Trumpet of Amdusias

  Lying somewhere between Sadness and Amesoeurs , this singular post-rock-metal-black-gaze-shoe-thing project is the sort of thing I have both entirely too much and absolutely not enough of. I have to admit to not being the biggest fan of the album cover, and I probably would not pick the record up in the store based on it, but fortunately I already knew about the previous albums. And really, when the only thing I can complain about is the packaging, it's probably a pretty cool album. I Am Devastation by Morari     ...and with that we come to the end of the first month of 2021. I did actually manage to talk about an album every day this month. I wasn't actually sure I would stick with it when I began. I've enjoyed it though, and I'm a little more confident that I will keep the streak going through February.

  Okay, so these folks are from not too far down the road from where I live, and they play weird dark folk music based on a bloody crypto-celtic mythology of pre-hispanic Iberia. How could I possibly dislike them, right? Oh, and they raise money for animal conservation by printing T-shirts with CRASS logo designs with elephants added. Seriously, how could ANYONE not like them? This is 100% hypnotic forest wanker Sunday brunch music. Chill, and enjoy. Xuntas by SANGRE DE MUERDAGO

  Atmosphere. There is a lot of it here. A lot. Like, all the atmosphere. So you know I like this album. Because I will forgive almost anything in the pursuit of atmosphere. I don't care about production values, musicianship, coolness, as long as the atmosphere is there. Fortunately, there is little that needs forgiving on this album. Solid riffs, steady drumming, well-mixed vocals. Solid playing, solid atmosphere. Did I mention the atmosphere? Serpentine by Hyrgal

  Droning psychedelic ambient black metal weirdness from back when things like that were not Brooklyn hipster cool, but confined almost exclusively to weird French bedroom passion projects. Ritual magick noise for, as one bandcamp reviewer put it, "listening to this in the bathtub at night with all the lights off". I have a whole playlist of things to listen to on public transport to drown out all the ambient noise of modern life, and this has been a constant in that rotation for the entire decade it has existed. Murmuüre by Murmuüre

  Definitely the winner for the best album cover of 2020, this six song EP will likely go down as one of the defining music history documents of the beginning of the end of the American Empire. 2020 was the year the genie really and truly got out of the bottle, and all the white nationalist wishing and praying and killing and cross-burning is not going to put it back in. You took all our hope away We try to keep it down but we’re all damned to say The message is simple, the message is pure, the message is just and true and utterly necessary: Stand down or get burnt down.   Wake of a Nation (EP) by Zeal and Ardor

  Is it still a "throwback" post if the album is only 18 months old? I mean, in the internet politics vortex 18 months ago is basically the cretaceous. Not so with music however, and this blistering track from the end of 2019 is, so far, withstanding the test of time. The best punk, and by extension post-punk, provides catharsis, a release for the feelings of powerlessness and impotent rage that the unrelenting tide of horseshit called late capitalism heaps upon us all daily. Cue the grindy guitars, pummeling drums, and bleak yet commanding vocals. Pierce the Feeling by ESSES

  Is it post-rock?  Is it sludge?  Dunno. But it's definitely HEAVY.  Portland might be full of terrible poseurs who can't tell the difference between skateboard company logos and actual fascists, but it is also full of bands that fucking slap. This is one of those bands, and this album is a sonic hammer. It is WAY too early to be talking about AOtY material, but this is setting the bar pretty high for the rest of the year to improve on. Fixed Ritual by Flood Peak

  In the late 1990s, I had a minor obsession with 4AD records, specifically with the collective output under the name This Mortal Coil . There was something very foreign and attractive in their lush soundscapes. Something that didn't exist in my corner of Southern (Christmas tree farming, not coal mining) Appalachia. Osi and the Jupiter is the solo pagan dark folk project of Ohio's Sean Kratz , and is mostly known for a couple of excellent albums of neo-Norse folk. However, Kratz is also from Appalachia, and recorded a three song EP dedicated to our shared " homeland and the spiritual connection to the dense forested mountains". Imagine if Ivo Watts-Russell had set up shop not in London, but in a barn somewhere on the back way between Morgantown and Parkersburg. The resulting catalog would not have sounded so much like This Mortal Coil, but instead would be this album. From the lush cellos of " They Ride Through the Sky on Horse Drawn Chariots ", with its ...

