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“Spectre Music of an Antiquary” – Emit
I don’t quite recall how or where I first heard of Emit. It was either via the Crucial Blast Records website or from Zero Tolerance Magazine, but I do know that when I first heard “Spectre Music of an Antiquary” I was thoroughly pleased. Each song is like a portent of a slowly creeping doom which lurks in between our plane and the next. It’s easy to picture haunted moors, benighted castles crumbling in ruin in the English countryside, and ghostly figures floating in antiquated robes and garments lingering from ages past in a world now unfamiliar to them.
The sound is deep and resplendent with eerie resonance and the somber minimalism of cold winter nights illuminated by ghostly moonlight, a perfect album to sit down to with a glass of wine and a good book. “Spectre Music…” is dark, ominous, charming, and well-crafted dark ambient steeped in mystery and shrouded by gloomy atmosphere likely to arouse feelings of isolation and wonder in listeners. It is truly a magical experience and remains to date one of my very favorite albums.
Listen below:
Spectre Music of an Antiquary by EMIT -
“Daemon” – Mayhem
Like the many-headed hydra of Greek myth, The True Mayhem sprouted yet another serpentine head with the celebrated release of 2019’s “Daemon”. This spiraling descent into pure black metal hell hearkens back to the golden age of the genre, luring us in with it’s Faustian offerings and casting us into a deep abyss of woe and utter blackness at once familiar and terrifyingly new. The seething guitars and thunderous percussion create a perfect backdrop for what may be vocalist Attila Csihar’s most diabolical performance yet, as he alternates between bellowing lows, chanting, frenetic shrieking, and spite-fueled snarling; he sounds more the part of the leering devil featured on the album’s cover than a mortal human being.
So what makes Daemon special? To put it bluntly, it’s just a nasty, vile fucking album. Daemon sounds like something summoned up from hell itself. It grips you with it’s talons and simply won’t let go until your soul is rent from your body and dragged down to hell to suffer forever. Desperate, deranged and hopeless, Daemon is the auditory essence of damnation.
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“Subterranean Rites” – Gnawed
My first encounter with Gnawed was shortly after the release of 2014’s Feign and Cloak, which I discovered after it was recommended by Zero Tolerance Magazine in an issue published around the same time. I was immediately a fan of the harsh, gritty soundscapes and dank atmosphere which Grant Richardson (Gnawed) produced. Unlike other noise or power electronics projects I had been exposed to at that time, what struck me most was that Gnawed was a very well organized project in spite of its harshness and grinding industrial sound.
I was no less impressed by the most recent Gnawed offering, “Subterranean Rites” which was released via Malignant Records just this past June. Subterranean Rites eschews some of the harsher elements of earlier releases, but is no less heavy for having done so. This claustrophobic offering is comprised of “over three years of location recordings in sewers, subterranean facilities, and abandoned industrial complexes” according to the album description on both the Malignant Records and Gnawed Bandcamp pages, and the end-results are fantastic: ominous vocals, sounds of machinery and chains dragging across stone or concrete, and a profoundly bleak ambiance conjured quite literally from the depths of the earth all manifest into a glorious, dark album.
I highly recommend this album as an introduction to other releases by Gnawed, as it may be more palatable to those who are not accustomed to some of the more challenging listens in the project’s back catalog, but do not mistake this for weakness as Subterranean Rites is focused, well-honed, and refined on it’s own.
Support Gnawed: Listen to Subterranean Rites below:
Subterranean Rites by GNAWED -
“A Journey Through the Dark” – Dungeons of Irithyll
One of my very favorite dungeon synth albums, “A Journey Through the Dark” by Dungeons of Irithyll bathes listeners in dolorous synth passages conjured from the lore of the Dark Souls video game series. The somber minimalism of this album is reminiscent of many environs from within the games (of which I am also a tremendous fan). It’s easy to imagine wading through the mire of the Farron Swamp or “delving deep” into the Irithyll dungeon, or scouring the Grand Archives to do battle with fearsome enemies while immersed in the eerie and dark soundscapes that A Journey Through the Dark evokes.
This short, but interesting and nuanced album is a rare gem which shines as ghostly emanations from a darkened bonfire, where old shrines whisper secret lore to chosen travelers in a benighted undead realm.
For fans of soft, brooding dungeon synth and (of course) the Dark Souls franchise, this album is simple, beautiful and effectively immersive.
