Malice Divine - Everlasting Ascendancy

Die sexin'

In my eternal quest to understand why the generation that came after mine seems to be largely so uninterested in the same kinds of metal that I've spent my entire life in love with, I came across a strange criticism I'd never heard before.  I don't remember where I read it or what the subject of the criticism was, but I'd heard something slammed as a "one-genre album".  My gut instinct was to blame short attention spans curated by Vine and Tiktok, but upon further reflection I actually understand where whoever said that was coming from.  Metal bands and albums tend to, almost as a rule, be influenced almost exclusively by other metal bands.  I don't think the genre has hit any sort of Hapsburg level critical mass as of yet, and I don't personally think we're anywhere close to the genre going supernova any time soon, but I get the criticism and I get why it can be exhausting to sit through 45 minutes of blastbeats and/or tremolo riffs with no other inspirations to reach towards.

A good example of why this seemingly compulsory insularity hasn't started to wear on me personally is Malice Divine, a one-man project that rockets past the "one-genre album" and lands squarely on "one-influence album".  Everlasting Ascendancy is, from nose to tail, influenced by Dissection and absolutely nobody else.  The vocals sound like Dissection, the riffs sound like Dissection, the melodies sound like Dissection, this project sounds like one incredibly talented fanboy living out his fantasies of joining the band in an alternate timeline where Jon Nodtveidt didn't wind up in prison.  Where Storm of the Light's Bane leaves off, Everlasting Ascendancy picks up without even a smudged footprint in between with the biggest immediate difference simply being the production being much cleaner.  There are an abundance of acoustic passages to help break up the lengthy runtimes of each songs and the guitar solos are brain-punching exercises in melodic excess, but it all kinda blurs into a slurry of Dissectionisms that keep the songs themselves kinda hard to differentiate from one another. The reason this doesn't really bother me here is because, if you're gonna pull from one band almost exclusively, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than Dissection.  Very few bands had as finely tuned an ear for the interplay between (and seamless blending of) razor sharp riffs and instantly memorable hooks, and Malice Divine has done a truly remarkable job of recapturing that magic.

The majority of the album is populated with acerbic scorchers, blistering past the listener at crazy speeds complemented by soaring guitar solos that sound like musical victory cries.  Even if there are technically a handful of songs that groove along at a more reasonable tempo and numerous contemplative sections of classical acoustic guitar, the overall impression that the album leaves you with is less of the complex interplay and dynamic push-and-pull of the songs and more akin to an impact crater.  Part of this is, as stated, simply because another band already did all of these things so it's easy to cluster all of these properties into one singular reference, but also simply because the fast, ruthless, pummeling parts with immediately singable hooks are far and away the strongest moments of the album.  The subtleties ultimately don't matter when they pale in comparison to the bombast.  Nobody appreciates the complex engineering of a bomb when it's currently detonating into a miles-high mushroom cloud.  I don't remember which songs have the prettiest acoustic passages or which solos are the most evocative, but I can rasp the chorus of "Apparitions of Conquest" back at you without even thinking about it.  All of these tracks are excellent the whole way through, only really beginning to lose their luster near the end.  "Reclaimed Strength" lacks the extremity of the rest of the songs and paradoxically fades into the background as a result (you'd think a change of pace would be welcome but Galvez is simply much better at in-your-face bombast), and "Illusions of Fragmentation" is the one track where I really think the runtime could and should have been trimmed, but the overall experience is enjoyable enough to not really be too much of an issue.

I suppose that's my main takeaway with Everlasting Ascendancy.  There are individual moments of cool things all over the place (I probably downplayed the non-Dissection influences too much, because there are shades of mid-era Immortal in the classically melodic moments and the opening of the title track is so overtly thrash influenced that it calls to mind Skeletonwitch in their prime) but when taken holistically, it feels much more simple.  And maybe it's because I'm just a big fat dummy, but the blurrier interpretation of the album, the one where everything just sloughs into a big Dissection-colored goulash, is just so, so much more satisfying than trying to manufacture more prominent diversity in the various moving parts.  One-genre albums still absolutely fucking rule.  Own it.

RATING: 84%

Serpent Column - Endless Detainment

Wars Waged in My Privates lol gottem

Look man I'm just gonna make this a short one.  I'm not reinvigorated by the Covid like most of you are, I'm alternating between pointlessly going to work anyway and spending a week at home being fidgety and annoyed at my housemates for simply existing.  I thought I was gonna review during this downtime to help keep myself sane, but it turns out I hate doing that too but dammit I'm gonna try FUCK

Serpent Column has been something of an underground sensation over the past few years, with Ornuthi Thalassa coming out of nowhere in 2017 to destroy listeners with the main dude whose name I can neither spell nor be bothered to look up's signature brand of spiraling black/death intensity.  Since that debut their profile has only grown, with last year's Mirror in Darkness managing to rank in the Top 30 across all genres on RYM, and the subject of this review, Endless Detainment, currently sitting at the pole position in the EP category for this year.

Each release has gotten more and more chaotic, and the current result of that ever-unfurling sonic degloving is an album so twisted that it eats nails and shits corkscrews.  There isn't even really a thematic thruline I can use within the context of this review to help it make sense, because around every new turn in the music is a new ghoul, a new trap door, a new falling rock.  Everything is a trap and it's a confusing and violent nightmare.  Take a look at "Arachnain", likely the best example of this album's utter distaste for the safe and familiar.  It starts off with the closest thing to a "normal" riff you're going to find across the entire twentyish minutes of Endless Detainment, with a quick trill and a few chugs, you can't help but feel like this is an illusion.  Nothing up to this point has been so simple and groovy.  After the whirlwind of broken glass that was "Violence Aesthete", there's no way Mr. Column even has the impulse control necessary to stick to something catchy.  And he doesn't, because before you know it, that simple riff is accompanied by bass and percussion that feel juuuuust a bit wrong, and by the time you can likely comprehend what the interplay between al the instruments is supposed to be well surprise now you're careening down Willy Wonka's Boat Ride to Hell.

A lot of people around the 'net (as the kids say) have been citing a huge uptick in influence from mathcore, particularly Dillinger Escape Plan.  I'm unprofessional as fuck and only have a surface level knowledge of what mathcore even is, so I'm just going to parrot that citation and hope it's correct.  I can understand it from what little knowledge I have though, as "Pantheoclasm" sounds dangerously close to what genre purists accused Deathspell Omega of being when Circumspice first dropped.  That influence is definitely there, and the first handful of songs in a row all exemplify that sort of dutch-angled firing-squad of riffage, "Manure in Pearls" specifically being the one that crushes my brain the hardest.

I've forgotten how to review and I'm going to abuse my reputation to post this rambling bullshit anyway.  The point of all this is that Serpent Column is extremely good, and if you look outside of MA you can tell that it's really catching on elsewhere.  Hopefully someday the largest and most historically important website for metal culture catches up, because this fucking rules. 


RATING: 88%

Svarttjern - Shame Is Just a Word

I almost scrapped this review because I couldn't think of a title for it

I didn't want to start the year off on mediocrity because that just seems like a bad omen, but I already reviewed the new Jordablod for a different site (this is the real reason my productivity slowed down around September, if nobody noticed) so I guess we're stuck with Svarttjern.

That's being a bit unfair, in all honesty, because Shame Is Just a Word is pretty solidly good, if unremarkable.  Svarttjern has been toiling around for a while, as this is their fifth album and more than half of the band also plays in Carpathian Forest (in fairness they are all the three shmucks who aren't Nattefrost or Vrangsinn, though they are original members here who have been around for fifteenish years).  This certainly sounds like a band that's been around for that long, but my problem with them is that they're about as middle-of-the-road as I can imagine.  Norwegian black metal seems to have been the easy king of the genre in the early days of the 2nd wave, but ever since the turn of the millennium I've found this particular scene to be one of the least interesting, and Svarttjern is a good example of why.  There's nothing wrong with Shame Is Just a Word, but it brings precisely nothing new to the table and seems pretty proud of itself for doing so.  You could argue they're just sticking to their guns/strengths, but on a personal level I guess it just doesn't interest me to play by the rules unless you've got some X factor like 1349's absurd level of intensity or Taake's impeccable songwriting skill. 

Svarttjern reminds me of Keep of Kalessin, and that's probably a weird comparison simply because I have no idea what Keep of Kalessin sounds like nowadays.  I don't think I've listened to them since 2008 or whatever but this is pretty much exactly what I remember them sounding like.  Very polished production and very slick presentation but riffs that feel like they were written via algorithm and raspy vocals that are very good for the style but unfortunately lack charisma.  There's value in a good throwback every now and then for sure, but I also don't begrudge myself or anybody else for wanting a bit more out of art.  This pushes no boundaries and breaks no rules, and the only thing about it that helps it stand out in any way is that there's a bit more of a heightened influence from thrash than would be usual for a band of this style, but even then that may just be my brain playing tricks on me due to the (frankly awesome) cover of "Bonded By Blood". 

