False – Untitled Review
For as much as the genre flaunts its supposed nihilism and negativity, at its best, black metal produces a sort of ecstatic trance in the listener. Thus, although the style is easy enough to muster …
Midnight Odyssey – Shards Of Silver Fade Review
The collapse of the record industry and the proliferation of inexpensive tools for independent recording and distribution have meant, in many ways, a liberation of artistic expression. On the whole, then, that’s a good thing: …
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. …