“In 2014, my main claim to AMG fame or, if your tastes are less than impeccable, infamy, lay in awarding Alestorm Record o’ the Year for the truly excellent Sunset on the Golden Age. I did some other good deeds as well, such as spotlighting Entrapment’s top-shelf Swe-death platter Lamentations of the Flesh.” Cause one out of two is kinda bad.
“Soulburn, despite the lack of output over the last two decades, possesses quite the rich history. Starting off as the successor to death/doom overlords Asphyx in 1996 before they returned in 2010, drummer Bob Bagchus adopted the Soulburn name again in 2013 in a project featuring fellow Asphyx member Eric Daniels and Swedish one-man death-metal factory, Rogga Johansson.” No Rogga, no peace!
“‘…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.
“The interesting tag of “gloomy death metal” was what initially intrigued me of War Will Reign. I envisaged atmospheric darkness or gothic strains mixed in with death metal which was definitely appealing. Well more fool me as it turns out this was not entirely accurate: instead, Prevail emerge from their dark, Dutch hole brandishing a more straight-forward, brutal form of vitriol.” The promo sheet fibbed? How dare they?!
“And so we return to An Autumn for Crippled Children for their sixth full-length in as many years. I was reluctant to take Eternal, being acutely aware of the ultimatum I set following their last album: evolve or die. Their work was already stagnating, both within their discography and within the album itself for its highly consistent song structures. There is a formula for my feelings towards this successor. Take The Long Goodbye; add nearly 2 years; multiply by duller melodies.” Sleepy autumns and dimming futures.
“In the context of reviewing an album, it’s surely one of the most cardinal of fundamentals to avoid the dreaded track-by-track format. The approach is dull, seems amateurish, and is usually indicative of a barrage of verbose superlatives, almost entirely allergic to the mighty Oxford comma. So what, oh what, is a Ferrous to do when faced with an album consisting of only 5 songs of spiraling, sludge-inspired doom?” Save Ferrous!
“Hailing from the Netherlands, doom duo Swampcult offer us sophomore outing The Festival – this time in full concept album regalia. We have all heard the myriad odes to Cthulhu and the Elder Ones, of star spawned atrocities and dark bloodlines, replete with many a tentacle toting album cover. Thematically speaking, originality is barely worth discussing; the real question is, as always: is it any good?” Get in your LoveCraft!
“When the band’s highly anticipated Deathhammer came out in 2012 it became and remains one of my favorite metal records of the 2010’s. Now Incoming Death is upon us, and these death-doom peddling Dutchmen are back to slay ultra-loud once more.” Back to the rack!
“The immense advertising campaign inadvertently carried out by certain English street signs notwithstanding, Dead End is a strange and largely uninspiring name for a death-doom band. A name like Paradise Lost brings to mind Milton’s epic poem about the Fall of Man, Katatonia suggests an inescapable numbness, and My Dying Bride evokes a mental horror show. Dead End, on the other hand, brings to mind seeing a sign that means I have to make a three-point turn before I reach the end of the road I’m driving on. I don’t exactly enjoy three-point turns, but they certainly don’t fill me with dread.” Fear the cvl-de-sac.
“The cultish devotion to contemplating endless variations of Descartes’s “evil demon” question mixed with Hume’s ridiculous skepticism has led some philosophers to seriously contemplate if saying “I have hands” is a valid assertion because we can’t definitively prove that we’re not just brains in vats (BIVs) imagining the whole world, our hands included. Somehow this line of thought is still taken seriously, and it’s given us plenty. It’s given us proof positive that if your philosophy abandons Aristotle and Aquinas, it’s going to be terrible. It gave us The Matrix; a good action flick. It’s also given us a record based around wondering whether our world is actually just an elaborate VR simulation in the form of Epica’s The Holographic Principle.” To glee or not to glee.
