“Ysgaroth is a “progressive extreme metal” band from Vancouver, their self-released Storm Over a Black Sea being their debut. While I’ve never entirely understood the phrase “extreme metal,” these Canucks throw everything and the kitchen sink into their poutine platter: black metal shrieks and tremolo, thrashy riffs, hardcore drumming, technical noodling, and avant-garde post-metal/sludge strangeness for a multi-car pileup with multiple fatalities.” Frequent wind.
“While I’ve traditionally identified as a basic black metal bitch, my listening habits of late have hovered firmly above death metal territory. The art of the Big Dumb Riff has held absolute command of my Spotify search bar, and it’s all thanks to the diversity the genre pool has spawned in over three decades of evolution. Just as I finish my most recent round of dick flattening at the hands of something as unflinchingly savage as Black Curse, I know I can hop to the opposite end of the technical axis to enjoy similarly aggressive highs in a fresh context. Cryptic Shift‘s debut is about as far from something like Black Curse as you can imagine on the caveman riff spectrum, but those same thrills are all here.” Up Shift’s creek.
“F is for friends who do stuff together. U is for u Kronos and me. N is for anywhere and anytime at all down here in the rad-soaked sea. Fuck that! F is for fire that burns down the whole town! U is for uranium…. BOMBS! N is for no survivors, when you listen to Nuklearth!” Containment is for posers.
“It’s hard to believe considering my current taste, but back in the mid 00s I consumed all the tech death I could. I devoured Arsis, Deeds of Flesh, Origin, and all the other bands who were just coming into their own in the midst of MySpace and metalcore. My tastes have changed since then, but it doesn’t take much to make me give a genre another try. And by “doesn’t take much,” I mean a Monday night death metal show two years ago that just happened to be taking place at my favorite bar in town.” Easy Z.
“Narnia is one thing. Try a band whose name says it all. Try GOD. All bold, all caps, almighty. I can see you looking at the genre tags, expecting words like ‘gospel’ and ‘power metal.’ Instead, you see ‘prog,’ ‘instrumental,’ and ‘tech-death.’ Do you believe in revelations? Well, you’re about to.” Get right with the Man.
“Are you ready for a hot take? I enjoy deeply of Exocrine‘s Molten Giant. Regardless of the criticisms it received in the linked review, I return to that record still, twenty-two months after it’s initial release. Tight, jagged and delightfully choppy, Exocrine delivered a big sleeper with Molten Giant. It looked like stock tech-death, sounded like stock tech-death, and stepped on just about every mine littering the tech-death field. Yet, it put a big, stupid grin on my big, stupid face.” Squid pro quo.
“While this normally isn’t quite my cup of skull-pit-juice, these three Greeks have got some serious chops on them. I may not know what befell the erstwhile, but that’s neither here nor there—friends, we’ve got death metal to listen to.” Before the befell.
“Yep. That’s a band name. Killitorous. Say it a couple times and soon you’ll see what they did there. Tasteful, right? I’ll be honest, it took me way too long to find it (ayyyy), but by that point I was already four listens into the Canadian supergroup’s sophomore record The Afterparty and was having too much fun to care about the silly double-entendre anymore. After all, we did give high marks to bands with such respectable names as Fvneral Fvkk and Shitfucker, right? So who am I to judge?” Tech-deathicus for the rest of us.
“It’s a bumper year for cheesehead tech-death. Just two months after Aronious’s hyperactive tech/prog Perspicacity, the usually sleepy-badger-state metal scene has another platter to offer, this time in the form of Jurisprudence, the sophomore LP from Ara.” Death precedent.
“Having been raised in church, I found my religious experience carried over into my vast expeditions into metal’s colorful multiverse: I find myself reaching more and more for the stuff that incorporates a unique tone of reverence, a sound of standing beneath the colossal or infinite. For bands like Batushka, Ancient Moon, and Behemoth, this liturgical and hieratic atmosphere is proposed through its ritualistic songwriting and uses of common religious musical elements (Gregorian chants, choirs, etc.) contrasting with blasphemy’s twisted dagger in an aural representation of madness. Sonne Adam‘s death/doom solo LP Transformation did this for me.” Worship music.
