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,…
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 certain electronic artists who have logical crossover appeal with metal fans; Merzbow and Prurient immediately come to mind, as well as industrial-leaning acts like Author and Punisher. Yet, there are other purveyors of dark electronics whom I’ve always felt should have more fans in the metal community, specifically…
One of my favorite aspects of being a music writer is being able to spend plenty of time dissecting albums I review for the blog ahead of their release. And for albums like Out of Time, that extra time is nothing short of a blessing. The album is hardly your father’s…
Anonymity in black metal has always been a double-edged sword. While it’s refreshing to see artists solely focused on their music and presentation rather than themselves as artists, it can also be frustrating to be unable to spotlight bands that truly excel at their craft. This latter point certainly applies…
It’s not entirely unusual to see a metal band with an established sound take a left turn into new sonic territory. Adding a new subgenre tag, incorporating a synthesizer, or mixing up the songwriting playbook are fairly common, and often welcome. It’s a bit unusual, however, to see a band…
No genre has experienced a more distinct shift in its cultural purpose than classical music. What was once the sole form of musical expression in Western culture has been largely relegated to specific roles in society. Modern classical certainly hasn’t lost any of its esteem, but in terms of popular…
The purpose of this feature has always been to highlight the synthwave scene and, up until now, it’s mostly been in the service of highlighting one particular act per installment. This has created quite a backlog as a result, due to the fact that there are just so many acts…
The allure of extreme music, for most, comes from its roots in counter culture. The hippy-dippy era had no idea what the hell was happening when Iommi picked the first distorted tritone. Fast forward all the way to the present day and a lot of extreme music can be branded and catered to specific groups. Counter culture is consumer culture. Honest extreme music is much more difficult to come by and much more difficult to consume when it finally shows up. It doesn’t get much tougher to swallow than this. Primitive Man are the embodiment of an “acquired taste”; the Denver residents playing doom that most fans of doom can’t even stomach. Consumption of their new full length Caustic is not advisable for anyone of a weak disposition.
Subtlety isn’t a common approach when it comes to sludge metal, which rather favours blistering, distortion-focused guitars and thunderous drums since the notoriously volcanic heaviness of genre spearheads Electric Wizard and Weedeater. Although in a genre that finds it’s bands in a battle of extremes, seeing who can cause the most damage to the PA system with their amps, the 2010s have seen sludge been taken down a number of different avenues. We have Mastodon using it as a basis to conjure up progressive, multi-layered musical odysseys, Indian using noise experimentation to make it as hellishly freaky as possible, to Bongripper putting an emphasis on the direct riffs in creating a mood through repetition. However, we have Melbourne underground head-turners Sundr, dragging the style even further out to a much less assertive sound, yet a much more ethereal and tension-building experience on their vertiginous sophomore LP, The Canvas Sea.
