“Terry “Christbutcher” Clark sports an impressive discography through a number of Finnish groups of all creeds: brutal blackened death explorers Excommunion, deathmongers Dethroned, OSDM purveyors Cryptborn, and most notably to me, black/death teeth-kickers Maveth. His first release since Excommunion’s 2017 release Thronosis, he’s back in black under a new pharmaceutical-sounding project: Proscription.” Doctor’s command!
“The band sport a Mitochondrion or Adversarial styled take on death/black metal with a thrashy assault-heavy relentlessness combined with eldritch melodies and passages of doomy ominousness. These New Zealanders laid it on thick with 2012’s double LP The Obsidian Codex, expertly balancing relentless blackened death with ritualistic atmosphere and dense doom to create an experience that felt far shorter than its immense hour-and-thirty-five-minute runtime suggested. Enter 2017’s Malediction, which wasn’t… that. While offering a “shorter” listen at fifty-four minutes, it never managed to truly escape the doomy drudgery and wallowed in uneventfulness for nearly an hour. Enter 2020’s To the Death.” Death be not quick.
One month down in 2019 and we’re off to the races. January was by most accounts—excepting the eventual contrarians in the comments section, a relatively disappointing month. After an almost overwhelming and backloaded 2018, the first month of 2019 felt like a pretty tepid start to the year. Fortunately, there were still some diamonds in the rough. So here’s three albums—two which received the reviews they deserved and one which was unfairly maligned—that I think that you should give your consideration from January of 2019.
Adversarial are a ‘blackened-death’ band from Toronto who’s 2010 debut is out on Dark Descent Records. This is one record that I’d been meaning to get to since I got the promo months ago, but you know, no rest for the angry, so I never got there. Well, not until this week, when I was duly impressed by this band’s chops on their debut record All Idols Fall Before the Hammer. The tracks on here go between blistering and atmospheric, and it’s worth checking out if you’re a fan of death metal.
