Archive for 2023

I love this thing. Dense, fathomless, evil as fuck – but with a twisted sense of humour too. Production is dank and echoic, which can make the blasting sections a bit difficult to decipher, but generally the production really lends a lot of atmosphere to the proceedings. What I didn’t expect to really enjoy was some of the slower riff sections, where the excellence of the guitar work can be easily noticed, as well as…

UUURRGHHHH I recently got a copy of this on cassette. Whether it’s a legit repressing or a bootleg I’m really not sure nor do I really care, because this shit fucking slaps. To call any era of Mortician’s music “primitive” would be fucking lazy, but the earlier gestations of the band are not quite as streamlined as what would come on the full length records, or even EPs like Brutally Mutilated. That may sound rather…

What the actual fuck is this? Off the strength of basically every single Mortiis side project (including earlier Vond), I got myself a copy of this on cassette. It’s a recent re-issue, but still. I wish I hadn’t bothered. This is easily the shittiest thing I’ve come across that’s got Havard’s name on it. Totally fucking pointless sound collages and minimal synths. It sounds like there has been absolutely minimal effort put into making this….

Less of the slamz and more of the high quality production death metal ting. Which y’know, is absolutely fine with me. Variety is the spice of life and all that – and hey, it’s fuckin’ great to listen to some some fuckin’ brutal death metal every now and then when the production is good enough that I can actually understand everything that is going on! Blood Oath is just that. It won’t win any awards…

Well then, things don’t half fall off after the first record. Folkfuck Folie (what is the title about?) is not necessarily bad but is absolutely not what I was expecting after the super intense, evil and evocative black metal whirlwind that was the band’s debut. Folkfukk is far more fractured and experimental, heading into directions and tangents that, at first at least, seem to distract from the core material on the album – that being…

Guitar tuning is so low that it almost sounds like it is artificially pitchshifted, like Libido Airbag were about to mix these guitars into some sort of techno-pornogrind bullshit. Alas, once one’s puny mortal ears hath adjuste to thon brutallic onslaught of disgusting noise that is the tuning ov Drop 666, one can appreciate the ants-in-yon-pants old school brutal death that Bowels Out are finest purveyors thereof. Such beautous movements as “Gourmet Vaginal Stew” and…

The first time I heard this record I was 15 years old, and drunk on black metal classics like Transilvanian Hunger or Burzum’s first few records. Hungry for more I decided to start at the beginning with Venom’s Black Metal album….only to find a bunch of sloppy thrash with terrible lyrics about shagging your teacher or Satan being your dad. Safe to say, this went straight into a pile and never really got played ever…

Feel like I’m on a different planet to the rest of the folks hearing this. Beats are interesting at best, irritating at worst, and the flow is just…. shit. Feels like she’s rapping at me over the tanoy system at one of those giant Tesco Extra supermarkets at 3 in the morning when all I’m trying to do is cop a Monster energy drink and a cheese sandwich and get back to the rest of…

Man, I love London Zoo, and Angels & Devils, so imagine my surprise when I found out that I’d slept on this thing coming out two years ago. I won’t tell you its straight fire, because as always with this kind of thing, its impossible not to be a bit hit and miss. Some of the collabs are a bit, err, not so great, to be honest, but the ones that are (I’m looking at…

“Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub – yay God!” Never thought a Family Guy quote would sum up Al Cisneros’ Om so perfectly, but there we go. “Gethsemane” is possibly the best song on Adviatic Songs (it’s been a minute since I heard that album though), but these dub remixes perhaps expectedly remove the startling urgency with which that beautiful song closes after 8 minutes of pensive meditation and bass groove. Instead, said…

I like this a lot more than I have any right to. I fucking HATED The Devil’s Rain, but on the other hand I’ve seen the Jerry-era 3-piece multiple times with multiple line ups (the one with Dez on guitar and Robo on drums was by far the best) and I fully enjoyed their live shows, regardless of how pointless the Jerry-led band is when on paper. The sound here is fast and loose, and…

Holy fuck, this is fuckin’ brutal; easily one of the best brutal death records I’ve heard in a hot minute. Dat bass, fam – dat bass. Fuckin’ drums on this are out of control though, mans can blast. Roger, perhaps best known for Mortician, is on point here with these drums. He can also be credited for producing this absolute monster of a death metal album. I feel however, writing endlessly about this would be…

