Trumpet of Amdusias

  What happens when you lock the lead singer of a antifascist political punk band from the UK in the house for a year? Apparently she makes a Skyrim themed black metal album. A really really good Skyrim themed black metal album. Noctule is the new black metal solo project from Serena Cherry (Svalbard). During the UK national lock down in 2020, Serena decided to write an entire black metal album themed to the RPG computer game Skyrim. Each song is about different dungeons, story lines and weapons within the award-winning game. She notes: “I have always associated Skyrim with black metal. The snowy mountain settings, the morbid themes, the Norse mythology backbone – it just goes hand in hand for me.” Prior to her 10 year career as the front woman of Svalbard, Serena previously played in a black metal band and has been excited to get back to her musical roots. With hypnotic, interlocking tremolo guitar leads, pummeling blast beats and reverb drenched vocals; Noctule sees Ser...

  I have always had a bit of a weird relationship to Krallice . They are a band I am supposed to like. After all, I pretty much make everyone I could find listen to every Schammasch , Imperial Triumphant , Ulcerate , and Zhrine album I could. I like bicycles and obnoxiously hoppy IPAs. I own and use beard wax. But for nine albums Krallice have always smelled (felt?) to me like a bunch of prog nerds wearing black metal as a costume to a frat party. I have just never clicked with their let's be weird so people will call us the weird guys shtick. Then the * gestures broadly in the direction of coronavirus * everything happened, and bands across the world had to find new ways to make music other than "hang out 24-7 and try to make things". It seems that forcing these nerds out of their own private guitar center idaho was a good move. The forced separation and out of studio time has resulted in a far less sterile album than previous outings. This is, instead, chock full of ...

  From yesterday's black metal tinged post-rock to now some post-rock tinged black metal. Swedish D-Beat black metal mavens with a love of post rock flourishes, Dödsrit are exactly the type of hard to properly pin into one little genre box band I like. Described by the band as "an eulogy for the hell we call our home" this is proper end of the world slow burn crust punk fused with grief stricken atmo-black and just enough potentially uplifting post-rock influences to keep the razor from your wrists for just a bit longer. Mortal Coil by Dödsrit

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...

  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

  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

  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

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

  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...

Rage of Devils is a one-person queer, anti-fascist, experimental black metal project hailing from Kentucky. Imagined as a rebuke to the bigotry and injustice swirling around the States, the aesthetic is one in which the Devil has come, to punish the wicked. Fusing the tropes of second wave black metal to the now more vital electronica and witch house genres by using the glue of dungeon synth is a pretty rad idea.  And for the most part, it is successful, without being the sort of over the top wall of noise you might expect from gluing bombastic to bombastic. There is a lot of a sound that I can only describe as Southern Hate Metal that I instantly recognize. Shades of both Joe Buck and ANTiSEEN , with a heavy helping of Darkthrone and Khold . Life of Horror by Rage of Devils

  Spectral Lore has always operated outside of the black metal "mainstream", forcefully rejecting its troubled racist homophobic history while digging deep into it's musical aesthetic. Spectral Lore is Ayloss, a singular Greek titan of weird metal. He has at least two other projects I know about; a creepy dungeon synth thing and a melodic blackened death metal project. This working outside the norm means some things that should be obvious just aren't. This is not exactly easy listening for either black metal purists or post- or prog- fans. Are there weird time signatures? Yes. Are there jazz-like trills on weird riffs? Yes. Are there hooks? No. What exactly is going on here? Why have I not thrown this record away? Why do I keep listening to it again and again? Ετερόφωτος by Spectral Lore

  Balmog hail from the rainy northwest of Spain, in Galicia, just outside of Vigo. They play pummeling blackened death metal. They have a new EP out in advance of next month's LP EVE.  This EP also has two covers, "Cripta" by Machetazo and "Esa Extraña Sonrisa" by Spanish postpunk cult band Parálisis Permanente . I don't get excited about too many Spanish bands, as the NWoBHM spirit infects most things Iberian metal, but this is a solid band with a pretty decent history of good blackened death, so I am actually looking forward to the release. Enjoy! Desacougo EP. by Balmog

