Varathron Announce New Album and Canadian Mini-Tour

Varathron are preparing to go into the studio next month to record a new album that will be titled Patriarchs Of Evil. The title is Varathron congratulating themselves on being the forefathers of the Root and heavy metal influenced Hellenic black metal sound. While the album may or may not be good, Varathron are still a potent force live so Canadian fans of actual black metal should check them out.

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Zemial – For the Glory of Ur Reissue

Greek black metal band Zemial have reissued their debut album, For the Glory of Ur, in a limited edition digipak. The CD is a self-release exclusively available for purchase from the band’s BigCartel page. If you’re a compulsive collector who has to have everything that wasn’t terrible from the mid 90s, maybe you will need this.
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Upcomming Rotting Christ Vinyl Reissues

All of Rotting Christ‘s back catalog is being reissued on vinyl by Peaceville Records starting with their second release and first studio album, Thy Mighty Contract on April 21st. Hack writer Dayal Patterson of Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult is writing liner notes along with bang co-founder Sakis Tolis. A box set of all of their releases, including the ones nobody wants, will be released later this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7CKYHEmNW0

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Sacriphyx – The Western Front (2013)

sacriphyx-the-western-front-cd

Article by Lance Viggiano.

Sacriphyx present a bog standard take on Hellenic black metal through the rollicking pulse native to Australia. The strength of the Greek strategy is in its ability to capture a variety of moods leading to a diverse heavy metal experience. The Western Front is a discontinuous concept album based upon World War I wherein its songs do not function as parts of whole; rather, they are self-contained units acting with autonomy in pursuit of the greater conceptual goal that is realized only through individual skirmishes. These compositional deployments reinforce stylistic choices by maximizing an array of emotive impact while minimizing any diminished efficacy of individual motifs as their power is not derived from their position in a greater narrative arc from song to song. Despite proficient execution, Sacriphyx fail to build upon the Mediterranean tactic in any meaningful sense and thus the movements of its elements will be predictable to those familiar.

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Rotting Christ and Marduk Fall North American Tour

rotting christ marduk 2016 tour

Greek black metal gods Rotting Christ have announced an extensive North American tour for this fall supporting generic war metal veterans Marduk. They’re coming out here to do some gigs! Shit will be wild man, wild! Here are the dates from Marduk’s Facebook page:

Frontschwein 2016:
NORTH AMERICA
09/02/16 Ft. Lauderdale, FL Culture Room
09/03/16 Tampa, FL The Orpheum
09/04/16 Atlanta, GA The Masquerade
09/05/16 Baltimore, MD Soundstage
09/06/16 New York, NY Gramercy Theatre
09/07/16 Boston, MA Brighton Music Hall
09/08/16 Montreal, QC L’Astral
09/09/16 Toronto, ON The Opera House
09/10/16 Columbus, OH Al Rosa Villa
09/11/16 Chicago, IL Reggie’s
09/12/16 Minneapolis, MN Triple Rock
09/13/16 Kansas City, MO The Riot Room
09/14/16 Denver, CO Marquis Theatre
09/16/16 Vancouver, BC Rickshaw Theatre
09/17/16 Seattle, WA Studio Seven
09/18/16 Portland, OR Bossanova Ballroom
09/19/16 Oakland, CA Metro Opera House
09/20/16 Las Vegas, NV LVCS
09/21/16 Los Angeles, CA Regent Theater
09/22/16 Phoenix, AZ Joe’s Grotto
09/23/16 El Paso, TX Mesa Music Hall
09/24/16 Dallas, TX Gas Monkey Bar & Grill
09/25/16 Austin, TX Dirty Dog Bar

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Kawir – Father Sun Mother Moon (2016)

kawir - father sun, mother moon

Article by David Rosales.

Kawir’s Father Sun Mother Moon strikes one as simple and mediocre pagan pop metal. From the recycled tunes to the standard, swinging rhythms of the genre that make actual metalheads cringe, Kawir has collected and presented them all to us on their new album. Kawir debases their music, pandering in the same way as those worthless politically-correct pop-dressed-as-metal bands like Turisas do. It really does sound like these Greeks could have been hanging out with Congressman Freddy Lim and Jesse ‘Djent-Black’ Liu of Cthonic, or drinking beers with the geeks from Tengger Cavalry. All these accusations are well deserved. The album therefore deserves to be dismissed as third-rate pap. Despite this, it is useful to look at this inconsequential list of boring tunes in terms of their de-evolution from Kawir’s previous album, Isotheos.

The concrete symptoms of banality and mediocrity can be found in the overall decline in richness of melodies and rhythms. Melodies have been shortened: they return much quicker to the root tone and rely more heavily on simple-silly rhythms ‘typical’ of Pagan pop. The variety of the types of melodies (that is the different arrangements of the motifs and their variations) are much less in number. Exactly the same with the rhythm guitars: less variety and where there was minimalism (which by definition, cannot be further simplified without loss of value), we now find a dumbing-down. The strict cyclic structures are far more evident in this album, replacing the quasi-linear Eastern European black metal which was used on their 2012 release. This uncreative disaster reaches unbelievable proportions when we encounter a dull track where after subjecting the audience to an ad nauseam repetition of a melody over a beer metal rhythm, Kawir simply fades out to avoid any shock to casual radio listeners in order to make it easier for the corporate broadcaster to place advertisements right after it.

While Isotheos melded melody and rhythm into a phrasal motific force, Father Sun Mother Moon clearly separates the paradigms of melody and rhythm. This in itself does not mean the end of the world but nothing is done to balance the combined simplicity. In fact, repetition plays an even greater role in filling out the runtime of this album: variations are less frequent, variation distance is smaller or unrelated, and single melodies or rhythms contain less content (movements from the tonic, manner in which they return to the tonic, temporary movements to different tonics, and even number of notes). Some sections on Father Sun Mother Moon reach the heights of the previous record but the overall quality is definitely lost.

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Kawir – Isotheos (2012)

Kawir Isotheos

Article by David Rosales

Kawir is a band that belongs to that side of metal whose discussion allows the true metal nihilist to distinguish between free minds who embrace the spirit of metal’s independence from political or religious doctrine. Metal has been characterized by its portrayals of power, courage and strength, while looking down on sheepish behavior, compliance with the system and general cowardice. When bands who openly express musical worship of Pagan ideals as a source for racial/national power, it gives one the opportunity to weed out the sheep in metal guise. The metal nihilist will find in the concept of the pagan theme in metal yet another expression of pride and power apt for the narrative of timeless natural struggle. He may dispassionately nod its head to the idea without necessarily embracing it as something that speaks to him, personally. He holds the burning flame of life in front of him, observing the destroying consumption that drives action in eternal co-dependence with passive materia. He stares at it directly without fear of having the miserable protective borders of human-society constructs burn away, nay, welcoming this removal of the illusory.
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Rotting Christ streaming the entirety of Rituals

Another album that I briefly wrote about a while back is approaching its official release date. Rituals by Rotting Christ will release on February 12th, 2016, and is still available to preorder from Season of Mist in the meantime. You know how a great deal of established and older bands stick to their stylistic guns, especially now that the crisis of the 1990s is but a dim memory? Rotting Christ is amongst them; they’ve continued their traditional-black-etc fusion ways as hinted at on their earliest albums and established, at the very latest, on Triarchy of the Lost Lovers. If this album fails to be of any value, you’ll at least have Thy Mighty Contract as a fallback.

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