Wilytank Primordial are one of those common knowledge blackened folk metal acts that prove that you don't need cheesy keyboards or flutes and fiddles to make interesting folk metal; just a little acoustic guitar to go along with their epic sounding metal music. However, no one ever brings up their debut 'Imrama' in any discussions of the band. Granted, this is one one of their weaker albums, but there are a good amount of quality elements to keep me coming back to it.

This album actually leans more toward black metal than folk but the influences that hint at their later inversion of that order are definitely here. There's the opener "Fuil Arsa" which has folkish acoustic guitar played alongside the metal music and non-English lyrics. Beyond that song, the rest of this album is mostly black metal; but Primordial does have their trademark Primordial tone going already, i.e. lots of triplet riffs and lyrics dealing with paganism, society, and dark romanticism. Those three themes are enough to cycle back and forth from through the album's ten song cycle, and there's some very memorable licks like the aggressive sounding "Here I Am King" and "The Fires", the more somber "The Darkest Flame" and "Let the Sun Set on Life Forever", and the flat-out epic opener and closer pieces "Fuil Arsa" and "Awaiting the Dawn".

There are a few reasons why 'Imrama' is one of Primordial's weaker albums though. A lot of these pieces are good but not great, and the only two I'd put in a Primordial dream live set list are the opening and closing pieces. The musicianship feels sloppy in places' the example that comes first to my mind is in "Here I Am King" in the first blastbeating section where the riffs and drumming don't seem to match up right. Singer A.A. Nemtheanga combines all his styles like he usually does: harsh, spoken, and clean. However, 'Imrama' features some of his weakest clean vocals ever. The dude barely has any range here, which makes him sound pretty boring when compared to his work in Primordial's other albums. Fortunately, he'd improve in time for the sophomore album 'A Journey's End' three years later.

'Imrama' was their debut album and Primordial are one of those bands whose debut album is only a dry run of the excellent material to come. These pieces are weaker than Primordial's later work, but the majority of them are still good for what they are with the side effect of making their later albums seem even better in comparison. So, go ahead and give 'Imrama' a go if just to see what Primordial was like before 'Spirit the Earth Aflame' or 'To The Nameless Dead'.

Wilytank So, it's been a few months since my review of Gorguts' 'Obscura' was published. Surely by now I must understand the album for the musical genius and divinity that it is and change my mind about the negative score I gave it, yes? No. I have not gone back to that album since the review for the simple reason that I refuse to listen to terrible music more than I need to. However, it's time to leave the past to the past. I have moved on to their followup album, 'From Wisdom to Hate', which is a great improvement over 'Obscura'. Unfortunately, that still does not make it very good.

First, I'm pleased to say that the production has improved and it's a lot more apparent that the guys in Gorguts are interested in actually playing their music to an actual key than making noise with the guitar strings. This coincides with the album's whole style which now sounds like a sort of post death metal album influenced by parts of "Nostalgia", one of the better pieces from 'Obscura'. With this particular concept, Gorguts have showed some promise. This post-metal concept is a lot more likeable than the "dissonant" noise that was existent in 'Obscura'.

What's the problem then? Why is this score rather low? The problem is how Gorguts actually executes this concept. As the album goes on, it just really seems to drag with all the slower paced riffs that I begin to feel like the playing is just really uninspired that it just drains my attention to the point of boredom. It gets worse when I look at a more modern example: Ulcerate. When I listen to 'Everything Is Fire' or 'The Destroyers of All', I get this sense of nihility mixed with a little misanthropy to make a really negative sounding atmosphere. I'm just not getting that here on 'From Wisdom to Hate'. The thematic elements are drastically different between the two. While Ulcerate have a rather negative view on the human condition, 'From Wisdom to Hate''s lyrics contain some bullshit about human transcendence. I get the feeling from the piece "Unearthing the Past" and "Elusive Treasures that Luc Lemay wanted to be an archaeologist before becoming a musician because both of those songs basically talk about how cool archaeology is.

The point I'm trying to make is that this post death metal style of music doesn't work as well in the setting that Gorguts presents here on 'From Wisdom to Hate'. Death metal tends to be much better when it has more negative energy. Not to say I don't appreciate Gorguts' change in style to something better than 'Obscura', but better does not equal good. At the publishing time of this review the band hasn't put out anything since this album; but even with the amount of time they would have had to change things up further, I'm not too enthusiastic as to what the product will be.

Wilytank If I ever wanted to listen to dissonant, nightmarish black metal, I'd turn to Blut aus Nord first. From 'The Mystical Beast of Rebellion' onward, it's what they've been pretty much known for. However, among all those albums, 'MoRT' has stood out as the most dark and disturbing to listen to. That hasn't made it actually better than the others though.

The first noticeable uniqueness in this album is how much slower it is compared to Blut aus Nord's previous material. Even 'The Work Which Transforms God' whose most well known pieces are the slower ones (particularly "Procession of Dead Clowns") doesn't match up with 'MoRT'. I suppose a good amount of that has to do with 'MoRT''s darker atmosphere. While 'The Work...' had faster songs that were really dissonant sounding, the slower ones had a more melancholic tinge. Every track on 'MoRT' is basically one bad trip or mental rape after another. This is music you listen to when your soul gets abducted and gets transported across some dark, ethereal void. The dissonant guitar work helps bring this about, but surprisingly so do the vocals. Vindisval uses a mixture of unintelligible screeches, growls, whispers, chants, and more to further conjure this frightening experience. The production is noticeably dryer as well, so the foggier sound will make you get even more lost in this black haze.

'MoRT' does have problems though, and the most notable problems were also present on 'The Mystical Beast of Rebellion'; but at the same time, these flaws were worked on to make them a little more bearable. The first problem is having the approximately 30 seconds of non-music between the songs. The good news though is that Blut aus Nord made these sections a lot more interesting. While all the sections between the songs on '...Mystical Beast...' were all quiet wind sounds, 'MoRT' instead uses creepy dissonant sounds that go right along with the music. My favorite of these is the transition between "Chapter VII" and "Chapter VIII", which has some really low and distorted growls as if Lucifer is speaking to the listener; quite fitting considering it's going into the final track of the album and the listener meets the master of this dark void. The other notable problem is the naming of the songs simply as "Chapter I", "Chapter II", etc.; and like '...Mystical Beast...', 'MoRT' isn't Blut aus Nord's most memorable output, but it's still very intriguing to listen to from beginning to end and there's more individual songs that I find myself going back to.

