Machukha Archives - NO CLEAN SINGING

(Andy Synn catches up on some of last month’s bumper crop of Black Metal)

Despite what some people might believe, we’re big fans of the ol’ Black Metal genre here at NCS.

Sure, there’s certain artists we don’t fuck with, for reasons which are entirely our own, but considering how rich and fertile the field is right now (as today’s article so adamantly demonstrates – right down to the fact that I didn’t have time to also include the likes of Coldcell, Limbes, and Unholy Altar) there’s more than enough great options out there to keep us busy until the inevitable heat death of the universe.

So – since I didn’t want the next edition of “Things You May Have Missed” to be all Black Metal – here’s four short-but-sweet write-ups of some recent albums I thought would put a smile (although I guess it’s more of a grimace) on your corpse-painted faces.

Last week I came across a verse from American poet and novelist Charles Bukowski that begins this way: “our public hell creates a / private hell and / there is no hell / except on / earth.”

Hell is a realm that exists in human imagination and belief too — a place in parallel to earthly existence or what comes after life. That is one way it exists on earth, even if it has no other existence, in addition to the public and private hells Bukowski wrote about — the hells that human beings make for others and for themselves.

I’m thinking about all these hells today, the realms of demons and the realms of human depravity and anguish, because I happened upon a sequence of new black metal songs and videos that I can only think of as hellish in one or more of those ways. Those songs fill up a lot of today’s collection.

But I only quoted part of Bukowski‘s verse. After positing that there is no hell except on earth he wrote: Continue reading »

BLACKER THAN THE BLACKEST BLACK

SHADES OF BLACK: ACOD, ANTIFLESH, ASPERNAMENTUM, DAUÞUZ, DRAUGNIM, EX CINERE, HÄSSLIG, MACHUKHA, NAXEN