Lurking somewhere between the doom stylings of It Will Come and the sludgy hues of Mares of Thrace, Swiss all female act shEver released their second full-length album, Rituals, earlier this year and it instantly gives a shot in the arm to all female bands, breaking away from the current trend of smoky voiced ‘vest metal’.  […]

I’m typically one that’s all for experimentation and avant-garde elements in music, I respect most musicians that push envelopes and boundaries with their music. However, sometimes it gets a little too much for me and that’s the case with Botanist — a one man plant-themed project delivered from the point of view of a man […]

Tort is yet another success from Spain’s blossoming doom scene. Spawned from the same fetid breeding ground that produced Eight Hands for Kali, Graveyard, and Warchetype, and featuring ex-members of Lords of Bukkake and Cuerno, Tort was formed out of a desire to play something other than “sad and slow doom”. Their debut for Totalrust […]

Israel’s Total Rust Music has carved out a nice little niche for themselves on the black/doom/sludge genre with a number of quality releases from the likes of Highgate, Lords of Bukkake, Pyramido, Funeralium and such. 2012 looks to be of to a similarly high quality start with a trio of releases by Spain’s Tort, French black […]

Here’s some of that sweet hot fire I glimpsed while reviewing Highgate’s sophomore album Shrines to the Warhead. This collection of demo and live tracks compiles the band’s 2005 and 2006 demos along with an unreleased track and two live recordings. Normally this type of material dump is only interesting to established fans but Black […]

Pyramido’s 2009 debut Sand was a decent, if repetitive, exercise in heavy rock sludge. Salt, their sophomore release, improves on Sand in nearly every way, featuring a wider array of influences and more variety. There’s still a problem of running riffs a little too long and the throaty, hoarse roaring vocals are at times overbearing […]

Highgate’s follow up to their 2008 debut is like a really interesting movie you end up feeling ambivalent about. A picture projecting sickly foreboding, a sense of dread and imminent mental and physical collapse but the plot meanders and at the end you’re left intrigued with no desire to watch it again. You’re left searching […]

Going solely by their name, you’d expect Lords of Bukkake to sound like one of those shitty goregrind bands with the pitch-shifted vocals and song titles like “Shit Eating Titty Whore Cunt Semen”. Thankfully, this is not the case. Instead of tedious goregrind, we’re blessed with some seriously classy doomed out sludge. The hack in […]

As the name might give away, For the Fallen is not happy-sunny-funtime music, and as such, should not be played at parties — unless, of course, the party is a funeral. Then it might be appropriate. France’s Mourning Dawn is the creator of this extreme exercise in depression and paranoia. It’s an unsettling slab of […]

Hyadningar’s The Weak Creation has been on my review list for a while now, sitting idle among a few goregrind and old-school death metal CDs like an orphaned stepchild. I’m glad I decided to play it before the first decade of the new millennium closed. Here’s one black metal album from 2009 that deserves to […]

It’s a well-worn horror cliché that no matter how far or how fast you run, the hulking, machete-wielding murderer behind you will somehow always manage to catch up with you – even while trudging along at a much slower clip. This pretty much sums up Paganus, an extreme-doom act hailing from Finland who’ve crafted an […]

I’ve never been a fan of the whole 1 song concept album. The only one that really set with me was Edge of Sanity’s “Crimson”, and I haven’t re-visited that in many years. Heck, even albums with just two lengthy songs like Moonsorrow’s last effort strains my patience. So here is a one song, 54 […]

From ever improving Israeli label Totalrust comes this rather impressive slab of sick French black doom from an act that features members of Heol Telwen, Ataraxie, Hyadningar, Mourning Dawn as well as suicidal German legends Bethlehem. This is 6 tracks and over 75 minutes of scrawling, twisted, painfully crawling doom with a tangible influence of […]

Here’s another addition to the depressive, doomy black metal genre from France’s Mourning Dawn, formed by Inborn Suffering’s (a pretty solid funeral doom band in their own right) Laurent, and while not quite as elite or disturbing as come of their county mates (Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega, Vehementer Nos, Obscurus Advocam, etc), and with […]

With some foreign releases under their belt, Israel’s Total Rust Music now turn towards their own country by way of the debut album from The Knell, and the fact this record was mastered by Greg Chandler of the UK’s Esoteric, should give you some idea as to Harm’s style. Rumbling, plodding classic doom/death metal with […]