SHADES OF BLACK: MISOTHEIST, DEATHLIKE DAWN, GLYPH, DARK PLAGUE, BLESTEMAT, BEHOLDER, VALRAVNE, PÂLEFROID

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Mar 032024
 

Here’s the way today’s collection of music goes: The first four choices include two albums and two singles that I thought fit well together. The music by all four bands is unmistakably harsh and hostile, but it’s also adventurously inventive and head-twisting, laced with the kind of unpredictable and unexpected elaborations that might invoke in some people’s minds the amorphous label “avant-garde”, or at least the term “unorthodox”.

After that I’ve included four other individual songs as bonuses. Later I’ll explain why I used that word to explain their presence here, if you make it that far (and you damn well should). Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): MISOTHEIST, AKVAN

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Feb 072021
 

 

I’ll be so bold as to say that lovers of black metal, or at least those whose tastes aren’t rigidly hemmed in by convention, are in the midst of a musical Renaissance. I don’t mean to say that every band and every variant are worth our time or our devotion — as in all art, there is wheat and there is chaff to be separated. But there are giant bushelfuls of wheat to fall into!

Sadly, out of the many noteworthy releases I discovered during the last week, the timing of which perhaps had something to do with Bandcamp Friday, I only have time to feature a couple, and I chose these two. Even with just these two, time prevents me from going into great depth about them

MISOTHEIST

I’ve been impatiently waiting for a new Misotheist album ever since coming across a preliminary version of a new song named “Benefactor of Wounds” in the spring of 2019. I had thought that Terratur Possessions would release the album that year, but the year passed, and so did 2020, and we continued to wait — though the debut of the album version of that same song last November did bring with it the news that the album would finally arrive this month. And so it has. In a word, it’s stunning. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ARKHTINN, STARLESS DOMAIN, MISOTHEIST, GLOOMY, SARVOK, ANTE-INFERNO

 SHADES OF BLACK  5 Responses »
Nov 292020
 

 

If you happened to lose your way, you can find Part 1 of today’s black metal collection here. And now you can get lost in the music I’ve chosen for Part 2. Lots of twists and turns lie ahead.

ARKHTINN / STARLESS DOMAIN

I mentioned in Part 1 that on November 18th ПРАВА Коллектив (Prava Kollektiv) released no fewer than five full-lengths, and that I spent time this weekend with two of them, while remaining eager to check out the other three as soon as time permits. I picked one of those two to lead off Part 1, and the second one is this: an album-length split named Astrophobia that includes the music of Arkhtinn and Starless Domain and features cover art by Markov Soroka. The split consists of two epic-length tracks, one by each band. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: DEUS MORTEM, MISOTHEIST, FRIISK, SÜHNOPFER, UNGFELL, ABBATH

 SHADES OF BLACK  5 Responses »
Apr 142019
 

 

(Our Norwegian friend eiterorm takes over the SHADES OF BLACK column today while our usual columnist (me) is otherwise preoccupied.)

Islander is overwhelmed with work this weekend and won’t have time to compile the usual Shades of Black. But Shades of Black is the highlight of any casual Sunday, so this time yours truly is compiling the list instead.

DEUS MORTEM

The Polish black metal band Deus Mortem was last featured on No Clean Singing in 2016, with their excellent EP Demons of Matter and the Shells of the Dead. This year, they will be back with their second full-length release, titled Kosmocide. In fact, the release – which will be carried out by Terratur Possessions and Malignant Voices – is only two weeks away (April 28 marks the date), so prepare yourselves for imminent inflammation. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: CHAPEL OF DISEASE, MISOTHEIST, HAUSTIÐ, CNTMPT, VANANIDR

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Nov 252018
 

 

For reasons that I’ll explain in a subsequent post today — reasons that will also probably diminish the volume of content at our site over the next two weeks — I’ve written this week’s edition of SHADES OF BLACK hurriedly. As is always true, I picked this week’s selections because I really like them and believe most of you will too, but today I don’t have as much time to explain why. The bands, however, convincingly speak for themselves through their music.

CHAPEL OF DISEASE

This German death metal band established themselves as a force to be reckoned with through their first two albums, Summoning Black Gods (2012) and The Mysterious Ways of Repetitive Art (2015). Their new album, …And As We Have Seen The Storm, We Have Embraced The Eye, will only elevate their already-respected status. Continue reading »