doom / black metal

Swallow the Sun and Trees of Eternity guitarist Juha Raivio, Amorphis vocalist Tomi Joutsen, and former HIM drummer Gas Lipstick joined forces to create this deeply emotional doom metal album. The album is based on the lyrics and poems of the late Aleah Starbridge, a member of Trees Of Eternity and life partner of Juha Raivio. Juha comments: "What we recorded was a raw moment in time honouring the memory, lyrics, and poems of Aleah Starbridge with all its pain, beauty and darkness. There are no stars left upon the bridge to light the way anymore, but the music will always be a dim light, even in the darkest of the night."

With that information in mind, I gave the album an extra good listen. I have to admit that I was a bit reserved at first. After all, in my opinion, regardless of who's in the band, they're only as good as their latest effort. When this album came in and I saw these names, I tried hard to keep away from the "supergroup" idea. I don't like that term. Yet, I do like this album and I'm sure that many people will agree with me.

Although 'No Starts Upon The Bridge' is mainly a doom metal album, you can discover influences from black metal, melodic death metal and progressive rock. True, the music is mainly slow but it can sting, hurt and gnaw, just like some of your depressive black metal favorites. On the other hand, you can also find some heartbreaking pieces of music. The vocals carry the same level of variation, alternating between clean, grunts and screams.

Then, there are also the poems, accompagnied by gloomy piano. You can almost feel the pain, the descent into a mental and psychologics abyss. You can feel it throughout the entire album. In that aspect, this album is a very creative, intelligent and well executed representation of a mourning process. It's a masterfully crafted tribute to a lost love one and a high quality modern day doom metal album.

If you want names to compare with, you can possibly add the previously mentioned ones, plus November's Doom, Anathema, Paradise Lost, Fen and so on. Fans of melodic doom will absolutely adore this crushing masterpiece. 'Raven's Song' and the soul ripping 'The Maze' are probably my favorite tracks on this album but, as often, this album comes highly recommended to all you doomers out there. This is talent.


​Serge

progressive / post metal

black metal / doom

electronic / coldwave

heavy metal versions of eighties hits

progressive / psychedelic rock

noise rock / industrial

noise rock / sludge

stoner rock / psychedelic rock

death metal

alternative rock

alternative rock / dream pop

indie rock / alternative

death metal

death metal

death metal / black metal

ambient

alternative rock / grunge / stoner rock

heavy metal

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doom / drone / black metal

post rock / progressive rock

doom

Last night, my and a friend were talking about music and about natural disasters. He had seen a documentary where people claim that the ancient Egyptians transported the massive stones on "sound carpets". According to the narrator, it should be possible to make drones and soundscapes powerful enough to levitate heavy loads. So the question was: "if they can be powerful enough for that, they can be amplified to cause some serious damage like earthquakes and collapsing buildings". It was a frightening thought, and a pleasant one too because that would make doom bands the most powerful acts in the world. 

This morning, I loaded the new album by Italian instrumental doom masters Lento into WinAmp. I've known this band for years and several of their tracks often appear in my playlist. 'A Penchant For Persistency' started to play and it immediately took me back to yesterday's conversation. In short: the sound of Lento can flatten mountains, shatter skulls and make water flow upstream. With this new album more than ever before, I think of Lento as the "Godspeed You Black Emperor of doom". 

Lento have found the perfect balance between harsh and complex doom metal and gloomy soundscapes. That being said, do not expect these ten tracks to maintain a constant slow tempo. In that, this album has heaps of variation, from blast beats to math rock inspired insanity to death metal resembling hammering. All this while the guitars produce as much noise as they possibly can. The endresult is an immense trip with plenty of unexpected passages and sounds. It immerses the listener in a thick cesspool of riffs, drones and drums.

I'm still not sure about the whole sound levitation theory but I am convinced that 'Fourth' is a brilliant piece of work. For the record, I have to mention that 'Let Bygones Be Bygones (A Grievance)' is my favorite track, probably because I'm mostly an ambient fan and this is the calmest tune on this whole album. Yet, I will obviously recommend this to all fans of doom and post-whatever fans. You just can't go wrong with Lento.


​Serge

doom / sludge metal

Ok, let's start by being brutally honest. Like with most music reviewers, a lot of albums I have written about eventually end up in my massive day-to-day playlist. However, since that playlist grows continuously, I no longer can remember every band, every song and every album. Quite often a song comes up, I like it but I have no idea who wrote it. It's a shame, I know, but there is nothing I can do about it. My brain can only remember so much. Yet, there are exceptions and Deadsmoke is one of them. Their previous album often blasts through my speakers and I always absolutely know for sure that I'm listening to Deadsmoke. They're etched in my brain.

