Another excellent entry! One which feels very different from my memory of Mercy. That record burned with an aching, yearning reach, romantic and beatific. Glass Garden is instead a doomy dirge through a dark and apparently looping apocalypse wasteland, tired and afraid and alone. Very different vibes, same engrossing quality: the thoughtful songwriting really draws you deep into the story. I felt the grit under my boots, following the haunted protagonist. Perfect story-telling with sound.

A dark miasmic wash of embittered misanthropy and mourning, channeled through a dynamic melodic mix of dense diabolical black metal lines, smoky like the furnace, and achingly mournful open passages, airy like a spirit leaving the earth and entering the sky, finished with our foolish ways. Serpentine turns of song keep your attention and deepen the flavor. An accusation of all of our disconnection from Earth, our sole source of life, perhaps sharpened by D.'s First Nations perspective.

Hell yeah! Anyone who tours with Elder is a friend of mine. This is my first intro to Slomosa and I am very excited to hear more!

Felt I had to check out this little record while it was still cold out! Another dose of unmistakable Wolves in the Throne Room atavistic and primordial vibes. The bite of black metal definitely takes a back seat to a lush wash of cold ambience, a choice I am not opposed to and look forward to seeing what I think on relistens. WITTR continue to expertly conjure the spirits of the Earth. Brings me back to Fire in the Mountains!

A home run!!! Everything you loved about their debut is here in spades. They maintain the absolutely A+++ razor-sharp melodies which excitingly don’t seem to fit any easy genre box and just burst with color, propelled forward by a totally raging and incendiary rhythm section. Atop it all, cutting vocals of spine-tingling emotion that grab you by the neck. I loved every single song and each one was a different delicious flavor. One of the best “experimental” bands out there right now.

A real opus! It is just HUGE. Deeply immersive, cinematic, and profoundly emotional; enough to give me chills in some places. Very cool to hear such a drum and bass-forward record: the rhythm section really led the show here, with guitars adding flavor above the emotive base of rhythm. Songwriting is well-honed, blooming and keeping you engaged even over long lengths alongside sincere and powerful lyrics. And perhaps above all, a master class in dynamic range and letting music breathe.

Purification stand tall, a towering statue in the temple, as one of the finest DOOM acts today. A masterwork strikes in the dark of night! As others note, a distinct Type O-ish gothy vibe adds interesting new flavor to the band’s palate while the base is still 100% Purification. Rips from the rhythms, to the keys, to the sax, to the vocals, everything coming together under the dominion of THE meanest riffs you have heard in an eon of the Earth. Just stupidly delicious, thick, lush musicality.

Marthe returns!!! Awesome to hear her back and she does not disappoint. Within awaits a book of wrath, a grimy manifesto of blackened punk fury, incendiary and venomous. Marthe effectively carves her place of riot grrrl-style spitting punk, crabwalking into the icy night with the best of the Norwegian black metal wave. Pure, barbaric, atavistic, driving. A beautiful borderland, full of stern rocks and fierce wind, between the realms of all the heavy musics we love.

A warm, hazy wash of true-flame-wielding heavy freaking metal. Hard to pick a favorite song because they just slink into one another. Everything you can want from the sword-wielding forebears of the trad metal we all love is wrapped up like a blanket in this record package: delicious guitar melodies and chord progressions, charging bass, energetic drums, and excellent vocals. All of the above arranged and mixed into a brew of sword and sorcery, heroes and monsters. Well done!

This album is really a grower! The grind of most of the first song feels like a harrowing gauntlet (paired well with the name), but the hard bud of the flower begins to open at the end, and for the rest of the album the flower blooms, revealing its strange colors and luminescence. Sleepwalker really have a knack for dense and challenging free jazzy heavy music which nonetheless coalesces, stitches together, in a way that makes sense and keeps you wanting to see which odd petals will next unfurl.

An astonishingly tasty adventure of black metal vengeance! The songwriting is absolutely drum-tight and razor-sharp, radiantly melodious; every song carries incredibly juicy melodic heft. Each turn took me by awesome surprise, again and again. There is just so much well-written progression and well-chosen notes and chords. The whipping energy will have you moshing, invisible-oranging, and drawing swords in no time. The tones are perfect: incendiary, yet blending into a highly musical warm wash.

Holy moly rock and rolly! A record meatier than Oma's stew. I love the twists and turns: in the first alone, a warbly almost ragtime intro, followed by massive doom riffs, followed not by growling, but by a total left hook of spine-tingling channeling of Layne Staley that is WAY cooler than growls. Excellent songwriting that is diverse and often very soulful and moving in places; really sounds doomed - devastated and forlorn in many passages like the best of electric blues, but on rocket fuel.

Wow, what an opus! The band maximizes black metal: tremendous operatic melody, huge sound, biting ferocity and sorrow. I really love what feels like a wide range of dramatic melodious songwriting Lure packs into the black metal framework, feeling romantic and bereft as much as evil and monochrome. If their previous work was a breath of the crypt, this record is a vast snowy plain of cutting icy wind across which you crawl, frozen and forlorn under the heavy blue clouds of winter twilight, alone.

Moody, ethereal, transporting to other places and other times in the way Led Zeppelin did at their best. The band carries their core of occult and obscure mystery forward from black metal to psychedelic folky gothic rock without missing a single step. It feels totally natural: of course we went from Vergezicht to Glas to Spiritus Sylvestris. The songwriting is sparkling, evocative, and spiriting-away, carried on a firm ship of excellent tones which dance pristinely between volume and silence.

Wow, what a powerhouse record!!! Firing on all crazy cylinders. This is the sound of a band giving it 110%. Could they even tour a live set at this level of energy?! I don’t know, but it sure makes for a great record! The band has expertly synthesized their insane bloodthirsty attack with their bombastic melodic sensibilities on this record, creating possibly the most “them” sound yet. A true evocation of howling winds whipping across the castle towers in the icy night, glittering with magic.

Your cloak flutters around your chainmail as you rein in your steed, gazing across the sweeping vistas of tree and stone to the distant citadel, towers rising against the sky and pennants whipping in the wind. Swords not optional indeed! This is medieval English/Gaelic sword and sorcery black metal of the first order, very much in the pantheon of Obsequiae, Véhémence, and Stormkeep. Beautiful tones, fantastically adventurous melodies, tasteful composition, engaging rhythms.

I saw Maggot Heart opening for Messa in DC and I was blown away! This was a time when you hear someone live for the first time and you know you will be hooked when you go home and check them out. They sounded as great, ferocious, and huge live as they did on this record: MASSIVE beautiful tones from all three instruments stitching together phenomenal, twisting, beguiling, serpentine dark songwriting and well-written, razor-sharp lyrics delivered with a spine-tingling intensity. Come back to DC!

Hell yeah! A tasty dish that Motorhead would be proud of. A crusty-as-fvck slab of d-beat wasteland attitude, swathed in dusty leather, riding into the hazy sunset. It was hard to pick a favorite. Melodies are short and sweet, rhythm section is huge, mood is extremely combative and energetic, and the production is first-class filthy. Looking forward to hearing more from Road Pig!

A tasty death doom record, full of the good stuff that you anticipate from such an LP: the howling guitarmonies, the monumental precipices of riffage, and the Big Sad which permeates everything, filled with sorrow and lonely longing. Atop that, Asphodelus carry these genre staples forward with solid songcraft which feels a little more energetic than pure dirge which might bring their sound a little too close to other bands: it feels like they carve a place for themselves. Well done!