Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Album artwork by Maciej Kamuda] I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese culture, but more importantly, I admire its people. That fascination has persisted throughout my life, stemming from childhood when I was just captivated by the beauty and courage of …
It’s been a minute since I’ve committed any significant amount of time to listening to doom. Any doom, really. From anywhere. Of any type. And not because there hasn’t been great doom the past few years. Rather, my attention has …
[Cover Art by Daniel Karlsson] Februus is a one-man project driven by the prodigious and still developing talents of Sweden’s Andreas Karlsson. His latest, Construction of Conflict, delivers 40 minutes of guitar-centric death metal that, despite being packed to the …
There’s much more than this plane of existence. Are you willing to listen? A few years ago, one of the more obscure bands on my year-end list happened to be Germany’s Ch’ahom and their debut full-length LP Knots of Abhorrence. …
In an effort to be tidy and fastidious, we offer you this handy and insanely organized assemblage of the full results of Last Rites’ 10-week salute to the 2010s. Perhaps a bit overkill? Eh, we …
Hopefully you can appreciate just how challenging it can be to force twelve unique individuals who are utterly obsessed with music into a situation where they must agree on the best of anything. Sure, there’ll …
The evolution of …and Oceans from an excellent but fairly standard symphonic and melodic black metal band in the late 90s to a group incorporating plenty of industrial and avant-garde influences was not entirely unlikely …
As I write this, it’s early May 2020, and for all intents and purposes, the world is ending. A new plague has killed hundreds of thousands of people the world across; in hard-hit areas, hospitals …
On April 20th, I wrote a lot of words about Bong Metal, a very arbitrary but surprisingly expansive subgenre of stoner metal. Many people have said that I wrote too many words, questioned the entire …
Anger. It’s one of the unifying themes of extreme metal. Anger against authority is perhaps most common. Anger at parents, anger at priests, anger at politicians. Anger against certain particular non-authority people comes up now …
Here we are again, friends—still in the grip of a pandemic, and most of us still under quarantine. Some states have begun easing restrictions to varying degrees, so it’ll be interesting to see how these …
As the virtuous musketeers of Dark Angel once pronounced, “We Have Arrived”—the tenth and final installment of our 100 Essential Albums of the 2010s is here, and with it comes all the goodness associated with …