  Well, I guess this is guilty pleasures Saturday now. Hexvessel is a "psychedelic forest folk rock band" from Finland that is often too heavy on the clichéd psychedelia and too light on the forest folk for my tastes. Misfits are the original "so bad they're kind of good" or at least fun in a drunken-fling-with-your-friends-younger-sister kind of way. Neither are, by themselves, enough to keep my attention for too long, but together, they don't have to be. A just shy of 4 minute cover of the second best Misfits song ever done up in creepy folky gauze, is just the sort of thing to pique my curiosity. Hopefully you'll enjoy it too. Halloween (Misfits cover) by Hexvessel

  Warning: May Contain Screamo. Gospel ended the way most DIY bands end: unceremoniously. They sort of faded away, after an anti-climactic intra-band fist fight on a lawn after a dumpster-dived vegan buffet house show in a suburban cul-de-sac somewhere in Indiana. But before that, they were everything. Underground, DIY, musical heirs to Minor Threat , spiritual heirs to Can . One big dysfunctional cocaine fueled road trip of a band, that for some reason I will never understand, I never saw live. This is a band that was engineered from the smallest molecule up to play in a bar in Greensboro while I drank cheap beer and ignored phone calls from the chef who wanted to know if I could open tomorrow. But they lacked the emotional equipment to hang together in a squalid van long enough to tour far enough for me to see them, and I will always be disappointed that I never got that chance. Regardless, this is an album that I have never put on and not listened to all the way through. It's ju...

  Here at the Forest Wanker compound, atmosphere is the whole of the law. If your album is the most competent, best produced, riff-filled slab of amazingness ever, but you lack the proper psychoacoustics to have a gestalt, I am completely uninterested. For me, you might as well be a single tuba playing scales. Psychoacoustics and an overwhelming gestalt are what made O turniach, jeziorach i nocnych szlakach one of the most talked about albums of 2016, and are what keep it in my rotation to this day. In my review of Gaoth's final(?) album , I mentioned how I was waiting for a new album from them. Wędrujący Wiatr is the same. Very few things, musically, would make me as happy as a third album from the Polish masters of atmosphere. There is reason to hope that we might just see that third album soon, so I thought I'd share their excellent second album with you. There's no "highlights" to speak of, no standout riffs or notable passages. This is not that kind of alb...

  It's no secret that I am a big fan of earthy, crunchy black metal. Bands that are pagan in the philosophical sense as opposed to merely being Scandinavian viking LARPers. Fortunately there is a roost for every bird, and here we have a French band who has joined the Forest Wanker pantheon. Calling themselves "Atmospheric Mysterion Faustian Black Metal Arcane" they have put out this debut album on the label/cult Solar Asceticists Productions. This is panoramic epic atmospheric black metal with some really nice unique touches, like the shimmering wall of female voices that weaves in and out, and the flickering candle like strings.      Bacchus by BACCHUS

  Australia, split album, pummeling black metal, dark folk passages, general malaise. I like it! Two Australian projects come together to make a slab of weird darkened music reminiscent of what might happen if Tombs covered a Steve von Till solo album. OTHRS: Hailed most notably through the dark metal time scapes of SPIRE, M.R, the initiating conjuror of that entity, presents us here with the second chapter of OTHRS, showcasing his unique blend of atmospheric black metal and mist ridden dark rock featuring vocals from V.S (Spire, Void Stare) and a cover of Horseback's "Invisible Mountain". Burden Man: "Grievance has been an experiment. An experiment in taking this band from a solo project only to a collective. It has helped open up the doors on Burden Man's creativity and has begun the process of utilizing both Blaize and John's pain, not just mine. What has come from that for these two songs is less sorrow and a more despairing anger while sti...

