Like latter era Death on intramuscular steroids, getting into a fight with Nocturnus at a Voivod gig. Voivod have stopped their show to watch the fight unfold in as near silence as a fight can happen. The Voivod guys are having brewskies and a sneaky joint. “It’s not bad, eyy?” Asks Snake from Voivod to nobody in particular, but his colleagues and audience are too enthralled by the chaotic mess unfolding before them.

Drudkh’s first album is magical. I was not expecting such a gentle, atmospheric creation. “Sunwheel” (yikes) is gorgeous, as is closing track “The First Snow”, but in all honestly the whole album is just fantastic. The production is minimal but not grim enough to put a dampener on any of the performers, and everything is audible and balanced well. If I had one thing to note that could be seen as a negative it would…

The final album with Abbath on guitars and vocals. I saw the band live around this time and I must admit that they were fantastic. Anyway, All Shall Fall doesn’t shine as bright as the main Abbath-written period of Heart Of Winter through to Northern Darkness, but is a welcome bonus that came several years after the main streak ended.

Everything is kinda buried beneath a layer of mud but once your ears adjust to the lo-fi production you can appreciate this release a bit more. It almost feels like you’re listening in on something that you’re not supposed to be hearing. What Existence In The Age Of Decay lacks in clarity and melody it makes up for in brute force and atmosphere. A strange concoction, for sure.

If I had to describe this album in as few words as possible I would say: it’s fucking class. Traditional black metal riffery underpins a punky (dare I say) black’n’roll-infused set of songs. I don’t mean BnR as in, endless boring ass d-beats, I mean genuinely sleazy, head-nodding tunes that invoke hazy memories of the exploitation world of the 1970s, helped along of course by the amazing artwork and that inherit Finnish sense of melody…

The first few tracks here originally appeared one year earlier on the split with Eluvium, only here they come with a few additional alternate takes to fill out the run time. I can’t help but notice the original split art was a photograph of either the Menkaure pyramid at Giza or perhaps one of the smaller satellite pyramids, yet this EP release has a photograph of the much larger and imposing Khafre pyramid. As someone…

Y’know, it’s real sad boy hours when one of the lads throws on Conqueror. That’s the end of the party vibes, my friend. But that’s okay, because generally, Jesu is a very good project. Conqueror, despite hailed as Jesu’s masterpiece in some circles, is a transitional record for the band, as Broadrick led the project from the super-heavy style of the debut through to the lighter, more synth-reliant gazey songwriting that would come. This transition…

I was recommended this as “one of the best video game soundtracks of all time”. Oh boy, can you imagine my disappointment. This is not a bad soundtrack by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m failing to see why anyone would put on any kind of pedastal. There are some interesting moments, for sure, but that’s about it.

In all seriousness, Hybrid Nosebloom is one of the more listenable slices of electronic tomfoolery from everyone’s favourite bird-loving noise maniac, Merzbow. To say that this is not as “harsh” as other releases of his is perhaps incorrect, as if you turn this thing up loud enough it’s gonna excoriate the inside of your skull and it’s gonna do a damn fine job at exactly just that LOL – but Hybrid Noisebloom is perhaps not…

Chunky, blasting grindcore from one of the modern fatherland’s for the genre, that being of course, Czechia. Production is fatty like butter being mixed into mashed potatoes, and the music sounds like you are gargling rich gravy with meaty chunks floating about inside it. LOL. All of the track names are dumpling-related and are pretty hilarious once translated. If you don’t take your grind too seriously this is well worth a listen.

This is like the Muslimgauze version of Scorn’s Deliverance. The whole thing is just folded over on itself over and over and over and reworked into different sounds (at least, that’s how it feels). It’s easy to lose yourself in this half hour of sheer atmosphere, which is really quite sinister.

Beautifully composed but somewhat typical sounding black metal from the brilliant mind of both Mrtva Vod and Këkht Aräkh coming together to create a fragile cacophony of weeping riffs, blast beats and screeching vokills from deep within forests unknown. Slava Ukraine!

