So A while ago, I was having a crazy day and gardening was the main task at hand, but it was made all the better because El Jefe had sent me this promo and I was pretty anxious because of the “Black Metal meets Hawkwind” description in the press blurb. The promo went straight to […]

Sometimes I find myself needing a break from Death Metal, Black Metal, and those related sub-genres and I look for something heavy, but different. So the other day I went down a Helloween rabbit hole, Keeper of the Seven Keys 1&2, Walls of Jericho; those are two prime examples of precision German Power Metal, while […]

What do you get when you cross mid-90s Black Metal ie: Dark Funeral, The Abyss, Necrophobic and Dissection with Helloween, and Metallica? The kind of vibe that Bloodcross is laying down on Gravebound. These unholy Finns are firing on all thrusters with this debut full-length. After releasing the Abysmal Blood Demo in 2021, they (presumably) […]

Technical Death Metal is one of those sub-genres I must be in the mood for. The same goes for Power Metal, but I’m talking about Replacire and not Sonata Artica; the former being the Eric Alper driven death machine that I had no idea existed and the latter being one of the best Power Metal […]

Death. War. Pestilence. Famine. A dying planet gasping for breath as it is gripped in the throes of Armageddon. Legions of demons sweep across the land, killing all in sight with reckless abandon. As the skies fall and the moon becomes black as sackcloth, it is out of this malignant hatred that Downcross was formed […]

1990; Fuck I’m old. In Death Metal history, however, it’s like I’m still in my twenties and it was DEATH METAL. Bands were releasing albums left and right, Napalm Death, Morbid Angel; the Earache label alone was like a goddamn factory with its roster of bands. Not to be left out were these dudes from […]

Finland. When I think of Finland I tend to think of the recent film Sisu. It’s about this gold miner who finds the mother load in a vein of gold. Long story short, some Nazis are killed in fantastically thrilling ways.  While I was listening to this debut album from Kratti Matka Kohti Kosmista, I […]

25 years is a long time. Hell, over 25 years is a long time, and I’ve realized that a lot of the bands I love are coming up on that side of their longevity, which isn’t much next to the Rolling fucking Stones and we all know they’ve been doing it since the Triassic period […]

What do you think of when you hear the word fluids? Soda? Water? Urine, semen, blood? With the band Fluids you know what you’re about to get… the absolute shit beaten out of your eardrums. Songs about the slimey and worm ridden carcass of this decaying planet and the human shit that inhabit it. Reduced […]

I love French Black Metal with every beat of my Black heart. The French have always been pretty brutal; guillotines and revolution were a way of life for many years of the country’s history. Not to mention WW1 and then occupation by the Nazis in WW2. The conflict hardened the country and unfortunately inspired a […]

Blood. Guts. Rotting eyeballs. Spewing bile and bodily fluids, forced to drink vomit… have you heard of McCamey Manor? You probably have, it’s in the public consciousness as a nasty place where you get $20,000 if you make it through and you have to sign a waiver; basically saying the “actors” can do anything to […]

Grindcore is one of those genres that’s pretty hard to fuck up. It’s pretty safe to say that Napalm Death are the creators and innovators of the genre and since their inception, countless numbers of Grindcore bands popped up in almost every country, Wormrot in Japan, Nasum from Sweden and Brutal Truth in the States […]

By now it’s not a secret that Finland spews out some incredible Black Metal. I could sit here and name check every band and that would be boring as fuck. I’m guilty of it, and since I realize that I’m excluded from persecution and it’s usually in my introduction where I pull that shit anyway. […]

The Greek mythology and the pantheon of gods has always fascinated me. From as long as I was able to read at a decent level I’ve loved the stories of Achilles, and after reading the Iliad I was hooked. So it’s no surprise that I have a soft spot for Greek Black Metal and the […]

During the total eclipse of the sun earlier this year, I wasn’t as stupid as most of the population seems to have been by looking at the sun, I admit to taking pictures of it. It was a bit magical, I had a bonfire going, and through no consequence at all I ended up listening […]

The first time I heard Steve Moore was the soundtracks for Mayhem and The Mind’s Eye (2017 and 2016 respectively). Zombi is a collaboration between Moore and A.E. Paterra and I have taken a deep dive into their music since getting the promo for Direct Inject. Since their inception in 2001 they’ve released six studio […]

I love a good mystery. One of the most used introductions “it was a dark and stormy night” always set the mood for some sort of dark mischief. So, today is not dark and stormy, yet I have a mystery on my hands. It concerns this band that El Jefe sent me called Lvme and […]

Looking back to 1992. I was living in England at the time due to my dad being stationed there with the Air Force. I spent many hours in the base record store, I discovered so many bands while living over there and Atrophy was one of them. It was a track on a compilation called […]

Well, I used a flaming tree limb as an air guitar for the first time today (I should mention that I was pretending it was driftwood from some sunken wreck) so… that’s something new. But I couldn’t help it, something was possessing me and moving me forward to this lava black beach. Yeah, that’s right, […]

35 years. Existence and longevity come from quality and excellence. Releasing album after album with diabolical precision has been the Rotting Christ ethic throughout their career, since 1988 when they were a Grindcore band and then transitioning to Black Metal in the early 90s with 1993’s Thy Mighty Contract, they have forged and put together […]

What’s the heaviest band you’ve ever heard? Sunn O)))? Black Sabbath? Electric Wizard? I’m talking about music that is slower than a Sloth crossing a road. Dooooom! But where Mudshow is concerned… they mix into their music spoken word poetry from Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘A Season in Hell’ which [successfully] creates a foreboding atmosphere. This is […]

I’m an Albuquerque native, I’ve lived in New Mexico, specifically the Albuquerque area for the better part of my life, which makes me a local. The scene here is stronger than ever before, having been blessed by bands like Unearth, Infested Corpse, Laughing Dog, Manias and Smashed Hands. To the new generation of bangers with […]

When I was still a young 20 something discovering Death Metal, I ordered a sampler from a label called JL America through a magazine called Wild Rags. I still have the cassette in my collection and through that one little cassette tape I heard Impaled Nazarene, Pyogenesis, Disastrous Murmur and of course, Acheron. The track […]

It was a cold, frostbitten night when my phone notification showed a new message. I swiped the lock screen and saw it was from El Jefe himself, my editor. He was asking in an enigmatic fashion if I would like to review this new album from Wolves of Perdition. I said that I would give […]

Being in a league with bands like 1349, Tsjuder, Horna and Nargoroth must be a great feeling (or maybe not, they might hate each other) but either way making metal this black is what Funeral Winds have been consistent with throughout their career. Since 1992 the band has been the constant work of Hellchrist Xul […]