Huggy Bear, oh yeeeeahhh! Cathedral were on a roll in the early to mid 90s, culmulating I’d say, with this absolute stonker of an album. Things slowly started to cool off after this, but goddamn, the band are on fire on this thing. First off, the production is huge. It takes away some of the chonk of The Ethereal Mirror and instead heaps on a bit of frosty clarity. Kit Woolven (RIP) and Doug Cook…

I won’t lie to you, I’ve avoided this album for about 15 years, only because Venom doing a 20 minute song has never really been something that has appealed to me. However, the joke’s on me becuase this shit fuckin’ rules. Also, generally, across this whole record, the production is fantastic. The sound isn’t a million miles away from the other earlier albums, but the guitar tone is just so goddamn sick and crunchy. I’m…

I think I prefer the songs on the S/T EP – these are the tracks that made me fall in love with Sunami after all – but the production here has got to be the best on any Sunami release that I’ve heard. The riffs and beatdowns just seem extra fucking hard as well, the ending of “Step Up” is just absolutely fucking off the chain, fam. Gulch’s bass drum is like a mule kick…

The only truly “meh” release in the 1349 catalog. This is down to the production more than anything else. If this was an bedroom album by a one-man industrial / black metal artist then I would be very impressed, but it isn’t – it’s 1349, with some of the best players in the game. There is no need for something as fast and crazy as this to sound so brittle and lifeless. A rare swing…

Perhaps closer to the themes and songwriting on Varjot than on the more “kvlt” Finnish Steel Storms or Death Before Dishonour, and whilst I prefer Varjot to the others mentioned above, I can’t help but feel that Voitto tai Valhalla lacks focus. Variety is one thing, but a lack of direction is another. I’m sure this was not the case during the writing and recording sessions, but I can’t help shake this feeling when more…

Love this album. I love the balance between the (dare I say) atmospheric, hypnotic riffs (a la Burzum) and just flat out brutality in the drum department. Guess it’s like Varg jamming with Frost or Nick Barker, only the drummers are not allowed to deploy their flagrant tom rolls and cymbal flourishes and must instead just focus on their machine-gun precision. Such stupid comparisons aside, Purity is fucking great. The songs are quite lengthy but…

My friend put this album on my computer sometime in 2008. I just didn’t get it at the time. It seemed boring, pretentious, overly long. I tried a few times over the years to get into it, but I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t for a lack of patience, I love artists such as Sunn O))), Merzbow, Swans etc. – further to this, returning randomly to the album in 2023, some 15 years later…

The solid, first major entry from the now-legendary Cattle Decapitation. The band that made this record is a long way from the band that is putting out albums today, but this is still well worth checking out, especially if goregrind or grindcore in general is your bag. 18 songs in as many minutes, Human Jerky is frantic and messy, both in musicality (although Serbian (RIP) and Astor hold it down) and also in voice (Travis’…

Oh my fucking goodness gracious me (as my nan would say). I think I may have just found my favourite Nile record. I came onboard the goodship Nile (sailing towards the duat, or perhaps to Orion, if Robert Buaval is to be believed (probably not)) with the release of Annihilation Of The Wicked. That album blew my mind when I was a teenager – I really hadn’t heard anything like it, in regards to that…

Quality.Consistency.Brutality – You can always count on Revenge to deliver the full-blown headcrashing sledgehammer of unstoppable war metal goodness. Infiltration.Downfall.Death is no different to any of the albums that have come before it (sans as many groove parts as its predecessor, perhaps, but we are splitting hairs), but the quality of the sonic madness offered is so high that one really does not mind to be fed the same carnage over and over and over…

Shaky, ramshackle black metal from the early daze of the Polish scene. Had no idea these guys had ties to Graveland, but the world of black metal is quite incestuous. Night on the Bare Mountain tickles in all the right places, and those turning over rocks after having heard all the genres greats will perhaps find some merit in this blackened gem, as I have. As many have said before, the acoustic passages sparkle with…

Struggling to find the words to accurately convey how absolutely atrocious this single is. Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted this. Nobody deserved this. This is, honestly, quite possibly, the peak (or is that nadir?) of cringe.