Support and listen below:
A Journey Through The Dark by Dungeons of Irithyll -
Lurker of Chalice (S/T)
In 2005 I was fifteen years old, and my burgeoning interest in all things black metal was all-consuming. I was drawn to the genre like a lunar moth to a pale flame and was fiercely inspired by various artists within the genre, particularly the classic 2nd wave Scandinavian bands, but also to the handful of USBM bands that I had been exposed to at that time, namely, Xasthur, Leviathan, Krieg, and Nachtmystium. Xasthur’s catalog from the early and mid 2000s was so bleak and soul-draining that it simply couldn’t be ignored, and the early Leviathan releases were just as harsh and bitter, but there was something else too, an element of weirdness that made Leviathan stand out. Not long after I discovered Leviathan and fell in love with “The Tenth Sub-Level of Suicide”, a great thing happened.
In 2005, Wrest (of Leviathan) released Lurker of Chalice, a new (at that time) project (and eponymous album) that would change my view of heavy music entirely. Lurker of Chalice didn’t boast the same ferocious buzzsaw riffs and agonized hateful screeching I had grown to love in bands like Gorgoroth or Carpathian Forest, this was something different. Slow, methodical, yet unpredictable and more atmospheric. This wasn’t just a black metal album, it was a gateway to another world altogether. Lurker is an odd entity to say the least, with its eerie song titles and spiraling dark ambiance, moaning guitars and sound clips from God knows where, all painstakingly blended together to create an atmosphere unparalleled and inimitable; a grand expression of something I can’t quite understand wholly or put effectively to words, but maybe not everything needs to be explained and vivisected away to nothing. To summarize, Lurker of Chalice feels like driving alone on the highway in those tired, dreary hours when the sun hangs low and the darkness is just about to swallow the horizon, and the trees on either side of the road pierce upward like vast living walls of shadows looming over other shadows, wavering in amorphous black that looks like it rolls on into forever.
It’s 2020 currently, and I’m still spellbound by this album almost two decades later because of it’s uniqueness and genuine charm, and that dark, ineffable place it takes me to when I listen to it. Lurker of Chalice is a masterpiece, plain and simple.
Support Wrest and Lurker of Chalice, listen below:
Lurker of Chalice by Lurker of Chalice -
“Crossing the Rubicon”
The past week or so has been a time of quiet reflection for me, as nearly everything apart from “essential businesses” is still closed and, apart from work, I’ve been home-bound. While this imposed isolation has been emotionally trying at times, my cabin fever has subsided for the time being, and I’ve been focused lately on nostalgia and old memories with friends, bygone events and eras in my life where things were markedly different than they are presently. I’ve spoken to a few of my close friends I share such experiences with, on the phone or via social media, and it’s been nice strolling down memory lane for the most part.
People have come and gone, and come back and gone again throughout the decades (such is life). Its bitter sweet sometimes, other times it’s a welcome change of pace. I’m not a sickly-thin teenager reeling with angst anymore, nor am I a brazen twenty-something frustrated with life: I’m thirty. I have a stable career, a wife, a child, a home, and my life is relatively stable. I’ve made a pleasant life for myself and my family. Will I play Dungeons and Dragons again? Will my brother, our friends and I get together weekly to play Warhammer 40,000 tabletop games again? Will I climb trees with Bobby and Chester and eat plums and play games with toy guns and stay up all night eating snacks and drinking Surge ever again? Things change. A man crosses a river, they say, but he can never go back because it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.
As sad as these realizations make me at times, the facts that none of these things will likely ever happen again, it wouldn’t be the same if they did. What I am most fond of is not material wealth or possessions, but experience and memories, and I hold each one, even the bitterest of them dearly, because every one of these past events played a role in my present happiness and stability.
I’m grateful for so much.
If you asked me a few years ago, or even twenty years ago where I thought I’d wind up by thirty, I’d have told you that I didn’t plan on living that long.
I’m glad I did.
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“Universal Death Church” -Lord Mantis
Like necrotic seepage dripping from a gangrenous wound, Lord Mantis reemerged from the gutters anew with Charlie Fell back in the band, and their latest offering, “Universal Death Church” is disastrously filthy, the heaviest and most putrescent of blackened sludge has been funneled and condensed into a nightmare-cocktail for the world to imbibe. While many extreme metal bands base themselves thematically around a return to pre-industrial revolution eras, the dark ages, and other more naturalistic approaches to the occult and evil, Universal Death Church aims both barrels straight into the back-alleys and dope dens of the modern world, a new dark age of addiction, the benighted wilderness of the present era.