So Shame Is Just a Word is a decent album full of decent songs with decent riffs but utterly lacking in atmosphere or mystery.  The best song on here is the one that A) isn't black metal and B) was written by a totally different band 35+ years ago.  I'm probably sending mixed messages here because I'm honestly walking away with a positive impression of a solid throwback of a classic style, but it doesn't elicit any real emotion out of me and completely evaporates from my memory as soon as the album is over.  Check out "Melodies of Lust" if you're curious.  It's the best original song here and it's probably simply because it's the longest and has the most time to develop, but it's a good representative of the album in a microcosm.


RATING: 66%

Tryglav - Night of Whispering Souls

Night of Glistening Poles

One thing that kinda bothers me right off the bat about Tryglav here isn't really a problem as much as it's a curiosity.  This is the solo project of one Boris Behara, who handles all of the instruments except the vocals, who are apparently handled on this release by the dude from Black Cult.  And I mean... that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that considering the dude is clearly a talented multi-instrumentalist so there's no need for him to stretch himself thin in an area he's not comfortable with (it's common to see one or two man bands where one guy handles everything except the drums, for example, and hell, Anaal Nathrakh uses this exact setup).  The thing that bugs me about this is... well clearly the main guy is front and center at all times, and he does apparently play live, though when he does he gets four anonymous cronies to don plague doctor getups to round out the band.  But like... what the fuck does he do?  He's never been in a band before, I have no idea what his main instrument is.  If he's not the vocalist then wouldn't that just look weird as hell to have a bunch of masked and robed creatures except for one random guitarist or something?  And if he is the vocalist live, then why not just do it on record?  I know this is all ultimately pointless in the end, but once I had learned that this was the composition of the band, I just couldn't let it go.  Bro let it bake for a little while longer, if you weren't ready to record the vocals, just put it off until you are, nobody is rushing you!

Anyway, that's all periphery shit that doesn't really matter.  What truly matters here is the music itself, and I think Tryglav is very solid.  Across the seven tracks, there is a common thruline of heavy melody, particularly in the vein of Swedish black metal from the second wave like Marduk and Dark Funeral.  Good chunks of the album are very blast-happy and loaded with melodic tremolo lines.  That's probably the simplest way to describe this, meloblack run through a couple of light filters, but that'd be selling it short.  There are a surprising amount of ideas on display for a mere seven tracks from a debut solo artist here.  The opening track, "Under My Skin" is fiery as hell, with a brutal underpinning that likens it more to war metal or a particularly nasty 1349 track than anything else, while "Deadline" throws in some really warm riffs/melodies and more laid back drumming, hearkening back to the sunny Hellenic scene, and then "Creatures of the Night" chucks some straight up hard rock influence to the forefront, creating something that a lot of reviewers are comparing to Lordi but that's because everybody but me is fucking lazy and can't look past lyrical themes.  Those slightly unorthodox tracks are the real reason Night of Whispering Souls stands out to me.  That's not to say the title track or "Werewolf" aren't great emulations of Dissection and Dark Funeral or anything, because they are, but blastastic meloblack is a really easy genre to do so it's refreshing to hear somebody take some pointed risks with it.

So it pretty much follows a set formula, with the odd tracks being the more adventurous slow ones with more conventional rock drumming (apart from the opener, which is the most brutal track by a long shot) and the even tracks being the more traditional meloblack affairs, so you'd think it'd be uneven and flip-floppy, but really it just keeps the album from getting dull since each new track is going to throw a new idea at you.  The best of each world is probably "Werewolf" and "Deadline", for my money, but really every song here is at the very least good.  Though there aren't any highlights that completely blow my socks off, I do find myself returning to this fairly often, so it's doing something right.


RATING: 80%

Black Kirin - Nanking Massacre

War is not cool

I don't like Sabaton.

I know that's a really weird way to start a review for an extreme metal band out of China, but hear me out, I'm going somewhere with this.

Beyond the obvious problem of their songs just not being very good, it's the grand philosophical approach of Sabaton that grinds my gears.  Mainly, I just don't fucking like war and I like the idea of turning it into a bouncy pop metal institution even less.  Warfare is an easy enough topic for metal bands to cover, and if you're a band like Sabaton it's indeed quite possible to choose specific subjects that fit the atmosphere of your music.  The Battle of Thermopylae?  Hell yeah, you can easily make a rousing metal song out of an ancient conflict that spawned an underdog story that persisted for nearly 2500 years.  The problem is that Sabaton doesn't stick to that, and instead they very frequently reach to much more recent conflicts with nothing cool or badass about them.  It feels like such a fucking slap in the face to look at horrible crimes against humanity, excessively grimdark stains on human history like The Great War, The Invasion of Normandy, or the fucking Final Solution and turn them into pulsing major-key 80s aerobics metal anthems.  I don't want a god damned Disney version of the fucking Holocaust holy shit are you kidding me?  One of their only genuinely good songs ("Ghost Division") is a rousing, triumphant, fist-pounding jam about motherfucking Rommel rolling the tanks into Paris.  They're constantly blasting this happy-go-lucky and completely uncritical soldier worship and these ultra-jingoistic battle anthems and it's made them unwitting icons for the Wehraboos and DEUS VULT shouting racists of the world.  I hate their tone deaf bouncing idiocy and I hate their stupid shitty songs.  Fuck them, seriously.

I bring all of that up so I can contrast their proud dorkery with Black Kirin, a band that tackles the horrors of war from a much more appropriate angle.

Nanking Massacre is the complete tonal opposite of the kind of shit I was just raging about, because this is bleak, nihilistic, hopeless, mournful, and just god damned painful.  This is obviously a concept album about The Rape of Nanking, easily one of the most horrifying war crimes ever committed, and the fact that the band hails from the country that was on the receiving end of this tragedy (instead of gee I dunno rockstar Swedes or something) gives this a lot of extra weight.  There's a sense of genuine sincerity in the total hopeless anguish that permeates a track like "Da Qu" or the mournful reflection of "Thousand Years".  I understand that art is subjective and always open to interpretation, but as far as I'm concerned, this is the correct way to go about such a subject.

The album begins with an ambient intro, the kind of thing I normally hate because it's just a timewaster 99% of the time, but "1937" is a rare example of when one works.  Opening on air raid sirens and wailing children is cliche, sure, but it so perfectly sets the stage for the horrors to come.  I think it was kind of brilliant to fade that intro track out into another quiet section, because "Da Qu" doesn't really start the carnage.  No, there's another minute or so of suspense, and I think that works so well in the context of trying to put the listener in the shoes of the victims of this horrible tragedy.  The warnings came, the civilians retreated to the safety zone, and then came the tense, petrifying quiet as they awaited the Japanese army to take the city.  The first minute of the song sounds like an album outro.  It's over, the battle is lost, the city is in ruins, and the innocent are left to pick up the pieces.  But then, when 1:08 hits, Code lets out this fucking horrifying screech that stretches out over 25 seconds while the music picks up and gets more and more frantic.  The thing here is that the song never fully makes it to full on riff-salad savagery, instead staying mostly midpaced in the riffs with the drums occasionally picking up speed entirely disconnected from the riffs, while the strings and mournful clean vocals soar over the top and occasionally break down into discordant squealing.  It doesn't represent badass metal, it represents violent and destructive chaos.  For the citizens of Nanjing, the end truly was the beginning of the real horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese war.  It was done, Nanjing had fallen, the only ones left were non-combatant civilians who wanted nothing to do with slaughter, and what followed was a month and a half of inhuman torture, rape, and murder.  The way the album starts perfect represents that tentative calm after the initial bloodshed, only to be later hit with a flood of violence that seemed to never end.

This is also the only track on the album where the most controversial aspect of the band's debut returns, the Huadan vocals.  For the uninitiated, Huadan is a role in Chinese opera meant to express a young, innocent girl, and they were just really bizarre and out of place on National Trauma (an album that was otherwise Album of the Year material but severely hindered by their inclusion), only truly blending in with the music on like two tracks.  Here though?  No, they sound accusatory.  That voice traditionally meant to represent flowery innocence only pokes through for a few seconds during the most intense section of the song to spit fiery condemnation upon the war criminals currently turning the capital of China into a bloody crater.  It feels weird and wrong because it is weird and wrong, and it's here to remind you how weird and wrong this whole terrible venture was.  There's something similar on "The Song" but it's less obvious and feels less like the band is intentionally trying to conjure up the image of childhood innocence being ripped away in the midst of a whirlwind of inhumanity.

From there the album ebbs and flows until it mercifully ends on a mournful aria punctuated with occasional twangs of an acoustic instrument.  It perfectly encapsulates the uncertainty of the chaos around them at the time.  There are several extended ambient sections, both segregated into their own tracks and intruding on the few metal tracks as well, reminding you that the whole thing is a senseless, chaotic hellscape of nightmares that nobody was ever sure was going to end.  There are only three traditionally metal songs here ("Da Qu", "The Song", and "Wangchuan River") while the remaining four are fully ambient mood-setters.  Of the metal songs, "The Song" is probably the easiest to swallow for people who aren't here for the full experience and just want to hear kickass songs, because that one is by far the darkest and heaviest.  It features two extended ambient breaks but the other parts are so intense and pummeling that it almost defies description.  It's blasting, chaotic, hellsoaked barbarism expressed through the most death metally riffs the band would ever pen (contrasted with the more epic black metal that occupies the rest of their work).