This release is great. Reminds me of Carelean-era Satanic Warmaster. There’s a lot of parallels with Satanic Warmaster, actually – the artwork too gives heavy similarities to vibes and themes that Werwolf has used with that project. I know the Finland scene can sometimes be rather incestous, so perhaps there is more going on here with this connection that tourists like me realise. The guitar tone is very fuzzy. Probably gonna be a WTF reaction…

I love this. Definitely an under-rated gem and not one that I have ever come across before, so I was very happy to unearth it. I can’t speak for the rest of the band’s discography, which appears to have a more mixed reception than their debut, but the interestingly titled The Lady Rides A Black Horse is a fantastic 90s black metal record. The production is actually quite dense for black metal, having more in…

What a fucking car crash of a split. Kudos to Cemitério Records for laying down mad cash to put this farce onto an fully glass mastered CD. RIP your bank account. So, where do I begin? The artwork I suppose. I’m getting a lot of mixed vibes here, none of which make even the remotest sense to me, but there we go. Perhaps I’m missing the point. The carnage starts with Crotch Rot, who are,…

Solid, nasty, evil-as-fuck sounding crust punk from the greats of the genre. Got this CD from the band way back at some random gig. There seemed a point where Doom were all over the UK underground (perhaps they still are and its I who hath becometh the hermit). Anyway, the production is a little brittle but otherwise this kills. It also seems a lot longer than it actually is, I guess because I associate crust…

I found a great big pile of goregrind CDs in my cupboard from a trade about 6 years ago, all without jewel cases and wrapped up in a pile. I totally forgot I even had these fucking things. In amongst the chaos of gore and spiky logos, Gross Hymns stood out to me a mile, probably due to its super fucking disgusting album sleeve. Into the CD tray it goes… So what does it sound…

Hard to digest, jarring “gabbergrind” from QNZ (the guy who would go on to run Rotten Roll Rex) and some other folks, all wearing silly masks and costumes, as par for the course. Coming on like a mix between NHC666 / Libido Airbag grade sleaze and the more bottom-of-the-barrel bedroom goregrind projects one saw explode during the late 2000s (I’m looking at you, MySpace). Lots of ridiculous samples, song titles, vocals and drum programming, with…

A lovely little package, but definitely another item in the Di6 discography that is for the die-hards and collectors only. There are much better live albums from Douglas, but the studio sessions here on disk 2 are actually worth checking out for those who are curious. There are some excellent reworkings of “Runes and Men” and “Fall Apart” as well what’s almost an acapella version of “Death Is The Martyr Of Beauty”, with Douglas yapping…

Love that fuckin’ album cover! Nice to see something from Locke that isn’t total fucking gore and evisceration (lol). So – onto the album itself. Sitting somewhere between the bludgeoning sounds of old and the more treble-heavy Rutan-produced sessions, A Skeleton Domain hits really fucking hard. There’s something about the riffs here that makes them extra dense and thick and sinister as all fuck. “Kill or Become” will melt your face off and turn you…

Scat Aficionados has gotta be one of the better sounding goregrind records you can get your disgusting little hands on. Slightly atypical of the blasting gore approach, Stoma do not employ a trashcan / bin-lid snare drum and instead have more regular produced drums (still doing lovely punk beats and insane blastbeats, of course). Production wise, this is where the album shines. Both the guitar and the bass (wow, the bass) sound absolutely gargantuan. Together…

Requiem, I believe, was a soundtrack that Scott did for a film. Now, I can’t remember if this film ever came out or if it was just an imaginary film which existed in order for such a soundtrack to be composed around, but you’ll notice some pressings of this release will have “The motion picture soundtrack” written above the word Requiem. Either way, this was the beginning of a short experimental series of releases from…

Dawn Ray’d seem to get a lot of shit flung at them but I think that this is more to do with their “politics” than their actual music. All that “its just evil riffs bro” shit goes out the fucking window when those NSBM loving edgelords get a whiff of some of the more prominent bands in the RABM scene. If you’re getting filtered by the existence of bands like Dawn Ray’d or idk Feminazgul…

I have disparaged all of the Death in June sound collage stuff over the last few years. Operating Hummingbird, and parts of albums like the latter half of All Pigs Must Die literally do nothing for me. I was surprised then, when returning to Take Care And Control, to find that it was incredibly listenable, enjoyable and of a high production quality. Now, I know Albin Julius did all the music here (this should have…

The Nazi bastards threw me for a loop here, I got nice and comfortable thinking that this was a lovely acoustic album or EP, but several tracks in things harshly cut back to fucking black metal. It’s a lovely effect, really makes the blackened shit seem brutal and sinister as fuck. Despite the dodgy lyrical content, the later metal tracks are fucking class. If only they’d cool it on the NS politics, Goatmoon would then…

Personally, I find Varjot to be an improvement on the earlier Goatmoon records. There is less in the way of sheer rawness and more focus on the folkier elements of the music, which work well with the cleaner production. Generally, I prefer black metal to be raw and disgusting but these changes seem to work well for Goatmoon, and the trademark feral shrieks are retained so there’s that too.