  If you work (or live) out of a to-do list or app, you almost certainly have a "waiting for" list where things that you've assigned to someone else or need prerequisites filled before you can move on live. I have one of those for upcoming/expected albums I am looking forward to, and a lot of bands end up on there after a debut album that I liked. Gaoth have been on that list for almost five years now. This album was released in the middle of 2016 by F.S., the only member. Early in 2019 he announced that a second album was complete, and teased a few tracks on Facebook, before disappearing. Perhaps this year is the year to finally get my hands on the second album? Who knows, but I can hope! For me, this was one of the outstanding albums of 2016, and really changed how I looked at atmo-black. Fiercely naturalistic, heavy on the atmosphere building, and utterly replayable, it has been in regular rotation since it came out. Dying Season's Glory by Gaoth

  In my previous L'Arbre De Thule review , I promised to share some Ad Nihil with you, and now I am making good on that promise. They play sludgy doom in the Slavonic style of Во Скорбях and Intra Spelaeum , namely bordering on funeral doom, but a little too energetic and a little too pissed off to really fall into the somber and stately realm. If New Orleans was in Novgorod Oblast, this is what Crowbar would sound like. I mean that literally. This is swampy sludge metal, but Slavic swamp sludge metal; Taiga in hottest summer forest fire choking the atmosphere swamp metal. I am going to call this Tunguska-core from now on. Сожжения Цивилизаций Миг EP by Ad Nihil

  I have very little time for the provincial purists among metal fans who whine and cry about every departure from whatever formula first tickled their goolies when they discovered whatever niche subgenre they have set themselves up as the gatekeepers of. That said, the most common criticism of Profetus that I see is that they are too orthodox, too rooted in the goth metal roots of funeral doom, too in love with their cathedral organ, too lacking in death metal chugga chugga.  Fuck the haters. The Sadness of Time Passing is equal parts a slow crawl through the dark, organist orgasms, and growling lamentations. To me, that is exactly what funeral doom should be - teetering on the edge of dungeon synth, simplicity in service to atmosphere and catharsis. Slow, crushing, ruinous. This is exactly as heavy as it needs to be. The Sadness of Time Passing by Profetus

  This is a band I have been a fan of for a long time, and has always fallen squarely into the metal-adjacent part of my collection. Until now. Photosynthesis is much closer to traditional black metal compositions than any of the previous albums. Close enough to finally get the band into the Metal Archives :) Replacing the guitars with hammered dulcimer, Botanist turns black metal on it's head, and continues down the road they began with Collective: The Shape of He to Come . Guitar-less black metal is the future! This is the second(?) album recorded as a full band and not as a solo project, and it really shows the power of the players here. Photosynthesis by Botanist

  Continuing on with the pagan/indigenous/non-European theme of recent albums here, we have some fascinating Mayan metal here to take a look at. Yaotl Mictlan began in Mexico and has since relocated to Utah, and has continued their melodic, atmo-black exploration of pre-hispanic mythology and Mayan cosmology. Traditional instruments woven into modern metal compositions; typical metal instruments playing traditional melodies; ancient stories told again, new. This is some cool stuff. Sagrada Tierra del Jaguar by Yaotl Mictlan

  Switching things up for today, we've got some pagan/nature worship inspired funeral doom for you, courtesy of Seattle Washington's Blood of the Black Owl , a one(?) person project dedicated to “Medicinal Musicals” and personal transformation. Enigma for the Cascadian Metal contingent (and I mean that in the best way possible), this is an album you could imagine hearing playing in a new age bookstore in a college town circa 1995. Given that I lived in the basement of such a store in such a town in 1995, this is a blast of nostalgia, nicely updated. Rivers Within Shadows by Blood of the Black Owl

