“Last week I reviewed an album called Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light. This week, my album of choice is called Eternal Hayden. Both albums are post-metal. Both bands — Junius and PH — have done trilogies of albums, and these Eternal albums are their fourth.” What did we say about triple albums?
![Mizmor – Yodh [Things You Might Have Missed 2016]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Mizmor-Yodh-768x768.jpg)
“Even before hearing a single note from Portland, Oregon’s one-man blackened doom psalmist Mizmor (מזמור), the striking cover art of Yodh—a reproduction of an artwork by Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński—tells us everything we need to know. The two faces in a desolate dystopian landscape, robbed of their distinguishing features and reduced to mute, expressionless monoliths, speak to our subconscious selves.” Woe to the world, the doom has come.
“When faced with a work of art that purports to be avant-garde, invariably a question must be asked: is the all-but-total abandonment of classical song structure and melody a hallmark of innovation and a refutation of the musical establishment or is it merely the flotsam-and-jetsam of musicians lacking the skills to write a decent song in the first place?” Challenging.
“Here’s a sage piece of life advice you can have for free: always carefully check what you’ve typed into your Google search bar before hitting ‘enter.’ I recently fell foul of this little rule while researching ‘depressive suicidal black metal’ (or ‘DSBM’) for the purposes of writing this review. Unless you’re feeling particularly brave, you’ll just have to take my word for it that while DSBM and BDSM might look similar, they are definitely not the same thing. I learned this the hard way.” Are we still doing phrasing?
“‘…the universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.’ It’s this thought by French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry that sprung into my mind while listening and re-listening to the latest record by Dutch ambient black metal duo Urfaust. Their style was always born out of a sense of desolation and isolation, a tribute to emptiness, owing equally to dark ambient and metal.” Of being and ambience.
“Just like death and taxes, you can count on Svart Records to artfully bestow the weird and the wonderful. Ark of Contempt and Anger’s promo blurb begins by saying that ‘Sink have once again created an oddly compelling and strangely enchanting album that is truly in a league of its own.’ Add to that, Sink promises rich and complex compositions woven with enigmatic lyrics, and I’ll admit I had a hard time resisting this.” Plus there’s a cute dog on the cover!
“It was on a tepid spring night that I witnessed, for the first time, the show put on by three mysterious French shamans going by the name of Aluk Todolo. A psychedelic, trance-inducing “krautblack” assault washed over the audience, permeating and shaking each molecule and atom of their beings. An unforgettable experience.” Darkness, beauty and brutality.
“The music of American drone metal duo Sunn O))), even though structurally simplistic, is anything but easy to consume. The richness of their sound still pours through layered subtleties that require attentive listening lest they be drowned out by the incisively crumbling riffs.” It’s all about that riff, that riff, that riff.
“I learned a major lesson this year writing for Angry Metal Guy Industries Unlimited, Inc.. No, I still keep the toilet seat lid up after I go. Rather, band names are everything. This calendar year alone, I’ve reviewed bands named after long Biblical phrases, Roman numerals, house breaking your dog, and even a band that was one letter away from sending homophobic metalheads running for their nearest vial of eye-bleach. And now? Mammoth Storm from Sweden is here.” A hard rain is gonna fall.
“Longtime readers may recall the genesis of my infatuation with Hope Drone in late 2014 when I featured them on the very first Sampling Bias (um, yeah I’ll do another one of those sometime) which covered the proud continent of Australia. I lauded their self-titled debut as ‘possibly the most devastatingly nihilistic recording I’ve ever heard, both instrumentally and lyrically’.” Relapse blurbed that little line, so does Kronos love Hope Drone’s newest record enough to merit a second blurb? Or did he fawn himself into a corner only escape-able through a good panning?
