poise dominates throughout Syntheosis, the piece originally commissioned for Roadburn Festival 2018 and then turned into a proper studio recording. Highly conceptual, Waste of Space Orchestra narrate a quite demented story somewhere between magical realism and occult horror. The album develops intently and purposefully, tracing the lines of an imagined ritual and its performers, three mysterious creatures that aim ‘to open a portal that will suck them into a different reality of brain-mutilating color storms and ego-diminishing audio violence.’” Waste not, want more.
Isolation, misery and despair. These are the grey building blocks A Swarm of the Sun use to craft their unique soundscapes of depression and suffering. The work of Erik Nilsson and Jakob Berglund, this project has explored the human experience in harrowing ways, most notably on 2015s masterpiece of pain, The Rifts. That album cut a hole in my soul like no other album ever did, even though I was in a good place in life at the time with no particular reason to bask in the suffocating despair the band so effortlessly conjures. Their sparse brand of post-rock/metal and quasi-doom is unlike anything else out there, possessed of a grim power that drains all the light and joy from the world, consigning you to endless cancer wards and funeral parlors to witness the grace and desperation that comes at the end of life. The Woods sees the dour duo return with another dose of downer post-rock, and it’s predictably bleak and unsettling.” The hearts of darkness.
“Unless you’re a polar bear, six straight weeks of below average temperatures will destroy your spirit. Rather than hunting for fun, uplifting, Record o’ the Month-caliber albums, you will find yourself dredging the promo bin for anything bitter and morose. Thus I stumbled across Megaton Leviathan, a band specializing in all things doom, drone, and shoegaze. Mage is mastermind Andrew James Costa Reuscher and his ever-changing band’s third album, and if the promo blurb is remotely accurate, its “borderline narcotic compositions” should be just what I need to push me even further into early winter doldrums.” How much does a gaze weigh?
“The appeal of Shone’s work, to me, has never been in its horizontal structure but in its exploration of novel pathways to create sound and the ways that Shone pieces novel noises together to act as riffs and melodies that produce memorable—dare I say catchy—music. How he produces a sound that’s so thoroughly chained to the physicality of its own creation. How he uses actual weight, in the form of a prison-like array of custom-fabricated instruments, to produce what, when we experience it, we call ‘heavy.'” Building the machine.
“Stepping out of your comfort zone is often a healthy thing. Slither away from the soft bed you know into the cold bath of the unknown and you might find yourself with a new affection you never knew existed. When it comes to metal, by and large, this means black metal for me. Though I’ve run into the occasional band that surprises me with articulate frostiness, such as Mistur and Gaerea, the genre as a whole tends to linger outside my grasp. So here I am once more, venturing into the obtuse murk, with the harsh glare of Essenz, a German outfit of cryptically abbreviated band members.” From comfort to cvlt.
“Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one before: lofty, esoteric song titles and album names, a promo picture of a single dude who looks like one of the choir guys from Batushka and goes by just his initials, and very little-to-no-internet presence at all, so looking for much information on the “band” in question, other than the fact that Adversvm is a German one-man act, is an exercise in futility… all these things would have you screaming, “Fuck, not another one-man black metal band.” And I would sympathize with you completely if it was accurate. You see, though, Adversvm is a one-man funeral doom band hoping to make a name for himself in a steadily-growing genre.” One slow man.
