“I have history with Devil Sold His Soul, but not all of it good, especially when we parted on poor terms: I got fed up with Empire of Light‘s excessive vocals and didn’t give EP Belong ╪ Betray a fair chance. Loss, the first release in seven years, hits differently: it chronicles seven years of grief and personal loss from its creators. Is it the labor of love it was intended to be?” Devil in the details.
“Suffocate for Fuck Sake was one of those bands I’d heard good things about, but never quite got around to listening to properly. They’ve been around in the post-metal scene since 2004, though they never quite made it to “big name” status. They disappeared for nearly a decade, which probably didn’t help, before releasing their third album In My Blood in 2017. Here on the imaginatively titled Fyra (“Four”), they continue a tradition of tackling heavy topics with a theme of addiction.” Die.
“It’s April 2021 and our favorite Russians masquerading as Finns by way of Ukraine and Estonia are back with their ninth studio release. Ice Fleet is their first album laced with any English (in its title) and tells the true story of an unidentified fleet of ships discovered in Northern Russia in 1930, with its crew and cargo perfectly frozen in time. Kauan offered some of the best post-metal of the 2010s, culminating in the delicate and stirring Kaiho in 2017. It arguably deserved a spot on my list given that I return to it more than most from that year, so what are my thoughts with the passing of 4 years?” Frozen feelz.
“As someone who’s candidly gone on record about mental health in the past, it’s always a gamble for me to dive into an album that heavily focuses on such a difficult subject. It’s not often that it’s treated with the necessary weight and care that it undoubtedly deserves, and more often than not, for every one An Isolated Mind‘s I’m Losing Myself, there are about 50 of these littering the scene, taking up way too much space and energy. If there’s one band, though, that can tackle it with grace and honesty, it’s Pennsylvania’s Zao.” Corridors of the mind.
“Synths are the future. It’s only logical now that the guitar, an antique device used by nostalgic, decrepit moshers in back-alley dive bars, is disowned. The guitar is dead. Long live the synth. Long live, especially, synthpunk and noise rock which, in the wake of that new, hip arcade game Cyberpunk 2077, is the in thing. In the satellite station of Aarhaus, Denmark – 166 cosmomiles north-east of Copenhagen – a young band by the name of Hiraki corrupt data by producing an abyssal synth-punk noise that takes influence from the likes of Daughters, Street Sects, and The Body.” Wall-E-core.
“I reckon most of you are familiar with the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none.” Some of you may even say the full version is supposed to follow up with “but better than a master of one,” though this is a modern addition, not a historical version. In music, things aren’t so cut and dry. With some bands, the focus brought by doing one thing well serves the music better; other artists seem to think that the more eclectic their influences the better. Plaguewielder seems to be more of a latter mind; searching across the web reveals tags relating the band to sludge, black metal, doom, atmospheric metal, post-metal and so on.” Jack of all plagues.
“Oddball French heavy rock outfit Los Disidentes Del Sucio Motel (LDDSM) is difficult to assign to a specific genre or style. Over their career they’ve been described as stoner, psychedelic and prog rock, and none of that is completely wrong. Nor does it give you the full story. Now they’re back after 4 years in limbo with fourth album Polaris, and they’re every bit as tough to pigeonhole as always. If I were to make a Hail Mary effort to describe their style, it would be alt-rock mixed with prog, post-rock, and post-metal, with grunge/stoner/desert elements lurking at the edges.” A multiverse of influences.
“Collaborations between artists are usually a tantalizing prospect. In recent years we’ve had a handful of high-quality collaborations: Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas, Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle, and Spectral Lore and Mare Cognitum the cream of the recent crop. Collaborations can be tricky, especially in the age of the supervirus and restricted travel. Communication of ideas is vital. A collaboration can either sound like a blissful mesh of an artist’s best traits or a haphazard collision of distant sound. Ben Price, the sole member of doom/sludge project At The Graves, has buried himself in a casket with the sludge/black/death/you-name-it three piece Myopic. A Cold Sweat of Quiet Dread is their first collaborative full-length.” Blood, sweat, graves, and bad eyesight.
“Pupil Slicer, although undeniably a trio, is vocalist/guitarist Davies’ brainchild through and through, seen in the guitar-and-vocals focus. Mirrors, following up an EP and a series of splits since their 2015 formation, combines its assets into a mathcore Frankenstein’s monster: twisted guitar work and frantic shrieks, Josh Andrews’ blasting drum tracks of an abandoned post-black project, and a healthy dose of Luke Fabian’s formidable bass and gutturals.” Eye on the prize.
“When non-Poles think about Polish metal, we usually think of the black variety. Well, that and a metal front-man with an absolutely enormous forehead. More of a fivehead, really. What we don’t think of, when we think of Polish metal, is atmospheric post-metal. Since 2014, Warsaw’s Sunnata has been trying to change that. Will their fourth full-length win them a share of the evil coffee market?” Post sells, but who’s buying?