This has gotta be up there with the greatest death metal records of all time. I wouldn’t neccessarily call Autopsy, or even Mental Funeral in particular, “slept on”. But when people talk about the greats, early Cannibal Corpse, Death or Morbid Angel gets brought up in most common conversations. Where is the motherfucking love for Mental Funeral, I ask? This shit is truly in a league of its own. And whilst I don’t think Autopsy…

I’m over here in my rainy, shithole part of the world, wondering how the fuck Re-Animated Dead Flesh gets such a bad rap compared to the other Mortician records? I do understand that folks might have been sick to the back teeth of Mortician by the time a 5th full length came out, but damn this shit fucking rules so hard. Dead Flesh easily has the best production of any Mortician full-length, with a much…

Got this thing turned all the way up on my stereo to hear that gut-rattling meatgrinder bass beneath the drums and riffs, but every time the vocals come in, they fart out of the speakers at such a low frequency that it nearly rattles the poor speakers onto the floor! Why the vocals are mixed so incredibly high in the bass range I am not sure, but one assumes it must have something to do…

The first Mortician release I ever bought, think I paid £13 for this from HMV in like 2006 or whatever, felt really expensive at the time. Even though this was one disc, it felt like it went on FOREVER. Hacked Up For BBQ can be a brutal listen in of itself, but with Zombie Apocalypse tacked on the end the journey is a long one! I remember thinking the sampling in Zombie Apocalypse was just…

It is unlikely that DIS will ever top Hatred For Mankind. That album was, as people like to say about these kinds of things, like lightning in a bottle. After the somewhat mixed reception of Widowmaker, DIS’ third “full length”, in this case a collaberation with the excellent Gnaw Their Tongues, is I think as close as we are ever going to get to that intense sonic explosion that was their debut. The production is…

ugggghhhhhhhhhhh! For when you need a shot of Autopsy real quick, real fast, nothing will slake your thirst quite like Fiend For Blood. Forewarning listeners at the time of the inclusion of short, grindy songs on Acts Of The Unspeakable (an album that drags along with the pace of a corpse otherwise), Fiend For Blood is a slight change of direction from the beautiful intricacy of Mental Funeral (especially in regards to the drumming), heading…

Fractured, bizarre, overtly sexual and kinda like a bad acid trip taking place in a seedy Village nightclub. I’m sure there’s a higher purpose to all of this that’s going right over my head but the songs were entertaining despite what can only be a deliberately nonchalant vocal delivery. The electronics are the highlight here, scattered all over the place with little thought or care to continuinity, smoothness or the desire to relisten after surviving…

I was three years old when this came out so I won’t pretend to understand the cultural impact that The Prodigy Experience had upon its release. I do however, remember just how much of an institution The Prodigy were by the latter end of the 90s, I vividly remember “Firestarter” coming out and being on the TV and so on, but Prodigy’s deeper electronic roots always interested me more, even as a kid. Experience is…

Acts Of The Unspeakable feels slower and more torturous in its pace than its predecessors, but it still has its moments of speedy goodness or unhinged manic shredding. In fact, “Ugliness And Secretions” back to back with “Orgy In Excrements” would have you thinking that I was telling porkies about the aforementioned slower pace but alas Acts does feel slightly more of a lurcher than before, and in more ways than one. That cryptic mention…

Muddy, messy, noisy black metal. Nada Brahma has the thrashy, raw elements that compromise 1st wave BM or to a degree war metal, but also converge here to create a chaotic, hellish listen.

A surprisingly solid and consistent collection of remixes, from a time period where remix albums are usually a death knell for creativity and are not exactly conducive to a good time during playback either (lol). Remanufacture however, genuinely does rework the original songs into something completely and utterly new. Its well worth giving it a go, unless you have some sort of allergy to 90s electronics. This thing is so 90s that wearing one of…

Madness, sheer madness I tells ya! Another band from the “Czech school” of goregrind and brutal death, with spastic drumming and lightening fast riffs. I usually use the term “farmyard vocals” as a cover all for the kind of stuff that Mincing Fury have going for them, but truly the vocal efforts here are more like “freakshow vocals” than any equestrian or bovine equivalent. Lovely production too, which makes this thing kick like a mule,…

Ah, Gallhammer. Bass, guitar noise, and loose drumming. Truly, a band after mine own heart. This shit doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it’s pretty damn obtuse and in your face. Ill Innocence is an interesting blend of styles and has a surprisingly sinister streak running through it. Very cool.

