Tag: Black
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: …
Vanum – Realm Of Sacrifice Review
The seed is a simple, descending tremolo line, a riff repeated in slightly different ways over the course of a phrase, but arriving at the same destination each time. It is featured in an obvious …
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 …
Vattnet Viskar – Settler Review
If metalheads were a fair bunch, they’d pick on the identical wardrobes of every “war metal” band as much as they focus on the looks of bands like New Hampshire’s Vattnet Viskar. Because really, the fashions …
Nahtrunar – Symbolismus Review
Nahtrunar comes to us from Austria, conceiving full length debut Symbolismus as a tribute to the nights at the turn of the year (a European thing known as “Rauhnächte”). I can offer no insight into …
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 …
Gorgoroth – Instinctus Bestialis Review
If you’re the type who fondly looks back to the days when the metal formula was a hell of a lot more straight-forward and money spent on nearly any spiked, panda-painted band from Norway resulted …