“…and though the word of the land was good — for blessed are they who toil as to bring glory unto Jørn — there were those that spake a word which decried all that is right and trve, and through their blasphemy bestowed they unto the land a pox which made a mockery of these things rendered unto all by our Lord’s Jørn-ness. ‘Behold!’ spake the Muppet ‘ye heathens ov Canada! Hear me, I beg! Renounce thy false idol and remove its name from thine tongues forever!'” Muppet the Revelator.
“‘Délétère’. A word which translates from French into English as ‘deleterious’. Aside from sounding distinctly metal, it apparently means ‘harmful’ or ‘damaging’. Bear this in mind. Addressing the band that is the subject of today’s review, Délétère partake in the affecting métal noir Québécoise scene.” Québéc-core.
“Life can often be confusing, gross and unnecessarily sticky. Three words one might use to describe Canada’s Tomb Mold, who, after tearing classic death metal asunder with 2017’s debut, Primordial Malignity, have since returned with an expanded line-up and another installation of their corporal jigsore quandry. Manor of Infinite Forms arrives rancid, raucous and ready to rot.” Rotting in the free world.
“Each month there’s another thrash release and each month—depending on opinion—they get better or worse. Spain’s Crisix brought it in March. Germany’s Traitor added to it in April. Now it’s May and Canada is here to contribute to the next batch of old-school thrash. And what does Infrared’s Saviours sound like?” Excuse me, friend, do you have a moment to talk about old school thrash and Saviours?
“The Angry Metal Promo Bin is a fickle mistress. She can conceal highly sought after treasures by surrounding them with infinite no-names, and she can trick you into believing that Rapture is Rapture. Worse yet, she mistags like a motherfucker, calling this genre that and slapping the black metal label on albums with wild abandon. It’s frustrating enough when selecting an unknown band only to find that she’s lied again, but there’s something even more personally offensive in seeing a band that you actually do know and love flagged under the wrong genre. Enter: Wilt’s Ruin, billed (like everything else) as black metal.” Black is the new bin.
“There was a time some years ago where I never read anything about metal on the internet. My knowledge of the genre came from the music itself and books like Ian Christe’s indispensable Sound of the Beast. My barometer of taste was my group of friends; a record that we’d spin endlessly and enjoy together was a great one. Kataklysm’s Prevail was one such record, and it’s remained a favorite throughout the years. Entering into the digital wilds of the internet age, I was shocked to find that there existed people who didn’t think the Maurizio Iacono fronted version of Kataklysm was great. All the pedantic arguments in the world never dimmed my enthusiasm for the band, and every new release of theirs is met with great anticipation from me.” Meditative destruction.
“Though the list of bizarre shit to be experienced and eventually incorporated into the norm only continues to grow, there are still some things that you just don’t expect to actually encounter for yourself. Cheese-stuffed fried chicken, lapdogs that aren’t insufferable yippy shits, an album brutal enough for Kronos… each of these wonderful oddities exists, but they’re hard at work being hard to find and proving my point. Among this list of wonderment and rarity is deathcore that I can tolerate beyond 15 seconds.” Buried treasurecore.
“The scene: Endscape #1047, adj: barren, industrial, gratuitous visual filters. The hero: Gas Mask Mook, exhausted after another long day of near-future photoshoots and fighting off angry crows. The soundtrack: the precise blend of death, thrash, groove, and metalcore that the astute reader might have already surmised lies behind this cavalcade of tropes. Montreal’s BornBroken forego silly grammatical conventions in their pursuit of a record that welcomes all comers, within the Hall and without. Is the soundtrack to your apocalypse, or will BornBroken be forced to face some harsh truths of their own?” Gas mask revival?
“In 2004, a close friend of mine lost not one but both of his parents in the Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives. While I hope I will never experience tragedy as dramatic and profound as his, the impact reverberated throughout our small group, and to a comparatively infinitesimal degree, we shared in his loss. Without wanting to cheapen such sorrow, doom metal — particularly in its more extreme iterations — has always offered me a similar catalytic capacity to know its author’s pain.” Tragic beauty.
“Before Beyond Creation, there was Augury. At the tail end of the 2000s, the Quebeckers were at the forefront of the proggy side of tech-death along with Anata and Obscura, and their 2009 LP Fragmentary Evidence is a too-often overlooked milestone in the genre – perhaps because so many contemporary tech death albums (Cosmogenesis, Those Whom the Gods Detest, Oracles, Everything is Fire) were just as good and bore follow-up releases. Yes, for a long time it seemed that Augury had been outright replaced by Beyond Creation, who snatched the torch of Montreal’s world-class tech death scene, but a bit shy of a decade later, here we are with Illusive Golden Age.” Back from the tech-dead.
