Jan 012025
 


Fireworks at the Seattle Space Needle last night (photo by Sigma Sreedharan / KOMO #SoNorthwest Photography)

(written by Islander)

Happy New Year to all of you! May the turn of the calendar page begin leading you to many good things over the coming year, even if it mainly leads you to still write “2024” in your date entries over the next few weeks.

Yesterday we finished the main part of our annual LISTMANIA series, and I posted a “wrap up” for it earlier today. All those lists verified what we already knew as the past year crawled by, i.e., that 2024 was another great interval for metal, even if it was a garbage fire in many other respects.

We have abundant reasons to expect that 2025 will also bring us abundant metallic goodness and greatness, and some of those reasons are already concretely apparent, witness the music I picked for this New Year’s Day roundup (though some of it also comes from the later days of December — and a couple songs are from 2010!). Continue reading »

Nov 192020
 

 

XLIX, the new second album by the Italian death metal band Crawling Chaos which is set for release on November 20th 2020 via Time To Kill Records, is a concept album inspired by a book that remains widely read and widely cited five centuries after it was written, and in its concept is a departure from the more usual subject matter to be found within death metal, including this band’s own full-length debut from seven years ago, Repellent Gastronomy. The band have explained:

“While Repellent Gastronomy was some sort of anthology of Lovecraftian horrors revisited in a death metal fashion, XLIX is a concept album in all respects. To write it we were inspired by “The Prince”, the famous book written by Niccolò Machiavelli in the Sixteenth Century. The narration is a kind of parable, a chronicle out of time and space that traces the story of a nameless and faceless protagonist. All the lyrics are penned in the first person by this sort of ‘new Prince'”. Continue reading »