Obviously though, I'm not quite as interested in simply headbanging my troubles away when listening to Nanking Massacre.  I'm here for the fully enrapturing atmosphere, and to that end "Da Qu" and "Wangchuan River" are far better.  Even so, all three of the traditional songs work incredibly well for what they represent.  The first perfectly showcases the panic and confusion of the terror as it begins, the second showcases the inhuman barbarity and the sheer extent of the war crimes committed on the Chinese innocents, and the third highlights the helpless destitution in the wake of the carnage, and the all-too-real fear that it may not even be actually finished.  And that's just the metal songs, the other four tracks are all sombre instrumental dirges in between the madness that always gives way to even further destruction.  In fact this is one of the only metal albums ever where I never have any intention of skipping the instrumental interludes, because without them the true feeling of panicked uncertainty wouldn't truly shine through.

I started this off with a small rant about Sabaton simply because they're immensely popular and most of my readers are surely familiar with them, and because I feel like Black Kirin is the complete polar opposite of them.  For Sabaton, they uncritically celebrate the heroics of warfare, the celebrity of valor on the battlefield, regardless of which side is conducting these campaigns (hence their occasional tone-deafness with making the Nazis the good guys, which come the fuck on dudes).  Black Kirin instead showcases the true human element of these wars.  Nanking Massacre isn't about battlefield heroics, it's about the mass slaughter of innocents once the battle is over.  Once the conflict has subsided and the chest-beating Bad Boys have their run of enemy territory, it quickly devolves into inhuman, callous destruction.  The true lasting effects of war have fuck-all to do with the superhero dogfighters and tank commanders, it's about the helpless innocents who wanted nothing to do with the senseless violence and get caught up in the crossfire, eventually becoming targets themselves as their lives are destroyed en masse.

With one of these approaches, you're looking at smiling heroes and ticker tape parades.  With the other, you're looking at thousands of naked innocent women and children casually dumped in a mass grave.  Maybe it's just because of my personal politics, but I think the making millions of dollars off the former is fucking insulting to the memories of the latter.  Nanking Massacre is a triumph of pulling back the curtain and screaming this is what you dumbasses are celebrating.


RATING: 95%

Warforged - I: Voice

This album gave me respiratory failure

Y'know, it figures I just finished a review ranting about how Artisan Era has usurped Unique Leader and Willowtip for the Tech Death Saturation Award, and then the very next thing I tackle is a band on their label that doesn't fit the bill at all.

Warforged obviously gets bonus consideration from me purely for being lucky enough to hail from my neck of the woods, but luckily they're an example of a local band doing Chicago proud for once.  Their debut here is clearly meant to be the first part of a saga of sorts given the title, I: Voice, and I can say with certainty that I'm going to keep my ears open for any followup.  Voice is very long at 72 minutes, and it's very dense with a whole lot of shit going on, but it's all done very well and the album ebbs and flows enough for the epic length to never become truly overwhelming, try as the music itself might.  Quiet ambient keyboard/acoustic passages occasionally break up some absolutely monstrous black/death throughout the runtime, and while these guys may not be masters of infectious riffing, they excel when it comes to atmosphere.  Voice is just an endless deluge of confusion and misery, and the disorienting, angular wonkiness of the music keeps the listener on their toes. 

The melodic techiness that their label specializes in is certainly prominent in parts (check the midpoint of "Beneath the Forest Floor") but it's not really their forte.  No, like I said their true strength lies in overwhelmingly crushing atmosphere, and special mention has to go to Adrian Perez's vocal performance.  This guy is absolutely fucking venomous and delivers one of the most menacing and caustic vocal performances I've heard all year.  Seriously this guy's shriek is out of this world, and I'm willing to peg him as the musical highlight.  With how the music cycles in and out of quiet and loud, he shines the brightest in both segments since he also handles the keyboards and piano when they invariably show up during the quiet passages.  Nobody in the band stands out as a slouch though, but the rest of the guys are merely serviceable towards the end goal ravenous devastation instead of being the driving force like the vocals.  Musically this hits many of the same notes as some of the more atmospheric tech death bands like Fallujah or later era The Faceless, or maybe something a bit more overtly black metal (those vocals I love so much tend to sit in a mid/high register instead of the traditional deep death metal growl, though he's capable of those as well) like Enfold Darkness.  Regardless, it's massive sounding and absolutely punishing.

I don't have many bad things to say about this, only nitpicks.  Like the riffs themselves aren't super engaging and tend to just chug really fast or noodle around the middle of the fretboard, but when coupled with the destructively complex percussion and harrowing vocals it all blends together very well into a monumental atmospheric statement.  And I guess there aren't any true standout tracks but this is clearly meant to be an album experience so it doesn't really matter.  Even my usual preference for short albums takes a backseat here since they pace themselves throughout the gargantuan runtime extremely well.  The whole thing is a knockout, and there isn't much about it I would change. 


RATING: 90%

Itheist - Itheist

Deathsmell Omega

There's nothing exactly wrong with Itheist's self titled debut.  It's suitably intense and chaotic, exactly the kind of thing that works extremely well when done correctly.  And hell I can't even say with confidence that this is done incorrectly, but that's also sort of my biggest problem with it.  Apart from moments of face melting intensity like "Guardian of Baphomet", the lion's share of the music contained on Itheist is just really safe.  Not like, safe for mainstream consumption obviously, this is far too extreme for that, but very safe for somebody who is familiar with this style of music already.  No joke, the press junket literally says "the new album brings together blackened melody with dissonance, creating a unique style of Extreme Metal", which is just.. what?  No, there's nothing unique about just doing what Deathspell Omega has been doing for 15 years now.  You're not special, you nerds.

But even with that said, I like this album.  Itheist is a shameless DSO clone and that's okay!  I don't understand this pathological need for metal bands to just fucking lie about how unique they are all the time, as if there's some rule that anything that isn't a new idea is automatically lesser.  It's fine to wear your influences on your sleeves.  It's fine to just rip off one or two bands if you're actually good at it.  Sure, the best bands in any given subgenre are generally innovators in some respect but it's by no means a requirement.  If you don't have any new ideas it's totally okay to just pay homage to your heroes.  If you're good songwriters and understand what makes their music work in the first place, whatever you produce will turn out just fucking fine, I promise.

Case in point... well, Itheist.   This is chaotic jangleblack in the vein of DSO with some hints of more death metal influence like Portal or Ulcerate or something, but overall it's really obvious where most of their ideas stemmed from.  But because they're good songwriters and understand why DSO is such a good band, the songs come out just fine, exactly like I said they would.  Maybe it's missing the point to get so hung up on a few sentences in a promo blurb but this is just fucking endemic to metal bands and it drives me up the wall.  Grab any track here and you'll hear whirling, tumbling dissonance with drums that sound like they're falling down a mountainside, and it'll qualitatively rank somewhere between "servicable" and "good".  Really my only complaint here is that other bands have done this better, but that's not particularly fair if we're viewing this in a vacuum.  With all context stripped away, this is a brutal, disorienting album with like sixty riffs per song and wild, flailing drumming, and that's just a blast to listen to.

The problem is that nothing exists in a vacuum, and when you take this with the context of the metal scene at large, you can't help but just spend your time thinking of a better band you could be listening to.  On the whole though, Itheist is a wild ride that keeps things entertaining and menacing despite a runtime that seems like it just never ends.  Try not to zone out and you'll find something worth enjoying, but it's really hard for your eyes to not glaze over after three or four tracks.


RATING: 66%

Sxuperion - Endless Spiritual Embodiment

Sxtiousie and the Blandcheese

Sxuperion apparently has a pretty solid body of work behind him already, but this fourth full length, Endless Spiritual Embodiment is my first brush with the sort-of-eponymously-named project.  I actually know a tiny bit of the guy's work, as I've heard him create some damn solid stuff drumming for Valdur a year or two ago, but Sxuperion here is his baby, where he handles every instrument, every lyric, every note, even the label it's released on.  So yeah there's no doubt that Sxuperion is a vanity project, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very good one.

One of my low-key favorite bands that I rarely ever talk about is Blasphemy, and I hear a lot of those guys here.  So it goes without saying that this is some form of black/death metal, though it doesn't quite tap the same war metal vein of the aforementioned influence.  Instead, this leans heavily on a form of meaningless chaos, and I mean "meaningless" in the sense of a nihilist philosophy where the world is an uncaring cosmic void of pointless misery.  Endless Spiritual Embodiment is therefore dripping with malice and misanthropy, tumbling wildly through malevolent corridors bleeding black blood.  It's hard to tell exactly which side of the black/death dichotomy Sxuperion favors, because a good case could be made for both.  "Endless Embodiment" is based on a very spacey black metal feel with furious death metal riffage, while "Sacred Chamber of the Enlightenment" strikes with destructive European death metal morbidity atop a bleak black metal atmosphere.  Think of something like a deeper and meatier Archgoat or a colder and faster Blood Incantation.  Sxuperion expertly straddles the line and in turn opens a portal to a realm that, while well tread, is endless in its capacity for extremity.

