Our This Week in Metal post collects our thoughts on music released in or around this week in the music world. We cover mostly metal, but we consider other genres to allow our writers poseur flexibility. Follow us on Instagram too!
Scuttlegoat's Curmudgeonly Critique
Black metal used to be about icy feelings — depression, hate , borderless self-expression. Scuttlegoat, for one, is quite glad that black metal musicians have discovered that having material that can actually be grabbed on to is beneficial. He wholly welcomes the rise of blackened traditional metal, which Tubal Cain and Slime Abyss fall into nicely. What once was kvvl is now kvlt again.
Anti-Peat's Perplexing Positions
Shrieking Demons namecheck Death and Autopsy as their comparables. In terms of style, that’s pretty accurate as long as we’re talking about those bands in their earlier, rawer eras. The Festering Dwellers is all malevolently melodic riffs and pounding rhythms. Is somebody gonna match their shriek?
Anhedonia clearly stretches the black metal genre tag a very long way. Yes, you can hear practices inherited from black metal bands in Lord Agheros’ work, but they’re all quite divorced from the traditional framework. Yet without using that genre tag, without expressing a desire to belong to that movement, I’d have maybe missed this and that’d have been a shame.
Bobo's Brainless Bearing
Danish deathmongers Phrenelith have unleashed a monstrous slab of death metal with Ashen Womb, an album that immediately engulfs the listener in its suffocating atmosphere. From the opening moments, Phrenelith’s dense, unrelenting sound conjures the spirit of Immolation, bombarding my senses with a massive wall of sound. This womb is made for rockin’
