BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART TWO: 40-31

(Here we have the second installment of DGR‘s year-end Top 50 list, counting down the second group of 10, with the next three groups slated for the next three days ahead.)

While we have not achieved critical mass yet in terms of writing for the year-end list, we’re definitely making progress down the line. This is still an area of the list where I often tell people that rankings – useless as they may be since this could be best viewed as ’50 albums DGR liked’ – don’t really start to crystalize in any sense until you start reaching the mid-30’s. So you’re reading the last vestiges of the albums I felt must be spoken about just so I can feel good about saying something about them and also starting to see the ones that I really sunk my teeth into.

They’re not a perfect representation by any means and I guarantee that come January 1st I’ll likely be kicking myself for leaving something off – especially with a late December drop of Frontierer‘s new EP looking like a contender to really fuck things up for me – but at least there’s some confidence in the ten collected before you today.

Tomorrow’s genre-spread will likely be just as silly but you’ll definitely start to see some old favorites popping up there since, much like one of the groups that appears in this collection, I too am a hallmark of consistency. I’m just not nearly as attractive.

 

40 – Persefone – Lingua Ignota Part 1

A lot of bands out there use the “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to songwriting, many of which have produced in the auditory equivalent of a stage show consisting of nothing but pyro hits and the occasional drum beat behind it. One of the things about having a wide array of influences is that if you don’t drill down on one of them you’ll end up in a realm wherein the main colors are beige and mud.

Persefone are a group that have pulled sounds from a wide part of the heavy metal spectrum over the years and, as their career has gone on, they’ve become a band I’ve often seen described as “extreme progressive melodic death metal” – which for as much of a mouthful of words as that phrase is, is surprisingly close to what they actually are.

Persefone have been favorites here for a long time now and yours truly has covered their last few releases – including the 2024 EP which now lies before you – so there’s a pretty good chance you recognize this crew from Andorra and their music, positioned somewhere between Dream Theater, At The Gates, Cynic, and the slightest tinge of metalcore for good measure. The square drawn between those four points isn’t the most rigid either, more like plotting four specific polar opposite coordinates on a sphere, because while you can hear those four main points in their overall sound, Persefone have also absorbed everything that could possibly lay in between. Add in a lot of New Age spiritualism for subject matter, season to taste. and ta-da, assuming you haven’t overcooked the thing you have a proper Persefone meal.

Lingua Ignota‘s turnaround time was pretty quick for Persefone; there’s only been two years between it and the group’s previous album Metanoia. For a band that on average has had gaps between three and five years between their albums, even an EP in just two is shockingly quick. Lingua Ignota has reason to be that way since it is the style of EP wherein the band are experimenting with their overall sound, as well as making one of the more noticeable changes a band can make to their lineup, which is the official addition of one Daniel R Flys into the vocals position. Lingua Ignota marks the group’s first recorded material with him, and so on top of giving them something to hit the road with, the EP is also an introductory course to the new voice that will be sailing atop the band’s trademark intricate guitar and keyboard interplay, love for complicated time signatures and tempo changes, and rhythm section that somehow manages to hang along for the whole ride.

Linqua Ignota Part I doesn’t ask too much of its listeners in regards to preparation for change, because twenty-six minutes with the EP will show that, more or less, the core of Persefone remains the same and they are just as reliable as they were before. The works comprised by this EP may be a little bit more chugging guitar heavy than they have been in the past, but otherwise you are still going to get these deeply woven together songs with enough space for keyboard and guitar solos that the provided room would be zoned for a sports stadium in most modern cities. My review states as much but this is still the same style of band that did pretty well with us on Metanoia as they did on Aathma, and before that the subjects of a deeper diving Synn report that had covered just about everything prior.

It’s the sense of familiarity with the band that has them in the upper amorphous rankings which change with the tides of Saturn area of the list. I’m always excited when there’s new Persefone on the horizon and the band delivered exactly that here. It’s a taste of much larger and more ambitious things to come but Lingua Ignota Part I also falls in line pretty well with the rest of the band’s recorded works. Few bands are as agile and deft as Persefone as they dance across the musical spectrum, and so if this is your first taste of the band – you’ve chosen a pretty good one.

