A VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE: PERCHTA, HELFRÓ, ULVER, PHOBOS MONOLITH, ISHVARA, VMTHANAACHTH

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Feb 142020
 

 

On Valentine’s Day 2011 (here) I provided a 600-word history of the holiday going back to the Roman celebration of Lupercalia, interspersed with efforts to explain why Valentine’s Day is metal. Re-reading it this morning, I nearly passed out from the tedium.

On Valentine’s Day 2012 (here) I posted an NCS “lonely hearts” column in which I answered a variety of e-mails from women offering to video-chat with me (soapy and fresh out of the shower), people trying to sell me products that would give me “robust bone-ons”, others who wanted to have my children (I proposed to send ampules of love juice and suggested names for the kiddos), and a few broken-hearted people looking for help (I told them to just go ahead and kill themselves). The Comments were funnier than what I wrote. I’m more grown-up than that now (yeah, right).

As far as I can tell, I haven’t made an effort since then to organize any kind of holiday-related theme for the music I’ve posted on Valentine’s Day, though I’ve usually make some kind of (usually snarky) comment about the day, typically related to how commercialized the holiday is. In case you were wondering, this year the National Retail Federation reports that those celebrating Valentine’s Day in the U.S. plan to spend a record average of $196.31, up 21 percent over last year’s previous record of $161.96, and that total spending is expected to total $27.4 billion, up 32 percent from last year’s record of $20.7 billion.

Isn’t that heart-warming? Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 3): HELFRÓ, HUSK, HAIDUK, HOWLING WASTE

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Dec 242018
 

 

I need my head examined, but what else is new? Here we are on Christmas Eve, when fewer people than usual browse metal sites such as ours, but even after already raining a heavy deluge of blackened metal upon your heads in Part 1 and Part 2 of this column, I’m still not content to finish. It is undoubtedly an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but undoubtedly untreatable. So here we are.

As mentioned in Part 2, my plan was to use the third part of this column to round up a few more full releases from late 2018 that I wanted to recommend before the year ends. The four I’ve focused on here in these brief reviews don’t exhaust everything I’d like to mention, but perhaps you can figure out why I decided to combine these four (hint: today’s the 8th day before the year ends). Maybe I’ll get to more later — after all, we do have 7 more days before 2018 expires.

HELFRÓ

Of the four records in this post two of them come from bands I’ve written about before and two are newcomers, including this first one, a new Icelandic black/death metal project organized by members of Ophidian I. Their self-titled album, released on December 21st, was recorded in part by Studio Emissary’s Stephen Lockhart and was mixed and mastered by him, and that’s why I paid attention to it. Glad I did. Continue reading »