All posts by Zach Duvall

Last Rites Co-Owner; Senior Editor; Obnoxious overuser of baseball metaphors.

Sulphur Aeon – The Scythe Of Cosmic Chaos Review

When Sulphur Aeon dropped their debut full length Swallowed by the Ocean’s Tide in 2013, they appeared fully formed. Not fully formed as original visionaries, mind you, but fully formed as a cohesive unit that

Best Of 2018 – Zach Duvall: Confessions Of A Cornfed Crackpot

Greetings, you husks. This year, instead of some State of the Scene Address, we’re going to talk about consensus in music fandom, and how it doesn’t really exist. Yes, seeing the same albums top every

In The Woods… – Cease the Day Review

The reunion of Norway’s In the Woods… a few years ago was as pleasant as it was unexpected. In the 90s, the band released three wildly different albums that brought a whole lot of sweeping

Deceased – Ghostly White Review

Deceased has long felt like a timeless, immovable object within heavy metal, the type of band that looks back on decades of ripped jeans and leather jackets while also being a predictor that the culture

Evoken – Hypnagogia Review

New Jersey’s Evoken has been one of metal’s great purveyors of misery for over 20 years now, and within the already extremely specific niche of funeral doom has maintained a bit of a micro-niche by

Life In The Afterglow – An Edge Of Sanity Primer

Edge of Sanity never fit in. Although they spent their formative years during the rise of Swedish death metal, they never released a classic regular death metal album, nor did they do the obvious thing

Arsis And The Curse Of The Classic Debut

Putting out a classic with your first album is a curse. Well, it’s just a bit of a curse, of course, because the percentage of bands and artists that actually put out a classic at

Moss Upon the Skull – In Vengeful Reverence Review

One of the tricky things about describing music is choosing exactly how deep to go when picking points of comparison. This is particularly true for anything existing outside of normal bounds. Stay too general, and