Uniqueness is often conflated with interesting ideas in our modern music consumption landscape. There’s plenty of experimental music that, while undeniably different, is pretty deniably good. I’ve encountered albums of all-acoustic black metal and blackened trip-hop on my travels, both of which defied the norms of their genres but were…
Short bursts of off-kilter aggression have yet to go out of style for me. As much as I’ve gravitated toward longer and more complex music, I still periodically revisit my high school affinity for the ’00s mathgrind and noisecore scene. I was addicted to bands like An Albatross, iwrestledabearonce, and…
There’s been much written about both the quality of vinyl and the lack thereof. I’m not interested in wading into the fidelity wars, but I do want to cite a recent “
Though I have no first-hand experience with this, my sense is that it’s more difficult for women and members of the LGBTQ+ to break into the relative mainstream of experimental music. Sure, you could argue that people with an affinity for “outsider” art would naturally be more inclined to accept…
Up to this point, Jute Gyte has made an almost annual tradition of releasing the boldest black metal album of the year. With this project, multi-instrumentalist Adam Kalmbach has channeled the black metal blueprint through classical composition techniques—microtonality and serialism, primarily—and paired the results with elements of dark ambient, industrial,…
That title, coming from this band, is honestly terrifying. We’re still reeling from Howling Sycamore’s debut release, a supergroup comprised of some of death metal’s best and making a weird type of avant-garde progressive metal, and here they stand before us with a promise of annihilation. Interestingly enough, Seven Pathways…
Sometimes music critics can benefit from adhering to the notion that “form follows function.” It’s an abstract use of the bauhaus principle, but one which feels especially relevant in the modern music landscape. We often slather genre tags on scenes and artists that are growing more and more stylistically agnostic,…
One of the fastest ways to a music critic’s heart is a seamless synthesis of styles. Anytime a group successfully blends adjacent or dissimilar genres, the results can push boundaries with a truly engaging, unique listen. Such is the case with Ache Pillars, the latest EP from one-person band Folian.…
There are plenty of fantastic bands that toil in the margins of relative obscurity. Some eventually find a wider audience and catapult themselves to various levels of fame, while others never reach that coveted status of instantly recognizable. It’s fitting, then, that Pennsylvania upstarts Veilburner signed with the aptly named…
*prognotes breaks down and analyses your favourite metal and progressive concept albums lyrically and musically. Read other entries in this series here. The last few years have yielded an incredible bounty of fantastic new music and 2016 was chief among them. Schammasch’s tremendous triple album, Triangle, was no exception as…
