“Antediluvian has always been a strange beast. Although undoubtedly akin to the aforementioned hordes of black/death density-meisters, these Oilers have always been slickly produced and solidly written. While acts like Grave Upheaval and Altarage are lost at murk in swaths of ambiance and distortion, Antediluvian prioritizes a strong tether of percussion to guide it.” You can’t punish the willing.
“Jim Matheos just might be the best guitar player nobody ever talks about. He’s all about tone, nuance, and restraint, which goes completely against the prog metal grain. I think of him as prog metal’s version of David Gilmour. I mean, Fates Warning, the man’s primary outlet, once released a progressive metal album with no guitar solos. Who does that? Matheos has been involved in a few projects that are well known and respected in the prog world – yes, Fates Warning, but also his Arch/Matheos albums with John Arch and OSI, his collaboration with Kevin Moore to name a couple. Tuesday the Sky, essentially a Matheos solo project, doesn’t fit in with any of these other projects.” Mindful Matheos.
“Steel Druhm recently announced loudly to the writers that someone should review some sludgy doom record that was probably pretty good. I fell over my desk and several trash cans reaching from the promo. Turns out, I was duped. First of all, Sweden’s Heathen Rites are not sludge.” Sludge misjudge.
“I was more than ready to write off Sermon of Flames as just another dissodeath album. It meets all the criteria: lurching riffs, wormy dissonance, bellowing insanity, and above all, violent disregard for its listeners. Its black/death breed recalls the mighty Mitochondrion or Abyssal with its hellish intensity and atmosphere – like many albums of its ilk. Just like every person, Sermon of Flames’ debut I Have Seen the Light, and It Was Repulsive is full of flaws and inconsistencies, highlights and strengths.” Things that cannot be unseen.
“Unless you only got into metal recently, you are sure to have an array of bands that you’ve listened to in the past and enjoyed, but for whatever reason you didn’t delve any deeper or keep up with their new releases. Occasionally you might see a namedrop somewhere and go “huh, yeah, I liked that band.” Sometimes you might even pick the thread back up. It’s how I got back into Madder Mortem, for instance. Other times, you shrug and move on, pursuing new thrills instead, making a solemn oath that you never fulfill, to one day get back to that enjoyable echo from the past. Such a moment of recognition struck me when I saw the name Thyrfing pop up in the promo box. “Thyrfing!” I said. “They were cool! Vansinnesvisor was a good album, I recall. They were kinda sorta big at the time, right?” Norse whisperers.
“When I was a diesel mechanic, I was regularly married to certain trucks. If you did a PM on it, you were now the expert on the truck. If the jackass driver filled it with gasoline instead of diesel, and you were the one that dropped the tanks and flushed the system, it was yours forever. If the Jakes and cruise control stop working and you spend eight hours ripping the entire dash apart to rewire everything that fried, you were definitely married to that truck. And, when that truck rolled back into the yard, everyone went quiet. They all knew you’d be dropping everything and your day would be in or under that piece of shit. They were quiet because you hate that fucking truck and you threw your favorite wrench set across the shop to show how much you hate it. And, as I was married to Kenworth Karen, I’m married to anything related to King Diamond and Mercyful Fate here at AMG.” Portrait of Fate.
“Fluisteraars was undoubtedly my biggest surprise discovery of 2020. Everything about Bloem was simultaneously right for me and completely wrong for me. But I came back to it, again and again, and finally, it wormed its way onto my year-end list and continues to be a staple of my listening for long walks on the side of the road. I was stunned to learn that they had a new album coming this year, but looking forward to new material from these guys.” Flowers of melo-evil.
“Way back in the golden, halcyon days of 2019, Wormwitch’s The Heaven That Dwells Within, with its wonderful mix of melody and brutality, became a consistent go-to album for a much younger, much less masked Felagund. Just two hellish years later, this Canadian quartet is back with Wolf Hex, their third full-length and another slab of melodic black metal. But does their latest measure up to my unfair expectations?” Of worm and wolf.
“Every now and then an unheralded act comes out of left field to whack you in the melon with a baseball bat forged of creativity and intensity. Colorado-based progressive death metal act Headshrinker just did that to me with their Callous Indifference debut. Combining rancid old school death with doom, suicidal-depressive black metal, and prog elements, this talented crew featuring members of Polyptych along with Havok’s Pete Webber on drums, created a deep dive into the complex and painful issue of mental illness and the soul-killing isolation and anguish it inflicts on those suffering from it. Feel good music this is not as the listener is plunged into a musical simulation of mental affliction with all its disorientation and unease.” Insanity and genius.
“Oxygen Destroyer is devoted to spreading the terrible gospel of the Kaiju — giant monsters who lay waste to cities, and often, each other — and their music matches that mission perfectly. Blending death metal and thrash metal in their many forms, the band paints with a varied influence palette, ranging from the deathened thrash of Morbid Saint, to the thrashened death of Morbid Angel, to the groovy violence of Demolition Hammer.” R U morbid?
