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

ambient / post rock

Moderation is an album released by Deer Park Ranger, a project of American musician   Trevor Humphrey, on August 17. With only six tracks – Shipwreck, Another World, Another Time, Old City, Time and Distance, Passenger and Selling All the Shelves –, Moderation is a beautiful and elegant album, with relaxing and poetic compositions, filled with ephemeral, but profoundly reflexive, serene and vivacious passages, that easily extrapolates the density of a virtuous conscience, eager to undermine the conflagration of its own thoughts, vicissitudes and restlessness, as a pretext to start a marvelous journey through a perennial and sensitive path towards a miraculous existence, where everything that is graceful can be felt with senses and urgencies never experienced before.    

The delicate melodies and the imponderable harmonies that imperatively comprehends the value of its planetary possibilities conduct the listener to an invisible universe of transcendental calmness, that understands the majesty, the colossal emptiness and the extraordinary necessities of the soul, where everything is evaluated from a sincerely useful perspective, formidably trained to appease the anxieties of the spirit. With an atmosphere meticulously built by the strength of a compassionate indulgence, Moderation easily transmits to the heart a feeling of quiet and reliable completeness, sustained by the increasingly harmonious substance of a consistent fragility inherent to the human nature. 

A beautiful record, that easily impresses by the standards of its delicate melodies, Moderation is a work of salutary benignity, that subtlety vibrates at the vast axiom of its bright majesty, magnificently expanded by the light of its sonorous eloquence, whose serenity can configure into the vastness of a gentle conscience the pragmatic equivalence of a divine interference. And as soon as the record is over, without any desire of interrupting the journey, you will rapidly turn it on again.        

Moderation is a fabulous record for the easy-minded, and for the ones who really love the marvelous experience of overcoming their own personal dimensions of sensibility, expectation and freedom. With splendorous songs that intensifies our perceptions to more dense and alternate states of grace, Moderation is a sensational, glorifying and profoundly meditative album, already tuned in the correct frequency of our hearts, minds and overall senses.

 
Wagner

post rock

Belgian post-rock-on-silent-movie band We Stood Like Kings return with their most daring and ambitious project so far. How else could you describe a newly written and recorded soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi? The original by Philip Glass is widely regarded as one of the most genius pieces of score music ever. For those not familiar with the movie: Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, is a 1982 American experimental film directed by Godfrey Reggio. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means "unbalanced life". THe film, along with two others in the 'Qatsi' trilogy, describes different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature and technology.

I think there are a number of different ways to approach this album. One, you can decide that the original score by Philip Glass is a masterpiece and that it's quality can't be matched. I mean, it is indeed an audacious step to try to walk in Glass' shoes. It's like me, a mere music reviewer who has also written one book, trying to rewrite 'The Karamazov Brothers'. For the album, the expectations would have been high, way higher than for their previous releases.

Two, you can see We Stood Like Kings as the talented individuals they are, having watched the movie and becoming inspired by it. They grabbed their instruments and started composing until an 82 minutes lasting soundtrack appeared. Three, perhaps you have never seen the Koyaanisqatsi movie and never heard the soundtrack. In both cases, this is just an excellent album to add your collection.

Four, you can see this as the follow up to their 2015 album 'USSR 1926'. I think that is the way I prefer to approach this album. Some passages in 'USSR 1926' still quite often appear in my head and quite regularly in my media player so I remember that album very well. 'USA 1982' seamlessly seems to follow its predecessor's example. The music can still be described as Chopin meets Pink Floyd meets Explosions In The Sky, as the band so perfectly describes it.

But. I like 'USA 1982' more than 'USSR 1926'. If I had any problem with the previous album, it might have been the fact that it was often too dramatic, too brushed and too classical. We Stood Like Kings seem to love a well produced album and they're very professional about the whole thing, but in 'USA 1982' I clearly feel the joy of playing this music. There is something euphoric about some of the passages in here.

Others seems more subdued, more minimal than previously, which obviously comes natural if you know the movie. The piano is still a constant but even there I notice a sense of enjoyment over perfection, which I think is a good thing. This quartet loves what they do and I love the way they do it. In all, this is a brilliant album, even if you prefer Philip Glass' original score. Anyway you like to approach this album, it's a highly recommended one, especially for post rock fans.


