Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Cover artwork by Douglas Leal] Listening to the new album from Brazil’s Deafkids, Cicatrizes Do Futuro, I’ve been thinking about rivers. [indignant voice from the back]: WHAT? Mea culpa, friend. I’m here today to preach the gospel of Under the …
[Album artwork by Harshanand Singh] The third album is in some ways a litmus test for a band’s longevity. Three albums is a sufficient sample size—you can generally tell where a band is headed, whether they’ll last, whether they speak …
[Pre]-historically speaking, the boys, Nocturno Culto and Fenriz, have always been influenced by the likes of Celtic Frost, Bathory, and all things ‘80s. In fact, they don’t shy away from the fact that it’s always been about that era. After …
[Cover art by Quinn Henderson] You’re familiar with the term, “unc,” right? If not, it generally refers to a washed up older feller whose personality in large part revolves around extravagantly performing confusion and/or displeasure at the mere notion of …
[Cover art by Dan Seagrave] For a band named after a movie villain that tended to wax poetically about destiny, there sure was a coincidental amount of serendipity surrounding their proper debut album. But before …
Whether it’s called war metal or bestial black metal (or if you’ve come up with a fairly pedantic set of parameters to separate the two), there’s no denying Canada certainly has a hell of a …
Years ago, in another life, I remember talking about the philosopher John Rawls with a grad school classmate. Having read too deeply in poststructuralism and critical theory, I made some sneeringly insufferable attack on Rawls, …
Fast Rites: because sometimes brevity is fundamental. Sometimes you want bands with nuance, and sometimes you just want a band to roll over you with the force of 10,000 hammers wielded by 10,000 cloned Donnie …
The film sample is a tradition in goregrind, but very rarely has any been used as awesomely as on the opening to Septic Vomet’s Infected Cadaveric Slaves. Taken from the 2013 Evil Dead remake – …
Familiarity breeds contempt, I’ve heard, and I certainly understand the meaning of that aphorism, but it’s not always true. Sometimes familiarity is a warm blanket, a well-worn pair of boots that fit just perfectly, a …
It was always the 80’s for us, man. – Fenriz Since A Blaze In The Northern Sky, the raison d’être of Darkthrone has been clear. Dig up the graves of the 80s for inspiration, inject a heaping helping of …
[Cover art by Sandra Fink] Sometimes you go into a band blind and immediately think, “This is pretty neato keeno, ye flatulent beast in need of Beano!” or something else a normal human would say. …