This album was dished out raw and reeking on November 22 of last year, and I loved it immediately due to its bearing traits of preceding Lord Mantis albums “Pervertor” and “Death Mask”, but with an outcome far superior to either (though both releases are excellent by their own right). The first two lines of lyrics to opening track “Santa Muerte” (named for a deadly batch of fentanyl going around the Kensington area at the time) are as dismal as dismal gets: “Mother of Mercy lives in Kensington/I heard she’s been turned out too”. Universal Death Church is a paroxysm of furious vitriol. This one has teeth. Support Lord Mantis and watch their music video for Santa Muerte below:
Or if you prefer, you can listen to the album in its entirety down here:
Universal Death Church by LORD MANTIS -
“Tchornobog” – S/T
Oozing forth from primordial depths, the malicious entity known as Tchornobog slithers forth to ensnare listeners with slime-drenched pseudopods and drag them to a brutal desert hell. This is one of those rare, unnerving gems that cannot be easily dispelled once heard; it is as innovative as it is cataclysmic, birthed from the very depths of a windswept pandemonium.
Tchornobog is incredibly dynamic in it’s composition, transitioning seamlessly between bouts of whirling sonic mania and slow, deliberate passages heavy enough to shake the pillars of the universe itself. This album is an amalgam of extreme subgenres blended together into a singular exposition of introspective darkness, and should please fans of death metal, death/funeral doom and black metal alike. There is a certain ambiance lurking in the background of this massive album that speaks of desert nightmares and forlorn hope, the vomit of moribund elder gods, and esoterica beyond description. Tchornobog is as crushing and bleak as the singularity of a black hole, and is as much an experience as it is an album. I find something new each time I return to it, and it’s that sort of thing that has made it one of my very favorite albums released in the past five years. If you like bone-shattering, skull grinding metal in lethal doses, then give Tchornobog a try.
Support Tchornobog and listen below:
Tchornobog by Tchornobog -
“Quarantine: Eternal Dungeon”
My house feels smaller than usual lately, and colder -even with the air conditioning off; It’s like a crypt, and I have been interred herein with my wife and daughter for weeks, only leaving to go to the store and to work when there is work on-site to be done. The monotony and isolation have made me increasingly weary and anxious. I know others are dealing with this same blight, not the plague at hand, but a different plague of the mind, one that dims the spirits and suffocates joy; a persistent and virulent malaise that wreaks havoc on those of us who are perpetually restless and without the balm of something, anything to do outside of our homes.
So, here I sit in my home office, plunging deeper and deeper into a bleak head-space. I can only distract myself from my thoughts for so long before they creep through, penetrating as worms through soil after a fresh rain. This house is a dungeon, and I am its captive, neither dead nor living, but a host for parasites and demons, an incubator for pitch-black misery.
I will try my best to continue writing and posting on this site. It’s been a while now since my last album review, or anything. It’s funny in a way, I always said “I could do so much more if I only had the time” and now I’ve got all the time I could need and have done nothing with it but sulk. We want a thing, plead for it, and when we get it, find ourselves disappointed and wishing to return to before.
It could be worse, though, and for many it is. Reach out to your friends and family, talk to them and tell them you love them. Have a conversation. Take care of each other and yourselves.
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“Terminal Aggressor II” -Dragged Into Sunlight
I spent years wondering when Dragged Into Sunlight would release anything after Negative Volume. For a time, it seemed to me that the band had gone dormant, apart from live performances, but I never stopped wondering what would come next and when that day would come. My fondness for the original 2006 Terminal Aggressor demo has been noted elsewhere on this site. I loved it. To me it was the epitome of desperate, spiteful noise encrusted about a moldering framework of the bleakest, most miserable black metal, like a tidal wave of unadulterated sonic rage, piped directly into my ears and polluting every depth of my being, covering every shore with its bile.
On January 10, 2020 I stopped wondering what was next. Turns out, it was better than I’d hoped for, as instead of a follow-up to their acclaimed album “Hatred for Mankind”, DIS went a step further and released Terminal Aggressor II.
Terminal Aggressor II is no less vitriolic than its predecessor and is nothing short of a vomitous auditory assault, unrelenting, battering, and unfathomably dark; an exploration of the aphotic zone of the human consciousness and the vile things spawned from those lightless places inside of us all. TAII is eerie, abrading noise shackled around a splintered scaffold of sludgy, primitive blackened death: not unlike its previous iteration, but different enough to stand of its own foul merits. This was a pristine follow-up to the baleful misery of the original. Support the band in all of their endeavors, and listen to Terminal Aggressor II below, but note that the band will likely receive none of the proceeds for this album, as Prosthetic Records dicked them quite badly in their record deal.
Towers of Rust 