Written by: Izzy
So normally, I like to give a little background in the intro paragraph of my reviews about the band I’m reviewing--some of their history, or how I came to discover the album. But in the case of May Our Chambers Be Full, Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou's recent cooperative album, neither artist is one I’m particularly familiar with, despite their long and storied careers. Thou are a band by which I’ve briefly listened to a couple albums and previous splits; they’re a very traditional sounding sludge metal band and I was never crazy about them. Not a bad band, but certainly not one that ever amazed me. Emma Ruth Rundle, on the other hand, I knew nothing about previously. After some quick googling I found that she’s made a handful of solo albums to decent acclaim, her style towing the line between singer-songwriter, dream pop, folk, and shoegaze, but has also been a member in post-rock and atmo-sludge bands. She also notably helps run the record label Sargent House, a rather eclectic group of diverse and beloved artists, most notably featuring Chelsea Wolfe and Kristin Hayter (A.K.A. Lingua Ignota.)
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Village stalwart Izzy is delivering a fresh retrospective review every Friday! Make sure to check in weekly for a dose of nostalgia. - Ed. Written by: Izzy In spite of my adoration for many of punk’s subgenres, from metalcore to screamo to post-hardcore and more, I tend to struggle with enjoying the older and purer forms of punk. I could talk about the three aforementioned styles for hours and hours, but ask me about my favourite hardcore punk bands and my mind goes blank. Like, there’s uh…I like a couple Black Flag albums I guess? Crass and Spazz are okay too, and there’s a handful of Japanese hardcore bands like Gauze or Crow that I enjoy a lot, oh there’s Rudimentary Peni! Those guys are amazing. What about Midori, do they count? Eh they’re probably too artsy to be hardcore punk, much closer to jazz punk. I could maybe come up with one or two more, but you get the point. Amongst that tiny list of bands, Fucked Up would probably seem like an odd choice, as most people know them for their later punk rock opera albums, but rather early into their career yet quite late in the grand scheme of hardcore punk sits an oddity dear to my heart: their 2008 sophomore LP The Chemistry of Common Life. Village stalwart Izzy is delivering a fresh retrospective review every Friday! Make sure to check in weekly for a dose of nostalgia. - Ed. Written by: Izzy Get out your rubber spiders, fake blood, and dollar store fog machine--it’s October 30th and tomorrow is Halloween! It’s my favourite holiday, probably unsurprisingly if you know me, and so I wanted to make a special review for you all this Hallow’s Eve. I thought about it for a bit, and decided I would review the scariest album I’ve ever heard, now for most people that might take some thinking, but for me I immediately knew the one and only album deserving of that title for me. Wormphlegm’s debut project… *ahem*, In an Excruciating Way Infested With Vermin and Violated by Executioners Who Practise Incendiarism and Desanctifying the Pious, a 32 minute single track demo which for the sake of brevity I will refer to shortened as In an Excruciating Way.
Written by: Izzy
It’s time for Sleeping Village trivia hour again. I’ve mentioned this on occasion, but let it be known: I think Iceland has the best current black metal scene. Every year there seems to be a new album coming from over there that blows my mind with their love of claustrophobic yet hypnotizing harmony and low commanding growls rather than icy shrill shrieks. While I do have a soft spot for Poland and Sweden as well, Iceland is where it’s at. So, you’d expect me to have been all over this band by now, right? Well, I listened to their collaborative release with Wormlust last year and thought that was good, but I never listened to their solo stuff until around a month ago when their third album, fittingly named Skáphe³, was suddenly the latest talking point around all my black metal loving friends, so I listened to it and well…holy shit. Village stalwart Izzy is stepping up the retrospective game, and will henceforth deliver a fresh one every Friday! Make sure to check in weekly for a dose of nostalgia. - Ed. Written by: Izzy Have you ever wondered what John Zorn sodomizing a saxophone at a Godflesh concert would sound like? Well, if so, firstly let me say you have excellent taste, and secondly, I think it would sound a hell of a lot like God’s 1992 cult classic Possession. For the shamefully uninitiated, God are a strange and short lived band formed in 1987 with an expansive list of semi-notable underground musicians that have occupied its roster. They employed a rather bizarre and grotesque blend of industrial metal, avant-garde jazz, and noise rock, resulting in an aberrant creation I truly feel no reservations in calling one of a kind. A frenzied and insane concoction of influences, Possession is an album that, if released today into the musical landscape of streaming and accessibility, would no doubt in my mind be hailed as a masterpiece. Village stalwart Izzy is stepping up the retrospective game, and will henceforth deliver a fresh one every Friday! Make sure to check in weekly for a dose of nostalgia. - Ed. Written by: Izzy Glass Casket are a bit of a personal gem. While they’re far from being the first deathcore band, their 2004 album We Are Gathered Here Today… is, in my mind, one of the most iconic and seminal deathcore releases out there. It is one of the earliest examples of a modern-ish sounding deathcore release, and, without a doubt, one of my all-time favourites. But as with many amazing bands, they are sadly overlooked, because their work was sandwiched in a period of time just before deathcore blew up. Glass Casket, alongside many others, ended up getting forgotten in favour of their contemporaries who would go on to bring the genre both its popularity and infamy.