On paper this is stronger and more promising than both of the previous albums, but also devoid of any stand out tracks and, let’s be honest, it doesn’t really contain much in the way of “black metal”. Whatever “black metal” means to you, and how long Dimmu Borgir have not been “true” to the style is debatable, but Eonian is almost completely devoid of the genre in its entirety. Despite the huge sound and excellent production, I…

Gut’s first – and by far their best – full length record, where the band mastered their microblasts of fractured filth. The groove level is off the charts here, something which countless copycat bands have attempts to seize and have failed. Expect long, intrusive samples of various strains of perversity from the vaults, up against silly vocal explosions and some of my favourite production ever for a gore/porn grind album. The drums are crystal clear,…

I’ll take jazz records that look like rock and / or metal records please, chief! The veritable concoction of sounds on display here were far from what I expected from such a shitty album cover (which looks like something you’d see on the side of a truck towing a rusty fairground ride). Using my limited palette of descriptive language, in a short sentence I could sum this up as being fairly similar to the “electric”…

Strong EP from an interesting band. It’s rare that the “sketchy” side of black metal meets the more uhhh, Deafheaven side of the coin (at least to my knowledge) but alas here we are. There is a morose quality to the riffs, and I’m not talking in a DSBM kind of way, I’m talking in a emo / post-(whatever) kind of way. Oddly enough, this works quite well, I must admit. Production is clear enough…

Genuinely sounds more like something that you would hear at a renaissance fair than as the soundtrack to someone’s D&D campaign. The instrumentation is so beautiful and varied it would perhaps be too reductive to label this music solely as dungeon synth.

Solid but puzzling compilation of “early” Edelweiss stuff, including the White Flower Power / Yeast Of The Mind single, as well as the self titled LP and a few tracks off of the following record, Behind Our Masks. I say it’s “puzzling” because 4 tracks into the run of self-titled tracks, we get the two tracks from Behind Our Masks, before the record closes out with the finale from the self-titled, which makes the track…

Side A is a bit kooky, with delivery not quite living up to the imagery and clever name (check out the original tape art for “White Flower Power”), but the B-side “Yeast Of The Mind” is absolutely brilliant. It is a really cool occult rock song, and genuinely sounds like it is from another era. Comparisons to BMSS are perhaps too easy, but I’ll throw it in just incase the sleeve of this EP doesn’t…

Interesting vibes, deeply entrenched in the BMSS / Assassination school of “Nazi hippy” occult rock stuff. On this debut full-length, there are some very strong moments for sure, but it feels like things could fall apart at any moment. Any sense of timekeeping or togetherness as a band “unit” feels very fragile indeed, but oddly that’s almost part of the charm.

It is truly difficult for me to comprehend how much of a failure Compton was. I mean, I’m not alone in this line of thinking but it is not a universally held opinion. In fact, I should instead be writing about my surprise at how well this record has been received over the years. With both The Chronic and Chronic 2001 being up there in my favourite rap albums of all time, upon release I…

I feel like I’ve heard a thousand records like this yet John Maus truly still stands alone. Such a minimal, nonchalant approach to electronic pop is delivered with a shrug and a post-punk indifferent style of vocal, but it is a delivery that Maus well and truly makes his own with this record. This things is backloaded in my opinion, with the best tracks coming in the final third, rounding out with one of my…

It’s hard to shake the feeling that over the last few years Goatmoon has more or less completely lost their original identity. Yes, obviously bands and artists change with time, but recent offerings such as this or Stella Polaris could literally be ANY dime a dozen black metal band but with BG’s vocals over the top of it. We’ve seen Goatmoon come a long way since Death Before Dishonour, but evolving into a homogeneous pulp…

A collection of various early Earth recordings, including the entirety of the Extra-Capsular Extraction EP, as well as I believe the first demo from 1990. As the compilation goes on, into the earliest songs composed under the Earth moniker, there are parallels that can be drawn not only from riffmasters like Iommi but also with early Swans and other such noisesome ilk. An interesting look at this group’s primitive beginnings.

