Mourning Hymns Of The Alchemist - my new compilation of blackened / satanic funeral doom, or "necromantic black doom" as some call it now, available now on streaming services! this beast of a playlist is a droning three and a half hours in length so it's perfect for if you've got nothing better to do but maybe smoke a fat one and slowly headbang in your seat.

featuring the artists Spectral Voice, Sulphur Aeon, Mournful Congregation, Convocation, & Sempiternal Dusk!

James looks at Tzompantli, the outstanding new album from Pomona, California based death doom masters Tzompantli, released May 17th on 20 Buck Spin.

Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force takes the listener on a journey into both the brutality and horror as well as a the majesty of the Aztec Empire. They take you there with a unique style of death doom that draws in elements of OSDM and cavernous atmospheric death metal. I need to impress upon you just how goddamn heavy this album is and how this heaviness is amplified by how menacing and eerie the album can be at times. This is an easy contender for my AOTY list and its going to take a lot to know it off. From commanding vocals, feral barks and war chants to crushing guitar, folk instruments and more do not miss Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force.

Read James' full review and listen to and order the album at the link below:

Dream Death: Journey into Mystery (1987)

Heavy metal has birthed many a brute husk of an LP over the years: the kind with zero commercial potential but which, nevertheless, attains a strange, unlikely luster over time, and Dream Death’s 1987 debut, Journey into Mystery, stands as a particularly exemplary case in point.

Its gruesome musical innards -- all putrid vocals, viscous guitars, and filthy rhythms -- combined thrash and doom with hoarse, hardcore-style vocals, verging on death metal growls, that sound as violent, vulgar and uncompromising today as they did 30-odd years ago.

And yet, these seemingly unsophisticated experiments in extremity would also prefigure the doom/death category championed by Paradise Lost, Anathema, Katatonia, et al, in years to come, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves ...

Dream Death hailed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Brian Lawrence (vocals/guitar), Terry Weston (guitar), Ted Williams (bass) and Mike Smail (drums) recorded a pair of demos in 1986, before signing with underground thrash specialists New Renaissance Records.

Journey Into Mystery arrived the following year and was, at once, prehistoric and forward-thinking, as complex tracks like “Back from the Dead,” “Bitterness and Hatred” and “Sealed in Blood” (think Slayer on downers) ruthlessly pitted fast and slow tempos against each other.

By contrast, both the title track and “Hear My Screams” indulged in more linear thrashing, while lumbering monstrosities like “The Elder Race” and “Black Edifice” choked out bowel-churning vocals over disorienting, circular riffs, not unlike what Obituary started doing, a few years later.

All the while, Dream Death’s deceptively well-arranged songs were buried under production so muddy and cryptic cover art so off-putting, that not even most ‘80s metal-heads could glimpse the band’s clairvoyant vision into extreme metal’s future through all that murk.

So, when Williams defected to local thrash band Eviction, the remaining three members of Dream Death went to ground for a spell, before resurfacing as doom stalwarts Penance, going on to release six albums of varying quality between 1992 and 2005.

And, in 2013, Lawrence, Weston and Smail resurrected Dream Death with new bassist Richard Freund, going on to record another pair of LPs -- neither one of which challenged Journey into Mystery’s cult status, needless to say.

p.s. -- Some of these words hail from my All-Music Guide biography of Dream Death and review of Journey into Mystery.