But we could’ve said that about the last four Persefone releases because this is a band that found a really, really, really solid groove of music to place themselves into and since then have been so consistent about putting out these high-quality thrill-ride spiritual journeys of music that you’d be okay picking any of them at random. Daniel puts in a strong enough performance on this EP that you can rest assured the band are capable of continuing on this path for years to come.

Persefone kept the machine going strong, as recognizable as it is, in 2024 and as a result have one of the better releases that came out this year in their hands.

 

39 – Mastiff – Depricipice

Growing up in the 1990s, I was part of a class of people who had access to what was known as a black box, which was basically a box from the cable provider that had been ‘unlocked’ by some of the more enterprising cable technicians out there over the years, so you wound up paying a basic cable fee but otherwise had access to all the premium channels that would’ve otherwise been locked away by higher subscription packages that had long since achieved highway robbery status.

My family was immensely fucking broke as well and this was our one true indulgence, so outside of an FM radio and the later addition of a Playstation purchased by recycling aluminum cans, including picking them up off the side of the road – an act that would result in my school backpack smelling enough like beer that I would actually be called into the principal’s office in my elementary school years and asked about it – that TV was kind of it.

I spent hours in front of that thing and my mother would listen to golden oldies – we had a station named KFRC out there whose playlist was effectively ’50s and ’60s era with a lot of Motown and the occasional ’70s funk in the mix – while I would be glued to MTV. It resulted in a musical specialization that for a long time meant I was an expert on ’80s/’90s music videos and chart toppers and then the entirety of the Motown scene proper.

I lead with this because you don’t realize just how much your environment and external factors can play on what your brain latches on to musically or how you can develop weirdly specialized music collections over the years. Writing for this site for a decade-plus now has created such a situation, in that I’m often exposed to scenes I would otherwise have never crossed paths with due to another writer being passionate enough about it to constantly cover it. I’ve likely done the same to a few folks around here, which means there’s at least three people more than is probably necessary who know the ins and outs of the local Sacramento metal scene as I’ve consistently brought it up whenever handed enough leash to do so.

What the has translated to is that thanks to Andy’s Best Of British and Things You May Have Missed series over the years, I’m weirdly acquainted with groups out of the UK that I would’ve otherwise never had the chance to cross paths with save for something that might’ve popped up on a label like Candelight. One of the names that has popped up enough times to spark a neuron in the ole grey matter is that of the hardcore/sludge hybrid Mastiff.

You would think that the core elements of the style of music that Mastiff makes on Deprecipice would be fairly simple, given that the ingredients seem to be tablespoons and cup-fulls of nihilism, depression, and occasional outright rage, yet this is something incredibly hard to master. Deprecipice is an album veering hard into the metallic hardcore side of things and the lion’s share of its songs are comprised of big, burly riffs and martial rhythms, all awash in a layer of feedback and distortion to make everything register on the abrasive scale.

This particular hemisphere of the heavy metal globe has gotten decently crowded over the years and even my own year-end lists reflect that – I usually wind up with three or four albums of the recipe that Mastiff are cooking with here – and the main reason why Deprecipice has bare-knuckle-boxed its way into the end of year festivities is that they’re stunningly good at this sound. Deprecipice reminds me a lot of just how vitriolic bands like Call Of The Void were getting before they started to hang it up in the mid-aughts; the harsh bark for vocals and rhythm sections that felt more like actual fist fights than anything musical. You could stand in front of a set of nice speakers with Deprecipice blaring out of it and walk away with bruises.

Midway through Deprecipice there’s a noise breakdown that probably says more about the album than I ever could. You think you’ve settled into a solid groove just shy of Ringworm’s territory on Deprecipice and then all of a sudden there’s a giant – and very, very angry – wall of static, feedback, reverb, and distortion that rudely barrels its way into your listening session as if the album decided now would be a good time to incoherently scream at you since it didn’t seem like the music was getting its point across. It is as if midway through the album Mastiff decided that the impression to be left by the album was going to be the live crumbling of an edifice, the masonry failing and the wall coming down all in one go. Veil ripped off to expose harsh reality underneath.

