Nov 062022
 

 

If you live someplace that observes Daylight Savings Time did you remember to move your clocks back one hour last night? I did not remember. But when I opened my eyes at 6:30 a.m. today I somehow did remember that it was really only 5:30 a.m., and I fell back asleep.

That might not have been a smart move, because I didn’t wake again for a couple of hours. Rather than use the time-change to get a head-start on this column, I’m left scrambling to get it done before too much of the day disappears. Words, therefore, are sometimes in relatively short supply, though the music is abundant.

P.S. For those of us in the US this might be the last time we have to remember to “fall back”. In March of this year the US Senate unanimously passed a bill that would make Daylight Savings Time permanent beginning in 2023. But the bill hasn’t been voted on by the House of Representatives, and time is running out for that to happen in the current session. Who knows? Continue reading »

Sep 162018
 

 

Unlike most of the music I chose for Part 1 of today’s collection, black metal isn’t the dominant ingredient in everything I’ve included in this second Part, though it always plays a role. I’ve segmented these five choices by design, with some connections I hear between the first two, and some different connections between the last two, and some HelCarpathian Black Metal in the middle.

ULTHAR

Ulthar‘s 2016 debut demo made quite a vivid impression on me, which I likened to “the musical equivalent of rabid wolves in a feeding frenzy”. Of that demo I further wrote: “The focal core of Ulthar’s music is corrosive, distorted, head-ramming, d-beat crust, but they spread out from there, incorporating bestial death bellows and deranged shrieking along with massive, spine-shattering chugs, violent blackened riff swarms, and melodically dismal and alien slower passages”. Continue reading »