Trumpet of Amdusias

  I am an unapologetic enjoyer of angsty emo screaming and post-rock shimmering wall of guitar noise. That is just another way to say that I like a lot of blackgaze albums. Like this one, for instance. Many many moons ago - in a different century no less - a surrealist band from the wilds of West Yorkshire released an inventively titled album full of inventively titled songs. On this album they played some avant garde, schizophrenic black metal. It struck a chord with a number of people, some of which would go on to form bands of their own. Three of those people would be some weirdos from the Netherlands who decided to make something wholly different from their inspiration. Nine albums of weird oddly tense blackgaze later, we get this. I can only describe it as " Smashing Pumpkins tour bus vandalized and burning in the parking lot of a Møl show" As The Morning Dawns We Close Our Eyes by An Autumn For Crippled Children

  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)

  P O R T A L R E L E A S E D T W O R E C O R D S T O D A Y That's how my day began. Several versions of that message. And friends, the hype is real. Unhinged ambient black metal sludge gloomcloud is back on the menu boys. Avow by itself is a massive adventure into murky disquiet, but played (As intended) sync'd up with companion piece Hagbulbia, it becomes infintely more sinister. Press play below and enjoy the madness Avow by PORTAL Hagbulbia by PORTAL

  I find it very difficult to listen to most music I talk about here while I work. I am way too involved in paying atrention to the music to get any actual writing done. Enter Cryo Chamber Records. Essentially a collection of the best in dark ambient music, they are where I turn for help actually concentrating and getting work done. I think of them as my "lo-fi beats for studying" alternative. They have a YouTube channel full of work-day length mixes in a variety of sub-genres of dark ambient music, and through them I have discovered a whole world of interesting soundscapes, that help me turn my office into a creepy tower in the fog. Which brings us to these Serbian weirdos. "Chants of Liberation" is a set of three gothic litanies to liberate the spirit of Man from the temptation of sin and a crooked path of Heresy. The robed priests from the upper sky-dome of the grand Cathedral are uttering the chants of Salvation to cleanse the ones who stray. The metallic s...

  I love this. The weird edge between atmospheric black metal and ambient "world music" style silliness. It probably has something to do with the inordinate amount of time I spent on drugs in new age bookshops in the early 1990s but that's not really the point... Whatever the reason, I have a soft spot for the ethereal, 4AD tinged sound of this album. It meshes really well with the most straight ahead atmo-black parts, and I really get a kick out of it conjuring a picture in my head of Lisa Gerrard in a black metal band. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the VAST back catalog this dude has. Three dozen albums released in a very compressed amount of time. I'll be busy plowing through this for a bit. Nature Lover by Dead Wasteland

Nadja is a duo of multi-instrumentalist Aidan Baker and bassist Leah Buckareff—active since 2005—and making music which can be described as ambient doom, dreamsludge, or metalgaze. Nadja’s signature sound combines the atmospheric textures of shoegaze and ambient/electronic music with the heaviness, density, and volume of metal, noise, and industrial. Think Cocteau Twins meets Sunn 0))) . For the new album, Luminous Rot, the duo retain their overblown/ambient sound, and explore shorter and more tightly structured songs reflecting their interests not only in metal, but post-punk, cold-wave, shoegaze, and industrial. Thematically, the album explores ideas of 'first contact' and the difficulties of recognising alien intelligence. This was in part inspired by reading such writers as Stanislaw Lem and Cixin Lui, as well as Margaret Wertheim's "A Field Guide To Hyperbolic Space," about mathematician Daina Taimina's work with crochet to illustrate h...

  I think one of the weirdest things about black metal is how, contrary to almost all other genres of music, it is a primarily rural phenomenon. Sure, it had a few moments of centralization in urban settings, and yes, bands like Odraza in Poland are playing a very urban version of the genre (and making a whole scene out of it), but for the most part, it is still a very rural musical movement. Black metal comes from lonely places, poor places, still-connected-to-their-environment places. It is built, in large part, out of a duality of fondness and hatred of the bleak landscape. Which brings us to the Canadian prairies. To Saskatchewan. A place of endless prairies suddenly turned into enormous shield mountains. A place of wild lakes, roadless wilderness, and bitter winters. And the place of Angrboða , and their demo, which I am confident in saying is the best demo tape I've heard this year. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the best demo I hear all year. Please give these folks ...