Why? Well, because they are so fucking good. It's like a mix between all the best elements of Conan, Monolord, Dopethrone and Sleep. On this new album, the Italians seem to repeat that recipe but somehow they have managed to take it to the next level. These songs are even more hypnotic, more psychedelic and groovy than ever before. They thrive on almost touchable fuzzed out riffs and thundering rhythms. If I didn't know any better, I'd believe that it was Deadsmoke who caused hurricane Irma.

I'm not going to pick a favorite, because quite frankly, this whole album might turn out to be one of my favorites - ever. However, I have to say that 'Emperor Of Shame' is as brilliant as it is simple. It's just one of those doom metal tracks that define a genre. Opener 'Endless Cave' grabbed my throat immediately and the whole thing kept me headbanging until the last notes of title track 'Mountain Legacy' faded away. 'Wolfcurse' is another instant classic, immersive and effective. 

So yes, this album comes highly recommended to all fans of doom and sludge metal. For me, Deadsmoke can stand next to my other favorite doom metal bands, including Winter and Bathsheba. I urge every doom fan to check it out and to join me in hoping that these guys will tour Europe soon. They'll demolish the competition, I'm sure of it.


​Serge

black metal / doom / industrial

This is filth, raunchy, putrid and horrifying noise, recorded in some deep underground sewer. It comes with the sole intention of corrupting your soul and dragging you into a whirlpool of depression and self destructive behaviour. This album is a sadistic assault on your eardrums and brutally pierces itself a way into your brain. Even for seasoned black metal fans, this one might be a bit over the top. The production quality  turns this album into a challenge, much like the first Scandinavian black metal albums, recorded on tape recorders in wet basements. So yes, in the obscure blackened underground, this thing might soon be considered a masterpiece.

The name sounds Dutch but Woest actually hails from France. Malemort (Your shapeless beauty, Equilibrium, Filthy Charity...), Torve (Hobo Erectus) and Dismas decided to form the band after hanging out in different bands in the French grindcore, crust and metal underground.for several years. With Woest, they combine their experiences in a brutal, chaotic and uncomforting way. The album contains six songs that seem to pick out the darkest and most intense elements of doom, black metal and industrial metal.

With lyrics in French and a continuously haunting sound stand out in today's black metal scene and I can only applaud that. Title track 'La fin de l'ère sauvage' is a creeping, grim piece of music that will send chills down your spine. Other tracks tingle with your level of tolerance and yes, I can only applaud that too. After all, there are people out there that only want to most extreme forms of metal. For them, this album is an absolute must have while for others this might come very close to mental torture.

So, you might be wondering whether I recommend this album or not. Well, I don't think these tracks will often blast through my speakers a lot, certainly not during a friendly family meeting. However, whenever this society and its moronic inhabitants piss me off again, this album WILL blast through my speakers and windows at high volume. For cleansing rituals, this thing is perfectly suited, but beware, this is dark stuff, perhaps even darker than anything you have ever encountered.


​Serge

dark ambient

black metal

post hardcore

drone / dark ambient

doom / post rock

death metal / punk 

doom / sludge 

hardcore / metal

experimental / ambient / noise

bandcamp

funeral doom

black metal

speed metal / black metal

bandcamp

death metal / grindcore

techno / rave / house

techno

Serge

doom / instrumental

Here in Belgium, we're suffering the last heat of summer. It's one of the hottest days of the year. My freezer currently is my best friend, even though it makes weird noises. Yet, apparently, I've just decided to raise the temperature by allowing some searing hot Texan doom metal through my speakers. 

One track, thirty seven minutes long and ranging from stoner doom to black metal, Canyon Of The Skull, The instrumental duo of guitarist/bassist Erik Ogershok and drummer Adrian Voorhies (Humut Tabal)  delivered a stunning piece of work. It's a sonic adventure,  one I recommend to everyone.

According to their biography, the band has been listening to Black Sabbath, Emperor, The Velvet Underground, Loop, Bell Witch, Yes, Mozart's Requiem, Igor Stravinsky and Earth. Of course, that might explain the versatility of this album. But still, I feel that there is more to this. Adrian might as well be a jazz fan as he often reminds me of the stuff that Tomas Järmyr does with The Void Of Expansion and Yodok III. The drums on this album are blasts of energy that seem to come from everywhere, and I like that. I like everything about this album. It's heavy, it's psychedelic and it's intense. So obviously I'm going to recommend this masterpiece to everyone who loves everything between Sleep, Dopethrone and Sunn O))).  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going  to crawl back into my freezer...


