death metal

How fast can laser beams travel on a guitar neck? Well, ask these guys! After a longer silence –
with last year‘s one-off single Plague Revival as a lonely sign of life– Seattle’s death metal-sci-fithrashers Xoth are back with their second self-released full length Interdimensional Invocations and
again they show how speed metal and tech-death can spawn a solid technical animal.

The band embarks on a 40 minute journey of speedy dual guitars, lots of double bass and a great
mixture of different voices which is one of their strongest trademarks.


Everything blends nicely into this lyrical chaos of rising cybernetic kings, a plague for mankind and the phantom queen at whose feet we kneel. It is evident how much fun Xoth had when writing these lyrics, because this is all taken with two grains of irony and that is what separates them from a lot of their tech-death colleagues. A genre laden with so much sterility and precision can definitely use a band that has a twinkle in the eye. The post-machine-takeover science-fiction theme is a good contrast to a lot of the over-serious topics you encounter in this genre. Nevertheless, do not mistake them for the Coheed and Cambria of tech-death – here is no solution to end wars, here those battles are over and mankind lost.

On the other hand it must also be clear that musically Xoth does not add anything new to this genre, they can compete but not challenge. Many other bands that they already shared the stage with are capable of the same dual-threat guitar attacks and double-bass massacres; nevertheless, the Seattle quartet can say for themselves that having three vocalists is a bonus as each voice is clearly identifiable and different, ranging from a bar brawl shouter to clear black shrieks and deathly growls.

The band is definitely at their best when they give the songs a rest, even if it’s only a momentary
one, but that makes them even more interesting, for example the little slap-bass part in Plague Years 20XX or the dancing and dueling guitars at the beginning of Mountain Machines. If they can focus their songwriting more on songs like the final Melted Face of the Soul in which classic metal guitar work alternates with on-point death metal riffing the next album can become even more of a genrebender. 

Xoth will release Interdimensional Invocations on October 18th and it can be purchased through
their bandcamp account.


​Thorsten

post rock / post metal

noise rock / jazz / experimental

doom / sludge

psychedelic / doom / stoner rock

ambient

house / techno / electronic

dark ambient

ambient / experimental

electronic / downtempo

bandcamp

heavy metal

black metal / death metal

ambient

Audiobulb

​Serge

metal

metal / death metal

facebook

progressive rock / experimental

psychedelic rock / doom

hard rock

progressive metal

psychedelic rock /  doom

sludge metal / doom

black metal

alternative rock / psychedelic / noise rock

black metal / death metal

From the crypts of underground label Aesthetic Death comes another unnerving release, this time Voz de Nenhum's Sublimation. This record strikes a nice balance between nasty and clean sounding, thanks to producer Carlos Ribeiro, who incidentally also recorded Belgium's Enthroned upcoming new album.

Voz de Nenhum is based in Portugal, although it looks like members from several bands collaborated in this effort. Among them, for example, is labelmate Alex Dictator, who recently released his own (very fine) record under the moniker Diktator.


The band wastes no time and, from the first notes of opener "Ia'Iaxa" starts summoning demons. I like the fact that all songs are spiced up by synthesisers, and in the case of Ia 'Iaxa this results in a moody droning middle part. Other songs, such as Nails and They, feature a mix tortured screaming and ritual chanting over slow semi-acoustic riffs. It just shows that you don't need hyperspeed riffing to create the right atmosphere...

Closer Voidsworn is an exercise in psychedelic Black Metal, hinting at Oranssi Pazuzu.
But for me, the real highlight of the record is Chains; it has a great, non-black metalish guitar riff is so infectious I could hum it all day long. It's a slow, brooding song, spiced with synth sweeps and anvil hammering. Glorious! All in all a very enjoyable offering from these Portuguese dealers of Blackness.It clearly shows that nowadays the most exciting music doesn't necessarily come from the best known names.


​Koen

ambient / classical

Sound In Silence

experimental / noise

alternative rock / psychedelic rock

death metal

post rock

ambient / classical

doom / black metal

black metal

hardcore

metal / death metal / metalcore

facebook

black metal / death metal

Chaotic Symbiosis is an album released on November 15, by American blackened death metal band A God or an Other. A little more than thirty-five minutes long, the record has six tracks: What Keeps Us Here, Exhaustive Perturbation, Tacit Alarum, Torrent of Failure, Ritualistic Devitalization and Chaotic Symbiosis. With a dense, brutal and very aggressive sound, Chaotic Symbiosis is a characteristic genre album: it has a very sinister premise, revolving around an excruciatingly painful, hostile and visceral sound, displaying occasionally more sensible and surreptitiously slow harmonies. Hunger to prey on the dark vicinities of a fatalist cosmogony, that highlights a permanently obscure universe, lost in the infinite despair of a primordial demise, this album is a mordacious descending into an exasperated reality, infuriatingly immersed in chaos . 