Der Sturmer, another band in the NSBM world that reportedly has the best riffs so are therefore worth checking out. I mean, their stuff here is pretty good, but I need to hear more releases to be absolutely sure. Totenburg… well, I nearly turned this off after five minutes as the production seemed a bit wonky but then some fucking incredible guitar playing started. I guess it’s the end of the first track on their…

Skreeeeeeeeeeee I hope you like brutal fuckin death metal because yknow, that’s what you’re gonna get here. You can say a lot about Pathology but the main thing to take away I think is that they are damn consistent. Production variations aside, as well as natural evolution of sounds, I think it is fair to say their output has been consistently solid over the years. This more recent studio album (currently placed in the second…

Very cromulent little EP from Atomck, back in the 3 piece daze (I wanna say the Never Work line-up?). The first few tracks are blasting grindcore madness, which is just lovely. Karl’s drums are fuckin crazy. The closing track, “Crowd Pleaser” is a banger too, slowing the pace right down, and including not just noise but also synthesisers, which is a nice touch. It doesn’t sound very “grindcore” when I write it out like that,…

Fuckin beauty of a cassette. Agathocles stuff is top tier, farmyard vokills over blasting mincecore and fun sillyness is the order of the day. Fentanyl Surprise side of the tape absolutely fuckin crushes it though. Absolutely beastly production with sick, crunching riffs and blasting gore drums / vocals. I’m happy with that – you should be too! LOL

Morbid Beauty has some interesting noise going on. The general vibe is more of a moody one than of total aural destruction. Ecclesiarch is much more low key. Unsure if there is a volume issue on the cassette that I have, but this side is much quieter. Nevertheless, some of the passages do built into impressive introspective noise drones.

The Hyperemesis side of this split has to be up there as some of the best goregrind ever recorded, of all time. I don’t lightly make such a statement, but fuck this shit is so goddamn good. The drums are tight, the snare sounding like its going to pop like a can of deoderant thrown into a fire. The riffs are sick as fuck and the vocals are just off the charts. Some of the…

Fuckin lightning fast grindcore, absolutely no fucking about. Gets in, fucking goes for it, gets out. Side B has an interest piece of sampling and noise collaging, with a bunch of Twin Peaks shit thrown in, which is cool – but the main event happens on Side A, with all the brutal smears of intense grinding carnage. Tidy!

When I first brought this thing into my circulation I had no idea that it was one of the first dub records. As in, one of the ones that pulls together Perry’s reworkings from other Upsetters releases. Either way, I fell in love with this before realising it was as important as it is the world of dub reggae (and music in general as a whole). You cannot beat the warm, analogue sound on this….

The sound of your head exploding. Man, this shit fuckin slaps. Bridging the gaps between goregrind and gorenoise (the line can be thin sometimes, for sure), and possessing a thick, chunky sound that is capable of carrying the full wet, sloppy impact of Meatal Ulcer’s work from the speakers right into your fuckin face. Why Won’t It Die? doesn’t fuck about, and it certainly doesn’t hang around, with tracks averaging out at around 40 seconds…

The Number Of The Beast is classic Iron Maiden, don’t get me wrong. There is no contesting that. My issue with this record however is that it is kind of on a bit of a pedastal. The tracklist is something of a classic run, but as a casual Maiden fan only four of these songs really mean anything significant to me. Personal preferences aside, it is impossible to deny that this is a fantastic listen…

The problem with Autopsy, is that you’re always going to be comparing anything that they do to their absolutely legendary first few records. There is not much out there that comes close to that sludgy, disgusting and unique blend of death metal that the band made their own. However, Autopsy are also a band that have safely avoided tarnishing their reputation with unneccessary and pointless and well, downright awful studio albums. Most bands cannot say…

More or less the same stuff as before, just a little different. Illegal Aliens does have however, quite possibly the worst cover art that I have ever seen.

