Archive for August 2022

As I covered in the review of the band’s demo, Verletzen are a local black metal band to me here in South Wales. The demo was great, with a very traditional yet clean approach to weaving tunes of blackest misery and grimness. Evil Will Triumph continues this trend much in the same vein as the debut demo, but with a bigger studio sound. For the most part, this works quite well, and it is nice…

Quite possibly the stupidest thing in my record collection, which is definitely the whole point of this thing. I remember, in the early 2010s, a race amongst the noisecore / experimental projects and labels to release the smallest record possible. Technically, RxTx’s Bleached Anus takes the win, being fully playable (if only for a few seconds) at 1.5″ in size. Esion’s 1.5″ however, is actually not playable at all, and is in fact, designed to…

VRV are one of those projects that is fairly awful on record but absolutely amazing live. Unless you have a particular penchant for drum machine fuelled noisecore with no direction or purpose, then please do not let me stop you. This 2008 CDr (I believe, from the man himself when I bought the VRV split with Agathocles) contains 2 sessions of improv madness, followed by an unlistenable live final session.

I had this when I was a kid but I don’t know what the fuck I was listening to because that was some 2 x CD set I pirated off a Russian website that had tons of bad demos and crappy synth passages. Satanica, not to be confused with The Satanist by the same band (way to go for original album titles, Nergal my guy hahaha), is none of the above, instead it is, of…

Low key, posthumous release from Godflesh during their initial break up, or just before. I think it was recorded in the early 90s originally. Anyway, here are 4 tracks of stunning introspective industrial metal, followed by 4 dub remixes of those same tracks. It gives Messiah a circular feel, as themes you hear at the start are reprised in the dubs at the end. It’s a great mix of stuff.

Stunning recent outing from Darkthrone, with a robust yet natural production and the usual predilection for slaying riffs. Expect slightly longer songs, I suppose Eternal Hails is not a million miles from Old Star, but the vibe is much different. The closing track here in particular is a tidy slice of epic metal. Long live Darkthrone.

Where do I begin with Tomb Of The Mutilated? I mean, just look at that art work! Just when you thought music couldn’t get heavier, couldn’t get more brutal, couldn’t get more disgusting, the 90s brought the wave of death metal full on and with it came Cannibal Corpse. This is a beast of an album.

This “album”, at just over quarter of an hour long, marks – for me – the point where The Locust “became” The Locust we all know and love. Granted, the line-up which made some of the greatest records of all time didn’t solidify until 2001, but this self-titled record is an absolute explosion of grinding synthesizer madness. It is hard to explain really, but there’s just something about the frantic energy of The Locust that…

This is the first of two self-titled releases the band did. The first is called, technically I guess, just Locust rather than The Locust. As a historical listener, the most striking thing for me about this 7″ is how the band’s sound develops from the more rudimentary powerviolence approach of the 1996 splits into what we could consider the more recognisable Locust sound. Hydra-headed jackal-like vocal attacks punctuate intense stabs of grinding noise. Most importantly,…

I’ve been meaning to check this out for a while, and to be honest it wasn’t bad, give or take the fairly weak story line. Musically, I think the soundtrack manages to strike a good balance between modern and nostalgic, with more callbacks to the original run of 90s games happening in the gameplay rather than in the audio. On the downside however no particular artist here stands out, especially as I pored over the…

A beautifully composed album from the mid-90s, led by Satyricon’s Satyr Wongraven (I guess this dude loves naming bands after himself, huh?). Discogs credits Norwegian percussionist Hans-Kristian Kjos Sørensen as having contributed to this record, as well as Ihsahn from Emperor, but for the most part, this is a solo outing. What we get is a solid 30 minutes or so of excellent ambient / dungeon synth music (before the term really existed, remember) that…

I was recommended this off the back of finding Lunar Womb’s Planets record. There I was in awe of the vaporwave-decades-before-vaporwave sound mixed with dark ambient (or dungeon synth to you modern kids). Watering A Flower is however, a different creature. There is a similarity in floating synthesisers and dreamlike pacing, but otherwise Haruomi Hosono invokes an entirely different listening experience. One I admittedly enjoyed in all its minimal, trance-inducing goodness, and I will seek…

The World That Summer is the third album from Death In June. It still retains a lot of the dance / drum machine elements of Nada! but Douglas’ experimental and acoustic sides are starting to flourish more. The album as a whole has a treacle-like pace, despite a few popping beats here or there. The music doesn’t match the pitch black cover art. It’s super chill, though.

Godless Savage Garden seems like something of a stop-gap after Enthrone Darkness Triumphant. I see it as more of an EP than an album, but its not a million miles away from CoF’s From The Cradle… EP or stop-gap Bitter Suites record. It would perhaps be callous to call these songs leftovers from the Enthrone… sessions but they do have the similar excellent, spoopy vibe with plenty of reverb. The band in this time dealt…

I feel dirty because a few of the black metal related things I’ve touched recently have leaned more towards the unsavoury (both Clandestine Blaze and Deathspell Omega which I’ve covered contain the unsavoury Mikko Aspa), so it was almost with a sigh of relief that I remembered I had a Feminazgul record to check out. I can’t decide if the name is pure genius or just downright awful, but either way, it certainly turns heads…

A 7” I’ve had for about 15 years and have listened to multiple times with a purpose to review it, yet I can never remember what the thing sounds like. It’s not bad, but the fact it’s so forgettable hardly looks good, does it?

I downloaded a bunch of Nargaroth records 7 years ago when they were coming to my town so it’s probably a good idea if I actually listen to them. Spectral Visions… is as much introspective electronic music as it is dingy black metal. When the metal does flow, the songs are slow and atmospheric. Personally, I prefer the electronic passages here, which come across like a techno version of Tangerine Dream drowning in dusty dungeon…

This was originally recorded and released digitally in 2018 but the tape eventually came from Haunted Hotel Records in 2020. Sulsa are at the absolute peak of what decent goregrind should sound like. There’s a little mince stomp (only just), but otherwise this is punishing gore with a fat, disgusting bass leading the way. The vocals are putrid as all hell, and I cannot recommend this band heavily enough. Cystoblastosis have some good old school…