SEEN AND HEARD: VASTUM, NAER MATARON, BYYRTH, ANUNCIAÇOM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Aug 282019
 

 

Man, every day brings so much new music. Honestly, it’s overwhelming. But that’s not a new development, is it? It just continues adding to the endless difficulty of trying to sift the wheat from the chaff. I feel confident there’s a lot more new wheat out there I haven’t come to yet, but I did pick these gleaming grains from the harvest of last night’s listening session. (Figure of speech of course, because this is some gnarly and nasty shit I’ve picked out.)

VASTUM

Any year that brings a new Vastum album is a very good year. I mean, other than all the other things in the daily headlines that make every year terrible. To counterbalance the greater-than-usual terribleness of what’s happening in the world during 2019, we will have Orificial Purge, and man, couldn’t we all use some a that? Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: GRAVE UPHEAVAL, NAER MATARON, VEILED, FOXGLOVE, THECODONTION

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Feb 042018
 

 

I spent a lot of time yesterday listening to new black metal and black/death metal, trying to decide what to write about in this Sunday’s SHADES OF BLACK column. My list of what I wanted to recommend to you included music from 20 bands… and that’s not counting the dozens more from previous listening sessions over the last couple of weeks. As a result, I chose the following five tracks pretty impulsively, consoling myself with the thought that I could pick some more for a further installment of this series early in the coming week. I hope that works out.

As you’ll discover, I bent the rules a bit… some of these tracks lean more on the death metal side of darkness than the black metal side. But it’s all still very black, and all very good.

GRAVE UPHEAVAL

Roughly five years after their untitled debut album, the Australian band Grave Upheaval, whose members are not officially identified but who are rumored to include members of Impetuous Ritual, Portal, and Temple Nightside, have a new album headed our way. Also untitled, and with songs that are identified only by Roman numeral, it will be released by Nuclear War Now! Productions on April 15th. Continue reading »