Hard to beat in my eyes, especially because of side B’s monolithic “Ouroboros is Broken”, one of the most powerful, hypnotising and mesmerizing drone tracks of all time IMO. Yes, it has drums, but if I need a “drone” “hit” then nothing really satisfies as much as the repetitive dirge of side B of this EP. One of the first Earth records I ever got on vinyl and it’s remained one of my favourites ever…

“Sacrilegious Scorn” and possibly “Serpentine Offering” aside, this album is awash in a sea of mediocrity. Every single track blurs together into one segment, and I feel like I’m listening to the same thing over and over. The lack of textural variety is dumbfounding for a band of such immense musical talent. Production wise, things are fantastic. Boasting a big budget sound, and for this record the addition of the absurdly brilliant Hellhammer on drums,…

I’m a simple man: I see nylons on a harsh noise record, I press play. I’m not really sure why but the two things just seem to go hand-in-hand aesthetically. I’m not about to deep dive into the pleasing subconscious link between the two things, but I will say that this randomly-found compilation is a highly enjoyable listen, combing efforts from more well-known names of the scene with more obscure artists. At around 80 minutes…

Another fantastic piece of work by Cat System Corp. Perhaps not as iconic as News At 11, but no less enjoyable or brilliant for it, Palm Mall Mars is a solid hour of the chillest of the chill vaporwave, at least in the original form and aesthetic of vaporwave. I’m no expert, but other artists have taken the genre in far more ambient and space-out directions. Palm Mall Mars is similar, but retains the dream-like,…

Cool hardcore punk with jacked riffs and with a super organic feel to the production. Nice bit of d-beat, shouty screamy madness and whatever those kinda back and forth two part riffs are called where you bounce around like fuck in the pit. I dunno what the fuck I’m talking about. This is great, though.

Unfortunately nowhere near as suave or sophisticated as the album sleeve promises. I have heard a Slayyyter release in the past so I should have know what to expect here, alas I let the Roxy Music lookin ass cover lead me in under a false sense of security. Granted, she has matured musically from dreck such as a “Daddy AF” but this is still vapid nonsense. Cool if you’re into that. I’m not lol.

A1 Yola starts strong, but I lose my way as the record goes on, which is a recurring theme with Esham records of this era. That being said, I feel like Esham is more confident on this record than his previous two, the whole vibe seems different and whilst the production is firmly in “later” territory, some of the songs are fucking great. We also get some dirty synths, bass lines and beats bubbling up…

Internally Mutilated play mama’s gooooood ol’ analogue gorenoise, drowned in a sea of tape hiss and bad samples from some Faces Of Death-sounding clips. The samples are like ligaments between muscle and bone (is that right? I’m not a medical expert lol) and make the bazillion songs on offer here flow together in one giant session, which is just lovely. Anal Birth being the same but more of the blown out speaker style variety, where…

Methadone Abortion Clinic are one of the more underrated goregrind projects out there, I think. I’m not sure if they are even still active, but this split is further evidence as to why I consider them so excellent. They seem to blend the slower groovy gore “bulldozer” stuff with more traditional forms of goregrind, and not to mention the sick, bubbling pitchshifter vokills. Biological Monstrosity are not too dissimilar, actually. For the sake of this…

A live session from shitfun is backed with a tinnitus-inducing selection of tracks from Industrial Holocaust. Somehow, the live part of this actually sounds chunkier and better produced (figure that out), but Industrial Holocaust bring the Assuck / early Nasum / early Brutal Truth vibes (can you tell by their name? Haha) which are an interesting foil to Shitfun’s more turgid affair.

Trachoma is a lesson in brutal gore done very, very well indeed but PNH, despite the thinner production, legitimately sounds like bloody shit flying from your broken ass at 197mph. Truly, utterly disgusting. If the cover picture hasn’t already indicated, this split is for perverted goregrind fiends only. A lovely little gem for those already down the rabbit hole!

Really cool groovy grind with a sick sound; clanking, horrible bass and heavy percussion. Only let down is the somewhat uninspiring vocal approach, but this guy is good at lows so I can’t throw any shade. Bands like this are a dime a dozen but this record was a lot of fun. I’d really like to see these guys play live. I can imagine a beach ball / various other inflatables kinda party at the…

To say that Sextrash fell off would probably be incorrect, because they were never “on” to begin with. The third record by this project however, apparently 14 years after the previous full length all the way forward in 2006, is a shadow of the former sounds of the band. It may be the “modern” production, it may be the shtick is wearing thin, or it (probably) is a combination of both these things. The hideously-titled…

