Mānbryne - Heilsweg: O udręce ciała i tułaczce duszy

Well holy shit. No one saw this coming. Debut albums are often pretty good. Rarely are they AotY contenders. However, this album, translated as Of Carnal Torment and The Wandering of the Soul, certainly is.

Is it a super group? Kind of. Except the Polish metal scene doesn't really work in the way you might expect. Many musicians are in overlapping projects of all sorts, so instead of a bunch of steady bands and an occasional supergroup, you have a spider web of permutations.

The permutation here is Priest (the drummer from Odraza), Wyrd (the touring bassist for Blaze of Perdition), S. (the vocalist of Blaze of Perdition), and newcomer Renz playing guitar.

The result of this recipe is essentially the album everyone was upset that Blaze of Perdition didn't release last year. Melodic, riff-filled, unmistakably Eastern European. Add in a neckbreaking pace and a bunch of gang vocals, sprinkle liberally with samples and you get something furious, cavernous, melodic, melancholic, and complex. Exactly as black metal should be.

Comments

Agriculture - Agriculture

a While calling themselves ''ecstatic" black metal, Agriculture traipses along the line between atmo-black and blackgaze pretty adroitly. I am not as head over heels as some of the metal press I have been reading about them (like Rolling Stone for instance), but I think they have a good thing going here. They remind me of Vattnet Viskar sort of, and I am going to withhold judgement until I can see them live to really decide. That said, this is an album that has been in heavy rotation at my house since its release. Agriculture by Agriculture

葬尸湖 (Zuriaake) - 孤雁 (Gu Yan)

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. ...

Dødsferd - Skotos

Raw atmospheric black metal it it's sun soaked Mediterranean best. Wait... That's not right. Oh, but it is. For 20 years, Greece has been the home of Dødsferd since it's beginning as a one-man side project. Now, 10 albums, as many splits and EPs, and five comps, two new songs are available. Packaged with a re-release of the landmark album 'Diseased Remnants of a Dying World', what you have here is the pinnacle of what raw atmo-black can be. A full LP of this would easily be Album of the Year. I can still hope right? Skotos (Atmospheric Black Metal) by DØDSFERD (Greece)

Trumpet of Amdusias

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