A bit of a mixed bag, but such is the way of compilation albums. The first half – or two thirds – of this thing is fairly solid. Granted, danceable industrial metal is not the reason why most people come and listen to Voivod but if you enjoyed the E-Force albums then this is a natural next step. Some of this is very similar to Godflesh, at least their more drum’n’bass-focussed stuff. The record rounds…

I have been perhaps less than flattering when describing the earlier works of Graveland, but I was convinced to give them another go when I was told that Celtic Winter was peak second wave black metal. I have to admit, that I somewhat agree with my friend who told me this. Celtic Winter is head and shoulders above any of the other earlier Graveland records, which are either mired with shit production, shit synthesisers, shit…

Come To Daddy is quite possibly my favourite Aphex Twin release. Perhaps there is some coincidence there with it also being my first purchase of one of his releases, but this thing is almost completely flawless. Over the years I must have heard this EP about 500 million times (slightly overstating it there), but I have never gotten sick or tired of any of the songs here. Speaking of which, they are all fantastic. From…

I’ve said before that early Brujeria is a raw fuckin beast of a band, and this debut full length is no different. Possessing an exceptionally downtuned and dirging sound, Brujeria’s grindcore is less frenetic and more bludgeoning in its delivery. Overall, the vibe is “I need a shower”, much the same like listening to more modern bands like Fluids. I guess that feeling comes with the territory when the songs are about machete violence and…

Admittedly, metalcore, deathcore, melodic death metal, all of this stuff – it is not in my wheelhouse. The reason I’ve decided to check out this album is the intriguing album art. It is rather still, serene and beautiful, and not something that I would ever expect to represent something that tries to be so heavy and aggressive as this. Unfortunately, where Veto falls for me is it’s enormously compressed production, which whilst not exactly rendering…

I have a lot of nostalgia around Selected Ambient Works Volume II. I spent many an hour staring at the CD insert trying to figure out what each of the song titles meant, knowing full well that it was what, 2003 or 2004 at this point and I could have easily just looked it up on the internet. Going back to SAWV2 though, for the purposes of this review, I attributed my feelings of love…

I love Vampyress(SS?)’ aesthetic and vibe but the reality is that Order Of The Dragon is a mixed bag of inconsistent quality. The artwork is fantastic, and I love the mix of the grainy b-movie still and the more vibrant styles used by Assassination / BMSS etc: these two things work very well together I find. “Tales From The Ghoulag” (compiled here from the 7″) is probably the highlight of the record, IMO, although the…

All over the shop, ants in your pants, frenetic punk music with art house leanings. I guess this is an early precursor to the no-wave scene? Not my area of expertise so apologies if that’s not right (edit: RYM has it down as No Wave music). This is fuckin’ carnage, kinda reminds me of Half Japanese or even early Locust stuff. Was really cool to find out Ikue Mori drummed on this thing too.

Vampyress (VampyreSS?) play in a brilliant occult rock style, definitely in the BMSS school of thought for sure, but never the less the composition is brilliant. The whole vibe and sound is just fantastic, and as a first impression, I’m really into this and looking forward to checking out the other EP / compilation. Billy Odal takes a little more warming to, but it’s still well made. Kinda reminds me of King Dude, but a…

I don’t think it would be unfair to call Revenge a one-dimensional band. Their dimension, is, of course, absolute fucking brutality. You come to Revenge knowing what to expect, and if you don’t, then you come unknowingly, you get your wig split, and then you keep coming back for more (unless you are, as Manowar said, a wimp and / or a poser). The uniform cover art across all releases, in the same stark colour…

Avid players of Doom’s original run of games will know, that the “expansion” to Doom II entitled “Master Levels for Doom II” never had any original music. As a player, one had to load the maps individually, before the existence of a map orderer or sequencer, and therefore one was subjected to Map 1 music over and over and over again for the duration of the Master Levels, which is a bit shit because the…

Lo-fi, low-key beginnings for the excellent BMSS. Spooky, dusty, cavernous vibes are the order of the day, a far cry from what the band would go on to do with stuff like Rainbow Nights and Burning Bridges. I also never knew these guys released anything on At War With False Noise, so I guess every day is a learning experience. Highlight of this thing has to be the closing creeper that is the title-track, which…

A really great acoustic EP from this fantastic project. Both songs comprise of the same elements but are also very much completely different. Both tracks, particularly the B-side, “Talisman”, sound very similar to bands like Rome or Death In June (is the controversial cover image also a nod?) but with some added black metal vocals for the hell of it. All in all, great atmospheres and great song writing.