Deprecipice is an album that charts very high on the acidic scale and isn’t anything remotely close to friendly. Where it lies is gnarled, intense, and otherwise intangibly violent, and it is one of those releases that seems to hang on with you. You can definitely find a groove and headbang along in a good eighty-percent of the songs on Deprecipice but you’re not going to feel good about yourself afterwords.

 

38 – High Parasite – Forever We Burn

With my eyes narrowed and a slight tinge of annoyance in my voice I find myself writing this, but how dare High Parasite write an album so specifically catered to my tastes that it makes me look like a hypocrite with no integrity at all? I have standards to uphold and a critical reputation to maintain and yet here I am with an album shamelessly grafted to be the most arena-worthy goth rock/metal in some time and then to do so using building blocks hailing from the My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost circles. Gods be damned.

Here I am spilling oversized whiskey-barrel’s worth of digital ink over releases that I can consider full audio experiences that people need to immerse themselves into in order to get a taste of the full spectrum of music on each album, and in the middle of that I’m going to drop a wild collection of singles that dances between a way more rocking My Dying Bride and a more poetic and Victorian-fantasy inspired Paradise Lost? I could not achieve more indignant coffee shop Karen attitude here if I tried, save for heading to the beauty salon around the corner from my house and asking for the Jennifer Aniston haircut treatment.

Because here I am, with an album I reviewed and even recognized back then as being appreciably willing to be shameless about its influences and goals and I’m ready to place that thing in the upper reaches of my year end list – if nothing else than to serve as an amusing pallete cleanser. Deeper (but not much more intelligent sounding) thoughts can be found here.

Yet Forever We Burn isn’t just that; okay, it’s mostly that. It’s like 90% that. High Parasite‘s Forever We Burn is going to be one of the most mainstream releases you’re going to find in the closing out of the year at this website. It’s a collection of singles that cherry-picks its favorite parts from other acts and drops them into a simmering stew of its own for ten songs and forty-two minutes of your time with one real wild curveball thrown right at the end of the whole affair.

It’s clear by the end of Forever We Burn that High Parasite were pretty open to experiment with their instrumental flair here, all in the quest of writing the next, undeniably catchy part that winds up subsuming the better part of my own lighter music listening time. Every single gear that turns within the machine of “Let It Fail” is so obviously exposed that you’d think it was an incomplete car without a body around it by just how many mechanisms you can see working, yet I’d be a fool to say I haven’t listened to – and attempted to sing along with – the damned thing a hundred or so times since the song saw release as an advance single of Forever We Burn. This is an album that basically interrupted what would’ve otherwise been a very critically heavy and otherwise mildly intelligent-reading year-end listening by essentially being made just for me.

Thus credit must be given to Graves and the crew comprised by High Parasite because for as heavy as the procession of my musical tastes has become over the years, I’m still a fool for sad boy with guitar music. While Forever We Burn is often chasing its own poetic flights of fancy and is appreciably bought into its own brand of bullshit, the center of the band is still constructed of solid and hook-laden guitar work. Gleefully grabbed like a child in a candy store across an entire genre, sure, but that is one situation where you find yourself more jealous of the fact that you didn’t think of it first than getting spun up about any sort of artistic experience.

Forever We Burn was one my “pop” albums of the year – which I’m sure still sounds like cars crashing into each other to the average Top Forty listener – and I’ll fully own up to being thrilled to adding this thing to the year end list.

 

37 – Bloom Dream – It Didn’t Have To Be This Way

I waffled a lot on where to place Bloom Dream and their album It Didn’t Have To Be This Way. The band are clearly one that is outside of my regular listening wheelhouse and one that I hoovered up while crawling through our various Things You May Have Missed articles that crop up on a regular basis these days. I’d pontificate on how much I’ve allowed my tastes to be steered by others on this website this year but honestly, this is a band who were likely going to find their way in by hook or by crook if given the chance.

