SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): SPECTRAL LORE, DEMERSUS AD NIHILUM, KAFIRUN, OMEGA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 142021
 

 

Although there wasn’t much rhyme or reason to the musical parameters of Part 1 of today’s roundup, Part 2 is a little more coherent since it uniformly leans into black metal. However, to suggest that these four songs follow a consistent pattern would be wrong — each one sounds very different from the rest.

SPECTRAL LORE (Greece)

My first choice is “Φονικό Φως (Murderous Light)“, which surfaced as a digital single on Bandcamp yesterday. It was originally written for and released as part of Art Against Censorship, a compilation of 36 songs from Greek musicians to protest a law that was intended to target and silence radical political artists.

That comp was released in February of this year as a free download (here), and I managed to overlook it. It obviously includes a ton of music, and most of it is from bands whose names I don’t recognize, so one benefit of Spectral Lore‘s single will be to help draw attention to it. (I’m not surprised to see a Yovel song at the close of the comp.) Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: A FEW ALBUM REMINDERS (VULPUS, KAFIRUN, VONNIS, TIME LURKER, CHAMBRE FROIDE)

 SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Jun 252017
 

 

As everyone who writes for our site has remarked from time to time, we just don’t have enough time to write reviews of every new album, EP, and split that catches our fancy, no matter how fine we think they are. I have no doubt we would still fall short even if we all did this as a full-time occupation instead of a part-time un-paid labor of lust.

I also have no doubt that we could throw more good music at your head if we truncated or eliminated our verbiage and simply installed music streams and yelled, “LISTEN TO THIS MOTHERFUCKERS!” Or maybe, “LISTEN TO THIS PLEASE AND THANK YOU”. But where’s the fun in that? Maybe more fun for you, but less fun for us… and that might lead some of us to spend more time playing with ourselves and less time playing with you.

Nevertheless, I’m admitting defeat to the hands of time in this post. There are a handful of recently released new albums in a blackened vein that I’m simply urging you to hear. Please. And thank you. Motherfuckers. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): ANIMA NOSTRA, ASHCLOUD, COLD INSIGHT, KAFIRUN, SADIST, WEREGOAT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Apr 282017
 

 

As I mentioned earlier today, I returned to Seattle very late last night after a 4-day road trip for my day job. While away, I didn’t have time to pull together round-ups of new music that I was noticing, so I have some catching up to do. This is the first installment of that catching-up exercise, which will continue with at least one more part either later today or tomorrow. The music here is organized in alphabetical order by band name, and I’ve tried to provide variety in each of these installments.

ANIMA NOSTRA

I wasn’t familiar with Anima Nostra before hearing this first song, but I’ve learned that it’s a collaboration between Henrik Nordvargr Björkk (Sweden) and Margaux Renaudin (France). The two of them released an album named Anima Nostra last year, and now they’ve taken that as their band name.

Their second album, Atraments, will be released by Malignant Records (digitally and on digipak CD) on June 2nd. I gather from press announcements that the sound now differs from their first collaborative effort, “taking the more intimate ritual ambient aspects of the debut, and incorporating them as part of towering constructs that blur the line between death industrial, doom metal, and neo-classical”. Continue reading »