siLLy puPPy The Calgary based MIND MOLD is the darkened bleak creation of Robert LaChance (guitarist of Canadian dark grind devastators WAKE), Will Bjorndahl, and Ryan Kennedy (of Calgary-based avantgarde grind anomaly Seminary) who together released this sole EP in 2017 and then returned to the spawning fertile hellish ground from whence they came.

Although a mere 21 minutes in length with only five caustic tracks to sample, MIND MOLD’s self-titled concoction courtesy of the Sentient Ruin Laboratories follows the modern trend of heavy downtuned dissonance guitar chords accompanied by anguished screams of pain and sludgy post-metal drifting processions that conjure up the most menacing of atmospheres and blackened doom metal fortified with thick noise walls of reverb and sustained feedback.

A trudging journey through the bleakest musical expressions possible, MIND MOLD’s self-affirming companions to be a blender’s worth of various extreme noise / hardcore / metal bands such as Neurosis, Red Harvest, Blut Aus Nord, Today Is The Day, Rorschach, Jesu/Godflesh, and Swans existing in a torturous harmony is actually the most accurate description anyone could possible come up with although i’d add the spidery guitar chords are more out of the Deathspell Omega camp.

In the end MIND MOLD sinks to a depressive new level of skronky pasty-metal style sludge that is really hard to categorize by normal standards. The corrosive creepy crawl of the bantering din is akin to a shoegaze act fornicating with a vitriolic disso-death band like Ad Nauseam, Ulcerate or Pyrrhon only slowed down to a snail’s pace of funeral doom metal with bands like Esoteric and Evoken coming to mind. Overall a grotesque mutilating journey of the soul into the darkest recesses of the musical gutter but delivered in a way that makes it all feel so good.

UMUR "Heir to Despair" is the eleventh full-length studio album by Japanese avantgarde/progressive metal act Sigh. The album was released through Spinefarm Records in November 2018. It´s the successor to "Graveward" from 2015, and the album features the exact same quartet lineup who recorded the predecessor.

As always Sigh have managed to incorporate new musical elements to their progressive blackened heavy/speed metal style and this time around it´s the inclusion of traditional Japanese instruments and the fact that Mirai Kawashima (keyboards, vocals, vocoder, programming, main composer) have learned to play the flute (and occasionally use it on the tracks like he does on album opener "Aletheia"), which are the most dominent new elements. There are of course other new adventurous ideas on the album, but if you´re familiar with the preceding releases from Sigh you of course wouldn´t expect it any other way. Kawashima just never ceases to amaze. He is such an incredible musical capacity, who seems to be able to do anything he sets his mind to (learning to play the flute before recording this album was probably a walk in the park for him).

The main vocal style is the usual raspy blackened snarling, but the extreme metal vocal style is complimented by both male and female clean vocals, vocoder parts, and a varity of choirs and backing vocals. In addition to the traditional Japanese music influence there is also a strong middle eastern music element featured on the album. The basic guitar, bass, drums rock/metal band instrumentation are combined with Kawashima´s different keyboards/synths/organ/piano layering and his classical music influences are heard throughout the album.

Avantgarde/progressive heavy/speed metal with raw snarling blackened vocals may be the best overall description of the music, but Sigh are as always almost impossible to give a label which makes sense for the reader. Compared to "Graveward" my ears tell me that "Heir to Despair" is a slightly more well developed and tasteful release featuring a sound production, which is also a step up from the sound production of the predecessor (it´s clearer and more powerful sounding). This album is even close to being accessible at times. As an example take a listen to the sophisticated and very melodic Iron Maiden influenced lead- and harmony guitars on "Homo Homini Lupus" or the uplifting and melodic rocking "Hunters Not Horned". Avantgarde music never felt this pleasant and easy going before.

When that is said "Heir to Despair" is still a complex and demanding release featuring many layers of instruments and vocals, and a generally unconventional approach to composing music. Most tracks have recognisable vers/chorus parts, but everything else going on are quite unique when heard in this context. Upon conclusion "Heir to Despair" is another high quality release from Sigh, who are still one of the most original and creative acts on the scene. A 4 star (80%) rating is deserved.

Warthur Emerging from a long hiatus, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum make a triumphant comeback. With an orchestra backing them, absolutely pristine production, and themes as dark and foreboding as any they offered up on their original run of three albums, this is a purified and intensified take on their distinctive musical approach, a terrifying metal-in-opposition meditation on human extinction and other weighty topics which runs the full emotional gamut from ethereal beauty to apocalyptic terror.

Not only do the band sound like they've not missed a beat - and in fact, they never did with many of the members having continued to work with each other in Free Salamander Exhibit, perhaps nodded to in the opening track here. Moreover, they began working on much of this material in 2010-2011 (and SQPR, a This Heat cover, hails from as far back as 2004) and have been gently working on it ever since, meaning this album has been brewed, distilled, and refined over the span of a decade. The end result might be the best expression they've ever offered of their creative vision, a keystone which ties their body of work together and which in retrospect it feels like their earlier albums were building towards all along. With many of the band members equally adept at rock and classical instruments, and Nils Frykdahl giving Mike Patton a run for his money in terms of vocal acrobatics, the Museum deploys its full bag of tricks here expertly, everything used purposefully and thoughtfully to best effect.

For a group which started out resembling an avant-prog take on Mr. Bungle, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum have only forged ahead into yet stanger territory; here they make Mr. Bungle's most alienating moments seem outright smooth and approachable by comparison, but never become dryly technical, maintaining an impressive command of atmosphere and emotion for the whole 66 minute running time.