The vocals are deep and bestial, the riffs are menacing and snarling, the atmosphere is cold and unfeeling, and what ties it all together is ironically a sense that nothing works.  Nearly every song includes a quiet interlude where almost nothing exists but dead air, allowing you to contemplate the absurdity of existence on your own before the tumbling cacophony returns to give you the answer.  The album smoothly swells between these cold voids of contemplative nonexistence and explosions of violent unmusical racket, and I think the album's true strength is that it's never really disorienting despite the chaotic din of cosmic torment.  Life is a hellish kaleidoscope of meaningless absurdity that takes place in a world that doesn't care about you and Sxuperion delivers the soundtrack for this bitter nonexistence.


RATING: 88%

Behemoth - I Loved You at Your Darkest

 I Was Apathetic at Your Darkest

Most people have probably pieced together that I spend a lot of time covering the more "popular" bands in metal, and that's simply because I listen to way more stuff with established reputation than unknown obscurities.  It's not necessarily because of some sort of internalized elitism, but mostly because after over a decade of actively reviewing I've come to find that undiscovered gems are like .1% of all undiscovered metal while the remaining 99.9% was forgotten for a reason.  It's more a matter of pragmatism than anything else.  I only have so much time to listen to music nowadays, I choose to listen to things that are proved to be good.  Because despite my notoriety for trashing bad albums, I don't actually like listening to them because I'm not a fucking masochist.

Anyway that small bit leads me to Behemoth, who is pretty much second only to Cannibal Corpse as the biggest extreme metal band of likely all time.  The band, particularly Nergal as a celebrity, are fucking huge.  Especially in their home country of Poland, the band has been put on trial for blasphemy charges, and Nergal himself is a bona fide celebrity, having high profile relationships with pop stars, acting as a judge on the Polish version of The Voice, and presumably sparking Beatlemania style riots when he announced his leukemia diagnosis.  They're a big deal, is my point.  So with those first two things in mind you'd figure I'd be all up on Behemoth's dick, but the weird thing is that throughout all my years as a metal fan, even getting into more extreme metal around the time Demigod came out, I've just never really been able to give too much of a shit about them.  This time, I think the intersection of underground respectability and mainstream awareness just kinda missed the mark.  Zos Kia Cultus has a handful of good songs and I remember liking both The Apostasy and The Satanist well enough, but everything else has always registered as not much more than a faceless blur of blastbeats.

So that brings us to I Loved You at Your Darkest, an album by a band that has captured the hearts of headbangers across the globe that I've just never cared too much for, but admittedly I was willing to give them another shot with this one based on the intriguing title and the fact that I remembered liking The Satanist from four years prior. That one was much darker and more brooding than their competent-but-unexciting barrages of non-riffs from the years previous, and I Loved You at Your Darkest here continues in a similar vein, but it feels more... I dunno, calculated, if that makes sense.  I'm not sure how to explain it without sounding too tinfoily, but I get the feeling that Nergal and co. saw how successful The Satanist was (and don't get me wrong, it was a rare bona fide hit for a band of this style) and decided that their own personal celebrity and the comeback story of Nergal recovering from leukemia had nothing to do with it and it was all purely because they added in darker, slower, gloomier elements.  Thus, they leaned into those once-tertiary elements super hard this time around

As a result, we're left with a black/death album that's pretty content to sit in a midpaced tempo and just fart about with spooky melodies and huck gothy arpeggios at you as often as possible.  That's not to say the idea is dead on arrival, but it's hard for me to argue that the execution was flawless here, because even after a dozen or so spins I still just totally check out for almost the entire runtime.  Batushka took the metal world by storm with chants and ecclesiastic bombast, but the only time similar idea here really works are in the huge preaching-to-the-undead-army breakdown in "Havohej Pantocrator" and the similar section utilizing a children's choir in "God = Dog".  I'd say the chanting chorus in "Bartzabel" is a highlight as well but honestly I think it stands out more for being the most unabashedly "churchy" part of the album than it does for actually being super well written.  "Wolves ov Siberia" kicks the album off on an old school Behemoth vibe with intense blasting and furious riffage (if not entirely memorable, which was always a problem for them), and then "God = Dog" more or less continues it with some more of the new elements integrated in, but after then the album pretty much drops it.  There are moments of blasting intensity here and there but they're so few and far between that I can never remember where exactly they show up. 

That's pretty much my main beef with I Loved You at Your Darkest, it's just kinda full of non-songs with a few standout moments here and there and that's pretty much it.  I actually think "God = Dog" is probably the best song here because it's the one that blends their old school furious blasting death with their new school ecclesiastic seriousness.  "Angelvs XIII" goes for the same thing with slightly less success (though the epic solo section near the end works really well) and "Havohej Pantocrator" just feels larger than life and kicks much more ass than it should, but that's about all I truly recommend.  I still don't know how the last few songs sound, most of the middle tracks blur by as well, it's honestly just a weird album that feels like it's caught between two worlds while simultaneously sounding very confident in its own confusion.  It's a very passive album and I feel like that really wasn't the intent, so I'm not sure how to feel about it.  Something did compel me to  return to this album fairly often, but even after all these months have passed I'm still not sure what that reason is, because there's nothing particularly grabbing here besides a few moments in particular.


RATING: 48%

Skeletonwitch - Devouring Radiant Light

This does not eat some fucking pussy

I'm gonna skip the customary introductory history lesson here and just say flat out why Devouring Radiant Light is so disappointing.  It's not that it's a bad album, because on purely musical terms it's just fine, even pretty solidly good most of the time.  No, the problem is that it's just... not Skeletonwitch anymore.

That sounds petty, and maybe it is, but the fact of the matter is that circa 2007, not a whole lot of bands sounded like Skeletonwitch.  They were fucking furious, with an immaculate ear for melody and the ability to weave riffs that were zippy and crunchy, basing themselves in simplistic thrash while taking cues from all over the metal spectrum.  Beyond the Permafrost was special, it was so varied and so loaded with hooks and so just... unlike anything else at the time.  It was a weird beautiful album that didn't take kindly to the idea of "rules" and just became some weird haven for badassery in all of its forms.  The band was a bunch of wildmen just throwing stuff at the wall and running with whatever stuck.  But everything stuck, so they charged forward holding a wall stuck with hundreds of knives and powered forward like a jet powered Spartan phalanx.

Devouring Radiant Light is, well, not that.  This new incarnation of the band is Serious.  They focus on atmosphere and that dreaded fucking Maturity shit I hate so much.  No guys, you rule at kicking ass with relentless ferocity, nobody heard "Within My Blood" and said "oh yeah this would be way better if they got a more generic vocalist and just made plain ass USBM". 

It's stupid but that really is my biggest problem with this album.  Check out tracks like "Fen of Shadows" or the title track, or most especially "The Vault".  These tracks are just... normal.  It's run of the mill USBM with none of the leftover fire the band used to carry.  These tracks are loaded with atmosphere, which in normal circumstances would be a good thing, and it's honestly not even necessarily a bad thing here either, but it's just fucking lame okay?  The band never shied away from their black metal influence, so why does this bother me so much?  Well look at it this way, albums like Forever Abomination or the test run with this new vocalist, The Apothic Gloom, were controlled drifts.  They were expert maneuvers, deftly weaving around a tight curve and exploring new territory without losing the course.  The propulsive momentum never slowed down, the band was still powering forwards with so much kinetic energy that the skidding vehicle never once seemed like it was in danger of losing control.  Those experiments worked, and they kicked just as much ass as the previous albums.  Devouring Radiant Light, on the other hand, is a total oversteer that sees the band careening into the curb and tearing off the front bumper.  These songs are content to sit in one place and meander around a handful of melodies instead of blasting forwards like the band is so good at doing.  The little ricer that zipped circles around unsuspecting headbangers is instead whirling in a demented double helix of smoke and skid marks with no clear direction beyond "wherever this inevitable wreck takes us." 

The new vocals are a bit of a problem too, despite also being totally fine on the surface.  Really it all just once again comes down to the band toying with unfamiliar elements that just makes them so much less unique.  Adam Clemans is a good vocalist, but he has a much more normal black metallish rasp than the firehose-of-gravel approach that Chance Garnette had.  He was an instantly recognizable feature of the band, and his ousting (make no mistake, the original story of him bailing mid tour to deal with "personal issues" while the band heroically soldiered on as an instrumental group was hokey, he was booted out due to his alcoholism (which he has totally owned and since gotten help for) and the band spun it to paint themselves in a better light when I'm sure everybody would've understood the truth anyway) left a huge hole that they only sort of adequately filled.  Clemans sounds fine, and he works for this new direction, but that just makes it all the sadder.  It's not the same band fans fell in love with anymore, and maybe that's a dumb reason to dislike the album but come on.  Why did we have to sacrifice Skeletonwitch to get another Nachtmystium?  Exmortus sucks now and Vektor is too far up their own asses to consistently write great songs anymore, if we had to lose the last bastion of creative thrash from the late 2000s, I didn't want it to be because they just became another dime-a-dozen meloblack band.