Schnauzer is a trip, as always. Not sure what I can add here that I’ve not already said before, but solid, chugging Ohio “scrap metal” underpins the various outpourings of madness that Jim puts us through. Sloth is a bit more disjoined, with samples and dare I say “acoustic” passages meandering between blurs of manic noisecore and more uhh “traditionally” paced songs of varying styles and genres. All in all, a fun split that doesn’t…

Let’s be honest, the only reason I found this record was because of Sabbath’s cover of “Evil Woman”. Either way, I’m glad for that bridge for bringing me to the world of Crow’s Music (see what I did there?). Either way, this is a glorious time capsule to explore, taking you deep into the worlds of blues and hard rock, where the style was converging slowly to become something else entirely. Such a pleasant and…

I’ve become rather fond of this album over the last few months. I love the floaty, ethereal nature that’s pinned down by the warm 70s full band production. This limitation does stop the band drifting too far off into the ether, but at the same time they refuse to stay still. Across the multitude of songs and vibes on this thing, it’s difficult to pin down the performers to commit them to a groove or…

Excellent, classic dungeon synth release from a now legendary project. Mournful, evocative and beautifully composed. The right balance of active instrumentation and dreamy atmospherics.

As with, well, pretty much any The Day Everything Became Nothing release, expect a solid as fuck but somewhat no-frills approach to the “dry heave” school of chest-crushing goregrind. I guess some folk refer to it as “bulldozer” gore, and CBT and Guinea Pig are great examples of contemporaries that share this sound. TDEBN however, eschew the overtly sexual themes usually associated with such brutal forms of music, and instead apply a fairly cryptic, simplistic…

What a really cool mix of styles. A lot of the tracks here probably explains my interest in industrial music. I heard this soundtrack a million times as a kid when struggling to get a grip on how play this game without being absolutely butchered by the enemy lol. I absolutely adore this dense, robotic sound which leads the majority of the tracks here.

This thing fucking slaps more witch titties than a sleazy hooded dungeon master in a shlocky 70s sexploitation flick. I may be slightly biased, as outside of the mammoth “Funeralopolis” on Dopethrone, Witchcult Today was the album that sold me on Leccy Wiz. The album I feel, despite it’s “wind tunnel” production, has some of the best stoner / doom tracks ever recorded, such as “Satanic Rites Of Drugula” and the eerily-similar in opening riff…

In my somewhat worthless opinion, this is where the second phase of Earth really took off. Sure, we had Hex and then Hibernaculum which reimagined some old stuff in the new style, but I feel like Earth MK2 really took off with the success and reception of The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull. The artwork by Arik Roper is a perfect representation of the sound on offer here: bright, vivid, yet with an…

Everything about this thing is basically a laundry list of what I look for in hip hop. Something however, is just not fully landing with me. It might be the length (oo er), or the general pace of the tracks being a real “creep slow” agenda – which is fine, but for every song on a 70+ minute album, well it can be a bit much. Anyway, this shit fucking rules, that aside. The production…

Dark, brooding dungeon synth with enough variation and instrumentation to keep you interested despite its hypnotic, meandering pace and nature. Truly a decent collection of ambient synth tunage.

CKY’s third album and the beginning of the end IMO. An Answer Can Be Found isn’t a bad album by any stretch, in fact the single released for this record, “Familiar Realm” and opening number “Suddenly Tragic” are both up there with some of my favourite CKY tracks. Unfortunately I cannot speak so highly for the rest of the album, as well made as it is and as good as the riffs are none of…

One of the more ferocious recordings from this era of Absurd, with the punk infusion that Absurd flirt with coming much more to the forefront than usual. I guess this kind of thing crosses over a lot with RAC / oi! anyway so it does not feel disjointed or out of place. In fact, it’s really good. Production seems a little harsher than most Absurd records of this time period too, which I’m sure contributes…

What part one should have been, IMO. Also, I’m not really saying that you could just take the best bits of both these albums and make one really fucking good album, but yeah, you could TOTALLY take the best bits from both parts and make a far more compelling and interesting record. On the surface, part two comes across initially as even more bare bones and sparser than its predecessor. I don’t think we even…

