SHADES OF BLACK: ORDER OF THE EBON HAND, THY LEGION, TIME LURKER, ZWIESPALT

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 272024
 

(written by Islander)

I guess it’s obvious from the size of this weekend’s two-part Saturday roundup that I had more than the usual amount of NCS time yesterday and this morning, and therefore kind of lost my mind.

I have only a small amount of mind and time left at this point, so today’s SHADES OF BLACK is so brief it could be labeled a token effort. But I didn’t want to skip it altogether, especially because, although the recommendations are few in number, they still loom large in the remnants of my head. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ROTTEN MONARCH, ÌSINKÚ, ZWIESPALT, VOLLMOND MYSTIKER

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Feb 022020
 

 

Back on January 19th I bit off more than I could chew. I promised a second Part to the SHADES OF BLACK column I started that day, and wasn’t able to deliver, either that day or the day after or the day after that. And now here we are two weeks later. A lot more black metal has surfaced in that time, but I’ve decided to stay with what I had planned for that phantom Part 2 on January 19th.

ROTTEN MONARCH

This is another album in a long list of favorites that I wouldn’t have discovered but for the recommendation of Rennie (starkweather), who continues to enrich my listening and that of everyone else who follows him.

Winds Over Ash is the third release and second album by the American duo Rotten Monarch. When I checked Metal-Archives after listening to an early song from the album, that treasured encyclopedia classified their music as “Metalcore/Death Metal”. I thought to myself, even if that’s accurate as applied to previous releases, it doesn’t work for this new one. I checked M-A again yesterday, and now it says “Metalcore/Death Metal (early); Atmospheric Black Metal (later)”, which was obviously a reaction to Winds Over Ash.

But the newer description still doesn’t completely work. Continue reading »