Last year I went through a pretty hardcore phase of melodic black metal where I was listening to classic like Dissection, Catamenia, Vinterland, and Sacramentum, as well as newer bands like Thormesis, Vindland, Wormwood and Störtregn. Somehow though, I completely overlooked Sweden’s Istapp (“icicle”) and their 2010 album, Blekinge and 2015 album, Frostbitten. But that has […]

The fourth album from Germany’s Thormesis, Freier Wille – Freier Geist, was my first exposure to this band, but that album was on and off my year end list for 2015, though it ultimately didn’t make the cut. The follow up, 2017s Trümmerfarben, didn’t strike me as positively for some reason and I didn’t even review […]

I’ve always been pretty knowledgeable when it comes to heavy/extreme metal and all its facets. All through my life, my fellow metalhead friends have referred to me as a metal encyclopedia. Like many die-hard metalheads, my affiliation with the genre has always been one from a “love and collect” aspect as opposed to merely a […]

It has been more than a thousand years since the minstrels, troubadours, and minnesingers of the Middle Ages strummed their lutes and cooed their poetry to eager and usually royal ears. Obsequiae, if they could travel back to those days, would have lulled the lords and ladies of court into wondrous reverie with a gentle opener […]

An oubliette, from the French word ‘oublier’ – to forget – is a dungeon. A particularly horrible and lonely sort of dungeon, little more than a hole in the ground. In you go, curled and cramped, and then a lid or stone is slid across the opening, trapping you in blackness while your body succumbs to pain, hunger, […]

Naglfar’s second album, Diabolical, is still one of the most successful ‘cold’ purchases I’ve ever made. And by cold, I don’t mean frosty black metal, although that obviously applies. No, in this case, I mean that I’d never heard the band before, and bought the album on a whim. This was back in 1999, the […]