Though it falls on the weaker side of Blut aus Nord's spectrum of albums, 'MoRT' isn't bad in any sense. If you're looking for something really dark and disturbing to listen to, then this is a great album to check out, because if there's one thing this album does better than Blut aus Nord's other works, it's that it creates a darker atmosphere than any of the others and it works out pretty well.

Wilytank After Lunar Aurora brought about 'Elixir of Sorrow', they really began to detach themselves from the symphonic black metal scene and began their second era of the second era of the band's history featuring a more depressive type of atmospheric black metal. 'Zyklus' first showed off the band's completed metamorphosis since 'Elixir of Sorrow' still retained some symphonic parts but still showed signs of the style change. 'Mond' refined what 'Zyklus' brought about; and finally, there came 'Andacht', the best of this era but for better or worse also the end of this era.

I must say, this is Lunar Aurora's most depressive album yet. The sorrowful tone first brought about in 'Elixir of Sorrow' is brought to its peak in 'Andacht'. Among the different types of setting the atmosphere evokes is "Glück", with the church-like atmosphere brought about by the choir; and "Geisterschif", which goes right along with its translated title "Ghostship" in that it makes me feel like I'm sailing away from the shores of some place on a wooden ship during a foggy day and a storm closing in. The atmosphere is brought about by the guitar work, something Lunar Aurora have become quite skilled at doing. In particular, the lead guitar in 'Andacht' is very prominent and very impressive. While there is noticeable use of the keyboards on this album, the lead guitar often overrides them. The keys are at their strongest on the final two tracks "Der Pakt" and "Das Ende", though one of the "atmospheric" elements on the latter song sounds like someone inflating a balloon.

The drums are programmed by Sindar, Aran's younger brother. With the rest of the production rather clear sounding, the drums also sound pretty good; but their presence is a little overbearing at times such as the final refrain of "Glück" where i feel that they might have been overproduced. The vocals are handled by Aran, Sindar, and Whyrhd; but good luck trying to tell who says what since three different voices are heard in the songs. The only one i could recognize was Whyrhd from his work in the 'Hoagascht' album; he has the lowest voice. But otherwise, kudos to him and whoever did the majority of the higher screeching on the songs as well as whoever did clean vocals on "Glück".

Though there are a few small flaws, 'Andacht' is enjoyable enough for me to put it in the top tier category of my review filing system. However, it would be the end of this era for Lunar Aurora; and after they reformed, Sindar would not join them. Let 'Andacht' stand as one of the band's greatest efforts to date as well as the most ideal way to make this era go out with a bang.

Wilytank Although people have told me it's healthier to not have an elitist sense of metal superiority, it's hard not to give the middle finger to many of the designated "mallcore" acts out there. Make Me Famous is the latest iteration of fresh new mallcore material to satiate the mallcore fans who believe that it isn't trendy enough to like Asking Alexandria or A Day to Remember anymore, or rather Attack Attack! since Make Me Famous wants to work off the trancecore angle Attack Attack! were using.

As most of you know now, the term "mallcore" is used mainly as a derogatory term. Unfortunately, Make Me Famous makes absolutely no effort shed the cliches that defined the derogatory term. They've got a stupid band name; stupid song titles like "Blind Date 101", "This Song Is Blacker Than Black Metal" (your fellow countrymen Nokturnal Mortum and Drudkh would like a word with you), "Once You Killed A Cow, You Gotta Make A Burger", "ifyuocnaraedtihsmkaemeasnadwich"; and that stereotypical look the band members have: straightened hair, revealing shirts, and skinny jeans.

Actually, if I didn't notice the different band name, I'd say 'It's Now or Never' is actually Attack Attack!'s newest album, failing to realize that Attack Attack! released an album in 2012 as well. So much got carried over that the only real distinction that Make Me Famous has is that the lyrics in 'It's Now or Never' are WORSE than Attack Attack!'s lyrics ever were. They still read like angst-ridden love letters, but Attack Attack! looks incredibly mellow in comparison to Make Me Famous' approach: every song's lyrics here is basically the same message as "You made me feel bad! Now I kill you, bitch!" If there's something I hate as much as angst-ridden lyrics, it's pseudo tough guy lyrics; and combining the two does not make either of them more bearable. As for the delivery, there's nothing that makes Make Me Famous special here. The vocalist mixes guttural harsh vocals with clean vocals that sound like he tried to audition for High School Musical. Musically, there's no outstanding qualities here. Lots of repeated chugging on one note, faster (mostly mid-paced) sections that aren't any more impressing, and overuse of that damn keyboard!

And the worst thing about having these electronic influences it that they almost fucking work! I've been impressed by a good amount of the material that Japanese melodic trance death metal act Blood Stain Child has put out as well as the Russian industrial metal/electronic/ambient project Senmuth's EBM material. But even in the metalcore setting, there's also Born of Osiris, who have put a decent amount of attention in the guitar work to make the keyboard use seem acceptable; having them not sound like a rave party also helps. The keyboards should be used as a booster for the music's atmosphere, not an accessory to wave around like your "swag".

At the end of the day, we have a very big mess of an album here. 'It's Now or Never' is not worth a damn to check out, and the only reason why I'm not putting it in the bottom tier of my ranking system is that it almost worked. But there's just way too many things wrong with it to justify giving it any proper praise.

Wilytank And here stands 'Quintessence', the last of the three Borknagar albums I got on that one day I mentioned in my previous two Borknagar reviews. But compared to the two other albums by them that I own, this one is the most distinct. It's an impressive archetype to what Borknagar would put out after this album.

It was during this album and 'The Archaic Course' that Øystein Brun would begin bringing musicians in to his project for the long run, all but discarding the supergroup lineup of well known Norwegian black metal musicians. ICS Vortex, who did vocals in 'The Archaic Course' previously, returns' but beyond him, there aren't any relatively well known players here. Grim, sadly, couldn't return to the drums due to his suicide in 1999. His replacement, Asgeir Mickelson, has proved his worth previously in Spiral Architect and plays the drums well in 'Quintessence'. Jens F. Ryland, previously playing second guitar on 'The Archaic Course', returns to reprise the role on this album. Ivar Bjornson is now gone, and he is replaced by Lars Nedland from the relatively unheard of duo group Solefald who would go on to be a permanent member of Borknagar.

