Heavy Delinquency – The Clearing Path

Eden Kupermintz
Heavy Delinquency
The Clearing Path are more than able and willing to rise to the challenge of esoteric black metal. This one man project, spearheaded by one Gabriele Gramaglia, hails from Italy and makes the type of black metal which straddles the line with death via sheer technicality and tone. The project's second full length release, Watershed Between Firmament And The Realm of Hyperborea (a name which instantly refer back to the intro paragraph of this article and the ideas of radical esoteric-ism), is a twisting exploration of these ideas, constantly offering up something new. Where-ever it goes, it's coated in this impenetrable sheen of bewildering musical composition and a vast, cavernous approach to production. This creates an album that's abrasive in ways far beyond the fact that the vocals are growls/shrieks.

Dysrhythmia – The Veil of Control

Mike McMahan
Reviews
There is a dissonance to the music of Dysrhythmia not employed by the above bands, and, obviously, Neil Peart has never employed blast beats, though Rush is perhaps a great analogy for what Dysrythmia aspires to, as both bands feel collaborative and feature equal contributions to the larger sound. But these extreme metal flourishes are only one element of the music and weave seamlessly with the larger tapestry, rather than being the dominant color, resulting in an album influenced by extreme metal, as opposed to an extreme metal album.

Hey! Listen To Lesser Life!

Heavy Blog
Listen To This!
It really looks like there's a lot of great new material coming out of the humid haze of North Carolina lately, this time in the form of some savage deathgrind. If you like your songs short and sweet but ultimately oppressive and nihilistic, then you've got it right here with Lesser Life, a savage quartet who have just released another excellent and concise EP. Bone Deep & Numbing takes a lot more influence from brutal death metal than their earlier (and more blackened) releases, and there's even some sludgier moments to help break things up too. While Lesser Life doesn't really want to commit to any particular style of extreme metal, they're unquestionably dedicated to putting out whatever's the most intense possible idea at the time.