“Some things seem to be just one tweak away from being great. Dead Carnage is an okay band name, but it seems a bit redundant. Isn’t most carnage dead? Better, I think, would be Live Carnage. The image of butchered and bloody bodies, moaning and clinging to their last vestiges of life, seems a lot more brutal to me than any imagery evoked by “Dead Carnage.” But hey, I’m a guy that listens to Goatpenis—a band’s moniker has never stopped me from checking out an album before.” Live undead.
“A mere six months ago I wrote a TYMHM piece on the second Creature album Contes Funèbres, noting that while that album had a black metal base and clear elements of 70s prog, it also contained an anachronistic theatricality, like a corpse-painted staging of Les Misérables. If Contes Funèbres was broadway, Ex Cathedra is opera.” Shock me, Amadeus.
“Protest the Hero couldn’t have known everything that’s happened since their last EP, Pacific Myth, in 2016. Since Rody Walker’s vocal cord scare last year. Hell, since announcing their fifth full-length in April. Protest the Hero couldn’t have known, and yet Palimpsest couldn’t be timelier. Though centering on key events in America’s early 20th century, the record reads so close to our current, woeful zeitgeist that my apophenia is still hovering at Threat Level QAnon.” Protests, man.
“Scott “Wino” Weinrich is at a point in his lengthy and influential music career where he can do pretty much anything he wants. He can cut more albums with his seminal doom act, The Obsessed, or perform with that other seminal doom act, Saint Vitus. He might even pursue collaborations with a who’s who of musicians as he did with Dave Grohl in Probot and with German dark folk artist Conny Ochs. Another option would be to record an album of stripped down, bare bones acoustic Americana rock. It seems as Wino ages, his heart gravitates back to that final option more and more.” Forever Wino.
“Fellwarden is an atmospheric black metal project created by Fen frontman, the Watcher and joined by fellow Fen drummer, Havenless. Much like many black metal projects we know (think Agalloch or Panopticon), Fellwarden’s music is inspired by the nature that surrounds them. For the Watcher and Havenless, the nature that surrounds them means the rearing landscapes and quiet, understated majesty of the fells of North-Western England.” Mournclouds in your coffee.
“Where do Pyrrhon go next? It’s a question that, to my surprise, I had not truly considered. In pushing the walls as far out as they would go with 2017’s stunning What Passes for Survival, the band became torch-bearers in death metal’s unexplored corridors. The quartet synthesize techniques from technical death metal, noise rock, and free jazz to craft ungainly structures and cut winding new paths through the labyrinth, resulting in two of the most original and contentious records of the 2010s. In Abscess Time, the band have a chance to explode into the new decade with a bold new direction.” Time, tide, and transformation.
“As a reviewer, it always feels good when you correctly identify a band’s influences. Hmm, I thought to myself upon first listening to The Third Kind’s Man vs Earth debut, this kind of sounds like All Out War. It turns out there’s a good reason for that. Formed in 2015, Kind count All Out War guitarist Taras Apuzzo amongst their ranks, along with other members from a slew of New York hardcore bands.” Earth had it coming.
“I really should know better by now. I thought that I’d learned early in my career as an unpaid music journalist, back when I was known simply as Nameless_n00b_11, that Steel Druhm and his gifts are not to be trusted. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a fair master, to be sure, but he also has a tendency to entertain himself by being overwhelmingly cruel. During one of our recent socially distant AMG staff Zoom chats, he told me that he had a promo picked out just for me, one that “sounds like Skelator if they actually tried.”” Steel gifts are for closers.
“Generally speaking, bands don’t wait until their 25th year in existence to hit their peak. Don’t tell that to Pale Divine though. Pennsylvania’s best kept secret has been quietly churning out beefy classic doom albums since the turn of the century, basing their sound around Trouble, Black Sabbath and Pentagram, with a gritty biker rock edge making everything feel sturdy and muscular.” Time has been good to some of us.
“Black metal has a weird reputation. If you ask anybody walking down the street about it, given its nuances of church burning and Satanism, they’ll shudder and tell you “that stuff is scary, man.” However, if you ask a person who regularly listens to it, it becomes a different beast entirely: using Burzum’s self-titled as an example, you’ll hear an angsty Ewok grumbling about his mom taking away his Satanic Bible while abusing a Walmart guitar.” Fear and loathing in Portugal.