Well, let's see what this new team can do. The folky, nostalgic, old world style of the first two albums are long gone. 'The Archaic Course' brought about a new style of goofy sounding progressive black metal that was definitely weaker than the first two. 'Quintessence' then works on the flaws of 'The Archaic Course' to make an end product that leans much closer to progressive metal than black metal. Vortex's clean vocals are used more often here, and he sounds great...just as long as his voice isn't being fucked with. If there's one negative thing to say about 'Quintessence', it's that layering the vocals can get somewhat annoying at times. One effect that's really irksome is on "Ruins of the Future" where he sounds like he's doing harsh vocals while his mouth is in a basin full of water and he's blowing bubbles. However, his voice sounds excellent clean and harsh on other likcs like "Colossus", "Icon Dreams", "Genesis Torn", and "Revolt" even if the vocals are layered at certain points.

Even the songs where Vortex's voice doesn't shine, the music is very well composed and makes up for it. The goofy sounding tone of 'The Archaic Course' has been peeled away, opting instead for a return to a more epic sounding tone like in the first two albums. Mind you, the nostalgic old world atmosphere did not get carried over. Instead, it seems that Brun and pals created a new epic atmosphere using the two electric guitars and more prominent use of the keyboards. To assign some describers to this atmosphere, I'd still say they bring up this old world that Brun loves so much; but now it seems like it's got some sort of mystical energy that Borknagar can wield using some sort of sorcery, especially evidenced on "Rivalry of Phantoms" where the lyrics talk about summoning winter, rivers, and the presence of time. Brun has been able to work this angle quite well. There's no acoustic guitar to be found on this album; but having Ryland on second guitar has allowed Brun to play some epic sounding leads, particularly on "Colossus". I do like Lars on keys more than Ivar, and the bigger role the keys play in Borknagar at this point in the band's musical transition is portrayed much better by Lars in 'Quintessence' than by Ivar in 'The Archaic Course'. The keys really shine on "Rivalry of Phantoms", "The Presence is Ominous", "Invincible", and "Genesis Torn".

It's not a perfect album, but 'Quintessence' has so many great things about it that the bad things have been greatly outweighed. Thus, I believe it deserves a top tier ranking. It's a very awesome progressive metal album with black metal influences, and it's Borknagar's second best album in my opinion. Unfortunately, Borknagar is coming close to the end of their golden era. They would still have 'Empiricism' yet to be released; but after that album, they would grow weaker as they would be unable to recreate the magic of these first few albums.

Wilytank Getting a CD to me means, among other things, that if I want to write a review for that album, I no longer have to be glued to a computer if I want to use the music as a reference (which I always do). I've also developed a craving to collect certain bands' discographies, one of them being Blut aus Nord's. One thing that's unfortunate though is that the three Blut aus Nord CDs I own at the time of writing this review are, in my opinion, their three weakest: 'The Mystical Beast of Rebellion', 'MoRT', and '777-The Desanctification'. None of these albums are inherently bad, but the good news is that any other album by them I buy is going to be better than what I have. For now though, let's get a review out for 'The Mystical Beast of Rebellion', the first Blut aus Nord album to be introduced to my collection.

Pressing the play button greets me with a fast paced assault of melodic tremolo guitar play and blast beating drums. This first piece, "Chapter I", maintains the drum pattern until a little after the four minute mark. But before that, the riffs do vary to prevent the song from becoming stagnant. Once the music ends, there's a minute of quiet sounding howling of wind that continues on into the first thirty seconds of the second song. Here lies the first problem this album has, and every song after the first one has that moment of quietness before and after the actual music. I call that time waste. I could handle it if it was just at the end of a song so I could just hit the skip button, but the fact that I must waste my precious finger energy holding the fast forward or otherwise sit waiting for the music to start again in the thirty or so second mark of the following song really grinds my gears.

Turning my attention to the actual music though, 'The Mystical Beast of Rebellion' isn't very bad at all. Blut aus Nord have all but dropped the pagan act here and have begun playing their nightmarish style that they would be known for in their following albums. Vindisval's guitar work is well played and well written; and the dark, nightmarish atmosphere is definitely present here; but these attributes are stronger in some places on this album than other parts of the album. However, as the songs go on, this album's second problem becomes apparent. The fast paced blast beating that was used in the beginning of "Chapter I" is reused as the standard drum pattern through the rest of the songs, which makes the album a little monotonous. The guitar work is well varied though, and the drum pace does try to switch itself up at sections such as the final minutes of "Chapter I" and the entirety of "Chapter V" where things slow up a good bit.

'The Mystical Beast of Rebellion' as a whole isn't Blut aus Nord's most memorable piece of music, and having all the songs named "The Fall, Chapter (roman numeral)" doesn't help. But although I usually only go back to "Chapter I" because there's no silence at the beginning and it eventually does slow its pace down, giving the whole album a full listen still offers a pretty solid experience despite its flaws. The good news for those who want this album for themselves is that the most readily available version of this album is the 2011 version with a bonus disc with three more songs that are all slower than disc one's and may be thicker in the nightmare atmosphere. It's a pretty win/win situation in my book.

Wilytank By the time I've caught on to Lunar Aurora, they've already split up and reformed; but I've found what I've listened to already so interesting that I was looking forward to their latest output 'Hoagascht'. The band has downsized, only maintaining Aran on instruments and Whyrhd on vocals. Regardless, these two veterans march on and make a very strong atmospheric black metal album.

See the art? The owl, the tree, and the moon? These things fit the atmosphere very well. Throughout the entire album, I think of an owl flying through the forest under a full moon and a star filled sky. Compared to their previous entry, 'Andacht', the atmosphere on 'Hoagascht' is much more consistent. One thing that boosts this is the much bigger role the keyboards play in this album compared to 'Andacht', provided that 'Andacht' didn't need the keys as much since the lead guitar on that album was used as a very prominent instrument. That attribute isn't present in 'Hoagascht'; the guitars are still layered, but there's no outstanding lead guitar. The keys here never make the music approach the boundaries of bombast though, and the guitars are the main instruments that carry the songs' melodies and tone; and the drums, while programmed, sound natural (especially when compared to the drums on 'Mond' and 'Andacht') and go with the album well.

Though much of the music is played mid-paced, such as "Im Gartn" and "Geisterwoid", there are faster pieces like "Håbergoaß" and the ending of "Nachtuele". There's also the slower epic, emotional sounding "Sterna" which is probably my biggest favorite from the album. The only track I really have a problem with is "Wedaleichtn", which starts out fine but then cuts to a prolonged sample passage that feels like it takes up a third of the song or more; so we've got a little time waste, but it's just a little impurity in an otherwise really clear glass of water.

This album just falls short of a top tier ranking. It's not as great as 'Elixer of Sorrow' or 'Andacht'; but I definitely like it more than 'Mond', which was a good album itself. 'Hoagasht' was a shift in the band's style though, and may bring a third era of the band as far as music goes. If so, I'm eager to see what all Lunar Aurora can do with it.

