It’s not every day that I get to premiere a classical music project sung and named entirely in French and also featuring some of my favorite voices in black metal adjacent spaces today. And yet, here we are. Forêt Endormie (“Sleeping Forest”) are all of the above, spearheaded by Jordan…
Welcome to Kvlt Kolvmn. Another month of hell, another month of premium black metal. Our favorite places may be unsafe to visit, but icy soundscapes of death and evil are always a healthy substitute. Hope your continued quarantine is chock full of some of the best black metal has to…
The sultry flora of Brazilian rainforests may not immediately come to mind as a focal point for incensed black metal, but Caio Lemos’ one-man project Kaatayra is well on the way to changing that. This project is enraged, but doesn’t seek to watch the world burn. In fact, it’s basically…
“Arresting” is a word which should be used for music more often. That is just a convoluted way of saying that I wish more music was arresting. Since music accompanies me pretty much during everything I do, there’s a tendency for even some of the best stuff out there to…
Technically, I could have made this post one of our Heavy Delinquency posts. Not because so long has passed since Ashbringer released their most recent album, Absolution, but because it’s really too damn good to have waited so long to write about it. Regardless of the name of this post,…
I had my cursor hovering over the “Purchase” button for tickets to The Dark Knight Rises the night of the Century Aurora shooting. I grew up going to that theater, as it was about ten minutes away from my childhood home. I decided not to purchase them an hour before…
July! What a terrible, awful month it is for anyone who suffers from the heat like I do. Actually, I’ve looked back on my previous two Editors’ Picks from July and I complained about the heat and the summer there as well, so perhaps I’ll refrain from doing that again,…
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…
One of the most elusive skills, a skill in dire need in metal especially, is the ability to balance between tension and release. It is in short supply everywhere, to be sure, since nailing the very subtle moments that connect a high-energy riff, for example, and a moving, quieter segment…
We recently mused on the failures of, and potential remaining hope for, melodic death metal. Briefly, we said that while the genre is on the ropes, there’s still good music to be made within it, either by “owning” the classic tropes of the genre or experimenting with new sounds. That…