  Ad Nihil is a criminally underrated Russian Sludge/Doom band, and I promise to give them some love here in the very near future.  L'Arbre De Thule is an offshoot project, featuring most members of Ad Nihil, and exploring atmospheric black metal and the lyrical themes of " Civilizational Transformations, Cults of Degeneration, Archaic Memory ". This two song EP rocks hard, with the aggressiveness I have come to expect from Ad Nihil. I am looking forward to the LP later this year. Blackened folk. Is that a thing? Not quite folk metal, not quite black metal. Like a Russian Panopticon or Nechochwen .   Dis Pater by L'Arbre De Thule

  My favorite Philly space truckers return with an EP of cosmic atmospheric black metal.  " Recorded during The Great Conjunction of 2020, where the planets Jupiter and Saturn appeared in the sky at only about a tenth of a degree apart. " Heavy on the meditative drone, light on the blast beat black metal formula, and decidedly RAW in production values, this is not likely to appeal to the wider metal community, but for those awake at all hours of the night multi-boxing EVE online a little bit drunk, this is perfect dinosaur clubbing hell-camp music (yes I am aware that makes no sense outside a tiny clique of nerds). Stella Moriens by Noctysmal

 " Dedicated to all the indigenous people of this brown continent, from the north to the south to the east and the west." Some nice tribal atmospherics here, and I am a sucker for heavy-reverb vocal tracks, so yeah. Consider this part of the left drift in metal that I have been seriously enjoying recently. Not RABM, but definitely not in the white-power viking LARPing camp. Eagle, Quetzal, and Condor (NP-XII) by Ixachitlan

 The thing I continue to love about this album, now five years after it came out, is how unabashedly Chinese it is. For me, there is nothing quite so nice as taking something from somewhere else and adapting it to your particular circumstance, whether it be food, music, or whatever else. The world is filled with terrible Nordic imitators, so I am always really stoked to see bands who lean in hard to their local scene / culture / roots. This is probably one of the albums that really sent me down that path, and I will always be indebted to Zuriaake for that. Gu Yan is an epic, sprawling, even cinematic, album, and should appeal to fans of bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Primordial . Musically, there are serious elements of Summoning here, but most of this album is utterly unique to Zuriaake and the atmosphere they build is entirely their own. Traditional instruments back up the backbone of the sound, not as a gimmick, but as the bedrock on which the whole edifice rests. ...

 Today I've been spinning this record on repeat. Maybe it's the cold, or the snow, or the general European inability to take either this virus or its vaccine seriously, or the fascist hellhole my country of origin is sliding into, but whatever it is, this is the self-care I need today. One-man Italian DSBM project (surely no one expected that, right) Lost In Emptiness has exactly one album - this one, released on In Shadows Enthroned in September of last year. Atmosphere is everything here, and the whole album teeters on the edge of ambient/blackgaze, which is not to many peoples liking, but for me, it really hits the spot today. Regrets & Sorrow by Lost In Emptiness

 Alex Poole is something of a phenom. From lo-fi black metal in Nashville with Troglodytic , to the ambient shoegaze of Esoterica , to the ravishing grimness of Kreig and the psychedelic dissonance of Skáphe , he has blazed a pretty remarkable, and definitely singular, path through the metal world. Now, as a (almost) solo project, bringing all his previous achievements in creating atmosphere his own way and disregarding the sanctified kvlt order, Poole has unleashed Häxanu on us. In many ways this is a stripped down, streamlined Poole. Much of the more interesting approaches he has developed over the years are gone, replaced with unbridled aggression and outright hostility as the prime atmospheric components. To my mind, this album is a complete triumph, a real statement. None of Poole's earlier bands have been very trve to the kvlt. He has, throughout his career made his own way, built his own take on all the constituent pieces of black metal, and in the words of Jacob Buczarski...