Tight as a duck’s arse blasting hardcore with top-tier production. Whether hitting top speed or falling into sick two-step style grooves, everything is firing on all cylinders. A short review for a short review, but damn. This shit rules.

Vektroid is easily one of the greatest producers in this style. Her style arguably defines the initial vaporwave movement, in not only “just slowing down” 80s pop songs but giving them a whole new life and meaning. It is easy to get caught up in the Floral Shoppe hype and not go further than that, but Color Ocean Road is proof enough that it is well worth doing that. Really cool, laid-back compositions are the…

Clean, tidy and precise electronic music that is very nice as background music but perhaps a little “too nice” for the kind of thing that I’m looking for. This is entirely a personal preference however, so if perfectly composed and precision-tight, chilled-out electronics are your thing, then you’d do no wrong in checking out Dive. I can’t shake the feeling however that sometimes during this album I feel like I’m watching some transitional B-roll on…

Very nasty, which is just lovely. Definitely on the grimier end of industrial techno. Doesn’t hit as hard as say, gabber techno, but still pushes sound to a fairly dark and brutal level, I’m sure that much can be gleaned from the artwork and song titles before even pressing play. Speaking of which, that artwork is very cool. Is it Pinhead smoking some harsh substance out of a bottle bong? I’m not sure. Either way,…

Very dark, dense electonic music that’s upbeat enough for you to dance to. Not as hard and punishing as other forms of “industrial techno” but enough to keep you on your toes, for sure, and also hypnotic enough to keep you hooked. I get some 90s vibes from this but for the most part it’s a very modern sound and a very clean production. The art is killer too.

A class Mick Harris / Scorn spin off project with the same level of quality paranoid beats, minimal yet spooky atmospheres and dense moods. Expect swirling, dark background noise with prominent and involving beats. They aren’t great big bass-wobbling stonkers, but they keep your attention just as well. Closing track “Silent Dust” is probably my favourite, but the entire album is best taken whole for the best kind of journey.

Perfect chill and get shit done kinda music right here. As with other folk online, I also thought that this was a Blank Banshee side project, but nowadays I’m not too sure. Either way, shit is great. Real clean production, focussed beats and amazing tunes. Such a shame that it is only 21 minutes long but hey, thankfully there’s more releases from this project. My highlight has to be the reworking of THAT hold music…

Disjointed Bliss All over the place, but that’s why we are all here, right? Had the pleasure of hearing the EX version (2016 remaster) rather than the original but all in all, sounds really great and hits all the right buttons that you’d expect such dreamy, fractured styles of vaporwave to hit. I have no profound statement to make, but Prism Genesis is a stunning arrangement of audio clips. The atmosphere that some of these…

Fuckin’ wild piece of work, this. Mangles together elements of grindcore and death metal in a swirling maelstrom pit of cacophonous carnage. There are moments that remind me of war metal bands like Blasphemy and Revenge, if I’m honest. Carrion For Worm is one of the few records recently that I have immediately played through a second time upon completing it. I know next to nothing about the band and this was my first experience…

This is an excellent underground hip hop record with a production style that is right up my street. I love the analogue warmth of a it all, as well the excellent and well-placed samples. Flow-wise, the Company have it nailed down, with some excellent bars and a general overall vibe that is really cool and confident. No idea where I picked this up but glad I checked it out. Really good stuff.

This earlier EP from Black Magick SS seems to focus more on songs that are written entirely using synthesisers and drums, rather than the “full band” feel of the full length LPs. Either way, this record has fantastic songs, some of the best in the BMSS catalog, and is well worth your time.