​Serge

post rock

Mammock is the most recent album by Russian post rock group Ruins!Ruins!. A very extensive record, more than one hour long, it has nine tracks: Serene, Hurricane, Distress, Grab, Arch, Kurta, Szorstki, Collumns and Polynya. With soft and poetic tendencies, a colorful flavor that gives to its modular nodes the surreal peculiarities of harmoniously playful idiosyncrasies, this record is the increasingly velvet transfiguration of an everlasting afternoon perpetually frozen in the surface of the universe. With smooth melodies, and a predominantly transcendental atmosphere that gives to its notes the lenient exaggeration of a formidable delusion, Mammock is an astonishingly formidable album, curiously unique. With wonderfully texturized melodies, converging to a lancinating path of primordial intonations, the excruciatingly intense harmonies filtrate the dilacerations of an existence that floats invisible through the sound, in a sagacious journey of sentimental completeness and vicissitude.         

With a genuine perception of priorities, preordained by a mature sense of principles, the melodies conduct the rhythms to a point of immoderation, where everything is highlighted according to the nature of a higher level of musical saturation. With a sonorous intricacy that subtlety disperses the whispers of its amalgamated dissonances, the striking result will be the curious profusion of a marvelous atmosphere of wonderful cosmogonies, where the musical rapture concedes to the axis of its inherent strength the colossal predisposition of a symptomatic ascendancy. 

Since the album is too long, though, it can be quiet annoying, although this fact doesn’t diminishes its artistic greatness in any way, whatsoever. With a formidable sense of originality, applied in a respectful degree to masterful technical abilities that amplifies its creative scope, Mammock is a very good album, that not only honors the post rock genre, but expands the vicinities, patterns and structures of its musical range.

A great album that certainly diffuses and rearranges the musical probabilities of the genre, as well as having a beauty of its own, Mammock is a true celestial triumph, despite its share of excessively uniform and monotonous passages. Nevertheless, it’s quite an artistic achievement!             

Wagner

ambient / post rock

Between darkness and light is the latest album from Blak, a Spanish instrumental post rock group. Released on July 28, the album has five tracks: In the absence of light – Eigengrau, Impression of an even deeper darkness – Illusion, Temples drawn by the blind – Revelation, Black drips in the sky – Overwhelming and Colors awake – Perception. A little heavier than most groups of the genre, the proficient technical degree of the band gets close to perfection. In a well-centered axis of astoundingly manufactured melodic thunderstorms, they manage to gravitate towards a superb sonorous perception of an absolute density, displaying a formidable level of harmonious intonations, that seems to evoke fragmentary dreams from another dimension.    

With a voluble energy that salutes the melodies reshaping them with sincere, but tender strength, there is a subtle ferocity hidden in the lines that inherently exhibits the profoundly detailed and powerful molecules upon which the music was written. Composed with the lancinating force of an anguish that has recently woke up, each and every note is masterly dosed with the prominent discipline of a barbarous musical veracity, easy to perceive at the sharp intensity of its profound and relentlessly organic melodies. Song after song, note after note, Between darkness and light reveals itself to be a formidable album, certainly one of the best ever released in the history of the genre. 

With the fantastic contrast between dense, vaporized, heavier harmonies and more lucid, easy-minded, serene rhythmic dissonant tonalities – maybe their way to express the darkness and the light referred to in the title, I suppose (and given the fact that, in each track, the listener has, in this marvelous sonorous journey,  the feeling of a soft, but gradual ascension, transmitting a sentiment that seems to be related to the title of each respective song) –, this record really has it all: from the ethereal desolate soundscapes of the melancholic vicinities of the universe to the greatest waves of a synchronic rapture, the creativity of this band has whimsically and beautifully delineated the sound of an amazing state of the art work, so refined and poetically diffuse, but at the same time expressively down to earth, that their genuine craft is yet to be challenged by any contemporary band.     
 
Fantastic from the very beginning to the end, Between darkness and light rearranges deep harmonies – as well as common themes to the genre – into twisted and more consistent patterns. Nevertheless, despite their groundbreaking originality, post rock enthusiasts will feel deeply familiarized with their sound. They are really on the right path to be a shining star of the underground scene.     

