Abyssal – Antikatastaseis Review
The artwork is inscrutable; the production yawns like a bottomless well; the guitars warp and stretch; the album title is Greek and the closing song title Latin: you know it, you love it — Abyssal …
Alda – Passage Review
Congratulations, of a sort, are in order for Washington State’s Alda. Whereas nearly all of their peers in the loamy, atmospheric black metal game focus on using delicate intros and gradually rising tension to explode …
Pyrrhon – Growth Without End Review
Let us now praise famous formats: Friends, the EP is a beautiful thing. Whereas splits and 7″s are usually home for orphaned b-sides, and LPs often feel like an obligation, the necessary economy and visceral …
Vorum – Current Mouth Review
Vorum‘s brand-new EP spends exactly zero time fucking around. Not a single wasted riff, beat, break, yell, or solo; zero-point-goddamned-zero seconds of fucking around. From the first moment of “Angels Death” to the last squalling …
Arstidir Lifsins – Aldafoðr Ok Munka Dróttinn Review
How effective is narrative art if one can’t follow the narrative? For music as richly textual as Arstidir Lifsins’s, the question is hardly academic. On the (mostly) German band’s third album, passages of sweeping, majestic …
Pyramids – A Northern Meadow Review
On Pyramids‘s self-titled debut album from 2008, the Texas-based band sounded like a photo-negative version of Blut Aus Nord‘s mind-bending MoRT album, all blown-out brightness and brittle dream-pop shards colored ominously by black metal echoes. …
Melechesh – Enki Review
Because you and I both know this thing has a good chance of shooting straight the hell off the rails, I’ll frontload the critical bit: Enki is Melechesh‘s most self-assured and accomplished album to date, …
Dødheimsgard – A Umbra Omega Review
Some bands wander by mistake. It’s hard to say if that’s the case for Norway’s itinerant Dødheimsgard (or DHG, if ya nasty), but because, over the course of their now five-album career, not one single album …