Angels Of Darkness… (Pt 1) took the “new” sonic template established on Bees Made Honey… and took it to a more dark, smoky world. As beautiful as tracks such as “Old Black” and “Hell’s Winter” are, the runtime of some of these behemoths, coupled with their sparse, minimal structures and inherent similarities, makes this album a slog to listen to unless it is just playing in the background somewhere. I can’t give it a low…

Nihility has always been my favourite Decapitated album but in recent times Winds Of Creation has crept up there to rival it. Winds… is an absolute belter of a record, combining all of the best elements of metal music and pushing them to 11 (not in a Spinal Tap way, but in a fuckin’ ferocity overload kinda way). As a drummer myself, early Decapitated’s sticksman Vitek always stands out to me, with his insane flurries…

A thoroughly disappointing outing from the usually very excellent Goatmoon. I do not dislike Silver Serpent for its departure into dungeon synth, I dislike it because it is a poor effort. Even for the more atmospheric, dreamy end of the genre, where melody and I suppose songwriting are replaced by pure feeling and invocation of mood, Silver Serpent fails to provoke any sort of worthwhile conjuration. Instead, Silver Serpent can be relegated to “video game…

It took me a while to get my head around Purge. I think it’s because my head really has to be in a certain space to fully embrace a Godflesh record. I can admire the beats and wailing guitars at any time, but to fully allow the absolute claustrophobia of their music to envelope me, well that takes a special kind of headspace, I guess. With all the pieces aligned, I can finally make my…

Not a bad album by any stretch, Damned In Black instead has the misfortune of being the album that the band made between two of their absolute best records. Therefore, Damned In Black slips through the cracks a little, which is bizarre because it’s pretty fucking good. Coming out just over one year after At The Heart Of Winter, this effort combines Abbath-led songwriting with some of the ferocity of the earlier records. It strikes…

Leeeeheeeheeeeeeeave mmeeeeeeeeeeeee I’ve probably heard this song a hundred thousand times. Since it’s release in 2004, with my friend’s obsession with the CKY / Bam Margera videos and my sister’s obsession with Ville Valo (before the goth kids got into emo music, although HIM is pretty IMO to be honest haha), this thing seemed to be in the CD player at all times. Be it in the car, in our room, or at my mate’s…

Despite having well and truly checked out of the Dark Carnival / ICP world by the time this dropped, upon returning for a re-listen I am surprised by how entertaining this actually is. Let’s get the brass tacks in place: this (and any of the other cards in the second deck) are never gonna be as good as anything in the first deck. ICP made a conscious decision, Mike E Clark or no, to go…

The compilation CD that introduced me to the fantastic project that is Faithless. For its 80 minute run-time, it does admittedly lose its way towards the end, but is toploaded with some of the best tracks of the band’s career.

It would perhaps be slightly derivative of me to compare God to the spacey, dub-style Godflesh tracks that bounced around a lot in the mid 90s, or to the second half of the excellent Vae Solis by Scorn, another project to feature the guitar work of Justin Broadrick. But, without going on a mad trip that would involve shoving a trumpet up my ass and putting a beret on my head to adequately convey the…

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: there is nothing out there quite like Intestinal Disgorge. Absurd levels of misogyny lead the way on this 50-minute nightmare journey through blasting carnage. Ditties such as “Stupid Fucking Whore Bitch”, “I’m Going to Kidnap You Bitch” and “Worthless Piece of Shit Bitch” are some of the more palatable song titles here which should act as a sounding rod (oo er) to help ascertain whether…

I vividly remember this single dropping. Goddamn, I thought it was the heaviest shit on the fucking planet. I rushed out and got the CD (the version with the blue cover) and played the song to death (ignoring the fucking dreadful remix version also tacked onto the CD). How in the sweet motherfuck did all this happen 22 years ago!?? Where did the time go? Where did my life go? Now I’m just sitting on…

Pointless single which in it’s 7″ form (that I got for 99p brand new, bargain) pairs “Evolution” (where J Devil’s voice strains hideously against a wall of computer generated auto-tune effects, uch!) with the Korn II album closer, “I Will Protect You”. What a fucking weird decision for the B-side, but hey, at least it’s not a crappy remix like the CD version of the single.

