Summertime. The living may be easy, the fish jumping and the cotton high, but Humanity’s Last Breath couldn’t give a shit about that. As Europe is broiled by a particularly ferocious heatwave, the Swedes prepare to deliver a relentless blast of bleak and uncompromising gloom on harsh Scandinavian winds. Abyssal,…
By now, you’ve probably seen us rant and rave about the new wave of “post-math rock”; more specifically, the trend of bands blending the traditional bouncy melodies of math rock with post-rock structures, jazz-influenced technicality, and generally progressive and experimental ideas. As I’ve outlined before, Art As Catharsis and Small…
Entries in our Stepping Stone series (which gives us a stage to cover some of the albums which influenced and created our current taste in music) can often be complicated. While we are obviously covering albums we love(d), our current relationship with them might be more complicated, containing a fair…
Bringing “the heavy” in new and interesting ways is tough, but Texas duo Pinkish Black have a way of making it sound easy. Frighteningly dark and drenched in desperation, they evoke everything from the more obvious horror-tinged vibes to ephemeral, unsettling tension. They’re never really heavy in the sense of…
It’s always a tricky thing when an established group puts out a new record. You don’t want to get your hopes up necessarily, but you’re just really looking forward to hearing it. Especially if that artist is one of your favorites. You don’t want to project on them but it’s…
Sixty years after Ornette Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come, contemporary musicians continue to challenge and expand upon the core tenets of the genre. Besides its notable anniversary, I mention Coleman’s breakthrough specifically due to its embodiment of disruption. The reception for his playing style has softened considerably…
As a music critic, I’ve always strived to go beyond curation by attempting to contextualize the artists and albums I review. Of course, finding and recommending noteworthy new music is still an important part of the job, especially in today’s saturated music market. But the opportunity for deeper analysis has…
We’ve pointed out many times that viewing your relationship with music as some sort of pure, Platonistic dynamic is absurd. The fact is that context, mood, pedigree, and aesthetic all play a part in whether you like a band’s music or not, often playing a bigger role than any “objective”…
By the time a band reaches their third album, it is not unreasonable to have a certain set of expectations about what it will deliver. Sometimes, the band will stumble and fail to meet them. Others will rise to the challenge and comfortably surpass them. And a third group, to…
Covering music for the blog provides both an avenue for curation as well as a means of tracking stylistic movements in various scenes. We’ve used our platform to chronicle the evolution of dissonant death metal, the new wave of traditional heavy metal, progressive stoner/sludge/doom, and a myriad of other subgenres…
