Here’s some breaking news: Nuclear Blast has announced that it will release a new Demonaz-led Immortal album named War Against All sometime next year, with Ice Dale (Enslaved) on bass and Kevin Kvåle (Gaahls Wyrd, Horizon Ablaze) on drums. I also got a Bandcamp alert about a new release here today by Teitanblood called Purging Tongues – 2022, though it seems to be a repress of the band’s 2011 single-song EP (Purging Tongues) combined with some kind of variation on that track named “Purging Tongues – Demon 1990“.

In other news, I still feel like shit — though slightly less shitty than over the past weekend. This has hung on long enough that I no longer think it’s the after-effects of dangerous levels of wildfire smoke that plagued my area over the preceding week, and more likely a nasty cold I picked up somewhere. First one of those I’ve had since the outbreak of covid. I’m vaxxed to the max and have pretty much given up masking, and I guess that was a dumb move. Those masks protected against more than covid.

In still other news, I feel like writing about new music anyway (in fact I already did that today), though like yesterday’s Shades of Black column this one will be shorter than usual (on top of everything else, my fucking day job is demanding a chunk of my time). I think of the songs in this collection as musical red meat for metal carnivores. Continue reading »