Svarte Greiner – Black Tie (Miasmah)
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Erik K. Skodvin’s Svarte Greiner project gets creepier & creepier, this new LP on his own Miasmah label is some harrowing shit, two side long pieces of dark string drone perfect for tuxedoed occult rituals, comatose bass string plucks on top of haunted smears, hushed unintelligible clatter behind the scenes adding to the mystery, black bliss, slowmo static fog rolling through valleys of bleak & bittersweet depression, murky & crystal clear, floating in the deep sea ink, a minimal motionless nightmare that you never wake from, perfectly exquisite in every way, only 500 each of LPs & CDs, so don’t snooze.
Owlfood – Drift Towards Her (Behind The Door)
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An excellent Boston trio that’s been hiding in the shadows for too long, hopefully this killer new LP will get them the attention they deserve. Destroyers Of The Moon is some dark moody shit, twisting doom drone and neo-folk gloom into sprawling blackened pagan jams, shamanistic chants à la Charalambides spoken over haunted strings and buzzing guitars, a pitch black night spent in the desert, opening the gates to the underworld and conjuring spirits to rain death, acoustic whispers in the smoke with the thrum of fear lurking beneath, dreams interchanged with reality in the throws of hypnosis, a delicate melancholic record of harrowing black folk, beautiful & exceptionally original, only 250 pressed up on the band’s newly minted label, you definitely don’t want to miss out on this.
Gog – A Promised Eternity Fulfilled With Cancer (Utech)
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Hard to believe this is just one dude makin all this fuckin racket. So much volume on this. Ironworks, aka “an epitaph for the death of the American dream,” is a monster of black industrial noise, huge walls of distorted guitar scrape, cliffs crumbling from the reverb, with a persistent percussion that doesn’t so much keep rhythm as it creates a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, machines running on their own because there was no time to shut them off, a thick black cloud that lasts for miles, vocals that range from shamanistic chants to DSBM howls, a somber piano’s final eulogy, a lifeless greyscape where the massive drone rolls and the dirt is caked in blood, brooding & brutal, this is perfect destruction. Do not miss.
Zurvan – Bones Like The Mountains (Rubber City Noise)
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I’m always psyched for some new Zurvan material. And Chapter IV is about an hour long, so there’s plenty of goodness to dive into. These two dudes really know how to bring the darkness. They craft a super minimal monochrome drone here, so quiet & subtle that the instruments are indistinguishable, a meditative fog seeping through your thoughts, neither dense nor massive but undeniably invasive, wrapping your soul in death’s shroud, a smoke & mirrors magik that scrapes your inner skull, bending light in transdimensional travel while galaxies evolve into black holes and time stands still, sounding like a motionless river of sacrificial blood, cloaking everything in nothing. Truly awesome work from these guys, definitely not something to skip out on.
Kapustin Yar – Dirge (Land Of Decay)
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GodDAMN this is some heavy shit. Antonio Gallucci coming from every genre out there and conjuring up something wholly new & awesome. Trithemius takes industrial to a new level, incorporating black ambient, metalgaze, noise, darkwave, and anything else that’s bleak & destructive, tossing in some twisted spaciness because obviously. Ear bleeding bass that hits harder than your speakers can handle, huge walls of heavenly nightmarish static, a massive lumbering nightwalker lost in an urban wasteland, tearing down skyscrapers and generators, a cacophony born from a decayed post-nuclear Earth, faulty machinery humming in the distance with vocals buried in the chaos or hissed & distorted beyond recognition, black hole terrors, drifting in space drugged out of your fucking mind, feeling your every atom warp the fabric of spacetime, your body swallowed by the heaviness. 100% amazing record. Then again, I expect nothing less from the untouchable Land Of Decay.
Trepaneringsritualen – Osiris, Slain & Risen (Release The Bats)
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The first vinyl outing of Thomas Ekelund’s (aka Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words) other dark project. An occult worshiping, devastatingly bleak horror of a record, oozing Death from its decrepit core, this is black ambient risen from hellish bogs, clouded in an industrial wasteland with echoing vocals shouted through pea soup fog and a brain vaporizing bass rumble deeper than the darkest Sunn O))) drones, the ritual sounds of undead shamans captured in a crypt for millennia and unleashed upon your unworthy soul. Deathward, To The Womb pushes ambient to its fucked & depraved limits. Sold out at the sadly defunct Release The Bats, perhaps available elsewhere, but already re-released on cassette courtesy to the fine folks at both Black Horizons & Merz Tapes.