The style of the band unfortunately suffers from a severe lack of originality, being neither surprising nor impressing, although they can work also in a more subtle and lugubrious context. A God or an Other definitely knows how to elaborate and to vehemently display very tense and slow-pacing interludes, that normally anticipates the hazardous and horrific doom of excessively tempestuous harmonies, that descends over the listener like a definitive cataclysm, eager to destroy everything that comes on its way. Probably, these macabre, melancholic and gothic serenades are the greatest triumph of their music.  

While you can feel a sharp, genuine and brutal ferocity embracing the consistency of a very aggressive, hostile and lancinating style, the most negative aspect of the band is related to the fact that it’s so brutally ferocious, and its melodies are so ostensibly rapid for the most part, that the sound invariably becomes too homogeneous. You inadvertently feel lost in the terrible storm of sameness compelled over its ferocious brutality, and eventually, becomes even incapable of differentiating one song from another. While there is genuine aggressiveness in their abrasive sound, there is little versatility and flexibility, which makes the album too predictable, and monotonous to a degree. 

While Chaotic Symbiosis is not a bad album, it’s style is very limited. Definitely, the tempestuous malevolence is genuine, and, to a modest level, interesting. But its creativity is too petrified to a restrictive musical diagram, getting close to brutal death metal for the most part. Resenting itself from stylistic limitations and a severe lack of originality, this album is mostly recommended to passionate enthusiasts of extreme metal. Outside this particular zone, the album will hardly find any appreciation. 
 

Wagner

black metal / death metal

The blind leading the blind is an album released on November 11, by independent Ukrainian record label Archaic Sound. Work of a musical project conceived under the alias 1914, this is blackened death metal on its most inventive, pressurized and obscure prominence. With sinister atmospheres, but abrasive guitar lines adorned by imperatively rapid harmonies, The blind leading the blind reunites in graceful cohesion all the fundamental elements of the genre: dense melodies, a guttural voice, pungent but dilacerating musical arrangements, and dubious melancholic sensitivities, that falls between the exhilarating devices of narrow ambiguity and glorious objectivity. Beyond the summary astute easiness of its aggressive downfall, this album satisfies coherently the mostly general qualities of the genre, while being too obvious and generic – almost predictable – by a more oblique perspective. Nevertheless, The blind leading the blind manages to be, more or less, an intense, intelligent and pervasive album, with some satisfactory songs that makes this work worthwhile listening it.

With eleven tracks – War In, Arrival. The Meuse-Argonne, A7V Mephisto, High Wood. 75 Acres of Hell, Beat The Bastards (The Exploited cover), Hanging On The Barbed Wire, Passchenhell, C'est Mon Dernier Pigeon, Stoßtrupp, The Hundred Days Offensive and War Out – this almost one hour long album is a profound, lucid, pertinent and belligerent anthem in preparation for war. With versatile elements that dispatch vividly its musical strength, The blind leading the blind is mostly characterized by powerfully exhilarating and brutal harmonies, that never dares to be condescending with its own ferocious and implacable plausibility. 

While there’s nothing on this album that could be regarded as deeply surprising or original, 1914 knows how to elaborate and to execute a solid, proficient, somber and cohesive musical work. With a salutary vividness that embraces its own virulent propensities and archaic glorious dimensions, the sonorous densities of the musical layers are characteristically well elaborated, and respect the boundaries of its own passionate, but effusively dark cosmogonies, that always explode in a tempestuous rebellion of nefarious harmonies. 

Like I’ve pointed out some lines above, The blind leading the blind definitely is not a marvelous album, but manages to be modestly good and interesting, all the way through. Its sophisticated enough to captivate an audience, solidify a cohesive sound and redefine intelligently the more discreet elements of its own style, while maintaining intact its general musical premises, and reevaluating this particular genre as a more extreme form of expression.  