Wilytank The winter of 2011-2012 was so fucking boring compared to the winters of past years. I had intended to use the scenic winter landscape to write several reviews for some winter themed metal albums and only got around to doing four since the snow barely stayed on the ground long enough to offer any scenic visual inspiration. So, it's sad to see the season come and go without leaving a lasting effect; but in its place, snowfall gives way to rainstorms, and there's definitely a few albums to be found and reviewed that are scenic like the rainstorm. 'Loss' by Wodensthrone is one such album.

This rainstorm-like atmosphere on 'Loss' is very reminiscent of 'Zîrnindu-să' by Negura Bunget and was even recorded at Negura Studio with (former) NB frontman Huppogrammos present. With this musical shaman's blessing, 'Loss' was given life in Romania where Negura Bunget drew inspiration from their region's spiritual heathen past. Wodensthrone also draws inspiration from their home country's pre-Christian roots, and there's such deepness to this ideology in regards to a more natural sounding landscape.

It is very rare that an intro track leaves a lasting impression on me, but damn! "Fyrgenstréam" is one of the best intro tracks I've ever heard! The calling of crows, whispering vocals, a somber sounding acoustic guitar line, layers of somber sounding keyboards as the vocals and guitars go on, all building on each other to provide a somber but incredibly epic atmosphere as the rainstorm approaches.

"Let me take upon myself this curse. Let my bloodline die with me. Let the great wind sing a lament to this land where nobility is no more."

After that, the storm kicks itself off with "Leódum on Lande"; and like a rainstorm, the music is dreary, yet purifying at the same time. The songs contain an even mix of fast blast beat/tremolo sections and slower paced sections. In songs like "Heófungtid", the music is played at a higher key, alleviating the dreary tone, yet maintaining the epic, purifying tone. At the heart of the aforementioned purifying tone is the keyboards and how well their master, Æðelwalh, utilizes them. The best part about them though is that, while they are prominent, they don't override the guitars in the album which are well produced and include bits of acoustic work involved.

It's like Drudkh meets Negura Bunget meets Wolves in the Throne Room. If you love any or all of those bands, you'll really want to look into 'Loss'. At the same time, though, I've never felt like Wodensthrone were ever ripping on any of those bands. They've definitely got their own thing going on that makes this album totally enjoyable without making me think twice about it.

Wilytank The second of the three Borknagar albums to review in light of my lucking find I mentioned in my review of Borknagar's self-titled is 'The Olden Domain'. During my initial immersion into the band, I recall 'The Olden Domain' being one of the band's best. Now that I have the CD and have been able to give it more listens to strengthen my opinion in preparation for this review, 'The Olden Domain' actually extends further than being my favorite Borknagar album, but I'll get back to that later. What I will say now is that while it is nice to have the three Borknagar albums I got that day at FYE, I would be fine with just 'The Olden Domain'. In fact, 'The Olden Domain' was the first Borknagar album I saw on that shelf that day.

From the self-titled, Øystein Brun carries Garm, Grim, and Ivar over to continue his supergroup lineup. Infernus was dropped, and in his place is Kai K. Lie. 'The Olden Domain' is Lie's first big album he would perform on, but it's definitely a nice album to have on his resume. The production on 'The Olden Domain allows the bass to be fairly audible and reveals that Lie is definitely capable of playing his part. As for the other musicians, Brun's writing style change toward Borknagar's modern progressive metal sound first shows itself on this album. A large amount of the music here is slower paced akin to the slower parts on the self-titled, but there's still a good amount of fast paced sections on 'The Olden Domain', especially on "Grimland Domain". He also throws in acoustic guitar pieces along the rest of the music in "The Winterway", "To Mount and Rove", and "The Dawn of the End". Meanwhile, Grim plays slower, but at a more controlled pace to match the new song writing, but he still manages the rolling kick drums and blast beats when they are appropriate. Garm really shines on this album. Compared to the self-titled where he sang 90% in harsh vocals, it's more like 45% on 'The Olden Domain'. His mixture of clean and harsh vocals flows excellently throughout, and I always find myself singing or humming along to the "ah" parts of "The Eye of Oden" and "The Winterway" as well as verses or pieces of verses, particularly the final verse of "Dawn of the End", though having all songs entirely in English makes 'The Olden Domain' easier to go along with than the self-titled which was in Norwegian/Swedish/whatever. Ivar and the keys play both more and less of a notable role on this album in comparison to the self-titled. They are a little more prevalent here with piano pieces and other sections bringing the keys out of the back, but they aren't overused. They play less of a role in that there's a lot less interludes on 'The Olden Domain'. There's only one folksy ambient keyboard interlude, and thankfully it's not as dull as the "Tanker Mot Tind" pieces on the self-titled.

I feel like Brun's intended message of nostalgia for a better a better time in the ancient past is actually portrayed even better in 'The Olden Domain'. Attributes like acoustic guitar, piano, and large amounts of clean vocals help this; but the biggest influence is the generally slower tempo on the album. I've pointed out the atmospheric tendencies in the more mid-paced sections of songs in the self-titled. In 'The Olden Domain, the tempos are slower and stay slow longer, thus giving much more room for the atmosphere to paint its pictures. All the songs are arranged in the most ideal order with "Dawn of the End" being hands down the best way to end this album. I can't bring myself to skip any of these tracks, even the piano ambient interlude "Om hundrede aar er alting glemt" or the instrumental metal piece "Ascension of Our Fathers".

'The Olden Domain' has very excellent features, talented musicians playing their parts right, one of Garm's best vocal performances ever, and that special charm that puts me in a good mood every time I listen to it. Thus, I am comfortable with not only giving this album a top tier ranking, but also a perfect 100/100 score. And though I have given other albums the 100/100 that I may hold in higher regard than this one, I will give 'The Olden Domain' the distinct title of being the best Norwegian metal album, which is a damn impressive feat by itself having to compete against all the other big black metal acts and coming out on top.

Wilytank Oh the things for a single college boy of 18 years to do while he is on spring break. I decided to take one of these days and hike to the top of a tall, rocky hill that overlooks the entirety of the town of Bedford and more in the valley below and beyond. Moreover, I wanted to use this scenic view as visual inspiration for a written review of Isis' 'Panopticon'. So I packed up my notebook, my iPod, two bottles of water, and a sandwich. An hour later, I was at the designated spot.

