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This guest review comes courtesy of Brihadeesh, who writes and publishes over at Peregrinator Reviews. Check out their excellent and ever-expanding back-catalog of reviews, and give them a follow over on Bluesky!
Written by: Brihadeesh
An oil painting of two knights clad in dark steel armour, one with a mallet and dagger and the other with a broadsword, effortlessly fighting off a horde of cross bearing crusaders is a hell of a powerful image when it comes to a black metal album cover. And this album really reprises this image through the music. Antifascist as fuck, and releasing via explicitly the left-leaning Realm & Ritual, no less, this is easily one of the best albums I've played this year. I recently came across a new band I thought I would enjoy but then a quick glance at their Wikipedia page showed me some pretty nasty things about their frontman—Jon Nödtveidt—and it was about how he was involved in a misanthropic cult of sorts and was arrested in and convicted of the murder of a homosexual man. The band was one of the "pioneers" of the Swedish melodic black metal scene. Like I discussed in my last piece on the new Wild Beyond EP, black metal in recent years has gone through several changes and the most notable of them being that it has been reclaimed and reinvented as Red and Anarchist Black Metal (RABM). People like Jon here are not revered and instead, a left-leaning or otherwise anarchist philosophy is embraced in the music that is made. Lyrics are often anthemic and call for rebellion against capitalist oppressors, often embellished with samples of powerful speeches and news reports of violence against the marginalised. What's even more powerful is that queer and otherwise oppressed people are in the forefront of these bands, and nothing makes me happier as a neuroqueer person than to see fellow queer people ripping out blastbeats and shredding some of the sickest riffs in town.
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Written by: Brooklyn Artemis
British summertime is the perfect time for sludge metal. The air is breezeless and humid, pressing downwards, cooking us in our homes and office cubicles. Flying ants mass at our windows, horde-like, a many-legged Great Heathen Army swarming over dying grass and melting bitumen. Government officials at every level are acting like proper bastards, though this is a less seasonal thing than one would hope for. It is in these oppressive climes that I revisited a growing back catalogue of modern UK sludge. The likes of Mastiff (a contributor to the Cyberpunk OST) and Swamp Coffin, both with excellent full length releases last year, have been fixtures of my listening recently. But another band I saw live a few years ago above a record shop in Sheffield also caught my attention during my heat-addled odyssey--Stockport’s Under. Appropriately for a band whose own Instagram describes them as a ‘tentacle K-hole nightmare’, there’s some interesting stuff going on in Under’s discography. The trio, formed in 2015, have released a series of EPs, splits, and full lengths that have honed a unique brand of progressive and at times psychedelic sludge. Musically, Under often swing between extremes, switching from slower and heavier riffs to quicker sections that display sludge’s hardcore influence, while incorporating a mix of almost soft cleans, high screams, and shouted vocals. Training Resource #5 (the band’s fifth release) was released in November 2020, just before the beginning of the second COVID lockdown in the UK, and I can remember that you could almost taste the resignation to what was to come on the air. The art of the EP, which is up there with the most unique metal album covers around, actually reminds me of that time, of that bizarre online academic and corporate culture that emerged during the pandemic, and never really went away. 
Written by: Jacob
Horns. Dissonance. A chant. This is the greeting from Tooth and Nail, the latest outing from Dormant Ordeal. It can feel almost insignificant in the moment, as so many throwaway "intro" tracks in metal albums can. But as soon as things roll into "Halo of Bones", intentionality appears. This is not an album where moments are thrown out lightly, even 46 second intro tracks. From the first proper track, "Halo of Bones," you'll be getting, well, the "bones" of the entire album. Atmosphere. Intense groove. A touch of black metal. Blasting death metal. These are the foundation upon which Dormant Ordeal builds their masterwork. All present, all introduced at exactly the right time, and none overstaying their welcome. The seamless weaving of all these elements immediately give Tooth and Nail a sense of magnitude and heft. It becomes evident over time, though, that these tools were used to create something lasting and emotionally charged. Anger, pain, panic, defeat, and resurgence are all felt not just in individual tracks, but in their placement and flow.
Guest Post by: Ria Wigley
1. Old Nick
If there’s one thing that defines the microgenre of Vampyric Black Metal other than lyrics and imagery about vampires, it is flamboyant, dare I say CAMP riffs, a big focus on atmospheric synths, and absurd song titles. No band exemplifies this better than Old Nick. In fact, the 16-bit inspired keyboard sounds were almost too silly for me to really enjoy this band upon first listen, but after giving it more time I quickly grew to love it. There is an inherent silliness to the obsessive adherence to a particular aesthetic that most vampire media portray, even when it still manages to be coldly sinister and atmospheric at the same time, and Old Nick is the perfect musical representation of that. If you were hoping for second wave worship with some more gothic elements...well this isn’t that, it’s much better. Plus, who doesn’t love song titles like "Blood, Blood, Blood, Blood, Blood" or "Spooky Wicker Basket 1994 (Yes, a witch!)" Recommended album: A New Generation of Vampiric Conspiracies |
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