BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART ONE: 50-41

 LISTMANIA 2024  4 Responses »
Dec 162024
 

(This is the first part of a five-part countdown by DGR of his 2024 year-end list, with each selection accompanied by his very extensive thoughts about the releases. Our plan is to roll out the rest of the installments on successive days until this week ends or falls into a sinkhole under the weight of his words.)

It feels like I blinked and suddenly a whole year had passed. Maybe it’s just the flow of life finally catching back up to me but this year moved in extreme fits and extreme starts and somewhere along the way I lost track of it among the deluge and wreckage that seems to be a daily existence. Among the piles of charred wood and still yet burning cars is another three hundred and sixty-five days of existence slowly signing its final paperwork and preparing itself to move on from the mortal coil.

At the very least, there was some sort of notification that this was coming. It feels like every year I open with some variation of ‘hey, this previous year sucked shit,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve taken a similar tack to open up a few of the previous year-end posts – if only some sort of dipshit had done an anniversary post whereby he might have easy access to all his previous years’ transgressions upon the internet and the collective heavy metal world at large –  so I’ll dispense with the usual landfill avalanche of thoughts pertaining to world events and the previous days gone by because, shock of all shocks, this year sucked.

Next year is likely going to suck too and the year after that will probably suck even worse. We’ll make the word ‘suck’ mundane through repetition, as if an ever-present shadow haunting our lives, by the time we’re done with this. Eventually, we will all lose all sense of what the word actually means and we will be permanently trapped in some sort of constant suck-vortex powerful enough that we’ll get dragged into court for infringement by Dyson and we’ll be numb to the common sense of suck surrounding us. We’ll have finally ascended into the boring dystopia I’ve bitched about that is coming for years. Just my luck I can’t even get one with decent Blade Runner lighting. Continue reading »

OBSCURA QALMA: “VEILS OF TRANSCENDENCE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Feb 142024
 

(We bring you DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Venetian band Obscura Qalma, which was released earlier this month by the Dusktone label.)

The nice thing about Italian symphonic death metal group Obscura Qalma is that they make absolutely no pretense of the style of music they’re going to make nor are they hiding who their influences are.

Obscura Qalma have been kicking around since 2018 and already have two albums and a few EPs – though one of each of those is the instrumental and orchestral version of songs from a previous album, much in the same way Fleshgod Apocalypse have taken to including the purely symphonic tracks as bonuses to their full-lengths recently. Adding to their name, all you need to do is look at a press photo of the band and you can tell there’s likely going to be a rich vein of SepticFlesh running through the group’s DNA.

Obscura Qalma don their lab coats and joyfully smash their death and symphonic elements together, cackling all the while, with lightning crashing in the background. Drawing heavily from the occult for lyrical inspiration – recently pulling large buckets up the well from the Aleister Crowley mines – Obscura Qalma are playing in a very wide musical sphere. The group’s latest EP Veils Of Transcendence punches in at four songs and a little under twenty minutes of boulder-heavy death metal with a huge symphonic and synth line buttressing the events and doing the melodic heavy lifting. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OBSCURA QALMA — “OPHIDIAN ENTHRONEMENT”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jan 232024
 

After a break of nearly 20 days in our daily publishing of premieres due to this writer’s submergence in the awful pits of his day job, we mark our return to the sharing of new music in truly spectacular fashion, with a jaw-dropping sonic spectacle from a forthcoming EP by the Venetian blackened death metal band Obscura Qalma.

From the beginning, Obscura Qalma have done nothing by half measures. If it is worth doing, they seem to think, it is worth doing in ways a listener can’t possibly overlook, on scales that dwarf the daily scrabbling of human ants and with the kind of power that overwhelms. Their lyrical themes have been equally far from the mundane.

Some might suspect that what you’ve just read is linguistic hyperbole, especially if you haven’t yet encountered this band’s heavily orchestrated amalgam of black/death, but the song we’re presenting today — “Ophidian Enthronement” — should banish any such doubts (along with any sluggishness that might be afflicting your minds). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OBSCURA QALMA — “AWAKEN A SHRINE TO OBLIVION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 092021
 

 

On November 14th, Rising Nemesis Records will release Apotheosis, the debut album of the Venetian extreme metal band Obscura Qalma, a record that provides the follow-up to their 2019 EP, Sheol to the Apeiron. Creating what the band describe as “blackened heavily orchestrated death metal”, they have drawn influence from the likes of Behemoth and Septicflesh, Death and Dissection, Hypocrisy and classical music, and film-score composers such as Alexandre Desplat.

But the band’s influences and inspirations are not limited to musical ones. They have created elaborate hybrids of sound in service of philosophical investigations that are equally elaborate. As the band explain: “”Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, as well as by contemporary figures such as Massimo Recalcati and James Owen Weatherall, Apotheosis (from the Greek meaning, “To Deify”) explores human existence in an epistemological solipsistic view. Elevated to divine status, from a higher point we can look at the external world as an unresolvable question rather than actually false.”

One single from the album has surfaced so far, and today we present a second one — “Awaken A Shrine To Oblivion” — which happens to be the track that closes Apotheosis. It manages to be both elaborately theatrical and chillingly unearthly, both futuristic and primeval, and it strikes with immense power. Continue reading »