JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

Comments:  Holy fucking shit.  From Nemtheanga (Primordial) comes this raging beast of traditional doom heaviness.  I've had this on repeat since I first heard the riff on "Thirteen Clergy".  Sometimes traditional doom can be boring (see: Pilgrim's release this year), sometimes it can comes drizzled in too much cheese for most.  All Hell's Martyrs demands your intention and puts it in a vicegrip without having to rely on gimmicky bullshit.

Also:  From Australia of all places?  Never would have guessed.

COMMENTS:  Guitars that sound like someone drilling into your brain, vocals that sound like a snarling voidcreature, long and hypnotic passes.  Everything you could wish for in a Bölzer release.  Soma treats you well and makes you lust for a new full length.

COMMENTS:  What a strange beast retching in the corner, soaking its hands in a chalice of drugs, and howling at the sky.  Howls of Ebb play a bizarre, tangled mess of death metal, fully decked out in weird.  The guitars don a regalia of otherworldly and off-kilter melodies.  These alien noise compositions combined with such organic production really do call to mind some awful, hulking savage yelling passages from Beyond Good and Evil at you.

COMMENTS:  Incantation has a great formula.  A great formula that has set them among the mighty as one of the most important death metal bands of all time.  This formula has been imitated by many, but hardly ever mastered as well as the originators themselves.  Dirges of Elysium sees Incantation taking this well-established formula and... not really changing a thing.  It's a solid Incantation release and exactly what'd you expect.

COMMENTS:  Savage Gold has Tombs prospecting deeper into the black metal veins of the mine they've carved into music's mountain.  This leads to an experience that is just as cold and impersonal as it is visceral.  Blast beats and tremolo picking oft give way to savage howling and emotional, mid-paced sections that drag you from a dead void of blackness into a morose, existential embrace.  This album feels like executing your brother for murdering your son.  

COMMENTS:  I'll give credit where credit's due.  Wildernessking, hailing from Capetown, South Africa, is bursting with energy.  The three songs on The Devil Within are driving, pulsating, urging.  The instrumentals are unrelenting, and the vocals untamed (as the name implies).  Unfortunately, that's about it.  The songs, if you look beyond their intensity, are mostly unoriginal caricatures of something already done.  

COMMENTS:  Crucial Blast always releases the most ridiculous, headache-inducing, transgenre shit.  I love it.  Cloak of Altering fits their catalogue so perfectly.  Imagine this:  a black metal band gets sucked into an astral vortex, where it meets and is fused with one of those strangely prolific underground eurodance DJs.  This deformed and spectacular creature then cover Pitchshifter.  Bam boom bam, you have Cloak of Altering.  This form of synergy of electronica with extreme music is almost off-putting.  Whilst listening, you begin to think to yourself, "I shouldn't be enjoying this.  I shouldn't subject my precious eardrums to this."  But you have, and continue to do so.  Cloak of Altering is more than the sum of their parts.  If they were a black metal band, they would be just OK.  If they were an electronic band, I probably would have never heard of them.  But something about the paradoxical nature of the music they make elicits a greater sense of allurement.  I do, however, enjoy Maurice de Jong's other works moreso than Cloak of Altering, mainly Gnaw Their Tongues, as I feel they have more lasting power.

COMMENTS:  The mighty Dirge's Hyperion enters like a moderately blended concoction of atmosludge, doom, and industrial phantoms of their back catalogue.  The album sits heavily, melding layer after layer of atmosphere with bleep-bloops, chanting, ringing chimes, droning strings, and barking vocals.  It all comes together quite nicely.  Unfortunately, at times, the album drags a bit.  I understand the intent of hypnosis and ambiance, but that doesn't necessarily have to bore the listener.  

COMMENTS:  Poland sure has been busy pumping out some solid releases this year. Enemy of Man isn't one of them. The recipe of the album is as follows: Take the modus operandi of Blut aus Nord and late-era Celtic Frost, cut away all of the things that make those releases interesting, equip a drummer that has a back capable of carrying an entire band, and add some pseudo-spooky atmosphere.  That's exactly how Enemy of Man plays.  Boring and unoriginal.  I found my mind wandering to things outside my headphones around halfway through the album, mainly due to me losing interest in what I had been listening to.  That drummer is really masterful, though, and you can tell the rest of the band is aware of that, as they pluck away lazily at their strings, making a feeble attempt to hide behind the dominating skill of their band-mate.