Wagner

When I started these Brieviews series over a year ago, the initial idea is to empty my inbox by writing shorter reviews for EP's, reissues, singles and a few full length albums. Back then, I was talking about 900 unread emails. That amount has tripled since then and we're already at part 25. That's a lot of short reviews if you ask me. Anyway, here are some more Brieviews for your reading and listening enjoyment. 

dark ambient

heavy metal

black metal / thrash metal

post rock

drone / dark ambient

bandcamp

stoner rock / hard rock

gothic metal / symphonic metal

black metal

Larval Productions

post punk / gothic rock

grindcore

Serge

post rock

This is an incredible beautiful album, the debut of New York based American musician Miloe Larsen. Almost fifty two minutes long, the record has ten tracks: Avenoir, Eva, A New World Ocean, Novel, Color, Mt., Blue Moon, Rose Tinted Serpent, A Schema and Aurora. Exceedingly spiritual, Oceanai elevates the listener to a melodic, serene, ethereal and surreal world, devoid of any pragmatic concerns. Wandering over the coalescent waves of an omnipotent ocean of beauty, the music of this album is above extraordinary; latently exposes the omniscience and the greater nuances of a sensitive conscience that seeks the higher grounds of an excellent existence.   

A marvelous album that juxtaposes the infinity of a superior path that heavily promotes the convergence of a stream of undeniable spiritual tranquility and the poetic serenity of an irresistible imponderability, this album creates a parallel world of vacant serenity, where all thoughts can rest, while they are reversed to a soft mode.  

All the melodies are exponentially beautiful, and translate a level of formidable lucidity, that resonates over a restless conscience. While there is an undeniable degree of simplicity in the music, the level of poetic profoundness is gentle, pure, educated and incorruptible. The amazing strength of creativity and the unconventional breaking beats that masterly aligns the harmonious equilibrium of these magnificent melodies at the epicenter of the splendid mosaic of the music’s rhythm also adds a strong level of efficiency into the general sonorous layer.     

While listening to Oceanai, it is possible to be completely impressed by this fragmented, texturized, efficiently detailed, perfectly studied and vehemently surrealist groundbreaking state of the art work. A major album that defies a conventional comprehension not only of the genre per se, but music in general, Oceanai invites the listener to expand the conscience into a more profound level of philosophical and reflexive knowledge. An almost impressionistic glory that enchants the magnificence of an infinite universe of sonorous possibilities, there is such a formidable degree of philosophical veracity attached to the sonorous molecules of this work, that you instantly feel yourself transported to another planet, a more serene, more complete, more glorious composition of life.  


Wagner

post rock

…and who will take care of you now is a marvelous, philosophical and phenomenal yet to be released album, by German post rock group Magma Waves. A little more than one hour long, this amazing record has seven tracks: I am afraid of you, Blind the Sun, SCRT, Portals, Fall of Columbia, The Great Attractor and Cloak & King. A great, magnificent sonorous picture of a galaxy yet to be discovered, this album is a splendid work that revives the more subtle and discreet possibilities of life, where everything can be held in a more punctuated, but beautifully intensified nature.  

With calmer, but expansive, elongated and diffuse melodies, …and who will take care of you now is a wonderful, meticulous and omniscient album, that aligns a peaceful and vehemently methodical serenity with the listener’s soul. With a groundbreaking, dense and profound resilience, simple harmonies and primordial impulses devise the explicit nature of a sound that creates its own organic synergy, intensely permeated by a complete sentiment of sophisticated principles of genuine creativity and originality. 

Although at first you can feel or even proclaim that this album doesn’t present too much difference from other albums of the genre, in just a few seconds this false impression easily evaporates: while there is a tension that juxtaposes a firm and restless emotional intensity, the pervasive easiness and the sincere calmness that floats everywhere through each and every note in this astounding sonorous journey reinvents the absurd sense of completeness that the harmonies exponentially create in the holes of your soul, while discovering at the same time in the vicinities of your senses the rapture of diluted realms that rapidly reinstates the veracity of a musical authenticity that urges to be recognized.  

An exceptional album that will easily find its way towards its audience, …and who will take care of you now is a great, peculiar and excellent masterpiece that comes to aggregate a whole new set of qualities into the post rock genre. To be officially released on September 15, this is a record destined to reverberate in the underground scene, disseminating a more intense and multiple perception of the genre. 