Violet Cold is an experimental AI simulated music project from 40°22’37.7″N 49°50’51.6″E. It is also one of the weirdest, coolest musical things I know of. Across something like 50 albums in the last eight years, Emin Guliyev has forged his own sonic world. Build out of whatever strikes his fancy, from ambient, noise, house, drum and bass, jazz, classical, folk, shoegaze, sludge, crust, powerviolence, post-rock, post-black metal and depressive black metal, Violet Cold is a towering rebuke to every supposedly "prog" band out there. This my friend, is how you prog. This is how you avant-garde. This man has trained computers to write better metal than the sum total of all Guitar Center part-time employees combined. Best described as "Militantly Anti-Fascist Astral Black Metal Dream Pop" this album takes yet another step into the musical (and political) future I hope we one day all inhabit. I am particularly impressed with the "Daft Punk as a post-metal band...

  The third album by German underground honorary pacific northwest cascadian band Abkher is upon us, and it is really cool. They continue the Darkthrone influenced Graupel worship of their earlier albums. But now a serious cascadian vibe emerges, riding the cymbals into a low end heavy bass-driven maelstrom. There is this thing that I now think of as defining in the Cascadian black metal sound - where the cymbals stand in for the rider's whip and the kick drum and bass guitar mimic the gallop of the horse - the drummers "gallop" but expanded to two instruments and from a fill to the actual core of the song. Maybe I'm not explaining it well, I'm not a musician. But, this album is a really great example of how to turn that combo into a sound. A creepy, moody, yet intensely driving sound. In Blut by ABKEHR

  I love the pathological hatred of self-promotion that defines a lot of underground black metal, but it sure does make it hard to write about new bands some times. I know absolutely nothing about this band other than that they are from Dublin Ireland, and they  play the sort of goblin vocal, snare heavy ritual occult black metal I like to listen to in those rare moments where I have the house to myself. Three main songs, with two shorter interludes, identified by roman numerals and nothing else. The interludes are piano and acoustic guitar bits that add a deeper dimension to what might otherwise be too much onslaught of 90mph diabolism. I personally am pretty into this as an End of Year List candidate. Definitely one of the best albums I've heard in May. Valais by Valais

  The holy prophet of forest wankers has spoken. Come close and hear his wise words. Or, don't. Last year Steve Von Till released No Wilderness Deep Enough (see the Best Non-Metal Album by a Metal Person award in my previous best of the year post), a guitar-less exploration of what music is when it tries to become a part of nature. On that album Von Till sang, chanted, and spoke, poetry over his modern compositions, performed on peinao, cello, mellotron, and synths. Now that album exists sans vocals. With bonus french horn and enlarged strings section. Nature music,. freed from intrusive humanness. Dig it. A Deep Voiceless Wilderness by Steve Von Till

  File this under "Things I Missed in 2020" I suppose. I have a real soft spot for goth rock, especially the just shy of dance-able, head nodding tracks that made Feeling Gloomy the nicest place to be sad in London in 2005. This is exactly that. Straight ahead 1980's-worship goth music. Not a hint of dungeon synth or neo- anything here. This is old school gloom, and clove cigarettes, and fishnet stocking gloves. You miserable bastards know exactly what I mean, or you're likely reading the wrong music blog. Bauhaus still holds pride of place as the band I've driven the furthest to see, and 4AD is still the only record label I still blind buy literally everything from. So put on your best androgynous frock coat, straighten your cravat, brush your velvet trousers, and enjoy this very dramatic trip down sonic memory lane. Exordiri by Damghar

  The 2010s were not exactly the most fertile era for atmospheric and / or raw black metal. The forces of lo-fi raw black metal were losing ground daily to the revisionist forces of crisp hi-fi death metal type production, complete with programmed drums and glossy, plastic-toy sonic packaging. Exactly one band ( Windir ) was able to build something still emotionally interesting out of that, and everything else is essentially of interest only to the completionist collector. Having been birthed in that era, Vallendusk was definitely in the proggy, folky, post-rock-y, super clean production camp.  Fortunately, they have since seen the error of their ways and leaned a hell of a lot harder into the grand, sweeping melodies of atmo-black, while keeping the sparkingly clean guitar tones and emotional crescendos of the proggy blackgaze thing they were on the cusp of with earlier work. So, if you'd like to be a black metal fan but the production of raw bm puts you off, here is a good ...