Part of that may be the strength of the album name alone, as I tend to gravitate towards discs with a bit of depressive ennui attached to their album titles – see Dormant Ordeal’s We Had It Coming and It Rains, It Pours or Svalbard’s various life-affirming titles like It’s Hard To Have Hope and When I Die Will It Get Better? – and that tends to be a calling card of the post-hardcore and screamo scene these days. Of course, I’d be ill-suited to fully dive into anything with those sorts of genre tags but the recent crossbreeding of those particular scenes with heavier strains of hardcore, and yes, metal in general, has made for an interesting creature all its own. Even though we’re generations upon generations removed now and the ‘influenced by’ onion could be peeled six layers deep, many of these groups are still managing to stand out on their own and that’s partially why Bloom Dream left such a mark with It Didn’t Have To Be This Way.

This website of course is not a complete bunch of luddites when it comes to the musical galaxy outside of heavy metal so Bloom Dream aren’t entirely in the land where there be dragons for us. In fact, in my time spent listening to It Didin’t Have To Be This Way, I found my mind wandering back to groups like Australia’s The Fevered and Fvck Mountain – when there was a strain of d-beat punk working its way through the post-hardcore scene at the time. Those, however, were also releases that came out seven to ten years ago at this point and the musical scene as a whole waits for no one. It is a constantly-evolving, ever-living creature on its own and it will expel music of its own will.

Each one of those expulsions is almost like a signal from space, a pulse-check and a shot across the bow at the same time to let you know just how a particular subset of music is doing at the moment. For me, Bloom Dream‘s It Didn’t Have To Be This Way morphed into that over time. I’m admittedly way out of touch when it comes to the particular influences that could lead to a release like this but I can definitely pull the old man ‘I know it when I see it’ routine and by that token… I am very much liking what I am hearing.

There are deeper thoughts available here. Although I didn’t write them so hell knows why you’d want to click away to check that out.

 

36 – Vale Of Pnath – Between The Worlds Of Life And Death

A storm gathers on the horizon, the skies change to colors indescribable by the common man, the winds shift and the poles seem to reverse, the hair stands up on you arm, and yet right before the end of everything you can proudly proclaim that you knew this was coming. You’ve read enough DGR lists to know this by the smell of it and you were just counting the minutes with each agonizing second a gift from the heavens. It’s time for the tech-death dorks to get their due and start appearing in earnest on the DGR year-end list.

This is something you could set your clock by, seconded only by the moment when you start seeing all of the melodeath releases of the year start to worm their way into this politely organized trainwreck. One of the bigger volleys of cannon fire comes courtesy of the ever-shifting lineup of Colorado’s Vale Of Pnath and thier newest album Between The Worlds Of Life And Death, which saw release in late May via Willowtip Records.

Some chucklefuck already reviewed this album all the way back in June, so that does save us some time in terms of introductions and handshakes in regards to who Vale Of Pnath exactly are. I can’t attest to what might’ve caused the latest lineup change in Vale Of Pnath, nor the distance between releases either, but it has been the tale of the band for some time now. That said, if you’re the type to only follow full-length releases then it has legit been eight years since the release of Vale Of Pnath‘s last album II, and if you’re like us and have managed to keep up the dragnet with the Vale Of Pnath crew, you’re still looking at a close to five-year gap since their last EP Accursed.

In the time since, Vale Of Pnath have been effectively rended down to just the bone and rebuilt from there, sporting a lineup that has now folded them into the wider Abigail Williams cinematic universe with Ken Sorceron joining them on vocals, Gabe Seeber on drums, and Austin Rolla on Bass. The only tenured staff at this point is the fixed point that is guitarist Vance Valenzuela.

I sometimes wonder if, much like Obscura, these bands with constantly changing lineups imagine themselves akin to someone like Death wherein there was one foundational member surrounding themselves with incredible musicians, over time leading to a surprisingly diverse discography. I do worry a bit that sometimes it gives the impression that many of these groups are assembled from interchangeable parts, but so far Vale Of Pnath have managed to keep themselves distinct enough that they don’t fall into the blur of the showmanship world.

Vale Of Pnath have quite the chameleon act going on because of it: there is still a very fast, tech-death core in place for the band but over time more and more of its members’ other projects seem to have influenced the overall direction of their sound. In the case of Between The Worlds Of Life And Death, Vale Of Pnath have transformed into a blackened tech-death band with a light seasoning of symphonic work over the top of it. On rare occasions, it even becomes an unintentional Abigail Williams disc – although, and I’m echoing my review here when I say this, it wouldn’t surprise to learn some of these ideas had long been kicking around on member’s hard-drives for a while, seeking that perfect quick-tempo tech-death release.

