I’m not generally a fan of post-metal, what with its simplistic, introspective riffing that goes nowhere and boring atmosphere, all in the hipsterish conceit that it’s actually more thoughtful than being, I dunno, good. But then there’s Portugal’s Process of Guilt who put so much venom and nightmarish tension into the post-metal compositions on their […]

Over the years Moonspell have packaged their gothic, lycanthropic atmosphere into many different forms, from deathy black metal to radio rock to electronic metal and back again. Over the recent few albums they’ve settled into a rhythm of making heavy, violent metal albums with the huge and dramatic orchestration of the more radio-friendly stuff layered […]

The debut album by Norway’s Omit is a monstrous work: five symphonic doom metal songs stretched across two discs, with song lengths between fourteen and twenty six minutes. Fortunate for me, I love long songs (hell, my favourite song of all time is “Close to the Edge” by Yes.) Omit perform a highly orchestrated, beautiful […]

For the last entry in my 2011 Shiver Records catch-up run we have the debut release of Belgium’s Marche Funèbre, a swampy ooze of melancholy death-doom. One thing I need to just get out of the way is that I simply despise the clean singing on this disc. It’s a warbly, pseudo-operatic, sadghost voice that […]

If Satyricon weren’t boring they’d be Panchrysia. I hadn’t heard of these Belgian black metallers until recently so I had a peek through their back catalog. I was surprised to find how familiar the riffs were. After two releases with an oppressive, Zyklon-esque production, 2008’s Deathcult Salvation adopted more of the cold, clinical style of […]

Bands like to create albums that feel like a cohesive experience with a beginning, middle, and end, sort of like a good story, whether or not they’re telling one. And as such you’ll find a ridiculous number of albums with intro tracks that are sometimes really cool but are generally disposable. Warbeast MMVIII (since renamed […]

“Black,” the first song on Holy Wrath, the debut album by Latvian band Diseim, is an absolutely fantastic death metal song. Big, groovy riffs; odd time signatures; a melodic-without-being-wimpy chorus; guttural, double tracked vocals; and simply great songwriting. It makes a loud, bold statement. Aaaannndddd… I should just leave it at that. I kind of […]

Sometimes you just need some filth in your life and Swedish band Septekh are all too eager to provide it in buckets. It seems like they pull every stop they can think of to make the whole experience as uncouth as they can, pushing their death-thrash riffs through a sludgy, somewhat dark production and injecting […]

I’ve always had a soft spot for Borknagar‘s brand of melodic, blackened, folky, progressive, epic metal. That’s not a genre, just a lot of well-deserved adjectives. Their self-titled debut set a blueprint for what was to come, and though they’ve improved their production quality and changed members over time, main man Øystein G. Brun has […]