 I am not sure how exactly today will go down in history (it's still too early to tell), but I am sure that this is a perfect album to watch the bursting of the American Exceptionalism balloon to. Novae Militiae create a type of terroristic black metal that demands collapse, that nurtures it deep within you. Relentlessly aggressive, unceasingly negative, unforgivingly brutal, As one Bandcamp reviewer put it, BLACK METAL IS VIOLENCE. I couldn't agree more or be happier about it. If you ever wondered what Judge Dredd listened to while waiting around to push someone's face in, wonder no more. Topheth by Novae Militiae

 Anaal Nathrakh are known for a couple of things. Blisteringly misanthropic blackened deathgrind, and lyrics that have me reaching for my dictionary. I am happy to report (perhaps later than the rest of the metal world) that nothing has changed on Endarkenment . This is, to be honest, the perfect soundtrack to my 2020, and maybe yours too. Nihilistic fury at the idiocy and brutal scorn for all of human weakness just seem to be so on message for the first plague year. From the first riff and angry scream of "Endarkenment" you know you are in for a real treat here. In their spit-in-your-face way, the band take on every terrible internet know-it-all, every political finger-pointing idiot, every "but muh freedumbs" sociopathic loser without a thought for anyone or anything outside their own tiny pointless existence; and they start the album by taking them down, hard: Take what small comfort there may be left Seize what you love and damn all the rest Panem, circenses, ...

 I am a huge Steve Von Till fan, and not just because I have a serious case of beard envy. I have recently been on a listening kick of his projects, spurred by his newest solo album, which I'll post here soon. Anyway, this has reminded me just how incredibly good Music for Megaliths is. Not far from my house is a dolmen, a megalithic tomb from the third century BCE. It happens to be one of my favorite places to walk, and near to where I am teaching my children to climb. Every time I hear "The Forest Is Our Temple", I am reminded of the dolmen, and have to go for a visit. Ruins, monuments, and ancient sites of worship are multi-sensory experiences – at once residues of the sacred, the parchment on which the passage of time has been inscribed and templates for imaginative reconstruction, spaces in which to invest and immerse, to trade your bearings for an inexhaustible state of transition. Released under the Harvestman moniker, this is a true Steve Von Till solo albu...

 I know essentially nothing about Hysteria, the woman behind the band Haunted , and I am completely okay with that. If I am being honest, the obscurantism and mystery of bands in this space is kind of my favorite thing about certain types of black metal and doom metal. I would add a new negation to the now-infamous Deathlike Silence motto " NO CORE NO TRENDS NO FUN NO MOSH" -- NO STARS. I like to think of it as the metal version of the "Fuck The DJ" trend in electronic music. I do know, however, that Saturnine is a great EP. Melancholy, morose, serene, audio sadness, of a kind that I normally associate with Catania, Italy and War Against Yourself records in particular. This is not a "genre spanning" album in the sense of having some tracks in different genres. This is a synthesis of the parts of multiple genres that Hysteria likes and wants to employ in the service of atmosphere-making, and I love it. It is obvious that a lot of thought and planning went...

  Vide do work on this album, proving that there's plenty going on in Louisiana besides New Orleans sludge. This is also a whole different world of grimness from my usual Italian dsbm bands. This is not just sad boi noizes; this is feral and insane. Like a mythical demented swamp creature, it claws and slithers through the dark. Hanging by the Bayou Light is a paean to misanthropy and isolation, and I wouldn't have it any other way. This is audio catharsis. Extra-special attention should be paid to the awesome D-Beat drums on "It Would Be the Last Time", an epic track that takes half of the ~30 minute running time of the album. Hanging By The Bayou Light by vide

In 2021, I am going to try to give you an album a day to listen to. Each one will be an album that I enjoy enough to have in my collection. I'll talk a little about the album, maybe the band (though I am notorious for not really caring too much about the people behind the music), and whatever thing(s) the album causes me to free associate or riff on.  Let's start this project with one of the more interesting experimental black metal album of 2020, Twixt Zero and Infinity by Crown of Ascension . Presumably named after a Magic the Gathering card, Crown of Ascension is a new project from Alexander White , whose previous work with Vessel of Iniquity and Uncertainty Principle (among others) are also worth checking out. This is a solid, maybe even excellent, atmospheric black metal album. Riffs, drums, everything, is in the service of creating the atmosphere.  Ghostly shrieks soaking in a vat of reverb; cardboard gunshot drums; guitars and keyboards in sync, creating something t...