  Any day with a new album from Panopticon is a good day. A day with a new Panopticon album dedicated to John Prine is exceptional. This is an immense (1 hour plus) slab of very doom-laden atmospheric black metal, full of the vastly expanded musical instrument collection of A Lunn. Featuring Guitar, Drums, Bass (4, 8 and 12 string), Keys, Lap Steel, Pedal Steel, Banjo, Square Neck Resonator, Acoustic Guitar and Bass, and Mandolin, not to mention two guest(?) musicians playing cello and violin. This is orchestral in size, if not in arrangement. Lunn separated his music into two distinct halves on his previous album, The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness. The scalding metal offerings and bluegrass-inspired americana here are reassembled, and better integrated than ever before. Adding more ambient and post-rock passages and tropes, along with spoken word samples, makes for a much more interesting album. ...And Again Into The Light by Panopticon

  Let's start with the band's name. Combining the word ‘Dor' (the yearning for something; the lack of something) with the term for spirit ‘Duh' – according to the musicians, this amalgamation represents the struggle to express those meaningful values that make us human by uniting the soul and the spirit.  Not content to have put Romania on the heavy metal map as the creative engine of Negura Bunget ,  Edmond "Hupogrammos" Karban and Sol Faur aka Cristian Popescu set off to redefine metal-ish music entirely. Given the difficulty people (myself included) seem to have in pinning this album down to a single (or a couple) genre, I think they might have succeeded. Dark folk, black metal, folk metal, psych rock, prog pop - everything goes into this stew. This, to me, has heavy heavy vibes of PELICAN or RED SPAROWES , but transported back in time to the early 1960s, where they, not Pink Floyd , record Piper at the Gates of Dawn . Which is of course, the best roc...

  I've recently written about the other project of Jaketeme Odo, Osso & Madeira . He has become one of the most important voices in opposition to the fake-populist kleptocracy of Jair "I wish I was a Chicago economist" Bolsonaro. On this album he lays out his thesis: In 2021 Brazil is going through one of the worst moments in its history. A racist, authoritarian and hygienist government has abandoned the population and now it is us for us. This album is a way to help families abandoned by the genocide who runs the country. Part of the amount collected in this album, will be donated to institutions that have been doing a wonderful and humanitarian work to help families that have nothing to eat and also people on the streets in a situation of vulnerability. I thank all of you who always support me and in this album in particular, I thank Pablo and Sangre de Muerdago for existing, making my days better and also for the authorization for me to cover Soterrado ...

  I sometimes indulge in collapse of civilization apocalyptic fantasies. Not the lone hero saving himself and his family from the chaos around them kind. Not the picking up the pieces and gloating about how much better prepared I am kind. No, I am not into the rough and tumble two-fisted hero fantasy. I am way more into the getting drunk on the roof of a building and laughing as we all get what's coming to us for being a festering disease on the planet kind of fantasy. The I hope I go last so I can smell the pointless stench all of human "accomplishment" has been reduced to kind of fantasy. Misanthropic? Yeah, guilty as charged. Anyway, this is the soundtrack to those fantasies. This is the album that plays at the end of the world. It plays so loud the bridges crack and windows crumble. Those unlucky to still be alive suffer heart attacks from the sheer sonic force of the bass. Hopelessly ruined, we all melt under the immense pressure waves emanating from this unholy soni...