Wagner

drone / ambient

death metal / grindcore

death industrial / dark ambient

Exabyss Records

post rock / ambient / electronic

ambient / classical

funeral doom

gothic rock / alternative / metal

drone / ambient / folk

dark ambient 

alternative rock / funk rock

facebook

indie / dreampop

industrial / electronic

Perc Trax

​Serge (2 & 3 by Patsker)

post black metal / black metal/ death metal/ experimental

Oasis is an album released on November 2, by New Zealand experimental/ atmospheric post black metal duo Súl ad Astral. Almost one hour long, the record has ten tracks: In Dreams Reborn, Float, Pennies Down The Infinity Well, Last Regret, Inaction and Consequence, Hindsight, This Broken Ideal and the title track, Oasis. A beautiful album, impregnated with a formidable level of organic fury, dramatic energy, dynamic synergy and an ostensibly explosive level of creative originality, Oasis is a lucid, expressive and very cohesive work, abundant on rapid harmonies, aggressive tonalities and distinct musical vigor. With a genuine and consistent signature sound, the album – from the beginning until the end –, reveals itself as a primal and whimsical musical work, that displays on the layers of its proficient salutary qualities an excellent and brutal performance.  

With the amazing and joyful intertwining of clean and guttural vocals, and discreetly flirting with power metal devices, the style of Súl ad Astral is very fluid, gracefully dynamic, dense and proverbially virtuous. Most of all, is impeccable and sensibly peculiar, with a very distinct grace floating over its very colorful, yet heavy notes. With some latent melodic death metal tonalities being amazingly prevalent over its distinct rapid sequences – nurturing the unlimited atmosphere of its boundless musical glory –, the sound is perfunctorily creative and fearless, and never renounces to its majestic harmonious and composite grandeur, that seems wisely dilapidated over the dimensional tapestry of a dense, but perfectly consecrated melodic expansion. 

As a sensational conjuncture of symphonies that departs from an entirely new universe of passionate and sagacious musical possibilities, Súl ad Astral has conceived Oasis as a masterful, rapturous and beautiful mosaic of marvelous splendor, whose wonderful style is definitely singular, and will hardly find a similar parallel in the history of underground music. 

Crossing over several distinct genres – post black metal, melodic death metal, post grunge, metalcore and even pop rock – in varying degrees, in a wide and creative range of intricate sonorous possibilities, Súl ad Astral is a fantastic and proverbial musical act, with no boundaries or restrictions whatsoever. Merging altogether the most predominant elements of several apparently disparate genres, this fabulous musical act conceives an entirely different level of greatness very cohesively, without any disruptions nor dysfunctions, whose splendid results can be categorized as a creative statement of talent and authenticity. 

With a splendorous shape, and an extending musical diagram, the energetic and powerful creativity of the duo is very compelling and graciously vivacious. They are obviously not bounded or limited to a particular genre, but definitely are fully compromised in developing its own insightful, organic and highly original musical style. 


Wagner

death / doom metal

Vanhelgd has a steadfast style, death metal straight from the heart. Deimos Sanktuarium is the fifth full release of this uncompromising band. Their heavy riffs of discomfort and death make them sound so recognisable. A heritage of the legendary Swedish death metal cult has been succeeded.

Mattias Frisk and his collaborators never disappoint. Deimos Sanktuarium is again an interesting piece of death metal violence filled with obscure grunts painted in a horrifying atmosphere. They know as the best to hold the tension over the rolling bass lines and evocative guitar riffs. The doomy slowness in the songs makes Deimos Sanktuarium an  album between doom and death metal. Melodic guitar solos create a false glance of hope in the dark ambience.

The mood is increased by several ads of chanting or choirs. Vi Föddes I Samma Grav is a perfect example. The creations of haunting voices fit perfect with the heavy riffs. Four of the seven tracks are in Swedish. Emotions and anger are at their best in the native language.

Profaned Is The Blood Of The Covenant starts very mystic and slow but emerges to haunting savagery. The guitars hail as hunted fearsome animals in the forests. The vocals scream like a grizzly bear in dusk.

Unearthly howls make The Silent Observer one of the best tracks on the album. The speeding of the guitars create an etheric aura. Mattias Frisk screams his lungs out while the vibrations of the guitar strings hypnotize you slowly into slumber. The song ends with doomy medieval voices.

Här Finns Ingen Nåd is the last track and brings old school death metal like the best. Deep frightening grunts kill all the light that is left. Strong berserk choral sounds will only make you to touch the repeat button.

Vanhelgd offers with Deimos Sanktuarium top quality death/doom metal. This release is available on cd/lp and digital formats.  Deimos Sanktuarium deserves a place in every death metal collection. The fantastic artwork is by Mattias Frisk. Buy or die. 

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Patsker