The only thing I can compare this to is some sort of band on a punk version of the whole Captain Beefheart thing. Like, the original incarnation of Anal Cunt is an extreme evolution of this shit right here. Am I right in thinking that this is so punk that its not punk anymore, in fact it is even barely music? Like someone gave The Cramps far too many horse tranquilizers and a bad tape…

An interesting collection of sound collages and other seemingly-randomised occurrences or little tangents of sound. Do I understand what’s going on here? Fuck no, but that doesn’t really matter to me. All of the different textures comply to an overarching ambience of unsettling mystery, of an uncanny atmosphere that can only come from an inability to put a finger on what exactly was the purpose of the work. I can’t remember how I came across…

AOAA are another one of those bands who started in the deathcore / slam – influenced end of the spectrum, and decided to change lanes into a more regular death metal approach as time went on. With their second full length, the band are fully in brutal death metal mode, but with enough chugging riffs to not lose all of their identity. The vocals are the highlight here, the loose, gargling growls that are spat…

One of the best places you could hope to start with the Agathocles discography. Bomb Brussels is 15 minutes or so of high quality, non-stop mincecore mayhem. When there’s AGx material out there as good as this, it pains me that so many splits and EPs are borderline unlistenable. The urge to tack a further super low quality set of live tracks onto the end of this thing has also been successfully resisted, leaving Bomb…

An interesting but perhaps natural evolution for the band, Burning Bridges sees the once kvlt-as-fvk esoteric black metal band now plunge headfirst into synth pop and/or rock. Comparing this to something like Panzerwitch and the change is surprising, but put it up against something as recent as Rainbow Nights and the gradual change makes much more sense. That being said, I think Burning Bridges perhaps strays too far from what makes Black Magick SS such…

A recent talk by Dr. Ben Hillier on “Esoteric Fascism in Extreme Metal Music” (well worth a watch for those who are – like me – perhaps on the outside looking in at this stuff) had me realising that out of all the “OG” NSBM acts, I had overlooked Spear Of Longinus. There is no beating around the bush here. There are no dogwhistles or covert symbolism: its all there, I suppose to their credit,…

An interesting record from Fenriz that comes on at first like a mix of leftover Darkthrone tracks with a bunch of folk elements thrown over the top of it. Hostmorke is, of course, far more than just this cynical first take. The songs are fantastic, and the black metal parts are incredibly good. The folk elements, those being mainly heavy, echoic, pounding drums and clean, chanted vocals, are a welcome addition to what we are…

For a black metal record, Blood Fire Death sure doesn’t half thrash hard! (I’m messing around, but damn does this thing go hard in parts). Nothing really hits the spot like Bathory (except maybe one of a thousand Bathory clones), here the band takes two approaches: one of building thrashing walls of whirlwind speed and another of conjuring powerful, hypnotic grooves. Both of these things are then pulled together into a dense production job, giving…

Fun – and extremely vulgar – brutal death metal, but not as good as the first album or even the demo. My initial thought was to write that there’s a lack of focus here, but in reality the songs are short and sharp, and the brutal misogyny / menstruation themes are as strong as ever (what a sentence to write out at seven in the morning lol). Don Decker’s vocals are absolutely crackers too. It’s…

I remember when this came out. I was so stoked that Seth was recording music again and then the announcement came that they would reform – albiet temporarily – with the original line-up for the 20th anniversary of the band. The 110 Song EP followed fairly quickly. I remember being a bit disappointed with it when it first dropped, mainly because it sounded like complete shit (and not in a good way). Comparing this to…

There is no title as fitting for this album as the title it was actually given. On this 1999 full length (the last proper full length, unless you count the parody album Fuckin’ A), Anal Cunt step up the nastiness both in word and in sound. The song titles and lyrics have reached what I think many would say are the “peak” Anal Cunt style, with a whole smorgasbord of intentionally offensive subjects covered. On…

Twin Peaks possesses one of the most magical and captivating soundtracks of all time. It is impossible, in my mind, to separate Twin Peaks the show from Twin Peaks the music. This is part of the reason I think, why Season 3 was so jarring to me at first, as Badalamenti’s score is used far less there. I now love Season 3, and Badalamenti’s contributions there are now some of my favourites, but not having…

Let Us Prey perhaps lives in the shadow of Dopethrone and therefore doesn’t get the attention it may deserve. However, after giving it a go several times, it is a fairly inoffensive offering from Electric Wizard that fails to really ignite any fire for me. That is of course not to say that the album is bad – it is well recorded, executed and is very consistent across its entire runtime. There are however, for…