Despite the hurricane-level of blowhardedness that you’re witnessing here in regards to what constitues a Vale Of Pnath at this point, it’s undeniable that Between The Worlds Of Life And Death has some absolutely killer songs on it. The ochestration, though mild, does at time uplift many of the songs it appears in – including the times when the band put an eerier and more twisted take on some torturous string bending in album closer “Burning Light”. Honestly, I had figured the album had a damned good ending in “No Return, No Regret” in the way it suddenly cuts off, but that’s also a good summation of the album as a whole.

The story of Between The Worlds Of Life And Death is of a real no bullshit, zero pretense album when it comes to velocity. There’s basically two instrumental interludes – contributed by one of the Wilderun team no less – and then eight songs of quick-tempo guitar pyrotechnics. “Soul Offering” is a murderous romp of a time and “Silent Prayers” makes for a hell of an actual introduction, even when using the common shorthand for ‘headbang you fucking morons’ style of guitar riff that it’s opening bit has.

Between The Worlds Of Life And Death has seen heavy rotation in DGR land, so I figured it would be well suited to crash through the ceiling of the year end mansion we’re building this time around.

 

35 – Disentomb – Nothing Above

This was not intentional on my part but welcome to slam block I guess — the weird, sort of amorphous genre that has slowly gained ever greater precedence within the wider heavy metal world as people realize just how complicated some of that in between the caveman wall-punching riff work can get. Many a band have sought to – unintionally or not – expand upon the genre as a whole, melding it with the brutal-death sub-variant that always seems to lend itself just as easily as a descriptor when the phrase ‘well it sounds like getting run over by a street paver’ is found wanting.

It’s been five years for Australia’s Disentomb, a group whose 2019 release The Decaying Light is still a constant recommendation on my end as an entry into a much darker and deeper world of heavy metal. When your albums could otherwise be measured in ‘realms chtonic’ then you should have a pretty good sense of just how cavernous your music has become. It may seem like the gap in time for Disentomb is a long one but that seems to have long been the pattern for the band with four-to-five year gaps between full-lengths being a constant highway marker for the course of their career. It’s the recent release of their new four-song EP Nothing Above that has changed that pattern, where instead of a full-length the band are offering up four very experimental – for them – takes on their overall sound as a potential slice of the future.

Nothing Above was of course spoken about at length when we touched base with it in late October, so a more critical read is available there.

For only four songs, Nothing Above is an expansive work. Disentomb are a band that already sounded massive – especially for a four-piece – but on Nothing Above they have somehow turned enough knobs or delineated slightly to the left enough that now they sound enormous. Why make death metal that sounds like it was recorded in a cave when you can instead just be the cave?

Interestingly, if you kept up with Disentomb‘s 2021 re-records of three of their earlier singles, some of the immense soundwork was already being hinted at. If the three years hence only amplified upon those ideas then it did them a world of good on Nothing Above because this is a release that by all measures is just immensely heavy. Disentomb don’t overcomplicate things too much here either, as they mangle Nothing Above into a walking creature all its own, leaving craters behind in its footfalls. Three of the songs could arguably challenge the sound of laying asphalt in levels of ground reverbration and when you think you might have a handle on the monster truck of dissonance that Disentomb have been driving your way for two songs, Jonny Davy of Job For A Cowboy pops up in “No God Unconquered” for some fun high-low contrasting vocal work.

At a hair over seventeen minutes, Nothing Above offers an intriguing vision of parts’s future. You could say that the four songs here stand individually from one another but Disentomb‘s overall brutal-death foundation stabs enough of a stick through them that they could be served as a kebab. Nothing Above‘s music is different enough and has enough mangled twists on the formula that the band were using for Decaying Light that it’s simple to understand how it seems like Disentomb were experimenting across these four songs.

That approach is appreciated, because when you become just one single-minded, one dimensional element, then that only works for a certain number of releases before people get tired and it starts to seem mundane. Playing mad doctor with it is the right approach because who knows, from these four seeds could sprout monstrous vines all their own and allow for new materials to be harvested.

