Trumpet of Amdusias

  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

  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...

  Dance music for Forest Wankers? Well, It looks like I'll be buying this entire back catalog. Calling this post-metal is walking a fine line really. This is straight up Dead Can Dance worship filtered through a Russian atmospheric black metal lens.  Going a step further into the electronic part than Mesarthrim , Elderwind , or Lustre , to a place on the edge of both Trance and Dark Ambient, this is pretty intriguing stuff. Arcanist by Nebula Orionis

  Once upon a time, on the shores of Lake Lagoda, outside Saint Petersburg, there were three friends. These three friends played instrumental post-black metal. They played it well. They sort of invented a genre - where French blackgaze and instrumental post-metal met, and created a celestial cacophony. They called themselves Trna . Across three albums they created some very serious and ethereal post-metal (which I should probably talk about here at some point). But, somewhere along the way two of the three decided to explore less salubrious topics, and formed a side project for this more morose, depressing music. That side project is Olhava . This is their second album. It is magnificent. I'm not going to try to sell you on it. Just listen. With a cameo fom Austin Lunn of Panopticon on track 3, this is quite the album. Multi-instrumentalist Andrey Novozhilov and drummer Timur Yusupov describe their new journey with words of thoughtful contemplation: “When winter is just starting ...

  Attention nerds. This is your new favorite album. Why? Because it is not only really good post-metal, it comes with a historically based tabletop role-playing game as part of the package. First off, Kauan is a band was founded by a Russian who writes in Finnish but who moved to Ukraine and now lives in Estonia. As you do. Secondly, they make almost-vocal-less post metal that makes me think of Explosions in the Sky , Russian Circles and Pelican . This record for certain flirts with the piano-laden edge of the boundary between post-metal and flat out post-rock Mogwai worship territory. The title is a reference to the true story of an unidentified fleet of ships discovered in Northern Russia in 1930, with its crew and cargo perfectly frozen in time. And that is where the RPG bit comes in. Ice Fleet is a tabletop RPG adventure/module based on Into the Odd rules. - A unique combination of game and music album that aims to bring your play experience to a completely new level of im...

  Meanwhile, in France, the steady march towards the eventual unification off post-black metal and doom metal continues at a sufficiently stately pace. Having released a conceptual trilogy of albums based on the French neurobiologist Henri Laborit's comportemental experiments with rats hen confronted with aggression, Decline of the I began a new project. Danish philosopher, theologian, poet and social critic Søren Kierkegaard's writings are the focus of Johannes . Heavy topics, and equally heavy music. Grief filled melodic guitar work, augmented by blast beats, death-metal style rhythm guitars, and layer after layer of cinematic washes of chorus. However, the overall effect is much more modern black metal than funeral doom. I am reminded of Mgła much more than I am of, for instance, Swallow The Sun .      Johannes by Decline Of The I

  Ever get so sad about something that the only way to cope with it is to get mad? Ever looked at a tree and wanted to cry? Ever hugged a tree while wearing corpse paint? If the answer to these questions is yes, then I have an album for you. Call it blackened folkgaze. Call it post-black treegaze. Call it the ever nebulous "Cascadian" black metal. Whatever you prefer. Whatever you call it, this is a paean to the rapidly disappearing forests of the world. "In short, if Agalloch, WITTR or even old Ulver ever moved you, you need this." - TERRORIZER    Passage by ALDA

  So, I am just going to let Gore Tech tell the story of this album directly: What's all this then? Well, in short, it's a new musical side-project from myself celebrating the fusion of heavy metal and sub bass music with a 1970s High-Fantasy vibe for good measure. (I know, bare with me) To get a more in-depth look, it all started in 2015 with a Discogs page set up to buy and sell parts of my record collection after returning to the UK from Germany. The name is a play on 'Southern Lord' one of my all-time favourite record labels based in the US responsible for releasing records by bands such as: Sunn O))), Sleep, Earth and Goatsnake. Later I’d perform vinyl DJ sets under this moniker when invited to play a couple of shows in the UK around 2018/19. These sets comprised of music from my ever expanding collection of 70s prog-rock, doom, stoner, blues, fuzz, psych and even some folk and world music. Of course, we all know what happened immediately foll...

  Post-black metal? Blackened post-metal? How do I jam "atmospheric" in there? The hairs must be split and the genre guardians appeased! Either way, it's three tracks of comfortably kvlt occult satanic-panic black metal from this two-piece from the home of railway museums and solid league one football. I like it. It's dense and atmospheric, and gloomy and depressing like a nice blanket on a rainy day. It is however pretty typical of the post-black genre and will not be winning any awards for innovation. Not that it has to. It is a nice textured album that fits the bill and does exactly what it says on the tin. Tangled Divinations by 𝕷𝖚𝖓𝖌𝖙𝖔𝖚𝖈𝖍𝖊𝖗

  This is something different. I don't often see atmo-black albums from India. Definite shades of Mesarthrim here, but not in a derivative way. This is intense, highly emotive and personal music, but not in a sad boi noizes kind of way. Instead in a moody, grand, profoundly weird way. Spanning multiple genres, but tied together by vocals that play like another instrument (my favorite kind), this is quite a journey of an album. Heavenless by Lesath

  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

 This is one of those albums I didn't want to like. Have you ever felt that way? Like an album was not so much your kind of thing as it was pandering to you? That's how I felt about this when I heard the teaser track a while back. It felt, I don't know, focus grouped maybe, to be the sort of album I would like. Fortunately, I got over my pretension and gave it another listen when it was released. Yes, it is still almost eerily the perfect sort of album for me: nature obsessed, human hating atmospheric black metal with post-rock influences and unabashedly emotional. However, I have lost the feeling that it was assembled cynically. This is truly a great album, and destined to become a classic here at the Forest Wanker Compound. Old Growth have done something really special here. Mossweaver by Old Growth