Ants in your pants brutal death metal with a tendancy towards the absurd end of goregrind / porngrind. I’m talking farmyard vocals, pitchshifters, snare drums that sound like dust bins, y’know, the works. Throw in some hilarious samples (as well as some disturbing ones) and 21 total traxxx of blasting madness for you to enjoy. I got this CD through a trade or something many years ago, can’t remember how I got it, just that…

Fairly straight forward and no-frills black and/or roll, with nice melodic parts, decent punk parts, and of course an undercurrent of black metal. Doesn’t break any new ground, but could be considered perfect party music for metalheads.

Little did I know that song titles like “Licking the Goat’s Vaginal Prolapse in the Name of Baphomet” existed. It is usually the pits of grindcore where such ridiculous songs are found, but alas war metal is also a mire ripe for the plundering in this regard. The excellently named Goatsmegma then, are to be commended for pushing the absurdities of such a genre into the next level. Thankfully, they have the sonic chops to…

The Anal Penetration stuff here is dirty as fuck. Blurry, bordering on noisecore levels of gore and or porn for the sick, depraved, musical deviants out there. A stunning noize of disgusting obscenity. Anal Whore, who I am usually a big fan of, sounds a bit off here. There’s like, some weird bass sound (I think) which makes everything sound like a clanking mess, and not in a good way. The Anal Penetration side is…

Crisp, clean production and surprisingly melodic guitar work. Judging this book by it’s cover I was expecting unfathomable pits of muddy brutal death crossed with “goregrind” (read: an extra layer of pig squeals) but Ambivalence has a lot more nuance to them than I could have expected. Unfortunately, nothing particularly challenging or engaging is presented here and the vocals can be pretty bad in parts, so the band’s name really comes into play here, to…

Low quality and low effort noisecore and / or grindcore is more or less what’s on offer from both bands here. There is absolutely nothing musically redeeming about any of this – and I suppose in some ways that’s the whole point. Production wise, expect the bassy, low rumbles of tired out cassettes.

Great black metal, with a raw but digestible and – huh, wow! – fully audible instrumentation and vocals. Art was mysterious enough to draw me in and the cacophonous racket kept me entertained until the end. A great little underground gem.

It’s cool to look right back to independent Em before he blew up, before he was Dre’s bitch and was before he was playing in every suburban white kid’s home in the western world. Infinite, as oddly-titled as it may be, is a slice of mysery of the daily life of a poor white guy in Detroit. Even with the Bass bros onboard even at this early stage, and with Proof (RIP) and Denaun helping…

In season 2 of HBO’s critically acclaimed series The Wire, dock worker and part-time criminal Thomas “Horseface” Pakusa asks his union boss Frank Sobatka the following question: “Let me ask you something important. You like fake tits? Thus far, I am undecided on fake tits.” – Now, I’m not saying that David Simon’s masterwork on the failure that is the war on drugs could or should have been written in any other way, but if…

Imagine if Chat Pile came from the Midlands, then you’d have something very similar to Rainbow Grave. Boasting line-up royalty with members having played in Doom, Napalm Death and Scorn, Rainbow Grave’s debut churns your guts with disgusting bass guitar led hymns of misanthropic venom. Wailing, screeching guitars and even a saxophone bolster the noise element of this bare bones attack on your senses, whilst the vocals mock and chide you into submission. Hideous shit!

Rawhead bring that FAT production and huge downtuned riff energy to the world of gargling gore. A surprisingly natural drum sound (read: pingageddon mode disabled) rounds out this barrage of swampy gore madness. I’d be doing Raw Addict (what a name!) a disservice if I compared them to early Dead Infection but damn that’s the vibe I get right out of the door with these guys. Crisp, tight blasts cut through a muddy sea of…

Impossibly raw, barely audible tape demo that would no doubt be lost to time if it existed in solitude, but is now an incredibly important document in the history and development of extreme metal music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not insinuating that “Demo 2” from Varg is some slept on lost classic that scholars of black metal NEED to check out, but for those who have studied every other piece of work from Burzum…

If you’ve seen any of Varg’s YouTube / BitChute / insert alternative video platform here / uploads then I do not doubt that you will be intimately familiar with this track. What first appears to be a guitar is I believe a well disguised VST instrument of some kind, but whatever it is, it leads “Forgotten Realms” memorable droning hook for 5 minutes or so. Also, isn’t “Forgotten Realms” a D&D campaign setting? You’re such…

Even for ambient Burzum, this is a very spaced out, ambient drone piece. Repetition is the name of the game, to put you into a trance-like state, no doubt. Do not confuse this tiny EP / single with the mammoth double album of the same name.

