Caladan Brood

Unru – Die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten Review

Unru – Die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten Review

“There’s something about abstractness in music that rides a fine line between tantalizing and off-putting. While anything tagged “avant-garde” is immediately greeted by a chorus of hissing and boos, there are ways to create effectively challenging tunes using relatively standard methods. Some metallic styles are born out of this aesthetic, as post-metal’s emphasis on landscapes or drone’s focus on overwhelming density spring to mind, but black metal has always maintained a bit more straightforward nostalgia in the unholy trinity: tremolo, blastbeats, and shrieks. Unru seeks to challenge such things.” Dare to be difficult.

Noctule – Wretched Abyss Review

Noctule – Wretched Abyss Review

Serena Cherry has a knack for melody. In her storied career with Svalbard, the charismatic vocalist and guitarist has co-written and performed a decade of melodic hardcore tinged with post-hardcore, post-metal, and black metal. Now, Cherry tries a little something different in her new solo project Noctule, hoping to “spread her dragon wings and take off in an intriguing musical direction on her own. A labor of love and isolation, Cherry composed and recorded the Noctule debut while in the UK Coronavirus lockdown. Opposed to the melodic hardcore leanings of Svalbard, she now bets it all on black in blackened release Wretched Abyss, an album themed after the popular RPG Skyrim.” Dragon, why do you cry?

Keys of Orthanc – Of the Lineage of Kings Review

Keys of Orthanc – Of the Lineage of Kings Review

“The title track and introduction for Of the Lineage of Kings, the fourth full-length release from Canadian Lord-of-the-Rings-meets-black-metal fans Keys of Orthanc, amusingly, feels like the perfect theme music for me as I compose this introduction paragraph. For one thing, this review is late — I’m not sure I’ve ever penned a review quite so long after the album has already come out. Life, it gets in the way. And yet, I am determined — determined, against all odds, to overcome the aforementioned life and get news of Of the Lineage of Kings out to you, the reader.” What heroes do.

Golden Ashes – In the Lugubrious Silence of Eternal Night Review

Golden Ashes – In the Lugubrious Silence of Eternal Night Review

“Black metal is great at it, as its entire purpose is to conjure blasphemous and decrepit images of icy forests and iconoclastic rituals, but there are twists to your snow-crusted Norwegian fjords and the sounds of Hail Satans: Austere’s desolate Australian deserts, Blut Aus Nord’s hellish industrial landscapes, and Saor’s Scottish highlands, to name a few. While images painted are up for grabs, the general consensus is one of darkness, bleakness, and spiritual desolation. But what happens when the black metal is, ya know, not that?” Bright darkness.

Cân Bardd – Nature Stays Silent Review

Cân Bardd – Nature Stays Silent Review

First-time long-time readers will note this site’s rep for lofty production expectations. Hell, even yours truly, who once indulged in sub-100 kbps Youtube rips, the food court Chinese of music formats, somehow finds himself infected with those same insidious ideals. Still, that total production meltdown, the one that drags down a perfectly otherwise great score and results in public gnashing of teeth, has escaped me. So when I saw that Nature Stays Silent was mixed by a 19-year-old one-man band ‘at home,’ I braced my eardrums for maximum pain.” Bardd of hearing.

RÛR – RÛR Review

RÛR – RÛR Review

“Oh, departures. Not traditionally a wildly anticipated experience, and yet to know someone is to invariably set the stage for a future farewell; all roads end in goodbye, whether spoken aloud, though silently alone, or else whispered in the dark before an audience of no one. Some goodbyes sing of poignant possibility, others give voice to the shape of grief to come. But the declaration of egress I now deliver unto you, my children, sounds… waaay more fuckin’ bleak than I had intended to, yo, good Jørn. In a nutshell, what I mean is that RÛR’s self-titled triumph is the last black metal review I intend to write for a while and it’s as befitting the occasion as they come.” Goodbye to necromance.