BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART ONE: 50-41

 LISTMANIA 2024  4 Responses »
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 »

CARRION VAEL: “CANNIBALS ANONYMOUS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 222024
 

(Here, DGR devotes about 1400 words to extolling the virtues of Carrion Vael‘s newest album, which is out now on Unique Leader Records.)

There was a period maybe five or six years ago where a band like Carrion Vael would’ve found a good handful of compatriots within their current label home of Unique Leader Records. Their brand of high-speed melodeath, light implementing of symphonics to help break up the constantly whirring lead guitar, and tech-death hybridization has gone under a few names throughout the years – even cheekily referred to around here once as ‘black dahlia murder-core’ – but there was one pretty distinct carrier of that strain of metal, and at the time many of those groups would’ve been ensconced within the loving brutal bosom of Unique Leader.

However, things changed and something interesting happened within real time as the label’s priorities seemed to shift, favoring the low-and-slow approach of many up-and-coming deathcore groups, or leaning heavily into the brutal deathcore monstrosities that were being born out of former brutal death and gore-focused bands.

Nowadays the label is a tri-headed monstrosity of its own and many of the groups who were playing the high-speed, highly-technical style found a home in labels like The Artisan Era – whose own bands like Inferi found themselves leading the charge in recruitment – and Willowtip seems plenty happy to cast their net in those waters as well. Continue reading »