At the Gates Members Form The Lurking Fear

Various members of the At the Gates have formed a side project known as The Lurking Fear. Former guitarist and primary songwriter of Gardens of Grief and The Red in the Sky is Ours Alf Svensson is disappointingly not among them. With At the Gates regressing to commercial speed metal after half of With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, The Lurking Fear promise to play weird, evil, and twisted death metal again. We’ll see about that.

(more…)

5 Comments

Tags: , , , ,

The Best Underground Metal of 2016

2016 is over. The funderground mentality continued spreading forth, infesting metal over the last year just the same as it had in the decades past the genre’s artistic high-point in the early nineties. Rehashes of past greats pandering to a lowest common denominator audience continue to dominate the release schedules of metal labels all too willing to please the lemmings with music fit to safely ignore during drunken socializing. Ever-flowing streams of posers are desperate to be rock stars, pumping out plagiarism, and paying their way to record deals. File sharing and streaming reducing the cost of hearing new music to essentially nothing has led fans to constantly consume whatever is new regardless of quality. However the purging is at last at hand. The day of doom is here. The filth who have lied and corrupted the underground must be cleansed while the commendable elite few will remain.

(more…)

145 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gorguts – Considered Dead Turns Twenty-five

Gorgut‘s debut Considered Dead turned twenty five this year. Gorguts shockingly were once an excellent death metal band. Considered Dead combined a rhythm riffing style reminiscent of Death but arranged those riffs into almost neoclassical compositions which unfolded over the course of each track, surprising with sudden shifts of utmost aggression into cathartic sonic violence.

(more…)

7 Comments

Tags: , , , , ,

Serpent Ascending – Ananku (2016)

Ananku is a term from the Tamil language describing the otherworldly and awesome power of sublime natural places and objects to overwhelm mankind into submission to their will by merely the perception of them. Jarno Nurmi of Serpent Ascending accomplishes this musically on his album of the same name by composing harmonized heavy and black metal style leads atop a death metal rhythmic basic into occult blackened narratives. Riffs are phrased and repeat to numerologically unfold, revealing profound and novel melodic leads as if the petals of a flower gradually blooming into gnostic truth when bathed in unconquered light.

(more…)

24 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Jarno Nurmi Interviewed by Raw War

Jarno Nurmi was interviewed by black metal blog Raw War to promote his one man band Serpent Ascending‘s new album, Ananku. Jarno reveals he has left Desecresy and discusses the Finnish black and death metal scenes along with the mythological, occult, and esoteric motivations behind his latest work, Ananku.

Aṇaṅku is a different concept from ancient Tamil language and the word was chosen because it is widely unused and unknown, in many senses, but also because of it’s meanings of course. This is a nod to my earlier interests towards Indian and Asian esoteric traditions from where the process began though it ended up in something quite different.
The album turned out to have emphasis mostly on Northern European culture and identity from which it seeks to find the hidden sacred force that the word Aṇaṅku symbolises in the context. The album is adoration to Earth’s and Nature’s holiness, soil, blood and death.

(more…)

6 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Infester Remaster Coming This January

Martyrdoom Productions posted more information about their long awaited reissue of Infester‘s To the Depths, In Degradation on their Facebook page this week. Hopefully the audio will be from the master tapes and not simply the original CD’s Redbook audio compressed and limited.

(more…)

8 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z