There are, admittedly, things for old fans to like here though.  "When Paradise Fades" and "Carnium Eternal" sound straight out of Forever Abomination, with their explosive energy pounding out some absolutely fucking vicious thrashy-blacky-melodeathy-fistfuckery.  "The Luminous Sky" also goes hard as fuck and contains some of the best riffs the band ever wrote.  This is what they should have been doing, if you ask me.  This is that controlled drift I was talking about, this is the absolute chaos that was just reined in enough to have a solid foundation of meaty riffs and ferocious intensity.  If you slapped these three songs onto The Apothic Gloom, you'd have an amazing experience that showcased a new direction without totally abandoning their previous strengths.  Instead we have them coupled with "Temple of the Sun" and "Sacred Soil" and therefore stand out as the most blistering assaults on an otherwise comparatively tame album. 

I hate to do the iconoclastic Boris thing here, but I just can't say in good faith that the music decency makes up for the massive disappointment with the band all but abandoning what made them so great in the first place.  If you're the type who gets pissy about the score, just pretend I gave this a 72%, because if I was totally professional and only judged this on musical merits, that's what it'd get.  But I'm not professional.  I do this shit for free as a hobby, I'm currently writing this while buck naked and waiting for a pizza to finish baking.  The Serious Critic in me knows that there's nothing exactly wrong with Devouring Radiant Light on a surface level, but the Naked Hairy Hungry Guy in me knows that I don't want to listen to this anymore.  In 2007, Skeletonwitch sounded like almost nobody, and now in 2018, Skeletonwitch sound like almost everybody.

I caught the band live a few years ago, opening for (I think?) Cannibal Corpse, and during the climactic outro of "Within My Blood", Chance addressed the crowd with "Thank you all so much for coming out!  Drink some beer, smoke some weed, and most of all..." and then switched to his raspy snarl and belted out "EAT SOME FUCKING PUSSYYYYYY!"  The band that wrote "The Vault" would never close with that.  This does not eat some fucking pussy.  I'm not even remotely surprised that this got a positive review on Pitchfork.  Fuck Maturity.


RATING: 41%

Pious Levus - Beast of the Foulest Depths

Two choooooooords two chooooooords

I don't normally do promo reviews simply because I feel like there's an unspoken expectation to, ya know, promote.  I don't like doing that simply because most bands sending out mass promos through an incessant PR company frankly aren't all that good.  There are exceptions of course but in my experience my inbox has been flooded with literally dozens of albums per week from bands that are just flat out mediocre in every way.  Lately I decided fuck it, I'll check a handful, what's the worst that could happen?  That's how I came across Pious Levus here, and I can say with 100% certainty that I never would have otherwise and neither would anybody else because fuck this is boring.

I brought up the whole promo thing because the band is halfway made up of members of Hod, another band I checked out thanks to promo spamming when I wrote for Metal Crypt (a site positively swimming in low-tier promo trash) some eight years ago.  Hod was pretty nondescript black/death back then and Pious Levus is pretty nondescript black/death now.  Beast of the Foulest Depths sounds a lot like what I remember Serpent sounding like years ago, although maybe a bit further on the evil atmosphere side than the straight ahead Goatwhore-styled riffery that it shoved in your face.  And "in your face" is a good descriptor for Pious Levus, and it's only halfway a good thing.  I like bands that are intense and dangerous sounding, and that's certainly the case here, but it's backed up with precisely zero interesting songwriting.  It's all very green, paint-by-numbers demon worshipping extreme metal made up of blast beats, tremolo riffs, and extremely lazy grunt-yells.  The album throws no curveballs, no expertly written riffs, no standout performances, it's just white noise of shouting and blasting with nothing of note happening within the cacophony.  This is a band made up of scene veterans, which is sort of tragic because it simply showcases why they never broke out beyond their local Texan scene in the first place, they're... just not very good.  No songwriting skill, no instrumental/vocal standouts, it's low effort black metal about Satan in a world that already has like 100,000 bands exactly like that. 

Special shoutout has to go to the ninth track, "Demon Xusha's Invocation".  I get that it's supposed to sound like a ritual, but I'm not even kidding when I say it's almost three minutes of the same two chords repeated over and over and over and over and over and over again.  Every eight cycles or so the second chord will ascend instead of descend with a dissonant tremolo thing behind it and sometimes the drums keep pace with the ride instead of the hi-hat/splash/whatever it is.  But that's it!  It's so fucking lazy.  I can't even begin to comprehend how the band thought this passed muster.  How the fuck can these dudes have been making music since the late 80s/early 90s and somehow decide a three minute duh-duhhhhhhhh duh-duhhhhhhh duh-duhhhhhhh song was worth not only writing, but going through the effort of recording and ultimately making the cut for the band's debut fucking album?  A ten year old could play this song.  A ten year old could write this song.  "Demon Xusha's Invocation" is bad and so is Pious Levus.  Don't listen to this.


RATING - 20%

Harakiri for the Sky - Arson

Through the darkness of future's past...

I'll admit that this is somewhat outside of my usual wheelhouse.  When I reach for black metal, I tend to prefer it to keep itself far away from the post rock/shoegaze trappings that have become so ubiquitous in the atmospheric camps as of late.  I have soft spots for Altar of Plagues and Wolves in the Throne Room but for the most part it just generally bores me to tears.  This is why the Austrian duo, Harakiri for the Sky, is such a huge surprise to me, because I love the absolute shit out of Arson.

From what little I can gather, most fans of the band find their fourth album here to be somewhat of a disappointment because very little has changed throughout their discography, but honestly this just tells me that I'm missing three other incredible albums by starting this late.  On paper, Harakiri for the Sky plays a fairly by-the-numbers brand of post-black, consisting mostly of melancholic melodies layered over simplistic mid paced riffs with distant vocals playing second fiddle to the melodies, but where I think this band excels is actually through their other fiddles.  The band takes the Anaal Nathrakh route of the two-man-band ideal by having M.S. handle all of the instrumentation while J.J. just stands there and screams, but I feel like choosing to take on a session drummer for Arson (the current drummer of Septicflesh) was probably a huge boon to the overall feel of the album, because he absolutely fucking murders his performance.  He seems to have an almost Kollias-level addiction to speed in his lower half, because almost the entirety of the album is comprised of him blasting his fucking heart out, and even when he slows down it's only through his upper half, as his feet continue pummeling away at insane speeds.  It lends a frantic dissonance to the experience that I adore, changing what would otherwise sound like "I'm dying and I'm very sad about it" into "I'm dying and I don't want to fucking die please help me."  Nothing about this sounds like a triumph, it's all instead a mournful dirge played with incongruent ferocity, and it's an extremely cool effect.  I'll take this speedy and riff-heavy approach over the weepy bleakness of Alcest any day.

Another thing that absolutely deserves mention is how brutally long every song is without ever feeling truly drawn out.  It never falls into mindless repetition, with each track being a dynamic journey complemented by seemingly dozens of riffs and patterns.  The most impressive parts of the band to me are the more peripheral aspects, but the songs all live and die by the strength of the melodies regardless.  There really aren't any moments where I find myself bored or wishing a certain section would hurry up and end, instead finding myself enraptured in gorgeous clean and/or soaring guitar lines over the frantic rhythm section.  It's pretty impressive to have the shortest song still fall north of the eight minute mark and never fall into a rut.  The meaty production helps a lot in this regard, because even if you do tune out, it remains quite full and never really results in passive background noise.

There are a few problems here though, and admittedly they're all fairly large.  For one, while the songs themselves are very dynamic and shift through many different sections with appropriately intense climaxes, they all tend to shift through the same dynamic.  The tempos are almost entirely dependent on a brisk mid-tempo or a desperate blast, the moods are all melancholic and depressive, and there are very few truly unique sections throughout the runtime (like the absolutely crushing quasi-breakdown riff in the climax of "Fire, Walk with Me" or the hopelessly gorgeous outro of "You Are the Scars").  There's no fully calm song nor any fully blast heavy full-metal-assault.  It's one mood, that's all you get.  I've skimmed a few reviews of the album online and many of them mention an almost Korpiklaani-esque folk metal section somewhere in "Stillborn" but that's... not at all true?  I think they're talking about the section at roughly 2:30 but really it's just the same basic thing they do for the rest of the album, just with a slightly more active guitar line.  I guess if you really squint your ears it sounds a bit like early Ensiferum but that's really stretching it.  What the hell?  Did one reviewer throw that reference in as a joke and everybody parroted it without actually listening? 

