SHADES OF BLACK: ELLENDE, MESZAROTH, OMINATION, ULTIO, SULDUSK, MALHKEBRE

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  5 Responses »
Feb 032019
 


Ellende

There’s quite a lot of new music I’m recommending in this Sunday’s column — three full EP streams (one of which is an EP-length single composition), plus advance tracks from three forthcoming albums. Coincidentally, four of the featured bands are essentially solo projects.

As usual, I picked these selections in part to provide some listening variety, though there’s certainly more than a fair share of melancholy and grandeur to be found herein, along with a fair share of ripping and tearing. I also positioned one selection to provide a bit of a diversionary interlude through its interweaving of Neo-Folk elements (and clean singing) among heavier sounds.

ELLENDE

I discovered this Austrian atmospheric/post-black metal band through a 2016 video of the title track from their 2014 EP, Weltennacht. I couldn’t get the song out of my head, and the video was hard to forget, too, since it included film of the 1987 public suicide of a Pennsylvania politician (Budd Dwyer) at a press conference he conducted the day before he was to be sentenced to prison following a conviction for bribery. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): CTULU, THYRGRIM, MESZAROTH, MASCHARAT

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Aug 132017
 

 

I had an especially tough time deciding what to include in this collection. Yesterday I spent hours listening and re-listening to things I’d collected over the last week, and to even more music that others had recommended to me, and I still fell short of listening to everything on my list. From what I did hear, these songs seemed to go well together. By coincidence, I discovered almost all of them thanks to links from my Serbian acquaintance Miloš, who I think must listen to even more new music (and more obscure new music) than I do.

I’m dividing this post into two parts, the second of which will come later today. I’ll also mention that some noteworthy black metal splits have also come out this past week, or will come out soon. They’re not covered in this post because I hope to devote a separate column to them tomorrow.

CTULU

The hooded and masked German nihilists who have taken the name Ctulu released a self-titled album last year (their fourth full-length). The album didn’t include all the tracks they recorded at that time, and the band have taken some of those previously unreleased recordings and assembled them into a new EP named Cultus In Tenebris. “At the same time,” the band have explained, “Cultus in Tenebris is a concept EP trying to catch the spirit of Necronomicon rituals”: Continue reading »