Its hard to pin down what a group like Disentomb might do in the future. Perhaps there’s six more songs just waiting in the hopper like this and Nothing Above will re-emerge as part of a wider whole with an equally nihilistic album name. Either way, what appears here is an almost perfect amount of time to spend with Disentomb. It teases enough that you think you’d want more, yet by that estimation one more song would likely be the one to pile-drive you up to your neck into the dirt.

 

34 – Defeated Sanity – Chronicles Of Lunacy

Given that it came out in the last week of November, I’ve probably spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Defeated Sanity and their newest album Chronicles Of Lunacy. I’ve likely put more brainpower into it than the album itself deserves, but something about Chronicles Of Lunacy and how it was positioned at the end of the year like it was, and how quickly I saw it rocket into people’s year-end collectives, set something off in me. In part because its appearance is justified but also because if you were to really take Chronicles Of Lunacy at face-value and first blush, you’d find yourself thinking it was a pretty good slam album and moving on with your day.

Why then, are people so willing to die on the altar of Defeated Sanity and declare it one of the best this year and why am I so willing to do so as well, as if upon the news of a new album release from the crew a spot was already created for the year-end festivities with their name on it? Part of that I think, does come down to the former reason. Chronicles Of Lunacy is a pretty good slam album and sometimes you need something so concrete crushingly stupid that it is almost enlightening. But the second reason of which I think might be me taking a wider and more holistic view of Defeated Sanity as a whole: in which I have found that not only have they had a long and storied career at this point but also they’ve evolved into quite the gateway band for a genre so extreme that the idea of someone serving as the introductory codex for it is completely absurd.

A large part of Defeated Sanity‘s allure is that they’ve been kicking around for so long that they have become a fixture in the overall death metal scene. They’ve been consistent as well, with recent releases ratcheting up on the technicality side of things to where a release from Defeated Sanity is not just a brutal death fireworks show anymore but also committing a fair bit of subterfuge as well. Watching someone try to headbang along with the band – much in the same way Wormed‘s sudden tempo changes do this – is an exercise in amusement because right when it seems like you’ve got it, Defeated Sanity flip the table over and get lost in these wandering instrumental passages, crazed free-jazz experiments on the drums, and occasional stuttering riffs that are somehow heavier than the sections that came before it. The amount of brain energy that must go into keeping track of where Defeated Sanity are in a song must be taxing when they’re on stage.

But the reason why I’ve found that over the years they’ve also become something of a gateway deeper into the genre is that by refusing to stick rigidly to one particular style, they’ve found a blend of the five or six directions where each song is journeying wherein every element broken out on its own is fairly approachable. It’s not the most complicated slam, the brutal death is suitable, the jazzier bits are always going to resolve so they can work their way back into skull crushing, and any instrumental wandering is usually coupled by something so remarkably stupid that it could pass for a current-era post on social media.

These are things which make it so that even when Defeated Sanity are traipsing their way through six minutes like on “Condemned To Vascular Famine”, you as a listener can stick around; you may not understand everything that happens here but there’s enough appeal to the lizard brain to make you stay. Same for when the group just sound like a running truck in “Extrinsically Enraged” or “The Odour Of Sanctity”. With songs that run the gamut in run times as well, Chronicles Of Lunacy plays out like a feral beast all its own, but it also provides a solid slab of death metal with enough barbed hooks in it to keep the journey interesting and make you feel like you’re somehow more intelligent for being able to describe an eighth of what might’ve just happened in a particular song.

 

33 – Ghostheart Nebula – Blackshift

Every year my drunken samba through the end-time festivities tends to reveal something about my listening tastes that I hadn’t otherwise expected. I think looking back at both 2023 and 2024 and the way this list is shaping out has completely cut through the vines and greenery that would otherwise block the mental pathways to this: my time for doom as a genre seems to be at an absolute minimum, and the ones that I do find myself enjoying are those of the camp that are heavily melodramatic and have an army’s helping of keyboard work to really amplify the general sense of despair.

