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 …
Atomic Aggressor – Sights Of Suffering Review
Friends, I have gone on record as a doofus, and I do not intend to recant. Generally speaking, I am no great defender of musical orthodoxies: I like folk in my doom, ambient in my …
Grimoire – L’Aorasie Des Spectres Rêveurs Review
If you listen to enough of a certain style of music, it can become difficult to articulate exactly what separates the good from the great. This is why, in part, anyone who tries to tell …
Ne Obliviscaris – Citadel Review
By all reasonable metrics, I ought to love this album. I own every single Dream Theater album – even the shitty ones. I own every single Cradle of Filth album – even the shitty ones. …
Dan Obstkrieg’s Best Of 2014 – Get Busy Loving
If you believe everything you read, then any given year in music was either the most overflowing bounty of sweet manna or the sorriest, soggiest bunch of dreck imaginable. Personally, given the sheer amount and …