Jul 302019
 

 

In preparing to introduce the premiere of Mylingar’s new album Döda Själar, I did two things I almost never do. I rarely listen to a band’s previous releases in reviewing a current one, and I never read other reviews of something I’ve chosen to write about. In this case, however, I re-listened to Mylingar’s first two records, and I read some other reviews (after completing my own). I listened again to 2016’s Döda vägar EP and 2018’s Döda drömmar (which was the band’s first full-length), in part because Döda Själar is the completion of a trilogy that began with those two, and putting it in that context seemed important, and in part because I was curious about how this mysterious Swedish band might have changed their music over time.

As for reading other reviews, I was also curious —  about how other people were processing such an annihilating strike. I saw such words and phrases as these: “entering the mouth of madness”; “filthy and nauseating”; “terrifying music for terrified people”; “a record that preys on all that makes humans uncomfortable and tormented”; “routinely twisted”; “heavy and demented chaos”; “some of the most extreme and claustrophobic music released in recent years”; “visceral and unhinged”. Even the advance publicity for the album refers to it as “[a] tempest of whirlwind blackened death metal barbarity and animalistic filth, unrelenting in its intent to rend flesh from bone and inflict torment”.

Resort to such words and phrases is inevitable. You’ll see similar verbiage in what I’ve written. Yet the infliction of different kinds of extreme discomfort, while an unmistakable characteristic of the music, is but one objective of Döda Själar, as I hear it. And the mind-wrecking and bowel-churning qualities of the music (also unmistakable) don’t manage to completely overwhelm the presence of other devilishly devised and insidiously seductive qualities that make the record stand out from the great mass of abusive black/death barbarism. Continue reading »

Jun 072018
 

 

The 2016 debut EP by the mysterious Swedish band MylingarDöda Vägar, was a nightmarish hybrid of black and death metal that seemed designed with the objective of inflicting torment and terror on a thermonuclear scale, igniting one violent hurricane of hate after another, each song ravaging the listener’s head with horrendous and even stupefying power while managing to provide unsettling changes of mood and gripping grooves to latch onto as handholds in these storms of sound.

A paradoxical combination of eagerness and fear gripped me upon learning that Mylingar had completed a debut album, and today it has been released through a conspiracy between Amor Fati Productions and Vigor Deconstruct/Fallen Empire Records. The name of the album is Döda Drömmar. How does it measure up against that frighteningly powerful first EP? Continue reading »

Dec 022016
 

mylingar-doda-vagar

 

Last month we premiered a song from the debut EP Döda Vägar by the mysterious Swedish band Mylingar. At that time I decided to defer my thoughts about the EP as a whole, with the idea of completing a review closer to the release date. That’s one plan I managed to complete, and just in the nick of time, because the EP is being released today by Amor Fati Productions and can now be heard in full.

The music on the EP is a nightmarish hybrid of black and death metal that seems designed with the objective of inflicting torment and terror on a thermonuclear scale. It ignites one violent hurricane of hate after another, each song ravaging the listener’s head with horrendous and even stupefying power. The effect is to produce the kind of adrenaline surge in the listener that I imagine is akin to a near-death experience in a midnight war zone, where you’re surrounded by combatants that aren’t fully human. Continue reading »

Nov 072016
 

mylingar-doda-vagar

 

You might think that when we agree to premiere new music by a mysterious new band, we would have at least some inside information about the musicians, their origin story, precisely where they are from, etc. But in the case of Mylingar, we remain in the dark — which is where their music dwells as well. We do know they are from somewhere in Sweden, and we have heard their debut EP Döda Vägar, which will be released in late November or early December by Amor Fati Productions. An excerpt of one song from the EP (“Såren”) was made public last month, and today we bring you a second track called “Friheten“.

Apart from the music itself, which sends bolts of lightning into your head, perhaps some further insight into the band can be discovered through the name they have chosen for themselves. As explained by Wikipedia, “mylingar” is a Swedish word that invokes a legend “about ghosts/spirits of unbaptized and/or unnamed children that have been forced to roam the earth until they could force someone to name and/or bury them, in fact ‘killing’ them for real so they can finally rest”: Continue reading »

Oct 122016
 

hour-of-penance-cast-the-first-stone

 

Yes, there are quite a lot of names in the headline of this post, but what follows isn’t quite as daunting as you might think. The first two items consist of news and art for forthcoming releases, but no music yet, and the last two items are just brief teasers of new music. In between I’ve sandwiched four full songs and videos, and I’m quite happy with what I’ve chosen, not only because the music is very good considered in isolation but also because collectively they make for a nice, varied playlist (and the two videos and album covers are quite eye-catching, too). At least it should be nice for people who have eclectic tastes. Here we go….

HOUR OF PENANCE

That’s a hell of a metal album cover up there, isn’t it? It was disclosed yesterday by Italy’s Hour of Penance and Prosthetic Records, who will release the band’s new album Cast the First Stone on January 27, 2017. The cover was created by Gyula Havancsak, whose work we’ve praised before in these pages.

The announcement was accompanied not only by a quote from our site (yay!) but also by the following statement from the band’s vocalist Paolo Pieri concerning the concept of the album, which revolves around the idea that “the injustices suffered during the Crusades and Colonialism do not justify the chain of hate that propagandizes the destruction of the West”: Continue reading »