Japan’s ultimate power trio Boris have been blasting out heavy rockers, sludgy drone doom and psychedelic hardcore for nearly two decades now, entering a highly productive and musically diverse phase with 2011’s New Album. This era […]
The first Beyond Dawn release I heard was the “Longing for Scarlet Days” EP, a droning black metal affair with a bleak goth rock—dare I say Celtic Frost-influenced—atmosphere and a trombone. With its murky production, […]
“Electric Sulking Machine” is a uniquely light reprieve in Beyond Dawn’s discography, having very little metal and not much of the electropop sound that would replace it. It’s a sparse, lethargic pop record with subtle […]
“Revelry” is pretty bleak in a subdued kind of way, a post-black metal doom album with a subtly experimental bent and an expressive rock sensibility. The album’s a little like a more metallic late-period Swans, […]
“Blood on Ice” is one of the essential metal albums, being both the termination point of black metal and the beginning of Viking metal, years before either sound became full-fledged genres. Some might argue about […]
“Starfire Burning” was my first foray into the pulp fantasy universe of Bal-Sagoth. Somehow a college radio station in Las Vegas got a hold of a promo and put it into heavy late-night rotation. And […]
In my opinion (which counts for a lot in some parts of rural Honduras), “Battle Magic” remains the crown jewel of the Bal Sagoth filmography. I say filmography because Bal Sagoth albums are multimedia experiences […]
“La Maquerade Infernale” was and remains a tremendously influential album. Arcturus was largely responsible for popularizing a more theatrical strand of atmospheric metal, and “La Masquerade” was the band’s defining statement, a grotesque and vaudevillian […]
“Des Winters finsterer Gesell” tells the dark story of Der Finsterer Gesell, a bitter misanthrope who wanders from homestead to homestead in the Alps in the dead of winter, murdering their inhabitants. The music, often […]
A Forest of Stars’ 2012 A Shadowplay for Yesterdays found the English band stepping up their game with a collection of extreme metal songs as deep as it was broad, audaciously cycling through a taxonomy of mostly British […]
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