Remember a few years ago when every major outlet was running articles about how post-metal stagnation was the final signal that the genre was denying? Most of them were gleeful, fueled by a complete misunderstanding of how widely varied and versatile the genre really was. The reality was that, often…
In their much anticipated follow-up to Mariner, the band returned to their core writing mode free of outside collaborators for their Metal Blade debut A Dawn To Fear, and have simplified their songwriting process to eschew a full-album concept, instead offering a collection of independent songs without preconceptions in the writing process. The result of this experiment is a record that is massive, plodding, expansive, and pensive, if not daunting and exhausting for those who aren’t too keen on The Big Slow™
One thing I can say about Russian Circles is that they have always been consistent. I’ve seen them open for Minus the Bear in Brooklyn in 2006, headline a tiny club in Milford, Connecticut in support of Geneva in 2009, open for Coheed and Cambria and Between the Buried and…
Combining atmospheric sludge and doom, featherweight post-rock and lashings of black metal come Latitudes with their most recent outing Part Island, a meditation on the elemental link between the natural world and the self, moor and mind if you will, and the slow but sure disintegration of one, and by…
Like most Granite Staters, I’ve driven through the Bedford Toll Plaza countless times. It sits on New Hampshire’s main highway connecting the state’s three biggest cities. In many ways, it’s a perfect symbol of a mundane daily routine: virtually everyone commuting from or above Manchester down to Massachusetts passes through…
It’s been a long six years. Times have changed greatly since Pelican’s last record. Post-rock – as Nick, Eden and company regularly detail – has wiggled its tendrils into an increasingly diverse pool of influences, blurring things to a point where I’m not even sure where to draw the lines…
Every once in a while, we all find that band or record that just gets us. Everyone has their own preferences, of course, and we all know what those are. Ever so rarely, we come across something that combines many of our likes together into something we can truly love.…
Despite the seemingly straightforward nature of drone, the style is a great deal more varied in practice. For drone metal in particular, the idea of drawing out doom to an even more low, slow and meditative state relies on each individual band’s interpretation of the genre they’re extrapolating from. As…
Nature is not only an archetype; it is the mother of all archetypes, a kind of overarching category for ideas that run the gamut from frightening, soothing, parental, scathing, looming, and infinitesimal. Among these can be counted such mainstays as homeostasis, the kind of effortless and delicate balance a lot…
Brighton, UK-based Yuxa have an intuitive grasp on the ideal ebbs and flows of atmospheric sludge and doom. In a genre characterized by (sometimes overly) patient build-ups and measured, drawn-out compositions, it’s refreshing to hear a band who make getting to the point possible within the post-metal/sludge framework. The slow-burning fierceness…