I actually acquired a copy of 'Panopticon' during the summer of 2011 at my favorite CD store in Princeton, New Jersey for $9.99 new. I liked its scenic, post rock atmosphere mixed with sludgey yet calm metal riffs. In fact, the albums's art of a scenic, panoramic view of a large landscape is what eventually influenced me to hike up here on this hill, find a comfortable spot amongst these rocks, and write this review.

And actually, the view of the town, some highways, partial forests, and open farm fields fits really well for the atmosphere of 'Panopticon'. If I was looking at a 100% natural view like a great, vast forest or something, I'd probably be reviewing something like Blood of the Black Owl or Agalloch instead (hmm...ideas...).

This album's main advantage when conveying its atmosphere is that it is based on instrumentation. In other words, the lasting effect of the vocals on this album is very weak. They're there, but they only do one or two stanzas per song. The most is probably three in "Wills Dissolve" and "Syndic Calls". The convenient thing about the vocals though is that while the lyrics aren't easy to pick out and sing along to, they're still capable of at least being hummed along to.

On the instrumental side, all songs are played at a nice, slow-mid pace and never change tempo in the course of a single song. The riffs are varied, however, and seem to build up an atmosphere in each songs before reaching a climax in its final minutes. Guitar tone switched comfortably back and forth in each song from calm sounding post rock guitar and sludge metal riffs. Also adding to the atmosphere is a well utilized keyboard and decently audible bass. All this coagulates into the atmosphere of the album and, by extension, the panoramic view on the album art and of my own view of Bedford.

Any album that inspires me to hike through the woods and up a steep, rocky hill to write a review utilizing the view I get from the top definitely is worthy of my praise. 'Panopticon' is definitely one of the best atmospheric sludge metal albums out there, and an obvious necessity for fans of the genre. And I'm definitely glad I got this little adventure early in this week, because it's raining later; and when it's not raining, I'm going to be working.

Wilytank As much as I would rather shop at CD stores besides FYE, I must give FYE a chance to surprise me with its used CD selection. Why? Because FYE HAS surprised me in the past with some of the used CDs I've found there. I've found some great albums at cheap prices such as 'Storm of the Light's Bane' by Dissection, 'Unification' by Iron Savior, three Primordial albums, Therion's 'Lemuria' and 'Sirius B' on 2 CD, and three of Borknagar's best albums. Of these, Borknagar is probably the most rewarding luck I've had with my browsing there. Since it's been forever since my initial immersion into Borknagar, I thought it would be nice to write a review or two or three to celebrate my reintroduction into the band now having three of their albums on CD. The first of these is the self titled debut by the band, one of the three I picked up at FYE.

Borknagar is the brainchild of Øystein G. Brun. With him on Borknagar's self titled is a lineup of well known Norwegian black metal musicians: Garm from Ulver, Infernus from Gorgoroth, Ivar Bjørnson from Enslaved, and Grim who played on Gorgoroth's 'Under the Sign of Hell' (though that would be released later). Everyone on the roster plays their respective instruments exceptionally well, but Brun does more so than anyone else. He's an exceptional music writer and guitarist. He states on the album's insert that 'Borknagar' contains Brun's feelings of nostalgia for a better, ancient past put to modern metal music; and I can actually take his word for it since the general tone here can easily reflect those primordial times. 'Borknagar' is raw, but not too raw; has keys, but does not overuse them.

The actual brand of black metal played here consists of fast-paced tremolo/blast beat along with a good amount of variation with more mid-tempoed sections gaining an atmospheric tinge brought about by Øystein's lead guitar and/or the keys. These atmospheric sections possess an epic quality that ties back into Øystein's original intended message with the album; and I just can't get my favorite of these sections, the parts at the 1:59 and 3:28 areas of "Vintervredets Sjelesagn", out of my head.

Garm sings mostly harsh vocals on this album save for a few clean "aws" and actual lyrical passages of "Dauden". His clean parts also tie in well with Brun's message; but if you know Garm, this should not be a surprise. All the parts together create an experience similar to Enslaved's 'Vikingligr Veldi' (released two years prior) mixed with Satyricon's 'Dark Medieval Times' (three years prior) with some bits of 'Bergatt by Ulver (one year prior) also present.

Even though I can definitely call the listening experience amazing, I can't call it perfect. If you don't pay enough attention to the music, most of it will go in one ear and out the other. Having all Norwegian song titles and lyrics doesn't help either. 'Borknagar' unfortunately also suffers from having too many interludes, 5 out of 10 songs, but I do like a few of their attributes taht tie in with Brun's message such as acoustic guitar and Garm's clean "aw"s, so I'm willing to overlook that problem a bit since all the real songs are all very good; though Ivar's "Tanker mot Tind" pieces are the low point of the album. I'm not giving 'Borknagar' a top tier score, but it's still an excellent addition to the black metaller's collection.

Wilytank Germany's Trist seemed like a good pie to dip my finger in after dipping my other fingers into the pies belonging to the Czech Trist and Lunar Aurora, the Czech Trist for the shared names and Lunar Aurora because Aran from Lunar Aurora is also the sole musician in Germany's Trist. I guess it's also good to have had an entire hand dipped in Darkspace's pie as well since I've seen people compare the German Trist (hereon referred to simply as Trist, I have no need to bring up the Czech one again for the rest of this review) to Darkspace. A comparison between one of my favorite bands and one totally new to me raises one important question: why the hell haven't I reviewed 'Dark Space II' yet? Alright another one: can Trist live up to the comparisons to one of my favorite bands? Eager to satisfy my curiosity, I tracked down 'Hin-Fort' (due to my inability to find Trist's debut, 'Tiefenrausch (Ein Abstieg in fünf Stufen)') and let the judgement begin.

The first disc here contains an hour long song. Hmm...Darkspace haven't even attempted to make a song of that length. Pressing play, I am greeted with some spacey ambient, so we have a mood setter. This already sounds different than Darkspace though. Darkspace's music is always at a lower key that gives it a freakier, scarier, more destructive sound. Trist sounds less so. Aran seems more interested in the light, transcendental aspects of space. I can hear the soft roar of raw black metal tremolo guitar in the background, so I guess this could be classified as black ambient. Let's see how this unfolds.

Ten minutes later: Still the same ambient? Wow, not even Darkspace carries out ambient mood setters that long. Paysage d'Hiver does in some songs, most notably on the first part of 'Nacht', but even that is its own separate song on some versions of the album. Here on "Hin", the prolonged mood setter is part of the whole song. I wouldn't mind it so much if it actually varied, but...