Treha Sektori – Solvah (Cyclic Law)
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Newish solo project of Dehn Sora (from Sembler Deah with Amenra dudes) that’s some seriously dark & stormy shit. It blends euphoria and terror into a doomed black ambience that’s fitting October just perfectly, fallen angelic choirs sounding like if Xela scored Argento, haunted snippets of rewound vocals done so tastefully, relying totally on airflow and barely using his vocal chords at all, elegiac drones & glacial drums that hang in the air forever, a crystal clear blackness from the deepest caverns, industrial drone that discards all shreds of cheese and transcends to a new level of horror, this is done so fucking right, so refreshing, so goddamn awesome.
Sun Splitter – Eye Of Jupiter (BloodLust!)
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How these Chicago dudes aren’t as well known as Locrian is beyond me. Sun Splitter have just as must genre blending as Locrian, just a different blend. They’ve got this incredible black industrial psych doom thing with some dark ambient noise/drone and even a little HANL style gloomgaze tossed in. I think III is their first vinyl (limited to 500, white, sexy, etc) and it’s monolithic & pure fucking evil. Seriously, this is just monstrous in every way. The riffs are skull crushing, a wall of reverb and distortion sounding like napalm melting your core, drum machines hitting harder than any human could, explosive blasts that level cities, with an abusive assault of rapid-fire fury for the second half of “The Serpent’s Golden Death” where the individual hits coalesce into a waterfall of insanity, static vocals that roar their way to the surface, guitars that chug & rattle, at home only in Hell’s scorched valley, crusted under the black sun. These guys get in a groove and don’t let up until they’ve reached total devastation, the drum machine locked in a loop, sealing their fate as endless riff demons. If you need some fucking heavy in your life, this is where you should be looking. This is the fucking best and most original metal. And with killer artwork by band member Anthony A. Dunn, you would be doing yourself a major disservice by passing this up.
High Aura’d – The Northern Sky Ablaze (Bathetic)
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It seems like maybe this is High Aura’d's (thee John Kolodij) big one. He recruited the mighty Greg Kelley for his trumpet powers, got Simon Fowler to create a masterpiece for the artwork, had John Twells (Type, Xela, etc) produce & mix it, and dipped it in lead with James Plotkin’s mastering. Not to mention that this is his first slab of vinyl, and it’s on Bathetic, and it’s already been praised to the high heavens by everyone including the fucking Boston Globe. But today is its official release, and I can pretty much guarantee Sanguine Futures will end up somewhere on my year end drone list, so this is my authorized stamp of approval that this record is the fucking BEST.
It seems like with each release Kolodij’s gotten darker & darker, which is A+ in my book, and this one is by far the blackest he’s gone. With the exception of a singular jaw dropping moment of euphoria (and trust me, it’s a special fucking moment), this is mostly all ominous rumble, running the line of doom and black ambient. He’s been pretty metaphoric with the water theme in the past, but this is overt and unmistakable, starting the album off with watery samples. This whole thing is like a foggy midnight journey through the middle of the ocean, with distant muffled canons fighting off some ancient sea beast, mythical & literal sirens wailing, calling with sweetness & alarm, chimes and clatter rattling in the still darkness, the crazy dude on top of the mast playing his song of mourning, the much saner dude in the hull with his heartache piano, everything sad and black, but not quite devoid of hope. Seriously pushing all of my drone buttons right now, ranking in the very top of records this year and likely for years to come. This is Kolodij at the top of his fucking game. Dude is already unstoppable and this is only his first vinyl. If you haven’t been keeping an eye on him yet, now’s the fucking time.
Misery – Sous L’égide Des Martyrs (BLWBCK)
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One of my favorite black metal releases of the year right here. Solo French dude Thomas Bel making absolutely killer atmospheric black metal on what’s quickly becoming my new favorite label (BLWBCK also put out the EUS, Postdrome, & Saåad album that I kinda freaked out over). This is something else entirely, though. Brooding & miserable as fuck, long bouts of chilled ambience, church bells & organs with hymn-like mantras, Paysage d’Hiverian frozen windscapes, stiff lumbering drums like a giant stuck in a blizzard, blistering sheets of icy fuzzed out guitars, and raspy tortured vocals that are clearly identifiable as such but blurred and muffled to perfectly blend with the wall of sound. This is soundtrack to the moments between the top of the cliff and the arctic glaciers below, howling winds & cracked bones, it drones the blackest & bleakest, a depressive cloud of ambient metal that’s just too fucking awesome in every way. And this is his goddamn debut? Perfectly timed to be the next Xasthur.
