Review: My Sleeping Karma – My Sleeping Karma
Jun 08
German world music inspired instrumentalists My Sleeping Karma’s newest album ‘Moksha’ is, how the kid’s say, chill as fuck and is generally perfect music for the common metalhead to relax to.
Review: Sigh – Graveward
May 18
Japan’s oddball maniacs Sigh are back with a new platter of crazy, and we couldn’t be luckier. A little more to the point as their albums go, but has all the brutal quirks we’ve come to love.
Review: Apostate – Time of Terror
Mar 23
A review of ‘Time of Terror’, the new album from Ukrainian death-doom band Apostate.
Review: A Sense of Gravity – Travail
Mar 16
A Sense of Gravity’s first record is a well crafted and expansive conglomeration of progressive hard rock, heavy metal, and jazz fusion that has a guaranteed shelf life of many, many spins on the player.
Review: Aetherium Mors – Drenched In Victorious Blood
Jan 07Aetherium Mors – Drenched In Victorious BloodTo prove right off the bat they can bring the fire, the band opens their first release with Sons of Men, an angry scorcher of grinding metal and blackened vocals that eventually opens up into some dirge-like melodic death metal. The song is pretty vicious in delivery, making it a good opener that gets your attention with its in-your-face attack in order to sit you down for a fairly well varied blast of metal during the rest of the album. Picking up where Sons leaves off, Luciferian March creeps along in a down-tempo doom passages before lurching into ferocious pummelings that come fast and furious with an arsenal of biting death growls and drilling double kick. As aggressive as the music is though, there’s still room for melody, which is a big part of the songwriting. While it is not an overly predominant character, there is definitely enough of it there to keep the music from being a bland flavor of blackened death metal instead of the often dynamic and well rounded songs we get on the album.The vocals are primarily higher register death snarls with a distinctly black metal attitude, including the lyrical content which is your average satanic fair for the genre. Guitars provide the backdrop of menacing riffing while driving the melody when it comes around. It would be nice to hear them have a little more meat in the mix however, but the drums generally batter their way to the forefront of the sonic palette. It is actually the drums where the aforementioned flaws can be found. While the playing is generally solid and effective, oftentimes they can overshadow the dynamics of the underlying instrumentation by drowning them out. It is a common issue of aural aesthetics in death/black metal, where the incessant use of machine-gun snare and kick hits can become a tiresome and overbearing focal point in the mix, rather than the driving accentuator that it should be. Thankfully, this is not a glaring issue that makes itself apparent often on the album, instead it is only occasionally noticed as a minor but forgettable annoyance.The band works with a well developed toolset for a debut effort, and aside from a few somewhat minor flaws on the production side of things, the listener might assume that Drenched in Victorious Blood is a second or third release from a...
Review: Melencolia Estatica – Hel
Dec 20Melencolia Estatica – Hel Hel is the third effort put forth by Melencolia Estatica, the dark and brooding spawn of mastermind Climaxia, one of the foremost women in black metal today. On the album, she handles the duties of guitar, bass, and vocal direction, steering the path for a grand yet sombre album steeped in both bleakness and viciousness. The album is a concept piece, based off of Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 expressionist film Metropolis, and given the surrealist moodscapes of either work, you could easily join them for a single experience. After all, the movie was a silent picture, so adding some atmospheric black metal to the background as orchestration works quite well.Being a concept piece, the album as a whole flows more like a long single construct, rather than focus on conventional single tracks. This said, the affair is broken up into six parts (Hel I-VI), each haunting their own little corner of the album. The overall sound is a mix of bleak yet melodic atmospheric wonderings with soft ghost-like clean vocals, and fierce passages of blistering black metal infused heaviness. The blend is engaging, and really gives the album a nice flow if you were giving it the full listen. The sedated moments are creepy and alluring, and the evenly spread mix of lulling guitars, haunting vocals, and soft choral keys make for well textured pieces of mood music. When you come upon the harsh parts, they are fiery and vicious, topped with some fairly impressive growls and screams that sound downright baleful. The production sounds clean and modern when it needs to be but also lets the songs sound gritty when it’s called for, and for both the sake of the album’s mood and for a more traditional black metal sound, the mix is coated with a lush, airy reverb to good effect.Because of the album’s nature, you won’t find much for single tracks that really pop out as stand alone songs. It’s sort of an all-or-nothing piece that needs the sit down listen, and while that may endear it a little more to this reviewer, just know that it may not necessarily be the sort of thing you throw on your iPod for your shuffle mix. Also, while the songs, or ‘parts’ all sound good and feature the full range of the album’s soundscape, there’s not a great deal that makes them very unique...
