Drama. It’s one of those things that, in the context of metal or extreme music, often feels clichéd like some sad self-parody, or just hackneyed and predictable. Things like the demonstrative highs and lows of symphonic or power metal and the cinematic tension of post-metal immediately come to mind, but…
In their much anticipated follow-up to Mariner, the band returned to their core writing mode free of outside collaborators for their Metal Blade debut A Dawn To Fear, and have simplified their songwriting process to eschew a full-album concept, instead offering a collection of independent songs without preconceptions in the writing process. The result of this experiment is a record that is massive, plodding, expansive, and pensive, if not daunting and exhausting for those who aren’t too keen on The Big Slow™
The historical significance of 1999 will be remembered for a long time now. It was a cultural moment that far exceeded any other “decade closer” in the 20th century. Events like Y2K or The Matrix seemed to bring to fever pitch the technological explosion, and the subsequent mark it left…
Even if you took a group of the most scholarly sludge punks and fed them a steady diet of Lightning Bolt, Neurosis, and Sonic Youth for years and years, it’s not likely they’d produce anything as unconventional as Wizard Rifle. Their tone and style is the connective tissue that convincingly…
It’s been a long four years since the sophomore release from Australian post-black metal outfit Hope Drone. Cloak of Ash, released July 2015 through Relapse Records, was the group’s shot at a breakout, and it was certainly a devastating and compelling release, earning a four-out-of-five score from us back when…
Many words have been spilled around these parts in service of post-rock and post-metal. Yet – outside of more expansive, god-tier, genre heavyweights; such as Isis and Neurosis – I’ve never found myself particularly captivated by the genre(s). Lush soundscapes building to cathartic crescendos are all well and good, but…
Back in November we premiered “Prayers” from the debut album by SOM, a supergroup of sorts featuring a trio of unheralded members of the heavy music landscape. Vocalist/guitarist Will Benoit and drummer Duncan Rich comprised two-thirds of the spacey/heavy indie band Constants, who played a strong role in the burgeoning…
For fans of post-anything metal, there was a turning point where we came to dismiss instant gratification. The point where we came to fall in love with the longform sonic journey, the gradual and subtle expanse of musical ideas, or the entrancing (and at times physical) nature of cascading, droning riffing and phantasmal leadwork. Bigger than that, it’s where we abandoned immediacy in exchange for the ambient, the psychedelic, the densely layered, or the ruminating.
There are a few topics which we keep hammering at here at Heavy Blog, whether through the text of our posts, the musical selection which we make, on “external” channels like the podcast, and more. One of them is that music, whether we like it or not, is a business.…
Brighton, UK-based Yuxa have an intuitive grasp on the ideal ebbs and flows of atmospheric sludge and doom. In a genre characterized by (sometimes overly) patient build-ups and measured, drawn-out compositions, it’s refreshing to hear a band who make getting to the point possible within the post-metal/sludge framework. The slow-burning fierceness…