Roughly five minutes later: Hey, a sample! At least we have some sort of variation. Let's see what this guy has to say. Hmm...light, darkness, the cosmos. Weird, mystical philosophy and science talk? Not uncommon with the space theme, but still lighter than Darkspace's sampling from 2001: A Space Odyssey or Event Horizon. The good news is that once he shuts up, the actual black metal kicks in. And so begins the raw, layered tremoloing and continuous blast-beat of the programmed drums. Eventually, Aran does some vocals, but they sound like some beast yawning. Following that yawning (and all other sessions of yawning in the song), some spacey keyboards are played. So, as far as the tremolos and blast-beating drums go, I guess this is like Darkspace, but the higher key still makes Trist distinctly not Darkspace.

Fifteen minutes later: You know what else makes Trist not Darkspace? It's that Darkspace have a good amount of variations in their songs, both in riffing and in tempo. Trist's "Hin" has neither of those going for it. the aforementioned yawning and keyboard mix is broken up by some guitar work, but then it's pretty much copy/paste throughout the entire piece. Eventually, the guy from the first sample comes back and says some more stuff, but then the same copy/paste song structure from before continues.

With really nothing else to say about disc one, I'll just move on to the disc two section of my review.

Disc two is composed entirely of ambient...and by ambient, I mean some tracks composed mostly with horror movie samples and others that actually are straight up dark/black ambient. Unfortunately, the ones with the samples tend to get really annoying. In the first piece here, there's some woman counting from one to sixty before some beastly noise is made. I'm sorry, Aran. I appreciate the effort, but if I wanted to listen to frightening music that isn't really metal, I'd listen to Gnaw Their Tongues. I will give you some credit though; the pieces here that have no samples are actually pretty good ambient. Probably because you were trying to make them actually atmospheric and interesting instead of recreating your favorite thrillers in musical form. You know what sucks though? The fact that there's only two here without samples: "Unter den Wolken" and "Schlaflos". "Fort" tries to be different by adding some beautiful grand piano and acoustic guitar' but even then, there's still a sound of a girl gasping in horror.

'Hin-Fort' is a messenger tasked to deliver a package to its intended receiver. The contents of the package and who the receiver is are irrelevant. What is relevant is that the messenger must trek across a wilderness filled with vicious, carnivorous monsters to get to the receiver. And despite his valiant efforts, the messenger is killed by the monsters, and the package was lost forever. Don't get the metaphor? Here it is in plain English: 'Hin-Fort' could not deliver. The black metal disc may be Darkspace in spirit, but it's missing some very crucial elements if it wants to be as great as Darkspace. The ambient disc, while having a few redeeming pieces, is really uninteresting overall; and I can think of a few ambient albums much better and twice as consistent as the second disc here. I wish I could give two separate reviews for the two discts; but even then, disc one would get like a 68%, and disc two would score somewhere in the 50s. Since they're packaged together, I have to score it as a whole.

I know Aran is better than this. Lunar Aurora is proof of that. As a matter of fact, the same year Trist released 'Hin-Fort', Lunar Aurora released 'Andacht'. Go listen to that instead.

Wilytank Trist have been called the best depressive suicidal black metal band out there. That really doesn't mean a lot to me because of my lack of interest in the subgenre, but I thought I'd pry anyway if just for the sake of getting more listening and reviewing experience in the genre. I ended up getting my hands on 'Stiny', the project's debut. Going in, I still had a little skepticism. Is there something beyond the photo of the main band member's smug look while all bundled up? 'Stiny' was released in 2006 so it couldn't be considered ground breaking for DSBM. Trist are from the Czech Republic and you don't really hear about a lot of bands from there, so I guess Trist could have helped put the country on the metal map.

From a distance, "not ground breaking for DSBM" holds a little more water than usual. Productionwise, 'Stiny' sounds very similar to Mutiilation: raw guitars and that distinct hollow sound in the drums. I do think 'Stiny' has a more melodic and varied sound which would definitely make it better than a large number of Mutiilation songs. There's prominent lead guitar in parts of songs that has an almost Agalloch tone. While the drums simply shift between slow and mid pace tempo while staying in 4/4 meter, drummer Pestkrist puts in plenty of fills to shift things up. And the production must be screwing with my head because the cymbals make it sound like someone's playing a harpsichord in the background.

Though the music does vary frequently enough, the tempo's refusal to do so kinda makes this album drag a big, especially "Samota" and "Pohøeb svìtel", the longest songs on the album. It wasn't, however, the type of drag that made me bored and want to quit listening; but it might have had some effect on why I don't find this album to be a totally amazing experience. I've heard Xasthur songs that were more eventful due to their tempo changes.

'Stiny' is nowhere near bad or even mediocre though. It's very good for what it is. T and J know how to play their instruments and in fact play them in a way to make some interesting DSBM. I'm still put off a bit by the tempo arrangement so it's not an album I'd listen to on repeat; but if you're looking for a decent DSBM album, you could do a lot worse than this. Even my limited exposure to DSBM unearthed some really bad albums.

Wilytank An album as impressive as 'Nachthymnen' is going to be tough to make a followup to, thoughAbigor did put enough work into 'Opus IV' to give it a fighting chance. It features some pieces of 'Nachthymnen' and some new pieces, but ultimately cannot give the same great experiences.

And the unfortunate thing is that 'Opus IV' does everything it's supposed to do as an Abigor album. It has nice atmosphere and lots of layered riffs in a single song (about eight in "Eerie Constellation" and around seven in "Breath From Worlds Beyond"). The atmosphere, even with its best parts like "Spektrale Schattenlicter"'s acoustic work in the songs outro and "Crimson Horizons and Ashen Skies" where the atmosphere fits right with the song title, isn't really as strong as Nachthymnen's super mystical atmosphere. i dare say that some attempts to be atmospheric on 'Opus IV' are even unwanted such as "The Elder God (My Dragon Magic"'s intrusive atmospheric interludes. I hate to say that because interludes would be fine if they went along with the song; but in this case, they're a little overdone. In "The Elder God", the song breaks at one point to play an acoustic interlude before returning to metal only to return to the same acoustic riff a minute later. Some time after, there's this crashing sound and Silenius shouting something. Perhaps I'm being nitpicky though. This song is otherwise perfectly fine. I just wish that it wasn't chopped up like this.

Production may be a banal thing to criticize in black metal, but 'Opus IV' has one annoying aspect. The first four songs have production similar to 'Nachthymnen'; but the latter four were mixed at a different date, and their production sounds not as good. It's not raw sounding; it just sounds like the music was recorded underwater. Apparently, 'Opus IV' was originally supposed to be two separate demos called 'Horns Lurk Beyond the Stars' and 'Blut Aus Aeonen' so that would explain the contrast of production. Musically, it's still good, but the contrast of the production makes the album seem inconsistent. The album would be better if Abigor chose to mix all the songs to one type of sound, even if they were all underwater sounding.