Mental Torment did well for themselves earlier this year and now we find ourselves with a band of a similar ilk, though less death metal and far more funereal in the form of Italy’s Ghostheart Nebula and their new album Blackshift. That they do so while using the existential void of the cosmos as partial subject inspiration just earns them extra points.

In case you’re worried, Ghostheart Nebula is very traditional in the doom sense, as the favored run-time per song for the band seems to hover around the eight-minute mark. Often the songs are awash in keyboard work that crashes against each movement like waves along a cliffside, and vocally, Ghostheart Nebula make good use of a cavernous deep growl and a beautifully clean-sung interchange. These aren’t all songs of heartache and loss as you might expect from my chosen doom wheelhouse, yet there’s a fair amount of metaphor and allegory at work. Much as I would love for opening song “VdB 141 IC 1805” to make any reference whatsoever to its titular number sequence, it’s mostly an introductory scene-setter before you hit seven songs whose sound seeks to fill the vast expanse from which the group are drawing musical inspiration.

Blackshift is one of the later releases of this year to make it into the year-end list with an impact date in the middle of October. Luckily, I didn’t have to write about it here – even though it was hovering in my review archive folder for the better part of a month – and it was instead covered as part of this archive from a few weeks ago.

What won me over with Blackshift wasn’t just the colder approach to doom but that there were also a few specific standout songs. The last three of Blackshift could easily stand on their own with its title song, “Traces”, and “Orphan Of Light” all flowing into one another. “Orphan Of Light”, especially, served as such a fantastic closer that my first few listens of Blackshift coasted back around to multiple loops just based on that song alone.

Ghostheart Nebula care about their craft here, and with songs that are written to be this long, still put in good effort to keep things interesting. They make good use of empty space – ha, get it – as well as big, drawn-out passages that seem to extend the pathways before their listener into infinity. Blackshift represents a good synthesis of all their overall sounds into seven songs and a deep rumble of an introductory bit. It’s also a release that clears the bar on the ‘just about everything you want from a doom release’ checklist. Even though this will likely be a year-end gathering of grind, death metal, and various other high-speed genres, you owe it to yourselves to slow things down a bit and check this one out and let it wash over you.

Besides, the next couple of entries will wake you out of the trance that you’ve been lulled into by that point anyway.

 

32 – Wolfheart – Draconian Darkness

Truthfully, I had not expected for Wolfheart‘s Draconian Darkness to grow on me as much as it did from the time of its release in early September until now. Even though few bands have mastered the big and epic, lost in the mountains, style of melodeath and folk quite like Wolfheart have, I think it is pretty fair to say that since the band themselves settled on that being their formula for success they’ve settled on hitting those marks again and again and again.

Wolfheart are a consistently good time and I’ve started to think that so much of my take on Draconian Darkness, with it feeling like the most ‘direct followup’ someone could feasibly construct to the album that came out before it, has colored my overall enjoyment of this release. I’ve taken to viewing it more as the refined and moodier sibling to 2022’s King In The North in a lot of ways. While the album prior had a decent brick of experimentation – for Wolfheart anyway – layered into its tracklisting, Draconian Darkness plays out with the band choosing many of its previous ideas and refining them into gloomier works. You still get your fire, flame, and ice allegory spread out all over the disc yet here Wolfheart are less a creature of burgeoning creativity and more the hulking mass working behind the forge that they often portray themselves as.

It’s amazing that even months removed from writing it up for review purposes I still find myself reflecting a lot of my initial thoughts with Draconian Darkness. Even then I had some wiseass crack about the album being permeated with a ‘tough-guy permafrost’. That’s also a good reason why I’m continually drawn to the Finnish crew’s particular take on the melodeath style, because the hammer and sparks blacksmith act somehow still seems to work. They’re so good at writing songs that feel like big, epic works that you’re willing to give them a pass on their rigid love of eight tracks and forty minutes representing an album.