​Serge

ambient / experimental

ambient / electronic / downtempo

doom / sludge metal

ambient / classical

punk / antifolk

progressive metal

death metal / industrial

black metal

shoegaze / alternative rock / dark rock

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ambient / downtempo

electronic / techno / experimental

Hypermedium

black metal

drone / ambient / minimal

noise

techno

post hardcore

doom / gothic metal

Yesterday, I was at a friend's house, drinking Irish coffee and talking about music. The subject was differences in quality between classic albums and modern day attempts. Every musical genre has its classic, must-have albums, released years or decades ago. My friend claimed that modern day albums rarely, if ever, reach the overall quality of those old favorites. I respectfully disagreed, mostly because I know that people define their opinion on "classic, genre defining albums" around their 16th year. Everything that comes after that, is usually new stuff, not to be adored as much as the so-called pioneers. It's just how our brain works.

In my opinion, there are loads of classic albums out there. The old bands just forgot to write and record them, which leaves that possibility open to other ones.  Of course, as a music reviewer I have actually encountered several of them. I think I have uttered the phrase "if this album was recorded in (insert year), this album might by now be a classic in the genre" many times before and I am going to have to use it again.

Polish gothic doom act Medebor takes us right back to the nineties. Founded in 1997, these guys obviously know their classics. Paradise Lost, Type O Negative, Tiamat, Moonspell, My Dying Bride, Anathema, November's Doom, Amorphis.... I too have heard them all, I've seen them all live and I recognize their influences in this epic album. In short: 'Dark Eternal' can easily stand right next to your favorite melodic doom albums.

The album opens with a strange, spoken word intro which lasts for a while before the guitars eventually kick in. But when they do, they immediately place themselves among the aforementioned giants in this genre. Melodic doom metal with both grunts and clean vocals, while the guitars and drums create a dark but immersive atmosphere. It's pretty much everything we loved so much back in the days.

I'm not sure which my favorite songs on this album are. I absolutely love the opener 'Forest Of Deranged' and the lingering doomer 'Never To Be Forgotten' but pretty much all the song carry the same quality, the same atmosphere and the same doom metal delight. In all, I can only recommend this beast to all you doomers out there, especially the ones who are nostalgic for that nineties era. Medebor will not disappoint you, that's a fact.


Serge

gothic / doom / metal / darkwave

A beautiful album with nine tracks, The Sad Wonder Of The Sun is best described as a dense, profound and renitent poetic quest for exceedingly perfect and pure melodies, constantly flirting with the light winds of an everlasting spring, flowing through a mosaic of surreal elevated majesty. The colorful and bright  harmonious waves of Ecnephias, brilliantly mixing a very peculiar kind of soft gothic rock with a brave, intoxicating and marvelously melancholic, but smoothly melodic type of dark wave, inebriates the listener with an amazingly singular style of music, that infuses into an obscure realm of dreaming divinities the preordained sense of an oblique grandiosity, that engraves in their music the uniqueness of a symphony destined to shape in the world a more sensible and gentle perpetual twilight of comprehension and lucidity. 

With a marvelously peculiar style that draws the strength of its inspirations from the sensible fugacity of an everlasting horizon of stone, Ecnephias merges a remarkable perception of profoundly poetic gothic aspirations with a more melancholic and melodic form of dark rock. The final result is a smooth, incisive, intense, dense and vigorously alternative sensible somber rock, that greatly uses gratifyingly delicate and expressively sensible harmonies to indulge their sonorous ambitions into a higher axis of literal rapture and commotion. Unfortunately, despite the ardently ascendant and formidable artistic sagacity of their music, Ecnephias sometimes gets too close to pop music and synthpop. Of course, not to the point of compromising the beauty of their art; nevertheless, some passages seem too overtly “happy”, indulging in what almost appears to be cabaret music.    

Evidently, I completely understand the diversity, the uniqueness, the audacity and the experimentalism of their style – something which gets specially obvious in the fifth track –; Ecnephias is not just another band, let alone be qualified as an ordinary rock group. They are a melodic art act, and no ordinary label literally applies to them. This is something you really have to understand before listening to them. With Ecnephias, there is no ordinary music. Not at all. Labeling or categorizing them is not just extremely difficult: it’s impossible. 

If there is a band capable of changing the entire scenario of the underground scene nowadays, and provoke a really consistent artistic, stylistic and sonorous evolution, this band is Ecnephias. Although I can’t really categorize The Sad Wonder Of The Sun as a masterpiece, there are songs on this album – like Povo De Santo and Nouvelle Orleans – that will literally blow your mind away. Fantastic symphonies of marvelously exponential beauty, if you like avant-garde metal, experimental music, or something completely out of the ordinary, you have to listen to this album. It is totally different from everything you’ve heard before. Be sure about that!   
  

Wagner