It's also the opposite of succinct, with every song avoiding the problem of needless repetition but still following a similar structure throughout lengthy runtimes.  Including the Graveyard Lovers cover from the digital version (which I'm using to review), it clocks in at an excruciating 71 minutes.  With the songs all being so similar, this is one of the few albums where I would actually say that putting it on shuffle and listening to roughly three songs before just moving on to something else wouldn't devalue the experience at all.  That's about all it takes to get a full idea of what the album contains.  The first handful of tracks seem to have more individual standout sections but the last three tracks are probably tighter and more consistent on the whole, but even then it's a negligible difference.  "Tomb Omnia" and "Voidgazer" aren't really all that different from "Heroin Waltz" and "You Are the Scars" despite this distinction. 

There's really no place to put this, but the vocals are worth noting as a flaw as well.  J.J. isn't a bad vocalist by any means but he's noticeably the only truly static element of the band.  His screams are all a monotone bellow, with no variation whatsoever between all of his lines.  He hardly even has a "metal" voice, entirely devoid of black metal screeching or howling.  It's just a gruff holler, and it wouldn't sound too out of place in a particularly moody (post) hardcore band.  I don't particularly mind it, personally, but it's noticeable and worth mentioning.

Now, here's where we peel back the curtain a bit and see how all of this relates to my own personal philosophy on music and reviewing.  To me, music is art.  There are different kinds of experiences and goals that any given metal band will tackle, but it's art all the same.  Taken as a piece of art as opposed to a clinical deconstruction of the elements at play within Arson, all of those flaws amount to essentially bupkis.  Yeah the songs are all fairly samey and it's agonizingly long, but... man who gives a shit?  I don't need a fuckin' math problem to tell me how much I enjoy something.  If you plug in the individual components and weigh them however you choose to weigh them, you're going to encounter a lot of negatives that drag the score down.  If those negatives actually do impact your enjoyment then hey, more power to you, but for me they just... don't.  If I used some sort of formula to score this album, it'd land somewhere probably as low as the high fifties or low sixties.  But in my heart of hearts, if I just ask myself "How much do I like this album?", the answer is a very simple "A shitload."


RATING: 88%

Death Fortress - Deathless March of the Unyielding

Fortress of Maulitude

Longtime readers of mine have probably noticed that I don't cover a whole lot of black metal.  It's not because I don't like the style or anything, I'm just bad at writing about it.  I have the niches I love (from the blisteringly hateful like Infernal War's Redesekration and 1349's Hellfire, to the more traditionally hypnotic and atmospheric classics like Darkthrone's Under a Funeral Moon and Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss), but my thesaurus of musical bullshittery doesn't extent much further than death metal.  So forgive me for putting this bluntly, but Death Fortress's Deathless March of the Unyielding is fucking rad.

I've seen reviews scattered around the internet for these Jersey Boys' debut LP, Among the Ranks of the Unconquerable, and a lot of people seem to praise the band's atmospheric approach to black metal.  If that's the case, then Deathless March of the Unyielding here must be a pretty notable shift in style, because the atmosphere here remains present but takes a back seat to seething vitriol and pummeling riffage.  This borders on black/death at several points, most notably on the first side of the album, with tracks like "Enthroning the Oppresor" and "Scourge of Aeons" coming dangerously close to sounding like a much more black-leaning interpretation of modern Behemoth, and the nonstop intensity is the main reason why.  This shit doesn't let up for a second, right from the word "go" they proceed to just rend the entire universe asunder with twisted, malevolent riffs and manic percussion.  That's the main thing I take away from this album, it carries itself with such forward momentum that there is pretty much no room at all to breathe, and that's a plus for a guy who usually spends his time with punishing brutality in death metal.  The overwhelming oppression can get to be a bit much I admit, with there being relatively few standout moments instead acting as one overarching unit, but that really just means that the album nails what it's aiming for, so I can't fault it for being good at what it does.

The 10+ minute title track that closes out the album does stand out though, albeit for different reasons.  This is the one time the band takes their foot off the gas, but the bubbling hatred still overflows.  Lower vocals are utilized here, and the band takes on a much more doom-laden tone.  The riffs churn and crunch their way through a spiral walk down hellish landscapes, taking on an almost tribal, ritualistic atmosphere.  It's very epic, and it's nice to hear a band that spent the previous half hour mercilessly bludgeoning me into oblivion craft a much slower and more sinister brand of black metal to cap off the experience.  It shows that Death Fortress are extremely skilled at everything they try to do, and this wide variance of ideas that all work marvelously showcases a band of professionals spreading their wings and dominating everything they set their mind to.

I just want to point out that it's at this point in the review I actually looked up the personnel behind the band and realized the guitarist and bassist are the two guys from Dethroned Emperor and the drummer played in both Disma and Funebrarum, so all that death metal influence I picked up while listening to this makes complete sense and my ear for extreme metal is just as sharp as always, I deserve a fucking cookie.

Deathless March of the Unyielding is absolutely crushing, and the vehement, blistering anger and hatred permeates every note.  I'm not about to sit back and call it a modern masterpiece, but there isn't a whole lot I dislike about it.  Death Fortress delivers a half hour of oppressive, punishing atmosphere with a massive undercurrent of barbarianesque power that decimates everything in front of it, before ending on a ten minute blackened dirge of hellish, Junji Ito proportions.  People smarter than I have compared them to Swedish legends Sacramentum, but if I'm being totally honest I've never actually listened to Sacramentum so you'll just have to take my second-hand word for it.  The point is that this album absolutely rules, and I'm glad I heard it.  It's not going to be winning Album of the Year or anything but it will certainly contend on a lot of peoples' lists as long as they get enough exposure.  And with songwriting skills like theirs, that shouldn't be a problem.


RATING - 88%

Besatt - Nine Sins

ok

Besatt - Nine Sins

It sucks.

RATING - 30%

Lord Mantis - Pervertor

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark just got weirder

Taste Swap round 5, bitches!  I'm bringing this fad back, and this time I've dragged the monstrous Thumbman, dystopia4, down with me.  The guy may do almost nothing except lift weights and listen to sludge, but every once and a while he takes a break to write reviews, and when he does he's one of the most consistent out there.  And so with that in mind I asked him to pair up with me for this little game I play, and the album he gave me was, much like the last two I did (Witchcraft and Bodycage), very, very good.  Enter Pervertor, by Chicago's own Lord Mantis.

With my first look at the (gorgeously grotesque) cover art, my mind understandably jumped to Dragged into Sunlight's monumental Hatred for Mankind, and I'm not alone because the two bands seem to be compared to one another.  The difference to me is that while Dragged into Sunlight takes visceral black metal and spreads it liberally over dark, oppressive doom, Lord Mantis takes that same Nordic vitriol and instead uses it to coat a base of filthy sludge.  Now generally, I don't give a fuck about sludge (which is precisely why I do these games, of course), but apparently taking the dank, grungy sounds of Grief and sandblasting it with the screeching hatred of USBM makes for a pretty fucking swell combination, because Pervertor completely rips face.

The first thing that stood out to me were the vocals, which channel Melechesh's Ashmedi in terms of sheer force combined with unrelenting harshness.  It sounds like he's pushing the words out of his body with the force of a volcanic eruption, and it comes off as so god damned gritty and powerful that I can't imagine any other way this band could possibly approach the vocal position.  There's a fifteen second howl at the end of "Ritual Killer" that just sounds like the vocal representation of genocide, and it only took the opening lines of "Pervertor of the Will" to cement this as one of the most vicious performances of 2012.

I mentioned Grief earlier, mainly because they're one of the very few sludge bands I'm familiar with in any capacity, but that's honestly not a great comparison because Lord Mantis seems to approach the style with a much different mindset.  Grief is about misery and despair, while Lord Mantis is about misanthropy and hatred.  As such, the music contained here is much more aggressive, which is largely due to the black metal half of the band's style.  The riffs rarely devolve into cliched tremolo abuse, instead working their way around very twisted patterns and evoking an atmosphere of filth.  The bluesy roots of the style rear their head occasionally (like on "The Whip and the Body"), but it never falls into Sabbath retreads or anything like that.  All it really does is keep the songs varied enough for them all to have their own identity in co-ordinance with the ideal of keeping the album unified and cohesive.  The whole album focuses on seismic heaviness, and that's really all I could ask out of it.

This is another case where there really isn't much fault I can find in an album.  This absolutely knows what it set out to do, and Pervertor certainly accomplished that goal.  It's dirty, raw, bloody, and visceral.  Basically any adjectives you could use to describe a knife fight apply here equally as well.  Since jumping from Candlelight to Profound Lore and adding the omnipresent Ken Sorceron to the fold, the band has found its way into the closest thing to the mainstream that metal really has anymore (that being the XM metal station and being namedropped on MetalSucks and similar publications), so I think it's safe to assume they've gotten slightly more accessible with their later releases.  If so, that's a shame, because the unrelenting vitriol contained on Pervertor is brilliant, and we really legitimately need more bands focusing on mood and songwriting like this.  Lord Mantis has a couple of tricks in their arsenal, and they employ all of them wonderfully here.  Even if you end up hating this, I dare you to tell me the vocals suck.  This sickly malformed and fanatical howling is pretty much the closest thing to objectively great you're going to find in extreme metal.  Definitely worth a listen if you're not a pussy, bro.