Oohhh hooo ohhhhh Illuminataeeee. Imagine my face when this dropped, as a hater of Devil’s Rain! Fortunately, on repeated listens I am very happy to report that this has much more go in it then Devil’s Rain, and I’m actually very excited that Jerry Only has launched a solo career (or at least put out a solo record). Realistically, and respectfully to Jerry and co. having the right to tour all those years as Misfits,…

Where has this shit been all my life? Now this is how you do 90s industrial properly! Goddamn. It’s like if someone took Pure / Selfless era Godflesh and turned it into a design document, fed that into the machine from The Fly along with a few Sepultura CDs. Fuckin’ sound on this is perfect – amazing production and balance, which really allows those riffs to hit home hard. It’s a shame this is the…

Annnnd this mushroom is for you! Chomp chomp, motherfucker. What do we call this genre? Surely it’s not BlackMagickSScore? Either way, it’s fucking great. Assassination’s full length isn’t the strongest offering from this scene but that’s not to mean that Circles Within Circles does not have its moments. I can’t escape the fact that the drums sound very fake, like it’s an out of the box VSTi, but all of the other instruments (and vocals)…

Agoraphobic Nosebleed mix it up a bit there. There’s a bit of groove, a bit of swaggering riffage, a bit of actual melody (if not melody in the gruff, distorted sense of the word). Parts 1 and 3 are really cool – very out there in the message it’s trying to get across – but very, very catchy for what this is. Insect Warfare here are just absolutely fucking unstoppable. This whole side of the…

Expanding on my recent comment, I figured I’d do a review as I owned the CD – This gets a 3 star because it was one of the first CD singles I ever bought. I wanted the album, because I knew a lot of OPM stuff had swears in it, and as an 11 year old, that was just the coolest shit ever. However, there was something about the absolute dogshit artwork on the album…

I had this CD single as a kid. I thought that the artwork was absolutely killer and way better than the actual album. I don’t really know why I bought this, as I already had the full album and I didn’t really like the sped-up remix by Soulchild. Still, I played this thing to death over the 2001 summer holidays and Left Hand Suzuki Method is still burned into my brain 22 years later. I’ve…

Personally, I really didn’t feel the second Ice record. I probably need to listen to it a few more times, but the dreamy, moody dub-like atmosphere of the first release is long gone, instead replaced with big stinky beats (not a bad thing) and a ton of guest vocalists ranging from Blixa Bargeld to EL-P, which makes this worth listening to if only for the strange cross-section of styles and voices. Bad Blood almost feels…

I’m fairly new to Sunami so perhaps that’s why I don’t get the “more of the same” feeling that many other reviews reference. Off the bat though, the S/T LP (a stretch, at 17 minutes lol) doesn’t hit quite as hard as earlier shit like the S/T EP or the split with Gulch, but is still pretty entertaining. The production has a bit of a step up in quality, which is nice, but generally, I…

I’ve been struggling to find the words to review this one for a while. It is also worth mentioning that Rainbow Nights has been in my regular rotation for a while now as well. There is just something so perfect about the balance of sounds here. I’ve never really been one much for 60s/70s rock or the recent occult rock revival movement, but this thing builds off of those two elements brilliantly, as well as…

I love the spacey vibe of the artwork for this thing. Also, the sound is crystal clear. I can sit here for hours opining on how great Sabbath were in the early days, or about the logistics of this thing being released and whether it was official or a bootleg. But, all that matters is, that this is a decent window into how the guys sounded back then. Most folk will no doubt have heard…

Fantastic production, and a lovely heavy guitar tone. First impressions have me feeling that this is like a cross between Anathema and Neurosis, but unfortunately nowhere near as interesting as either of those bands. I can only echo sentiments that have already been declared by others: this doesn’t really go anywhere and is more of a task to sit through than a trip you can get lost in – which is a real shame because,…

Spooky, plinky-plonky noises fed through tape loops and other analogue methods of shaking you to your very core. Nowhere near as good as later Cluster and I appreciate the name change. Nevertheless, Klopfzeichen is very unsettling background noise and would work perfectly as the soundtrack to some sort of sci-fi / horror movie. As for active, engaging music – this is not it, but if you’re awake at 3am and want to feel something other…

I’m not an expert on this kind of music so it’s hard to find the right words to describe it. In these cases I tend to just leave the review but I find myself coming back to Daft Punk over and over so I have to give it a go. It is also hard for me to not view this album through the lense of nostalgia. I was a kid when “One More Time” dropped,…