Warthur The debut album from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, opening with the immediately gripping Sleep Is Wrong, is the shocking answer to the question nobody thought to ask: "What if a band took its inspiration from the most horrifying moments of Mr. Bungle, then crammed in a bunch of influence from Rock In Opposition/avant-prog groups like Univers Zero or Thinking Plague at their most dark?" With Carla Kihlstedt's enigmatic violin work adding an extra dose of tension and widening the sonic palette, and the rest of the group splitting their duties between more conventional rock instrumentation and more esoteric instruments, this is certainly highly varied in sound, but a keen appreciation for their musical influences shines through and makes sure that whilst their approach is highly unusual, there's clearly a distinctive aesthetic vision involved and they're not just making random noise. Grand stuff indeed; their other two albums of the 2000s were great too, but they're clearly building on the foundations already laid by this album. Here is where their truly groundbreaking work took place.

siLLy puPPy There have been many one-man bands throughout recording history and in the world of metal perhaps the underground niche of black metal has attracted the most misanthropic loners who don’t work well with others but in recent years it seems many other styles of metal have been finding a sole multi-instrumentalist take on the entire project without the volatile nature of fellow band members. For better or for worse this trend seems to be growing and Australia’s CAVE SERMON is just one more such case. The alter ego of Melbourne based Charlie Park, the CAVE SERMON project started cranking out post-metal recordings in 2021 with both and EP and a full-length debut. While both releases pretty much flew under the radar, the same can’t be said about Park’s sophomore album DIVINE LAUGHTER which seems to be causing quite the raucous in the world of experimental metal. It should be mentioned however that while Park handles all instruments, the vocals are brought to you courtesy of guest screamer Pablo Miguel Méndez of the Colombian blackened disso-death / core band Mico.

Fresh out in January 2024, DIVINE LAUGHTER is one of those albums in the modern world that is ever increasingly difficult to classify as all the once traditional subgenres of metal have confluently joined at the hip and created a rather bizarre array of hybridization efforts with traces of death metal here, sludge metal there, blackened elements, moments of core, prog, classic heavy metal melodies and so forth and so on. To convey it all on paper requires a vast list of up to six genres (at least) just to try to grasp the contents in this art metal extravaganza. While the caustic dissonance and guttural growls point first and foremost to the world of death metal, the compositional styles are fairly unique in that they don’t adhere to any particular style of metal and as heard on the lengthy 9 1/2 opening “Beyond Recognition,” moments of metal are dropped completely in lieu of a sprawling lysergic journey into the world of Krautrock-ish psychedelia.

But this is indeed an extreme metal album through and through with caustic sludge metal tones and drumming techniques, blackened overtones and even bouts with post-metal, CAVE SERMON certainly has done its homework in the exploration of the larger metal universe and crafted a abstractly wild beastly ugliness with DIVINE LAUGHTER. The dissonance at full decibelage enhanced by thundering tempos and frenetic blastbeats may point to Ulcerate, Artificial Brain or a number of modern bands but where CAVE SERMON differs in the completely unorthodox shifts in where the compositions take you. The core elements from deathcore, metalcore and even moments of mathcore, Park keeps you guessing what will be the next hairpin turn move yet never strays to far for too long from the crushing death sludge that squeals and churns and evokes the very bowels of hell.

A crushingly brutal album for the most part however lush psychedelic interludes occur (“Beyond Recognition”) in the middle of tracks as to pacifying post-rock moments (“The Pain of an Invader”). Intros and outros also serve as the opportunity to pain the canvass with different colors of sound and although the metal aspects are dark and ominous, these contrasting elements are actually quite bright and cheerful but also fleeting in the big picture compared to the dominance of the caustic deathened sludgery. The lengthiest tracks are quite progressive and offer excursions into varying motifs, tempo shifts and even time signature deviations. The strangest head scratching track on the album is the penultimate “Birds and Machines in Brunswick” which completely drops the metal and rather offers an electroacoustic birdsong with a droning background. Sounding more like something from Nurse Than Wound than say Convulsing, this cements the fact that this album is pretty out there and attempts to take extreme metal into territories that nobody has dared gone before. However as cool as the track is, it sounds completely out of sync with anything else on the album and probably was too “artistic” for its own good.

In a way the electroacoustic turbulence is more like a 5-minute fluffer for the closing title track at 12 minutes plus which is by far the longest track. This one jumps right back into the metal with a series of stomping riffs with an accompanying atmospheric guitar sweeping all over the backdrop. The keys add a nice ambient touch as well. This one begins more as a posty death doom sound in the vein of classic Neurosis or Isis only with death metal bantering and growls. The addition of the chaotic swirls of sound above the main chugga-chug adds nice layers of tension. This last track is the most focused as it tends to use a post-metal structure of repetition which makes it easier to follow than the abstract nature of the rest of the album. It also delivers all the elements in the right doses and in the right logical procession and in a way provides a recap of what you just experienced. It’s an amazingly clever slab of weirdo metal freakery!

A veritable stab of psychedelic death / sludge / progressive / experimental metal, CAVE SERMON delivers exactly what the artistic album cover insinuates and that is something completely new for the world of (mostly) death metal. While i think the album could’ve been streamlined a bit better in the vein of the final track, overall this is an exhilarating slab of psychedelic freakery meets technical brutality. Yeah the electroacoustic “Birds and Machines in Brunswick” seems a bit like a fish out of water without any thought as to how it relates to the rest of the album but i have a feeling this was basically just a warm up album for more to come. Despite my own thoughts about how element A should’ve been replaced with element B and so forth, i do find this to be an excellent listening pleasure in its own right and perfect for those who love the crushing caustic nature of extreme metal augmented by moments of psychedelia.