Cal used to have his own blog but he hasn't updated it in over a year, but you can find his MA reviews here, and he also reviews for The Metal Observer, so you may know him already, but he's pretty swell so read his stuff dammit


RATING - 90%

Hoth - Oathbreaker

I look for love in Alderaan places

Hey BH! Your ragepost about Jari Maenpaa got a lot of circulation around the internet! It showed up on Reddit and MetalSucks even wrote about it! It became the most viewed page on your blog by a longshot within one day! How are you gonna follow that up? Another response to Jari's second cry?

Nah fuck it, let's talk about Star Wars.

Hoth here is a band I checked out for all the most obvious reasons.  I mean come on, look at their logo!  Clearly, these dudes didn't give a fuck about taking themselves too particularly seriously.  If you wanted to name your band something that brought to mind dead, frigid landscapes, Hoth isn't a bad choice.  It's an icy wasteland from a well known fantasy universe, it's not uncommon for metal.  But then shaping your logo like a fucking Tie-Fighter??  Oh hell yeah, let's rock this shit.  Let's have some fun and play some god damned metal, yo!

And that's where I was wrong, because this is played straight as an arrow, with all the dead eyed seriousness of a veteran soldier.  And you know what?  It fits fucking perfectly.  I suppose the darkness of the Star Wars universe has kind of been downplayed in my memory, because for some reason I couldn't possibly imagine this theme being anything other than bombastic and silly.  Apparently The Phantom Menace is all I can recall on a whim.  Fucking trash tainting the classics and yadda yadda this isn't about that.  The point is that Oathbreaker is an incredibly mature album for having such a massive scale to it.

What I mean is that there's a stunning amount of tastefulness and craftsmanship to be found in the songwriting.  The music is put against the backdrop of fighting Robot Jesus, Lord of the Space Gestapo and all of the songs are pretty long (nothing is shorter than five and a half minutes), but the two dudes in the band manage to do the same thing that Gotsu Totsu Kotsu does so well; they keep the songs simple and let them grow organically rather than meticulously structure and orchestrate their direction.  They keep everything grounded and focused instead of just throwing a bunch of shit at the listener in some futile hope of conveying some epic atmosphere.  It's hard to explain but it's something that seems so obvious to me when I hear it.  There are actually a fairly wide variety of styles on display, and none of them ever feel forced or awkward.  You're gonna think I'm crazy, but hear me out on this... Hoth reminds me a lot of Ensiferum.

Stop laughing, I can explain.  Yes, the band is listed everywhere as "melodic death/black metal", and that's not wrong, but the melodies that permeate the foreground of the whole record sound straight out of Markus Toivenen's book.  Ensiferum helped make folk metal popular by blending it with power metal instead of black metal like most bands at the time did (and still do), which gave it a hugely bombastic nature that few bands were really championing back in 2001.  Hoth take that folk/power metal blend of Ensiferum and put it back in a black metal template, if that makes any sense.  Melodic black metal is probably the easiest way to describe what's happening on Oathbreaker, but if you wanted to touch on every genre that makes a prominent appearance, you'd have to say something ridiculous like "Epic Melodic Technical Progressive Atmospheric Black/Death/Thrash/Folk Metal".  There are a shitload of ideas at play here, and they almost all hit bullseye.  Each track seems to have at least one lead melody that carries the song throughout most of the duration, and each and every last one of them runs the risk of getting stuck on loop in your head for days at a time.  And underneath that melodic forefront, you can have songs like "A Blighted Hope" that take a merry melody and twist it into something sorrowful and depressing before throwing it over a very bouncy and triumphant rhythm, completely changing the mood and theme of that melody without changing a note of it.  Contrast that with songs like "Unending Power" that are so visceral and punishing that it could easily be mistaken for a Skeletonwitch song.

The smorgasbord of stylings on display would mean nothing if the songwriting itself didn't also rule, and of course, it does.  It's hard to really put into words, but I touched on it a bit earlier.  Everything about this just feels organic and well thought out.  The songs are all structurally interesting, never falling into trenches of repetition, and even though every song has at least one extended clean section, they never feel obligatory or needless.  It's just... this is the only place the song could have logically gone from here, so that's where it went.  There's really not a whole lot to complain about here, Oathbreaker is a very solid album that takes vast swaths of several different styles of extreme metal and manages to tie them all coherently together with strong melodies.  I mean, the riffing is pretty decent and the drumming is excellent, but it's really the melodies that make the album worth listening to.  It's impressive how they manage to make it seem like so much is going on while keeping everything simple and never overdoing layers upon layers of bullshit like many bands are prone to doing.  Just listen to the fucking thing already, I pinky promise it's super good.

Also fuck Star Trek, I'm glad Kirk got crushed by a bridge.  Screw you, Tailgunner!


RATING - 89%

Hades Archer - Penis Metal

HORSE COCK

There are some things in this world that deserve the utmost praise; the things that naturally gifted people can accomplish with enough hard work (like landing on the moon with less computing power than a TI-83 calculator), little marks of genius that only the insane would stumble upon (like finding out that if you sniff the gas right before whipped cream comes out, you'll get high for five seconds), and what the bottomfeeding scum of the universe dream up in a flash of fluke brilliance (like whoever invented r/tittydrop). Sometimes, all three will morass into one grody, sticky glob of god-knows-what, like whatever stoned Chilean savant wandered into band practice one day and said "Guys, we absolutely must name our next release Penis Metal." And with that, Hades Archer blundered into what is hands down the greatest release title of all time.

And does the music inside hold up? Ehh, kinda. All Hades Archer truly is is competent. No individual aspects of the band stand out, the songwriting is pretty generic (if energetic), and the vocals are of the more lazy croaking style of black metal, of which I'm not a fan. I can give props for the EP being so cohesive, with the entire thing melding together as one solid fifteen minute explosion of blasphemy and noise, but beyond the heinous cacophony there isn't much I can really hold high as exemplary. The riffing is certainly not flaccid, but it isn't particularly rigid either. The percussion pounds away in that constant battery of one dimensional blast beats that anybody who has heard South American black metal before is surely quite used to. I do like the hypnotic throbbing in "Gloria Rex Infernus", but it's one of the few moments where Penis Metal isn't just shooting ahead at full speed. It works as a nice, very brief reprieve in betwixt all the harsh walls of noise. The title track also stands out for one of the only acceptable one-phrase choruses in the history of metal. Man if you can't rock out to PE-NEES ME-TAL PE-PEES ME-TAL, then I don't ever want to be your friend.

Otherwise it's nothing special apart from the obvious aesthetic genius. Typical bestial black metal with almost zero outside influences (you aren't going to find any thrashy riffs here), but I do admit that it's pretty charming in its enthusiasm. It's fifteen solid minutes of Chilean black metal and there isn't much else to say about it apart from the stunningly brilliant title and art. It's just a lot of fun to rock out with your cock out all willy nilly. Dick cock wiener schlong schwanzstuckers tallywhacker KNOBEND MEMBER STAFF WILLY BOABY PEEN DINGALING KNEESLAPPER TURTLENECK TODGER TROUSERSNAKE.

SPURT.

REYNOLDS.

RATING: 65%

Lvcifyre - Svn Eater

Reviews like this don't just happen

Oh lord... here it comes again... I can feel it.  This rumbling, this warm, distant cacophony from deep within my gut.  It's becoming a frequent thing, especially over the last several years.  Perhaps it's the enhanced amount of fiber in my diet, or maybe it's simply a new routine I've been working myself into.  But regardless, this feeling is unmistakable.  I try fighting it, but the buzz grows louder with every passing moment.  I hear the dim rememberings of voices past and present in the darkest cockles of my subconsciousness.  "Dude, just go", "You won't regret it, seriously!", "I can tell, this one is going to be different", "Bill, I just shit myself".  Eventually, I can't fight it any longer, as the buildup has been immense.

I run to the bathroom.

Initially, the slow churning and grinding was moving along at a rather deliberate pace.  It felt as if the demons inside were preparing for their assault moreso than actually carrying it out.  Maybe it was a bluff?  Maybe there was no such violent attack planned in the first place? It felt like an eternity, I sat there, jaw agape, neck straining, waiting for something, anything to materialize.  All I could hear and feel were the distant rumblings of an all-too-familiar entity; a slowly awakening beast, sleepily pawing at the light at the end of the tunnel, trying to remember why it was even awakened in the first place.