As underwhelming to me as it is compared to 'Nachthymnen', I still enjoyed 'Opus IV'. Sure the production inconsistency is a little annoying and there's a few things I'd change on certain songs, but the guitar and drum work is excellent and the use of acoustic instruments and keys great for the most part. A recommended listen for black metal fans.

Wilytank Hmmm... Metalcore? Melodic black metal? Symphonic black metal? What flavor will Abigail Williams scoop out for this year's ice cream cone, 'Becoming'? Well, looks like they settled for post black metal, and to be honest, it's quite bitter. It sounds like Wolves in the Throne Room, so I SHOULD like it, but really it might be that very fact that I do not to a full extent. After all, a bar of solid gold and a bar of iron spray painted with gold paint may look similar, but one holds actual value and the other is a cheap imitation even if said imitation does look illustrious.

Quick note: never in this review or any other of mine am I going to use the term "hipster black metal". I've seen other people use it for bands like WITTR, but I do not like using it because 1) It's cliched; and 2) It makes the critic look like they can't come up with any good reason to criticize the album and simply settle with a derogatory, faux genre label.

Wolves in the Throne Room may be the dominant influence on this album as their type of transcendental atmosphere is obviously present, but they're not the only influence. Ken Sorceron's vocals frequently remind me of Malefic from Xasthur mixed with either of the vocal roles from the dudes from Summoning. In "Infinite Fields of Mind", there's wailing tremolo guitar starting at 7:05 that I'm sure I've heard in more than one Nightbringer song. After that section is over in the same song, we've got some Primordial sounding triplet riffing. I guess a good thing to point out is that at least Abigail Williams is for the most part keeping the tempo mostly on the down low so as to avoid looking like they're deliberately ripping on other bands, especially WITTR with their almost constant blast beating; the two exceptions of this being the first half of "Ascension Sickness" and the ending of "Radiance".

That said, there's still some creativity found in 'Becoming'. Mind you, most of it is found in the album's closer "Beyond the Veil". This song, in contrast with the rest of this otherwise average album, is probably one of Abigail William's best. The utilization of the classical strings is excellent, and goes really well if Abigail Williams were trying to really go for the "transcendental" vibe that bands try to go for with this type of black metal. If they made a black metal album with more of this type of soothing string work, it would probably be some sort of spectacle.

As it stands though, 'Becoming' is still rather lackluster when lined up with other black metal albums I've listened to. "Beyond the Veil" and other creative parts save the album from falling below the level of mediocrity, but it's still definitely not an album I'd buy. I am kind of worried for Abigail Williams though if they decide to jump on another bandwagon. Their metalcore days made them unpopular enough already, and there definitely will be people out there calling them bandwagon hipsters for their current transcendental style. For their sake, I hope they don't make a leap that will dig a deeper hole for them like turning into a dubstep band or something. With luck, they'll just go with the aforementioned calm classical instrument infused post black metal and make "Beyond the Veil II" or something.

Wilytank After skimming over Lunar Aurora's discography, I can safely identify two separate eras for the band. The first era placed a lot of emphasis on keyboards to make some pretty interesting symphonic black metal. The other era is more of a depressive, atmospheric black metal tone. Keys are still there, but they've been re-purposed as a secondary part of the music. 'Elixir of Sorrow' seems to be a mixture of the two eras, and it is this album that I shall write my first review for this band.

The thing that sets this album apart from all the ones before it is the guitars. The production is much clearer, more melodic, and has a more noticeable second layer of guitar. It's a big change from 'Ars Moriendi' where the guitars were much more raw and the keys were really prominent. Here in 'Elixir of Sorrow', the guitars are the prominent instrument. The keys still exist enough on here for me to call this symphonic black metal, but they fit more comfortably in the role of a supporting instrument. I kinda like them better like this. They compliment the new guitar style quite well, especially since they keep a spacey, atmospheric tone but fit into the more depressing feel of the album like a glove.

I see 'Elixir of Sorrow' as a conceptual work of melancholy, and the sorrowful lyrics fit right in. 'Ars Moriendi' tried the concept as well, but it didn't really hold up as well due to its more bombastic approach with the keyboards. The extra layer of guitar in 'Elixir of Sorrow' does do the theme justice as well. It definitely makes the music's atmosphere deeper thus making the depressive tone much more welcome.

Despite there only being five real tracks, 'Elixir of Sorrow' is a very filling experience. Of course, having two songs that exceed 10 minutes in length may have helped. Saying that doesn't do them justice though as "Augenblick" and "Hier und jetzt" are some of the best songs on the album. All the other songs are great too though, and "Elixir of Sorrow" is definitely one of Lunar aurora's best albums. Definitely a smart choice for the black metal enthusiast.

Wilytank "Hey, Wilytank. If you liked 'The Dwelling' so much, what is your opinion on Sabbat's other albums? You know, the ones that aren't 'The Dwelling'?" That was a question asked by myself to myself. Granted, I do really like all of Sabbat's material, 'The Dwelling' sticks out for being an hour long song. But let's go back in time. In the 80's, Sabbat released a few demos (EPs?) showcasing their thrashy, oriental black metal. When the 90's came around, the only original member left was Gezol. Sabbat would then acquire Zorugelion, Temis Osmond, and Elizaveat; all big names in the band's history. When 1991 rolled around, Sabbat finally unleashed their first official full length, 'Envenom', onto the world.

'Envenom' still reflects upon their 80's sound, but the songs here are all new (save for "Black Fire" appearing on some versions of this album). Another nice change is that they cleaned up their production a good bit, which is good since demos like 'Born By Evil Blood' and 'Desecration' had some really deplorable production. Otherwise, they still have a comfortable amount of grittiness to black up their sound. The bass is still fairly audible, a typically noteworthy detail in Sabbat's more well known demo era songs such as "Black Fire".

One thing that is absent from 'Envenom' and I wish wasn't is a decent amount of cleaner vocals. Sabbat's clean vocal songs in their demos like "Black Fire" and "Mion's Hill" were really good. On 'Envenom', there's only Gezol singing clean on "Eviler" and Temis' higher pitched, semi-clean vocals over Gezol's growls on "Carcassvoice".

