“When Demoniac released So It Goes back in 2020/2021, they wowed a lot of metal folks with their unique take on classic thrash. That record attacked the genre in so many interesting ways, using progressive song structures to create a thrash journey that had to be heard to be believed. But the thing that really pushed these Chileans into the spotlight was their use of interesting instrumentation, including some piano and, most notably, the clarinet.” So it went.
“AMG’s Unsigned Band Rodeö” is a time-honored tradition to showcase the most underground of the underground—the unsigned and unpromoted. This collective review treatment continues to exist to unite our writers in boot or bolster of the bands who remind us that, for better or worse, the metal underground exists as an important part of the global metal scene. The Rodeö rides on.” Death in July.
“Let me just address the elephant in the room: Voidmilker? Sure, metal’s got lots of voids – don’t even get me started. However, milk is far from the most metal liquid, unless you thought Milking the Goatmachine was the most kvlt thing since Mayhem took a shit on the ashes of an unsuspecting Norwegian church. And kvlt Voidmilker is, because black metal is the name of the game.” Got void?
“The last time Sergio Catalán released a full-length album—only four months ago, because of course—I opened my review with a rhetorical question: Sergio González Catalán—can anyone stop this man? Does anyone want to? Now, in June of 2023, the answer is clear: only Sergio can stop Sergio, and today, in a sense, he has chosen to act. Two Years of Grief, the sixth full-length release from his solo project Rise to the Sky marks an end to a “series” he began two years ago on the passing of his father, Sergio González Bombardiere.” Productive pain.
“The somewhat ominously titled…However, It Still Moves is the debut of Chilean death-doomsters Sporae Autem Yuggoth. Without being able to parse the Latin, but being informed by the promo material that theirs is a “Lovecraftian moniker,” all this adds up to quite a foreboding piece. This portent proves pretty accurate upon pressing play. What unfolds is an hour of spooky, synth-accented, gritty death metal that’s essentially funeral doom with a grimy low-fi production.” No sudden movements.
“Sergio González Catalán—can anyone stop this man? Does anyone want to? Year after year, EP after EP, full-length after full-length, there is no slowing him down. Less than two months into 2023, the man behind Rise to the Sky and Winds of Tragedy is back with another full-length, the sophomore album for his latter black metal project.” Hating down time.
“Infusing the traditional Black Sabbath-style doom with smoky desert vigor, El Camino de la Serpiente (The Path of the Snake) rocks and rumbles rambunctiously. There’s a pleasing looseness to the music, a cool devil-may-care swagger that makes it impossible not to move along to the many, many riffs packed into the 46-minute running time.” On this rock, they will build their doom.
“Wheat dies fast; chaff lives on forever. What that means for thrash, I don’t know, because that genre will relive the good ole days until the barn burns down. I also don’t know what that means for Trastorned. The Chilean quartet have spent 15 years working out the perfect homage to the genre with their debut, Into the Void. It’s mean. It’s fast. It sounds exactly how you want it to sound. But those three points mean little these days, and it will take so much more for these thrashers to survive the thresher.” Harvest tunes.
“At this point, discussing the impressive release schedule for music written by Sergio Catalán feels redundant. In fewer than three years of activity, Rise to the Sky has released five full-length albums alongside two EPs, one of which came out fewer than six weeks ago. And yet, here he is again, the main man of the one-man (alongside drummer Emidio Alexandre of Dark Oath) project Winds of Tragedy, only this time, the name of the game is black metal, not doom, and As Life Drifts Away is not the latest in a long line of releases, but the debut.” New style, same feelz.
“I don’t generally like change. Even an objectively positive change to my life—a new job, for example—takes some time to win me over. In music, however, I’m a lot more flexible—I love it when things are different, odd, unexpected. Rise to the Sky, the death-doom metal project from Chile’s Sergio Catalán, appeals strongly to the former impulse. Now releasing his fifth full-length release in three years (and sixth total release in the last two), Rise to the Sky’s gradual shift away from “death-doom” and into “just-doom” has been little short of glacial. Every Day, A Funeral is, in many ways, exactly what we’ve come to expect from Rise to the Sky, but familiarity is not something I scoff at, and his material has been plenty solid so far.” In the wake of graves.