 I've talked a bit about Raat before . So I was happy to see another album from the Byron quoting Indian depresso-metal maven. Like Raison D'être before it this is a moody, gazey, almost dsbm album that is definitely tip toe-ing closer and closer to Sadness territory. Apocalyptic vocals and drums hold tension against dreamy guitars and synths. Shoe-gaze in the extreme for most of the album, this is definitely good driving around alone in the rain music. Sylvan by Raat

  Can we skip the Japanese tales of vengeful female ghosts bit and concentrate on the rest of this for just a minute? Check out the Lamp of Murmuur style album cover.Check out this weird 1980's era angry ass logo that should be on a Christian Hosoi deck. Now dig that this project is from Nashville fucking Tennessee. You know, the pedal drunk cart for every overweight bachelorette party in the whole fucking fat ass South by gawd.You know, the Grand ol Opry and Confederate fucking every-damned-thing Trashvile TN. I guess that would spur me to turn my raging hate boner into musical expression before I walked into the near QuickTrip with a shotgun and started randomly improving the gene pool too... I probably would not be nearly as successful musically as this outfit is. This is prime do-not-give-a-fuck-how-you-pasty-euro-losers-do-it USBM. This is 100% furious Southern fried black metal. More of this please. Onryō: Vengeful Spirits In The Eastern Night by Saidan

  It is not often that I wish an album was longer. But at less than 30 minutes,this blast of hateful Icelandic kvlt metal is WAY too short. This is potentially the best Icelandic metal album this year. Taking their vocal cues from both Svartidauði and Misþyrming, this is another example of powerful Icelandic singers pummeling the instruments under their almost chanted lyrics. I am definitely looking forward to more from these folks, and I hope a full length is on the way soon. Dönsum Í Logans Ljóma by Forsmán

  Valravne plays "aggressive depressive misanthropic black metal" and is based in Asheville, NC. A year ago they released a nasty little slab of dsbm that, true to form, sounded like it was recorded with a fisher price microphone. They have since seen the errors of their trve kvlt ways and re-recorded and re-mixed the album, along with new material, into something actually pretty awesome. A bizarre mix of Ted Bundy, The Divine David Hoyle, and screeching anti-fascist lyrics, I can't help but love this. You will too. Some Kind of Vampire - Remastered by Valravne

  I grew up watching spaghetti western movies with my uncle during the Summer. It was always wild to me how something so uniquely American could be just up and moved to Spain with Italian directors and cast, and be loved by Americans as something authentic and real. I also know plenty of various Nordic euro-chauvinists who still maintain that there is no such thing as trve American black metal, it being totally a Norwegian invention right? Somehow those two things do not come together to make an awesome album of Nordic black metal stalwarts using the tropes of American western aesthetics to make a cowboy album about the north west of Norway. Instead you just get this. Which is kind of like if Yngwie Malmsteen formed Pantera in his mom's basement in a Bergen suburb. You can listen to it if you want. Wild North West by Vreid

  Do you enjoy music, or do you like to be unnerved by music? If it's the second, this is gonna be high on your Album of the Year chart, I can already tell. Hallucinatory, occasionally psychotic, shimmeringly off-kilter. This is a legitimately deranged piece of musical illness. I like it. A lot. You should like it to. We all like it down here. Met onoprechte deelneming by Kwade Droes

  Glory to the Emperor. We have a new Chapter joining us in the eternal fight against heresy. No longer will these Xenos run rampant across the face of the Empire of Mankind, spreading their foul prog- and tech- metal heresy. Exterminatus! There really isn't enough WH40K themed metal. Given that the band that got me into the genre was Bolt Thrower , I am always on the lookout for more non-cheesy Warhammer themed metal. Hail of Bullets has been carrying the flag for a bit, but have failed to rally the troops. After a very long wait, there is a worthy challenger. Aschenvater are here with the German translation of the Drop Site Massacre on Istvaan V ( Landungsfeldmassaker ) to delight the faithful of the Legions and strike righteous fear into the heretics and warp-demons of foul debased death metal. More chugga for the chugga throne!   Landungsfeldmassaker by Aschenvater

Shrine ov Absurd is the solo project of Cuban musician J. His album, originally released last year, has been picked up by Godz ov War and released. This is one intense album. Thundering bass and maniac drum lines back up some seriously fire riffs. The howling vocals complete a rather distressing package of nihilistic rage. This is pummeling, almost punishing. But in a good way. A passionate way. I really like one-person bands because the vision and focus are usually more clear and honest than in a group. This will become one of the albums I point to as perfect examples of that. Monotony by SHRINE OV ABSURD