Wagner

ambient / post rock

A very good album by American post rock group I/O, Anyone, Anywhere is an interesting record, with profound and horizontal nuances, that subtly rescues in a wider layer of intense compositions the most imponderable and realistic virtues of the genre. Relatively concise, the album is a little more than forty minutes long, and has nine tracks: 60 // South, I, Allston, Alternates, II, To Everyone I Could Have Loved & All The Places We Could Have Called Home, CB, MA, III and Rte. 89. With a genuine style of their own, a charming and eloquent simplicity that evidently gives them a remarkable sonorous consistence, and a profound and vigorous authenticity that pervasively predicts the grandiosity of a style bound to extrapolate, expand and break sonorous boundaries, Anyone, Anywhere is a very lucid and aggrandizing work, standardized by a conceptual perspective of existence that capacitates music as a driving force of life. 

With a flexible, but nevertheless categorical style that sees the wonderful possibilities undertook by the lines of its own metaphysical intensity, this album magnificently explores the colorful perceptions of its melodic charisma, while dilapidates and disseminates the marvelous conjuncture of a serenity unable to be dissipated. Navigating in a hazardous, but brave ocean of benevolence, the comforting, peaceful and softly melancholic sound perfectly aligned by this heavenly work will elevate your soul into a higher dimensional level of existence.

Exploring a colorful group of sentiments, and beautifully transforming it into sound, I/O aggregates a whole new level of artistic proficiency into the genre, wonderfully transmitting to the human essence of the universe a degree of sensibility and comprehension that will enlighten the principles of our collective conscience, if correctly understood and appreciated.  

A beautiful album with delicate nuances and a spontaneous ordination of reality, that captures the pressure and the presence of our innermost source of discontentment, over a perspective of profound virtuosity, a world of light emerges, with enough love to heal all the scars of displeasure. A quintessential album with a formidable musical background, that overflows an abundant original veracity as well as a cohesive essence, Anyone, Anywhere is a precious record, that will certainly captivate a huge audience, that will be inherently pleased and satisfied with such a marvelous and sensible musical strength.  


Wagner 

post rock / progressive rock

Beings of Light is a superb and splendorous album, by Russian instrumental progressive rock group City of the Lost, released on July 17. With eleven tracks – For What Are We Fighting For?, Красные Звёзды, Красные Гимны, The Reason Why I'm Here, Justice, Стальное Сердце (Диалог), A Fire Inside, Stream of Life, The Last Words, Reflection, Ballad of the Key Keeper and Fragile Peace Revives – Beings of Light is a terrific, sensational, singular, fabulous and magnificent record, that revives the purest and most fundamentally effective sonorous textures and principles of progressive rock, in a vigorously consistent harmonious path of poetic intensity, precise devotion and sincere beauty.   

With vivid and exponentially lucid harmonies, that wonderfully and ostensibly flirts with power metal, City of the Lost has done an amazing and gracefully elemental work on this album. With perfectly aligned guitars, a monumental collision of preciously designed melodies converges efficiently in a torrential universe of captivatingly intense sentiments, that extrapolate at the voracious circumference of its resurgent symphonies the everlasting life of a sound that is destined to never dissipate. In an eternity fulfilled by the entanglements of a soul that fears the spontaneity of an elevated serenity, Beings of Light is a supreme anthem to the graceful healing of an imperially expansive infinite universe, perpetually comprehensive to the possibilities of the human thought. 

A beautiful album from the beginning to the end, Beings of Light is the pure alignment of a consecrated and excellent technique, masterly combined with the essence of a poetic and marvelous creativity. With wonderful harmonies all the way through, accompanying the listener in a fabulous journey throughout a fantastic, dense and splendidly colorful universe of sensorial joy, rapture and transcendental completeness, this record is a formidable work of art, destined to be considered a reference in the genre.   

A splendid album that certainly has everything to be regarded as a milestone, Beings of Light is a crucial and imponderable work of art, that synthesizes the perfection of an incredibly dilapidated technique, combined and amplified with the groundbreaking serenity of an expansive creativity, that knows no boundaries in what concerns the scope of its immensurable possibilities.  
 

Wagner