Wharflurch – Shitslime Review
Some are born gross, some achieve grossness, and others have grossness thrust upon them. With apologies to ol’ Bill Shakespeare, Florida’s brilliantly named Wharflurch may as well have knocked down all three of those grossness …
Wampyric Rites – The Eternal Melancholy Of The Wampyre Review
Is black metal real? Sheath your quills and hold your emails, please. Yes, of course black metal is real in the sense that it is comprised of actual sounds, rhythms, melodies, vibrations of the tympanic …
Fractal Generator – Macrocosmos Review
Fast Rites: because sometimes brevity is fundamental. No matter how comical the idea seems to anyone not already accustomed to parsing half-step pitch variations in toilet-puke vocals like a sommelier mouthfeeling the ever-living shit out …
Best Of 2020 – Dan Obstkrieg: Only Kindness Matters
For reasons largely unknown, I gave myself precise word limitations for the blurbs which follow. For those of you playing along at home, this means that I wrote 100 words exactly for each metal album, …
Grayceon – Mothers Weavers Vultures Review
Because they belong to San Francisco’s diverse and recombinant music scene, Grayceon is hardly alone in making genre-agnostic but undeniably progressive heavy metal. They are, however, almost singularly adept at summoning big, unguarded emotions with …
Enslaved – Utgard Review
The greatest artists tap into something beyond themselves and speak elemental truths from everyday syllables. Certainly in the case of music, the presence of a sympathetic or at least engaged listener helps to close the …
Körgull The Exterminator – Sharpen Your Spikes Review
On album number five (and first in five years), the black / thrashing maniac Spaniards in Körgull the Exterminator have turned over a new leaf and found their sensitive side. From the meditative Nick Drake …
Neptunian Maximalism – Éons Review
The Belgian collective Neptunian Maximalism is not, apparently, interested in half-measures. Éons, their full-length debut, spools its more than two hours’ worth of music across three conceptually separate discs which span genres and blend improvised …