SHADES OF BLACK: ADAESTUO, VOLLOÍOM, HYNGWAR, VOAK

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 042022
 

For this Sunday’s column I’ve included three complete releases and one from a forthcoming album. I venture to say that you’ll find the first two releases formidably frightening and the third one more head-hooking and heart-exploding, while the advance track is an amalgam that’s fiery, feral, and defiant.

ADAESTUO (International)

I’ve written with admiration about all three of Adaestuo’s previous releases — the 2016 debut EP Tacent Semitae and the band’s two albums, Krew za krew (2018) and Manalan virrat (2020). So there was no chance I wouldn’t make the dive into Purge of the Night Cloak, a new EP they released just last week, but which seems to consist of recordings conceived in 2016 and first made in 2020. They describe it as an effort “to bring the intrepid beholder into a more Faustian Gnosis”. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: APOGNOSIS, HRÆ , VENOMOUS SKELETON, ADAESTUO, SCHWERMUT

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  10 Responses »
Mar 082020
 

 

For this week’s edition of the column I decided to include five complete releases, four albums and an EP, all but one of them released since late January. But my time is short, and so, with apologies to the bands, the only way I’ve been able to manage this is to pursue a strategy of picking only one song per release to focus on, accompanied by just the most general overview of everything else. With luck, this will be enough to seduce people into exploring each release in greater depth, despite the relative shallowness of my own words.

APOGNOSIS

The Greek black metal band Adaestuo is one of two in today’s feature whose past work I was familiar with, and that past work — a self-titled demo in 2016, the Phase 6 debut album that same year, and the Cult of Human Sacrifices EP in 2018 — has been remarkably impressive. The new release is an album entitled Dominion In Polarity. It came out last September, and I really should have written something about it before now, because it’s tremendous. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ADAESTUO, OBSCENITY, VETUR, SUNSTARE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Nov 072018
 

 

According to our traffic statistics, roughly half of our visitors regularly come here from countries outside the U.S. I suspect that many of those people still paid a bit of attention to the elections conducted here yesterday, but probably not to the same extent, or with the same degree of emotional turmoil, as most of us in the States. Though I thought about staying away from the TV and the internet in an effort to reduce my anxiety, I failed. So, it was a late night of watching returns and a morning consumed by reading about what happened and what to make of it.

Nevertheless, I did manage to squeeze a bit of new metal into my ears last night and this morning, and chose the following advance tracks from four new records to share with you at this point — with more to come tomorrow.

ADAESTUO

Though I only managed to write about one track from Adaestuo’s 2016 debut EP, Tacent Semitae, I thought it was fantastic. I’ve been quite interested to hear what this multinational trio (instrumentalists VJS and P.E.Packain, and vocalist Hekte Zarenwould) would do next, and now we’re about to find out. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: SCHAMMASCH, NORDJEVEL, ADAESTUO, ABDUCTION, OVNEV, SADOKIST, ILDRA, TITAN X

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  8 Responses »
Oct 232016
 

Schammasch

 

This Sunday’s edition of Shades of Black is quite large, but I nevertheless decided not to divide it into two parts for fear that I’d get diverted by something and never finish Part 2.

The first two items are new videos for songs from previously released albums. The next three are new songs from forthcoming albums. And the last three items are all songs from releases that have been out for a while but that I only discovered recently.

SCHAMMASCH

Andy Synn wrote a special three-part review (collected here) for Triangle, the new album by Schammasch, calling it “a true triumph of ambition and creativity”: “[A]ny listener who embraces the experience of Triangle on its own terms, with their eyes, their ears, and their mind open to the spiritual signals it transmits, will find their decision rewarded ten-fold.” Continue reading »