January is like a box of chocolates; you never know exactly what you’re going to get. That’s how the famous saying goes, right? In any case, the start of the year does tend to be an unexpected affair. December sees many of us going into relative hibernation, as PR and…
There are, in my mind, two months in the standard calendar year that are the ripest for black metal: January and February. The early winter months, stuffed with family gatherings and holiday cheer, make it somewhat difficult for me to truly bask in the shadows cast by metal’s most sinister…
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…
Last week, I reviewed Mo’ynoq’s Dreaming in a Dead Language, turning to such words as “suffocate”, “buried”, and “overbearing”. The more I spend time with this album (and I’ve been spending a lot of time with it), the more it opens up and those words somehow become more and less true. On the one…
Some music has urgency; it feels like the notes have to keep coming or you’re going to suffocate but the more of them that sound, the more buried you feel. Black metal is the genre which most often elicits this feeling, probably because it’s so fast and abrasive. Something about…