A highlight reel of Draconian Darkness would look different for everyone because if there is one thing that comes with a consistent cohesiveness, it is the sense that remaining at a consant eight makes it so that standout tracks are going to vary. I haven’t changed too much from my review, though I have gained a bigger appreciation for “Throne Of Bones” since calling it out the first time. The death obsession that dominates a fair bit of the tracklist on Draconian Darkness could easily be a highlight grouping for some folks on its own. It’s hard to deny it when you have a song simply titled “Grave” and then also have a stunning number in “Death Lead The Way” as well. Others may be drawn to the traditional fire and ice grouping within Draconian Darkness as well.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly where those particular thrown darts might land on the board but it is a process I’ve watched with bemused interest since Draconian Darkness saw release. I’d be just as excited to see how many people thought “The Gale” was a good closer as well, or if I’m just a fan of a darkened fadeout the way Wolfheart approach it on this release.

Wolfheart have been a long-time fixture in my pile of year-end selections, always hovering around this particular area. They’re like a signpost in my musical listening habits now, something you could use to navigate by while finding your way around. They’ve been such a constant fixture that I would’ve been more shocked by Draconian Darkness not making an appearance than it being here. In other words, this is a drum I’ve been banging on for years and am unlikely to stop doing so now. However, there’s always a chance it could be someone’s first time — to which I say, Draconian Darkness is a damned solid starting point and you’ve got a whole lot of releases just like it to dig into after this.

 

31 – Hannes Grossman – Echoes Of Eternity

The January-into-early-February run of releases is always a rough one when it comes to end of year activities. I’d love to see a scatter plot of just how many of those releases manage to survive until year-end season because, honestly, unless it’s a really big name or something that has felt like a tectonic shift within the world of heavy metal – which are exceedingly rare occurrences these days – it seems like the early in the year releases are likely to catch a knee to the chest by something that came out during the summer/fall touring season.

It’s why I keep a notepad file on my desktop that is just a list of releases by month that I’ve been interested in; otherwise I’d be worried I’d be leaving the short end of the stick to projects that came out in that window I mentioned. Doubly-so for all of those if it manages to be an EP, because the blessed short run-time of those things can also be a double-edged sword given that they flash by so quickly that sometimes they tend to flash out of a person’s memory at the same time.

If you haven’t followed Hannes Grossmann‘s solo work then you’re missing out, as he’s made great use of the wider spread of musicians he’s had an opportunity to work with over the years. Reliable and precise behind the drum kit, he’s been both recruited and keystone to quite a few projects over the years but with a spread that has him running anywhere from Alkaloid to Blotted Science to Dark Fortress to Obscura to Necrophagist and so on; he’s gathered quite the grouping of musicians to call upon whenever he’s feeling creative.

His solo work has been markedly different from his regular stuff as well. Though tentatively at first and built out of material fitting for his time in Obscura, he’s since gone experimental virtuoso on some albums and on others almost complete two-step melodeath. His most recent album and EP combination have landed very well with me, and the purpose behind Echoes Of Eternity seems like one of those times when a musician is offering to meet me directly at my doorstep. Echoes Of Eternity is meant to be a throwback and tribute in a lot of ways to work with other projects, which meant that for the course of the EP he wrote stuff that was well-suited for the wheelhouses of the previously mentioned murderer’s row of musical projects – especially if you like the technical death metal side of things, with two of the songs specifically playing in the graveyard of Necrophagist so much it could actually awaken the dead to tell him to knock it the fuck off.

Yes, there is absolutely a review of this EP penned by yours truly and you can find that nightmare here. Even though Echoes Of Eternity stated up front that it was largely mining past projects projects for new ore, it still managed to serve up some killer songs. Being an EP, picking out specific tracks feels like a fool’s exercise in some ways, especially since I have it camping out right on top of the bubble that is the top ’30’ – whatever that’s worth – of this year end song and dance. However, I really found myself drawn to “Engraved In Their Shrouds” and “Human Body Automaton” over the course of the year since Echoes‘ release, but I could stick my neck out for the titular “Echoes Of Eternity” as well. Again, the whole EP being five tracks and a comfy twenty-one minutes means I’m going to extol the virtues of listening to the whole EP anyway.

Even though his solo works have flown pretty stealthily past folks in recent years, I would highly recommend checking them out. It’s fun hearing someone who has been a pillar of a style that so many have launched careers from over the years finally just let himself loose and play what appeals to him at the moment. These are albums and EPs that have a snapshot quality to them, but each one has contained either some criminally catchy or blindingly furious tracks within.