As we deepen our exploration of different genres, expectations form alongside our opinions. This allows us to better curate and analyze music within a constant, torrential downpour of new releases. With bands like Bolt Gun in the broader “post-metal” landscape, we expect powerful themes with a cinematic delivery, something the…
It’s so interesting how we can find beauty in metallic ugliness. Metal is a genre that prides itself on being dirty and underground. Some people believe the point is to be inaccessible. We have to keep out those normies, after all. We can’t have them coming in here and trying…
I don’t think I’m saying anything anyone doesn’t know with this, but music truly is an art form. We forget that sometimes when we’re listening to top 40 radio or going to a concert. To be fair, a lot of music can seem like it’s made from a cookie cutter…
A dark and foreboding greeting to you, heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! Yes, I’m afraid it’s that time again. The death of the year 2018 demands a review, and we would be quite foolish not to oblige. It’s been another very solid year for doom metal. Personal favorites and genre darlings alike have returned with huge releases, up and comers have made themselves known, and a certain giant of the scene made a comeback after a far too long hiatus. What’s not to like about DOOM 2018?
Ah, October. The month of changing colors and the impending onset of winter. The shadows get longer and there’s an air of mystery enveloping the world. Perfect time of year for some music that reminds you of the inevitable end of all things! Riven definitely does that with their take…
Greetings, heaviest of heavy bloggers! Welcome to our very special ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of Doomsday. Stifle your gasps and crack your smelling salts; what you’ve heard is true: it has been a full 12 months since Doomsday began highlighting the very best of underground slow and low. It’s been a…
Greetings heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! Welcome to Doomsday, our monthly roundup of all things slow, low, and otherwise doom related. 2018 is truly picking up steam and I’m (not at all) embarrassed to admit that I’ve already begun thinking about my year-end sludge pile and what records might make it…
The most interesting thing about metal as a genre is just how liberal the definition of the genre is. It’s a genre that encourages experimentation and invites reinterpretation. At a certain point, one has to argue whether something isn’t metal. As a result, metal fans benefit from having artists who…
Some music doesn’t want you to be happy. It doesn’t care to lift spirits or engender triumphant emotional release in its listeners. Instead, it attempts to drown you. To suffocate and brutalize you. To lay bare torment through audio in order to suck you into the chaos and anguish in…
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.”