  Polski metal mocny, polski metal zły, polski metal niszczy! Poland has pretty much always had one of the most innovative, strongest, angriest metal scenes. I have almost always liked the albums that have made their way to me from that scene. This album is certainly no exception to that trend. Explosive, powerfully produced, emotionally battering, and with the wildest fucking lyrics I've ever read. Netflix, ogolona cipka. Tonę w wiadrze. Pełna i wściekła. Rosnę i rozlewam. Wszędzie brudzę się. Krzyczę, nikt nie sprząta. Netflix, a shaved pussy. I'm drowning in a bucket. Full and furious. I grow and spill. I get dirty everywhere. I'm screaming, nobody is cleaning. As someone who generally dislikes metal lyrics, singers, vocals, etc.. I am just over the moon about the violent dadaist filth poetry here. Bonus disgust for the crying baby / microwave sound sample. Listen, and be filth, worm Dom Człowieka by SZNUR

  2013 was a weird year. The US Government gave up on holding anyone accountable for the 2008 financial crash and the home loan scandal, Americans shrugged their shoulders at rampant drone strikes on civilians, Republicans tried to rig an election in a major city and suffered no consequences, right wing terrorist attacks reached a level where they joined mass shootings, extrajudicial police killings of marginalized people, and endless foreign war as mere background noise to the American experience, and the whole country kind of woke up to the fact that running an entire political party on HOPE sorts of ends up with a NO WE CAN'T feeling. Somehow, I don't remember exactly how, an album by a Canadian band called Anti-Freeze crossed my path. Lo-Fi, harsh, raw, angry as fuck. A perfect soundtrack to the collapse many could smell on the air but wasn't quite on top of us yet. A second and third album followed, chronicling the continuing slide of America from idiotic HOPE to simm...

  TRVE KVLT BLEK METAL. Black Metal Without Adjectives. However you want to signal that a band or an album is orthodox, foundational, traditional, what have you - this is it. 100% blast beats, tremolo picking, and wraith-rasp shrieks. This is crudeness as an art form. Spectral Wound are now the keepers of the black flame. There is zero nostalgia here. This is true modern black metal, but also exactly what 90's black metal was.  I'm going to go ahead and predict that this will be my black metal AotY. It would take truly herculean effort to make better black metal than this. A Diabolic Thirst by SPECTRAL WOUND

NOTE: There are two bands called misotheist. This review is about the antifascist blackened thrash misotheist, not the Norwegian black metal misotheist .  "Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ('When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun') to the frequent use of expressions such as 'degenerate intellectuals,' 'eggheads,' 'effete snobs,' 'universities are a nest of reds.' The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern cultural and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values." - Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism" June 22...

  Harsh Raw Black Metal meets melodic black metal in an alley to smoke meth and start a bar fight with one of their ex-fiance's new boyfriends. Fans of Lamp of Murmuur will find a lot to like on this album. Finnish black metal in execution, this is a nice kaleidoscope of glistening guitars and crashing cymbals, ambient and eerie atmospherics, raw, icy vocals. Think Taake , Windir and Forteresse . Blistering speed, but not just speed. Precision hate. Akt II: Fall by Narzissus

  Mare Cognitum is a one-man band created by Jacob Buczarski solely for the purpose of creating epic soundtracks to fleet battles in my favorite submarine spreadsheet simulator . That's totally not true, but it could be. EVE Online is a mostly tedious, occasionally heart-pounding MMO for people who nerds look down on as too nerdy. You know, the sort of people who like to drink beer and yell into their headsets at Russians in the middle of the night while listening to weird space metal. This album is perfect for that. It is presumably also very good for other purposes but I wouldn't know anything about that. Press play, turn it up, and undock. Solar Paroxysm by Mare Cognitum