How things have changed. In April 2010 I wrote a THAT’S METAL! post mainly for the purpose of displaying photos of the magnificent eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH’-plah-yer-kuh-duhl) volcano, which you may recall wrecked havoc on air transportation as far away as the UK and the European continent. But because this is a metal blog, I thought I ought to find some Icelandic metal as musical accompaniment for the rad pics.

I hunted and hunted across the interhole as it then existed, and I remember I didn’t find much. Of what I found, the best music was by a band called Changer, so I went with that. I’m sure there were many more Icelandic metal bands creating music back then than I was able to find, but it still struck me that the scene had a pretty low profile internationally.

It’s certainly much easier today to find music by a broad array of excellent Icelandic bands, and two of them in particular have become favorites at NCS — Atrum and Sólstafir. Hell, just last weekend I discovered another one — Severed Crotch (discussed in this post). Over the last few days I’ve been exploring two other Icelandic bands whose music is even more extreme than what I’ve heard from Iceland previously. Theirs is the kind of black/death metal that invokes the word “ritual” when performed live, or the term “apocalyptic metal”, or perhaps the phrase “death worship”. For English speakers, their names are also not nearly as easy to pronounce as those other bands’: Svartidauði and Vansköpun.

SVARTIDAUÐI

Svartidauði’s name means “Black Death”. That weird letter near the end is an “eth”, with a “th” sound. Between 2006 and 2010 they produced three demos and they contributed a song to a split in January 2012 with a Chilean band called Perdition (the eye-catching artwork for that split is up above), which was released by a German black metal label called the World Terror Committee.  They are now planning for the release of an album under the name Flesh Cathedral, which will be distributed in Europe by Terratvr Possessions and in the U.S. by Daemon Worship Productions. The artwork for that monstrosity is right after the jump. Continue reading »