Written by: Izzy
Chances are, unless you’re a big nerd like me who regularly seeks out weird bands in weird genres like cybergrind and power electronics, you’ve probably never heard of this band in question. But for a blossoming noisehead like myself, albums like this are candy to me, meaning I absolutely love it and it’s probably not healthy. The description-defying Kenyan noise duo Duma have only been with us a short while, officially forming in 2019. Their eponymous first offering to the world is 2020's best industrial-related release at time of writing, an opinion I expect to continue holding through the rest of the year as I am thoroughly impressed by and cannot get enough of the dizzying blend of noise these two employ.
Written by: Izzy
Svalbard are a relatively new face in the world of metal and punk, their first release having been unleashed upon the world in 2014. Since then, they’ve been a consistent talking point for both their gorgeous melodies and blend of neocrust, post-rock, screamo, and blackgaze, as well and their political stances, frequently angering basement-dwelling neckbeard metalheads who proceed to furiously write a tweet about how women are ruining metal--Oops, was gonna try and not get too political on this one. My bad. When I Die, Will I Get Better? is in many ways a logical trajectory for the band. Elements of post-rock and blackgaze have always been present in their music, starting at their debut One Day This All Will End, becoming more pronounced on their amazing 2018 release It’s Hard to Have Hope, and finally reaching its climax here on their latest. Those influences have become pushed so far to the forefront to the point where I think calling them a neocrust/blackgaze band wouldn’t be too far off, but that descriptor would still be missing something.
(TW: This review features topics related to depression, death, and suicide, take care of yourself and don’t read this if you aren’t in a healthy mental state where this type of content could bother you, your life is precious and there are people who care about you. <3)
Written by: Izzy
When people think of depressing music, often they think of albums like A Crow Looked At Me, Carrie & Lowell, Skeleton Tree, Deathconsciousness, or maybe Sunbather. Albums built on an atmosphere of helplessness, ones that allow everything to slowly sink into your pores, the malaise of existence, the yearning for more, the needless tragedy of death, the feeling that nothing will ever get better. Rarely do people think of an album as aggressively depressing, one that beats itself against your skull over and over again, screaming into your ears the throes and deepest depths of human emotion where not even sadness can lie, where all that’s left is rage. In a word: Black Sheep Wall’s I’m Going To Kill Myself.
Written by: Izzy
2019, I can pretty confidently say, was “the year of black metal” for me. Not only was the quantity of good black metal extremely high, but the quality of the best releases was unheard of. Normally every year I find maybe 3-5 albums in most of my favourite genres that I love and hold onto, but 2019 gave me TWELVE (12) black metal albums I’ve revisited since the year's end, some of them half a dozen times by now. Amongst those phenomenal albums was Serpent Column’s Mirror In Darkness, my first brush with the band, which certainly set my expectations high and they were quickly fulfilled by their EP/mini album Endless Detainment from earlier this year. I was blown away and already left extremely impressed, but clearly even that wasn’t enough for Serpent Column as shortly after it was followed up by their latest opus, and topic of today’s discussion, Kathodos. |
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We provide thoughtful reviews of music that is heavy, gloomy...and loud enough to wake us from slumber. Written by a highfalutin peasantry!
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