  Even here at the Forest Wanker Temple of Sad Boi Noizes , we enjoy some straight ahead musical aggression from time to time. Riivaus is the solo endeavor of Hoath Daemnator , who under different pseudonyms is also a member of Sacrificium Carmen , Wömit Angel , and Nôidva (among other groups). Hoath ‘s unhinged screeching may take some getting-used-to. It's an unrelenting ice-pick to the eardrums. But the riffs. Blazing riffs. Maniacally flickering leads, rocking out like feral punks. Anthemic heavy metal black metal but not black 'n' roll? Sign me the fuck up. Hehkumaton by RIIVAUS

  Jaketeme Odo from Pessimista goes solo to do some anti-fascist  atmo-black.  Tinged with dungeon synth and sometimes melting into straight up 4am dark ambient synth creepiness, this is a bleak album. To isolation, personal losses, hatred for those at the top of the pyramid ... From inside the cave of loneliness, the echoes of wails and fury form shock waves that advance over their heads and open the earth beneath their feet. I just decompose in a dark corner, while I observe the peace of society in the face of aggression. Domesticated, you live peacefully in line at the slaughterhouse. Here inside the cave, I can smell the rotting of his creation and his fears. Unfortunately, it seems to be too late for a reaction to take place on the dominating hand. Maybe this is all just a hallucination, maybe I'm next in line at the slaughterhouse. Maybe I am also blind and I created a parallel reality that I call a cave so that I can feel safe. Our approachin...

  What could possibly go wrong with naming your metal band exactly the same thing as another metal band ? Nothing I suppose, as long as you establish a beachhead of sorts - on social media, or at the Encyclopedia Metallum, or somewhere. But, if you just slip a record out into the world and silently slip back into the dark, you might have a bit of trouble. I hope not, because this is a really cool record. From the drone intro to the icy wilderness of the second and third tracks, this is a fine piece of atmo-black bleakness. MOONLESS - Elusive Dimensions by Moonless

Founded in 1997 in the Swiss region of Bern, black metal solo-project PAYSAGE D'HIVER remained a strictly underground phenomenon at first. Mastermind Wintherr unleashed a steady stream of 10 full-length so-called "demos" and 4 split-EPs that earned him an excellent reputation and large following When the Swiss came "out of hiding" with "Im Wald" ("In the Forest") in 2020, his regular debut album even entered the German charts underscoring the organically achieved status. Each full-length release, including the so-called "demos" and regular albums, constitutes a chapter of a continuing story, which PAYSAGE D'HIVER narrate about a protagonist called "Der Wanderer", who roams an otherworld realm. In "Geister", the Wanderer has a lucid dream in which he meets beings from another dimension, which is in fact our world. To him, we terrestrials appear as the ghosts. Our only means of contacting the Wand...

  Music has informed my opinions on many subjects over the years. One of those opinions is that cross-pollination and cultural borrowing and mixing is not only a good thing, it is the only thing that matters in this world. Seeing something interesting from one place get mixed with something interesting from another place and turned into a new, third, thing - that's just really cool. And no, I'm not just talking about music anymore. But I am talking about it because of Cult of Occult 's new EP Ruin . Imagine 1980's Finnish doom meets 1990's sludge metal not in Louisiana, but in Lyon, France. Or perhaps you'd prefer to imagine Buzz Osborne and Krist Novoselic being inspired to start bands not by seeing Black Flag , but by seeing Bethlehem . Ruin by Cult Of Occult

  In 1886, workers gathered in Chicago to protest in support of limiting working hours to 8 per day instead of the usual 12-14. A bomb was planted by capitalists, which exploded and began a panic that was later smeared as a riot. The police, as American police always do, began shooting. They killed eleven people, and in doing so, kick started the modern labor movement. Every May 1st we pay homage to these martyrs of labor by downing tools for a day, to honor their sacrifice and to flex the muscle of the only class that has ever built anything. Today is for reminding the capitalist class and their boot-licking sycophants that they need us, but we have never needed them. What better way to kick off that day than with some French anarchist black metal cut up artists making an album about work and it's uselessness to modern people? This album is anarchic in all meanings of the word. "We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make e...