Last year, Portugal’s Gaerea blew me away with one of the more expansive and adventurous black metal records I’d heard in a good while in Unsettling Whispers. When I heard that members of the band had formed a death-doom project called Oak I low key lost my mind. “Sculptures”, the…
The Drowning are a very good band. A great band, in fact. Their brilliant mix of death and doom metal stylings, which melds the highly melodic and funereal dirges of Mournful Congregation and Evoken with the precision and emotion of a Paradise Lost or My Dying Bride, has produced a…
There are few, if any, labels in the metal world that can match the unique hot-streak of Indian juggernaut Transcending Obscurity Records. Every few weeks it seems, another record drops from this label that transfixes me. Australian doom merchants Illimitable Dolor and their sophomore record, Leaden Light, are the latest…
November might as well be dubbed “the month that time forgot”. In the States, it at least has Thanksgiving in it, which gives it some kind of unique character. Elsewhere, that’s not even true and in many places, it’s just one more month. It suffers from coming right before December…
Greetings, heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! It’s that time of the month once again where we delve into the deepest of fuzzy riffs and slowest of bangers. I have to admit, I both love and hate this time of year when it comes to music. Everyone rushes to get their records…
Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked treasure…
Composing an album with the backdrop of other media is a daunting task. As we discussed earlier this year with our review of Ehnahre’s Theodore Roethke-referencing album The Marrow, it’s difficult to create music that accurately conveys the emotional context of the source material while also extrapolating enough to create a unique voice that can stand on its own. This is particularly true for albums that reference movies and similarly complex texts; whereas a novel or poem contains just text to decode, films contain several more elements that need to be interpreted, most challenging of which is the pre-existing music already linked to the visuals and script. In these types of situation, it’s a smarter bet to draw inspiration from a film while pursuing a larger thematic ideal, which is exactly how Bolt Gun succeed on their colossal, one-track album Man Is Wolf to Man. By drawing influence from a myriad of sources that bolster a stated pursuit—particularly Soviet and Ukrainian filmmaker/writer Konstantin Lopushansky’s dystopian film Posetitel Muzeya (Visitor of a Museum) as well as works by Soviet filmmakers/writers Andrei Tarkovsky and Krzysztof Kieślowski—the band realizes the grandiosity of this endeavor with an excellent display of thematic metal aimed at capturing the “existential horror of Stalinist Russia.”
Black metal has the unique trait of being a simultaneously phenomenal and abysmal genre. With an innately prolific trait and a relatively simple, consistent formulaic structure, the genre has spawned countless innovators as well as countless more bedroom warriors churning out one “Name Your Price” Bandcamp dud after another. Unfortunately,…
Is it possible for Lycus to be considered doom metal veterans following their sophomore album, Chasms? If their mastery in the craft of creating foreboding yet strikingly beautiful funeral doom is any count, this young band are certainly on track for advanced placement.
For those who missed our last installment, we post biweekly updates covering what the staff at Heavy Blog have been spinning. Given the amount of time we spend on the site telling you about music that does not fall neatly into the confines of conventional “metal,” it should come as…
