SHADES OF BLACK: BEASTLOR, I AM THE NIGHT, VERHEERER, DODSKOLD, ASCEND TOWARDS THE MOON, WICHER, BALMOG

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
May 092021
 

 

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve gone off the deep end. Between the new-music round-ups I prepared on Friday and Saturday and the column you’re now staring at, I’ve thrown out 28 advance tracks, EPs, or albums, almost all of which surfaced just within the last week or two. I don’t expect any normal person to pay attention to all of it, and I don’t really know how any normal person would pick and choose among all those tracks. So why have I done this? Don’t know… still waiting on the psychiatric evaluations….

BEASTLOR (U.S.)

I decided to begin with one of the two complete albums in today’s collection. It landed, fully formed and without warning, on the most recent Bandcamp Friday, two days ago. As you can see, I didn’t defer paying attention to it, because the man behind it is Mick Barr (of Krallice and Encenathrakh). Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: VOID PRAYER, VERHEERER, DISHARMONY, BLOT & BOD, DIE KUNST DER FINSTERNIS, LESATH

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Sep 302019
 

 

I can’t think of anything very coherent to say by way of introduction this week, perhaps because the music below has rendered me incoherent. [Correction: more incoherent.] So let’s just go right in:

VOID PRAYER

Void Prayer (previously known as Cave Ritual) are from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and its members are part of the Black Plague Circle, which also includes Nigrum Ignis Circuli, Deathcircle, Niteris, and Obskuritatem. Their previous releases under the Void Prayer name include a 2014 self-titled demo and a 2017 debut album, Stillbirth From the Psychotic Void, neither of which I’ve heard, but about which I’ve heard good things.

The Signal Rex label will be releasing a new Void Prayer three-track promo tape called L’appel du vide (“the call of the void”), and the first song in this collection is its title track. Continue reading »

CULTHE FEST 2018

 Metal News  4 Responses »
Feb 262018
 

 

The fifth edition of Culthe Fest will take place on March 31, 2018, in the city of Münster, Germany. When the festival’s organizers invited us to help spread the word about the event as a co-sponsor, the answer was a no-brainer, based on one glance at the line-up. Feast your eyes upon these names:

UADA (USA)
THE GREAT OLD ONES (FR)
VERHEERER (DE)
HEMELBESTORMER (BE)
TURIA (NL)
ALBEZ DUZ (DE)
BELTEZ (DE)
VYRE (DE)

With only one exception, these are all bands whose music we’ve enthusiastically praised at our site — and the one exception (Vyre) are a band we’ve happily discovered for the first time as a result of their confirmed appearance at Culthe Fest 2018. So it wasn’t a difficult decision to lend our own putrid name to the event. The difficulty is that we’re far away from Münster and haven’t yet gotten the teleporter operational, because this would be a hell of a show to attend in person. If you can be there, you damned well should! Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: VERHEERER, AFVALLIGE, YHDARL, MALADIE,KRUKH, ABIGOR

 SHADES OF BLACK  12 Responses »
Jan 072018
 

 

I mentioned in yesterday’s last post, which immediately precedes this one, that I have an extraordinarily long list of intriguing new music that came out (or that I discovered) over just the last week. And a great deal of that is music from the black realms… too much to shoehorn into a single SHADES OF BLACK post.

So, even though this is a long post, with a lot of music for you to explore, it doesn’t exhaust everything I would like to recommend. Sadly, I’ll have to shoehorn everything else into an OVERFLOWING STREAMS post tomorrow, in which I’ll deprive myself of the pleasure of commenting on the music and instead simply furnish the streams, with release details.

VERHEERER

The first song in this collection is also the one I heard most recently, thanks to a link yesterday from my astute acquaintance Miloš. But it demanded to be placed here, because it shot a lightning bolt straight through me on the first listen. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ABYSMAL LORD, NIHIL KAOS, WOLFBASTARD, NIGHT, VERHEERER

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Sep 202015
 

Abysmal Lord-Disciples of the Inferno

 

This is the second part of a two-part post I began earlier today, the purpose of which is to collect new music that I discovered in an extended bout of listening yesterday, most of it from bands who were also new discoveries. It gets the Shades of Black label because much of it is black metal, though as you’ll discover, there’s quite a lot of diversity in these songs.

ABYSMAL LORD

In August of last year we premiered a song from a debut EP named Storms of Unholy Black Mass by Louisiana’s Abysmal Lord. That EP was a hell of a debut, and now the band have completed their first full-length, which is scheduled for release on November 27 by Hells Headbangers. The strength of the EP would have provided reason enough to look forward to Disciples of the Inferno, but the first advance track from the album (“Sabat”) seals the deal. Continue reading »