Dec 162024
 

(This is the first part of a five-part countdown by DGR of his 2024 year-end list, with each selection accompanied by his very extensive thoughts about the releases. Our plan is to roll out the rest of the installments on successive days until this week ends or falls into a sinkhole under the weight of his words.)

It feels like I blinked and suddenly a whole year had passed. Maybe it’s just the flow of life finally catching back up to me but this year moved in extreme fits and extreme starts and somewhere along the way I lost track of it among the deluge and wreckage that seems to be a daily existence. Among the piles of charred wood and still yet burning cars is another three hundred and sixty-five days of existence slowly signing its final paperwork and preparing itself to move on from the mortal coil.

At the very least, there was some sort of notification that this was coming. It feels like every year I open with some variation of ‘hey, this previous year sucked shit,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve taken a similar tack to open up a few of the previous year-end posts – if only some sort of dipshit had done an anniversary post whereby he might have easy access to all his previous years’ transgressions upon the internet and the collective heavy metal world at large –  so I’ll dispense with the usual landfill avalanche of thoughts pertaining to world events and the previous days gone by because, shock of all shocks, this year sucked.

Next year is likely going to suck too and the year after that will probably suck even worse. We’ll make the word ‘suck’ mundane through repetition, as if an ever-present shadow haunting our lives, by the time we’re done with this. Eventually, we will all lose all sense of what the word actually means and we will be permanently trapped in some sort of constant suck-vortex powerful enough that we’ll get dragged into court for infringement by Dyson and we’ll be numb to the common sense of suck surrounding us. We’ll have finally ascended into the boring dystopia I’ve bitched about that is coming for years. Just my luck I can’t even get one with decent Blade Runner lighting. Continue reading »

Feb 032020
 

 

The Swedish melodic death/thrash band Carnosus are both young in age and youthful in their career, but their rapid progress has been unusually impressive. Their first EP, 2016’s The Universal Culmination (which they recorded with Tomas Skogsberg at Stockholm’s famed Sunlight Studio) opened a lot of eyes and ears, earning them an accolade from Sweden’s Close-Up Magazine as “the best unsigned band in Sweden” in May 2016. But it’s clear that there was still a lot of untapped potential in this group, because their debut album Dogma of the Deceased is a big step up over the EP, in both its songwriting and its execution

This time Carnosus recorded the album at Studio Fredman with producers Fredrik Nordström and Robert Kukla, and the record features memorable cover art by Vojtěch “Moonroot” Doubek. The album will be co-released on March 13th by Satanath Records (Russia) and Shirley Road Records (U.S.), and today we’re bringing you the lyric video for a powerful new single from the album named “Deceptive Authority“. Continue reading »