T.O.M.B. – Tribe Of The Corpse (Crucial Blast)
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Normally these PA dudes (full name: Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) do black metal type things, with some other strangeness thrown in. UAG (aka Undercovered Ancient Gateways, aka we get it you like acronyms) has them stripping all metal from their sound but going blacker than ever. Black noise, black ambient, black industrial, just completely fucking black. The metal fury is gone and replaced with a bleak industrial howl, a post-mortem skullcracking drone that rots your bones from the inside out. I’m not sure where UAG was recorded, but they’ve been known to do field recordings in asylums & crypts, so who knows the location of these haunted sounds. These guys can take the sound of the wind and turn it evil, and there’s lots of percussive elements, cemetery gates and butcherware clanging in an arhythmic lurch, and on one track it’s even akin to a faded blastbeat, heard through six feet of earth a thousand miles away. Boiling static and hissing rain, thick with decay, harrowing walls of death, so much creep & screech that it’ll be hard to sleep soundly after hearing this. There’s even a track that’s made from the sounds of scraping a contact mic “across the rotting flesh of an actual corpse.” It doesn’t get more fucking necro than that. T.O.M.B. really outdid themselves on UAG. So glad there are labels like Crucial Blast putting out awesome shit like this.
Medroxy Progesterone Acetate – The Ghost Of Dried Wells (Black Horizons)
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The one & only Medroxy Progesterone Acetate is back with a fuckin beast of a double tape, 2 hours of insanity that gets the deluxe packaging treatment from Black Horizons (side note: the image up there is only an interpretation, a snippet of the full artwork). This is some downright fucked up shit, wavering between diseased drones, black ambient, filthy industrial, nightmarish noise, and drifting shimmer. All sorts of weirdness on here with Darren Bauler taking on most of the responsibilities and various friends adding such talents as “Possession States,” “Concussion Machines,” and “Recording Anomalies.” The sounds are fucking out of this world, disgusting & horrific, festering & boiling drones, straight from the demon’s stomach, voices abound, dazed whispers rambling paranoia and death, haunting your very soul, shrill tinnitus bleeding out of every pore until it’s no longer part of the tape, it’s taken up residence and infected your ears, subtle rhythms grow into discrete beats that sound like old rusted machinery trying to reclaim their previous lives, and strangest of all, the moments of pleasant dreams and blissful ambience, tiny beacons shining out of the rotted wasteland. The bleak & harrowing doesn’t get much better than this.
Sujo – Six Days (Inam)
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It seems like I just wrote about Sujo’s last (free!) record, Terran. I kinda did (less than 2 months ago) but that was a late writeup and this one is mostly on time. Plus, I just got this and it fucking rips. Absolutely fucking massive, this dude pushes all the right buttons for me. Diaspora is apocalyptic drone metal of the highest order, taking all genres and mashing them into ultimate destruction. Like Nadja’s metalgaze mixed with Locrian’s blackened noise, some Before The Dawn Heals Us style majesty, and Pyramids’ furious blastbeats. Songs of doom that sound like a leviathan is wreaking havoc, conquering the world, and you’re the only one who can stop it, that slow motion scene where you finally stand up to it, alone, knowing there’s no hope of survival. Deep bone rattling rumble, monolithic static feedback, the hardest hitting drums and the grandest euphoric drones ever, black & blissful as fuck, the most jaw dropping loudness I’ve heard all year. Turn this fucker up and watch the world crumble.
Sujo – Ceptian (Inam)
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Download Terran
/fog thick blackened bliss/
/grey dawn turns to wall of noise/
/faint spectral crackle/
Sky Burial – The Cadence Of Collapse (Small Doses / Phage Tapes)
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This is one book you shouldn’t judge by its cover because this one is fucking AWESOME (and that album art just ain’t my style). Michael Page, the dude from Fire In The Head, goes cosmic, with Threnody For Collapsing Suns comprising the middle of a loose trilogy (in between Kiehtan and the brand new Aaegri Somnia). This one is a huge slab of deep space. Black wind howling through wastelands, haunted humming power lines, an exploded galaxy’s worth of space dust dirtying up the place, synths ranging from demonic heartbeat pulses to zen drift euphoria, soothing shimmer next to brain stopping blasts and bleak industrial tension. It’s both dark & light, the sun in all its glory and the resulting black hole, with beauty scattered throughout. Only three tracks, clocking in at 50+ minutes, absolutely huge, sprawling to infinity. Black bliss kosmische for the next century.