It took slightly over nine minutes of drawn out, rumbling foreboding.  I felt the walls begin to bow outwards, and I knew it was time to put down my Gameboy and brace myself.  The Volcano Badge would have to wait, for I had my own Vesuvian catastrophe to worry about.  I curl my toes and and clench my fists, bracing myself for the inevitable supernova.  And sure enough, it delivered.  The initial eruption of burning malice was nothing short of inhumane.  It is a pain of the most middingly pleasurable kind.  The kind of thing I would not subject myself to frequently, but when it happens on its own, I gladly endure it, for I know the spoils are usually worth the struggle.  This blackened wretch of filth wasn't doing much to stand out from the other floods of vitriolic scorn that I find has become ever so prevalent as of late, but it was proving itself formidable nonetheless.  This violent purge was based in the death of all things, as if the very essence of life was pouring out of me.

Like most experiences of this nature, what lasted was a forty to fifty minute expunging of bubbling vehemence.  Despite the upfront nature of the beast, it (like most of these nasty things) feels to be off in the distance when in progress.  Despite the fact that the pummeling ferocity of the experience might cause me to grab the edge of the toilet seat for support while my skin flushes and all strength drains away in a maelstrom of fiery hatred from within the confines of my own bowels, it all feels to be emanating from a distant cavern in which I have zero plans of spelunking.  In a way it's almost frustrating because at no point in this expulsion did the pace ever change after the initial crescendo.  A fifty minute plateau of virulent sadism ends up being a rather unfulfilling sequence of events when there is so little time to breathe between the suffocating atmosphere of malice.  From the beginning to the end, you could have taken any snippet of this whole ordeal and played it back to me, and I'd've never been able to tell you how far along in the torturous endeavor I was.  I would take a minor courtesy flush every once in a while, but it's only a temporary reprieve from the demonic malediction.

And of course, when it all was over, I felt unsatisfied.  Color began to return to my cheeks and feeling to my fingers, but after the cleanup, there was no story to be told.  Yes, I'm well aware I'm telling you this story now, but this has become such a frequent occurrence that this really could have been any one of the dozens of other times I've sat through such an experience.  I mean, it's not something I dislike.  The beefy tones of utter demolition as they resonate off the porcelain are satisfying in that they rarely sound like there is no greater passion behind the push, and the far-off ululating of the demon at the forefront of this almost always sounds like something to be feared, but the utter indifference to the ideas of pacing and thematic variation within the vast annals of my lower intestine just end up being overwhelmingly dull.  At the end of the day, all I can really say is that I took a really big poop.  The poop wasn't more impressive than any of the other big poops I find myself experiencing, and it's quite a decent poop, but it's a poop I've pooped many times before, and if nothing else, maybe eating some Cap'n Crunch Oops All Berries to the stew some more vibrancy in hue would be welcome.

And I just wrote an entire review comparing Lvcifyre and the Dark Descent Records/OSDM Revival scene to taking a really nasty shit.  What have you done with your day?


RATING - 70%

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Maybe life is like a ride on the freeway?

I'm gonna do something a little different here, an experiment if you will, so bear with me.  Deafheaven is a band that's been generating a lot of fuzz.  Neckbeards around the world have been ovulating with excitement over this new "different black metal" band since the hype of Liturgy and their unbearably inane frontman seem to have fallen by the wayside in recent months.  Places like Pitchfork and probably Anthony Fantano (I haven't looked yet, but I can guarantee he's reviewed and loves this album) have just been drooljizzing all over the place since the release of Sunbather in the middle of June this year.  Now, this will be an experimental review for me for a few reasons.  1) Hipstery post-black metal is entirely out of my element.  I like post rock and I like black metal but I rarely seem to fall in love when the two are blended (notable exception for Altar of Plagues' first album), and 2) This is clearly the kind of album you need to sit down and lose yourself in.  "Experience" more than "listen to", something with many layers that you can tune in and drop out to, ya know?  Well I'm not doing that.  Nope, I listened to this once about a half hour ago and now I'm reviewing it.  Consider this different because it's a first impression from an outsider.

And what do I think?  Well... I like it.  I like it a whole shitload, to be more precise.

You see, most reviewers I know and trust have been pretty lukewarm about this album, whereas others with taste I rarely mesh with and unknown noobs and noted hipsters and whatnot have just been showering this with praise.  This usually indicates that the album's content and quality is probably more in line with the minority I trust, but here I actually think I'm gonna have to side with the jizzlobbers, though not nearly as fervently.  I don't find Sunbather to be any sort of world changing effort, nor do I foresee this ranking on my year-end list, but I do find it highly enjoyable, and even when this experiment is done I can easily see myself spinning it more often.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm entirely well versed in this style.  I mean, I'd like to think that I'm pretty kvlt with my post rock tastes (Godspeed You! Black Emperor is good in theory and atmosphere but sloppy in execution, Gifts from Enola is sheer brilliance, God is an Astronaut are basically a pop band but I love them to death anyway, and then I can namedrop a bunch of horridly obscure bands that I adore like Yndi Halda, Foxhole, you.will.die.in.the.desert, Up+C Down+C Left+C Right+C ABC+Start (I swear to God they're way better than their name implies), The Samuel Jackson Five, Six Parts Seven, et cetera), but most of the bands Deafheaven are compared to are bands I have little to no experience with.  I haven't heard a single note of Alcest's music,  I know who Liturgy and Weakling are but I've never actually listened to their music, Wolves in the Throne Room are pretty rad I suppose, and Skagos is okay, but I haven't heard Fen or Lantlos or anything like that.  Basically the entire atmospheric-post-black-shoegaze-cascadian-whateverthefuck scene is entirely foreign to me, and so I have no preconceived notions on Deafheaven or Sunbather, nor do I think they're diametrically opposed to black metal for simply trying to be pretty and not singing about Satan buttraping virgin ibex.

"But what do they sing about instead?", you may find yourself asking.  The answer is simple: mundaneness.  Of course the band has some really esoteric sounding explanation but it really boils down to "inane shit".  I suppose they're trying to be poetic or something but there are only so many ways you can screech about ogling topless women from afar before you're forced to throw up your hands and just admit that there's no higher art here and move on with your life.  Luckily the lyrics are as inconsequential as they are stupid, because the music itself is very evocative and romantic, along with a sense of psyched out urgency, remorseful interludes, and frenzied blasting atop very soothing melodies.  I feel like whatever the band was trying to achieve here, they nailed.  I'm sure there are much better things hidden in the underground within the style based on how many casual fans are blown away by this record and how many well acquainted with the style are underwhelmed, but dammit I'd be lying if I said this wasn't a very strong, emotional sounding album that can't help but make one hell of a connection to the listener.  Maybe it's because it's so accessible (who am I kidding? Of course that's why) that it's been so successful, but I have to hand it to the band, after merely one listen the entire experience stuck with me.  I remembered the weird, hypnotic pulsing of "Vertigo" and the soothing melodies of "The Pecan Tree", I remembered the spoken word sermon in "Windows" and the major melodies permeating throughout "Dream House".  I can't lie, the songs are all very well written, and the atmospheric black metal transitions to the post rock sections so smoothly that it never once comes off as clunky or forced.

Of the seven tracks here, only four are really traditional "songs" like you'd expect, with each one being broken up by a shorter (semi)instrumental interlude.  These interludes are actually very well done and flow remarkably with the mood and pace of the album.  "Irresistable" in particular really stands out for me, being so damn calming and gorgeous, though "Windows" is also extremely captivating with the aforementioned spoken word samples.  Of the more structured "songs" on the album, I feel like it's cliche to say but I really find "Vertigo" to be my favorite on this first listen.  It's the longest one, but it never feels like it's being stretched out.  It moves along at a deliberate pace and contains a lot of ideas, but it's all very well thought out and the complexities make themselves known without being obnoxious about it.  What I mean is that throughout all the pretentiousness and cliches of post-black metal, this entire album is very well written and yet doesn't seem to feel the need to be all in-your-face and intellectual about it.  It's content to tell you its story, relay to you its imagery, and just sit back and let you soak it all in.  I like that about it, Sunbather is a very passive album.  It's a pleasant listen, with many moods and relatively simple execution.  It's basically a lot of ideas boiled down to a minimalistic approach to songwriting and it knocks it out of the park.  It's not showy or irritating, it's just... good.

In the realm of pretty, atmospheric black metal, I may not be an expert but I suspect that Sunbather is far from one of the worst in the genre.  The vocals are very distant and brash, the guitars are clear yet kinda dirty, it's basically everything you'd expect from a production standpoint, but therein lies what I like about the record.  Nothing in particular strikes me as horribly new or innovative, but it's just a simple album with a simple goal and it's done very well.  There's nothing worth hating (nor praising to high heaven for that matter), and overall I can't think of too many bad things to say about it.  For a first impression, Sunbather left a hell of a mark.  Again, I don't see this making my top 10/13/15/however many I decide to do this year, but if there's not much I would change about it and it keeps me engaged for a full hour despite stupid pretentious lyrics and waves of unnecessary hype, I'd have to say that Deafheaven hit a pretty strong ball.  It's no 700ft over-the-bleachers moonshot, but it's a solid double in the perfect seam between two outfielders.


RATING - 83%