The art for this thing is so absurd (lol), I want it blown up to 3m x 3m in size and have it mounted (oo er) on my wall, so I can admire every glistening muscle in high fidelity. Music-wise, Absurd’s production seems a bit thin on the ground (with the exception of the ever-excellent vocals) and I could have sworn that I have heard some of these songs before? Feel like I’m getting into…

I’m being facetious of course, but similarities to something like Enthrone Darkness Triumphant are abound. Knowing the notorious reputation of Goatmoon it’s pretty funny to draw comparisons between the two, but alas I shall quit whilst I’m ahead. Stella Polaris does employ the same swirling pianos, orchestral hits, style of razor-sharp melodic riffing, and even a few pitchshifted narration vocals just like the record I am jokingly comparing it to, but Stella Polaris’ true singular…

One of the coolest things I’ve heard for a while from the black metal world. Super lo-fi, intense compositions from the forgotten lands of Cornwall. At first it can be quite difficult to tell the two projects apart, but whilst there are slight differences between them it is pretty obvious that they were both composed by the same individual. The production is (no doubt deliberately) obscure and the drums are muffled blurs of kicks and…

Fam, these woods be straight bussin’, fr fr. Damn this shit crunchy as hell, though. It’s like the band has been to my local Chinese takeaway to sample the giant spring rolls. Then they took one of those things, no doubt all cold and soggy by the time they got it back to the studio and said, “we want this, but in guitar tone”. Like that terrible barber meme, recording engineer Billy Anderson said, “I…

Serpents Of The Light is where Deicide starts to lose me. To be fair, the first three albums are ranked incredibly high for me; their unique (for the time) brand of serrriously evil death metal was second to none, especially on the self-titled and Legion. Serpents Of The Light is far, far from being a bad record, it is just some of the genuinely scary energy and atmosphere of those earlier incantations has started to…

Where it all began for the now infamous Black Magick SS. Black metal enthusiasts will no doubt feel right at home with the muddy, distant production, but fans of even the most dusty and occult psychedelic rock may be alienated somewhat by the intense layers of fog present on this thing. Despite this (I’m not complaining, just suggesting it may be a bit much for those outside of the lo-fi worlds lol), the magic (no…

I have returned to this particular Klaus Schulze work many times over the past few years. It all started when YouTube’s algorhythm seemed hell-bent on recommending it to me, and I eventually gave in, due to the artwork being cool as hell and due to Schulze’s link to Tangerine Dream. I know very little about Schulze’s other works, but Kontinuum has become a go-to for “get shit done on the computer” kind of music, be…

I thoroughly enjoyed this journey through the ages of electronic music. I was sitting here vibing, thinking, “damn, this thing covers some bases!”, from the deeper Berlin School origins to the bubblier “acid” approach of the 90s. When the beat kicked in during “Life Making Its Way” I was sold on Enophophilia and went to read the description on the Bandcamp, where the artist admits to wanting to create a hybrid electronic sound that encompasses…

The primitive yet thoroughly entertaining beginnings of one of metal’s most endearing (lol) bands. Things are a little rougher around the edges on Cannibal’s debut, with the influences of 80s “proto” death metal still in the mix along with (dare I say) a few thrashy elements too. I wouldn’t call their playing sloppy by any stretch of the term, but the band are certainly looser here than on any other studio record, but moreso due…

AGx stuff here I think is live (I think lmao), but pretty fuckin’ solid, and thrown in are a few of the band’s classic tracks to keep things interesting (unique to this session of course). Cannibe session is on par with their other material if you’ve heard it. If not, expect razor sharp guitars and monotonous but also incredibly satisfying drum programming. Insane watery gore vokills are then slathered all over the top of the…

Gotta love the mix of smoooooooth gangsta rap compositions and sick as fuck horrorcore lyrics. Brother Lynch was truly a pioneer of the horrorcore style, at least in the dark and disgusting lyrical content. Content varies from the usual gangsta fare but dialled up to 11, through to mad shit like cannibalism, which feels like it comes waaay out of left-field with the gangsta rap beats that are carrying this thing. So bizarre! Esham might…