Musically, this album is very well crafted. There's super thrashy pieces like "Satan Bless You", "Eviler", and "Reek of Cremation"; punkier licks "Evil Nations" and "Carcassvoice"; the much slower "King of Hell"; and mid paced tunes "Devil Worship" and "Deathtemptation". "Deathtemptation" in particular gets my utmost praise. It's probably the best crafted song on this album. The lead guitar is very impressive; the song starts out with an awesome solo, and a double solo appears later after the second refrain. I also really like the oriental sounding guitar during the first parts of the refrains of the song.

Unfortunately, I cannot give 'Envenom' a top tier score. For all its excellent moments, the album just doesn't as hard of a kick as some of Sabbat's later albums. "King of Hell" is actually skippable. I also really wish the harsh vocal production was better; I could barely hear it most of them most of the time. There's still lots of fun to have with this album though; and for those just getting into Sabbat, this isn't a bad entry point.

Wilytank As I sit here with pen in hand and Abigor's 'Nachthymnen (From the Twilight Kingdom)' being channeled from my iPod into my ears, a thought dawns to me: for a band that seems to be so straightforward, Abigor aren't all that easy to digest. I've listened to 'Verwustung / Invoke the Dark Age' before, and even now I can't really form a solid opinion on that album; but that's a review for a different date. I did give a few songs from 'Verwustung' another listen to dscern a few differences between that album and 'Nachthymnen'. What I can safely say is that 'Nachthymnen' is better produced and puts for emphasis on keyboards. Mind you, 'Verwustung' had keyboards as well, but 'Nachthymnen' the make themselves more at home. I guess they have to be if you want to give your album a subtitle like 'From the Twilight Kingdom' (*chuckles to self*).

You know what? The reason why Abigor are more difficult to digest than some other black metal bands is because they put so much time into writing riffs. To test this theory, I listened to "Unleashed Axe Age" and "Reborn Through the Gate of Three Moons" one more time; I counted around ten individual riffs in the former and around 14 individual riffs plus two acoustic riffs in the latter. And these songs are only around six minutes long as opposed to another black metal song with a similar length like Mayhem's "Freezing Moon" which only had around 5 riffs in the song. Abigor may seem like a run-of-the-mill black metal band at a distance; but after picking the song apart like I just did, the music writers seem like very overlooked geniuses. Granted this is still black metal; it has the production, melodic style, and atmosphere of 90's black metal. Abigor just provided more proof that there's more to the genre than the cliched kvltic nonsense that outsiders perceive.

The atmosphere served up on this album compliments the guitar work here very well. There's keyboards, timpani, bells, acoustic guitar, and female vocals. these elements are used in exactly the right way to portray the mystical atmosphere of this Twilight Kingdom. None of them are used excessively, and I would not classify this album as primarily symphonic black metal. Even the keyboards are used sparingly; when I said they were more emphasized, I meant easier to hear).

In the end, I'm going to sincerely say that I really enjoy this album. If you don't pay attention to it, it will just go in one ear and out the other; but this album is very special when you really get into it. Abigor are very good at what they do, and are definitely triumphant in portraying it with these Nacht-hymns.

Wilytank Yyrkoon are really known for being a death metal band with their albums 'Occult Medicine' and 'Unhealthy Opera', but Yyrkoon have actually been an experimental bunch. Even 'Occult Medicine' and 'Unhealthy Opera' sound distinctly different from each other. Their debut actually has standout black metal vibes. It would be wrong, however, to assume that just because it doesn't sound like 'Occult Medicine' or 'Unhealthy Opera', 'Oniric Transition' isn't any good. Why? Because the fact of the matter is that 'Oniric Transition' is VERY good.

When I call this black metal, the prime influences I see here are Satyricon and Emperor with clean vocal sections that sound like they were done by Kristoffer "Garm" Rygg. The keyboards are prominent in 'Oniric Transition', and they work some magical wonders as they carve their dreamy marks. I do hear some death/thrash metal influence in here as well, most prominently in "Lost Ideal" and "Wind of Decline", but still a few traces in the others songs in some riffing patterns, but otherwise I maintain that this is a black metal album due to the super melodic aspect of the guitars and, of course, the keyboards.

I do find 'Oniric Transition' disappointing for its brevity though. The album is only about 30 minutes long, probably less if you take away the intro, interlude, and outro tracks. I felt Yyrkoon could have squeezed a few more tracks in to make this album's experience decidedly more full. Nevertheless, I did find myself quite absorbed in 'Oniric Transition', so much that on my first listen I thought "Throne of Complains" and "The Awakening" were the same track. The guitar solos are very well played when they occur. Of course, my true kudos has to go to the keyboardist again. Without the keys, I'd probably end up scoring this album in the low 80s or high 70s.

'Oniric Transition' is an excellent album for those looking for good symphonic black metal. Yyrkoon are a good band; they can really mix up their music in strange ways and still manage to make a good album. 'Oniric Transition' is no exception. However, this is also probably the hardest album of theirs to get a physical copy of, so good luck to those of you who want to go and try to find it. Even I had to settle with a digital version for review.

Wilytank Don't you just hate it when an album that people can't stop whoring about turns out to be a load of shit? Case in point: Gorguts' 'Obscura'. "If you do not like this album, you are not a fan of death metal." said one guy somewhere. Yeah, I don't think that my liking of Bolt Thrower, Immolation, and more is all for naught for me hating on this terrible, overrated album. It's not intriguingly intelligent. It's not headbangingly awesome. It's not even dark or disturbing. It's just fucking annoying.

Let me tell you what guitar wankery is. Guitar wankery is when you try to write and play your guitar riffs making them sound all technical and challenging but forget to make them actually interesting to listen to. 'Obscura' is filled with so much guitar wankery that the guitarists might as well be shoving their dicks through the guitar strings, and it is this blight that takes this album furthest toward the wrong direction if Gorguts wanted to make an album that was truly interesting. When there are songs that actually do have riffs that are somewhat interesting such as the post metalesque "Nostalgia" or the doomier "Clouded", you can rest assured that there will be plenty of wankery added to the song to level it all out. And the funny thing is that people say that it's the vocals that are the weakest part as if good vocals made any difference in death metal.

The other bad thing about this album is that it's an hour long. This review may have been (slightly) higher if Gorguts decided to cut a few songs and make the album less than 40 minutes. If they cooled it with the incessant wankery, maybe they would make the hour long trek less irritating. Sitting through this album as it stands isn't going to produce any memorable moments. It's just going to make you want to bash your head in.

The little melodic aspects that actually are existent in some of the songs, post metal vibes on "Nostalgia", and even the slower "Clouded" are simply not enough to save this album from the singularity of terribleness. Everyone knows of releases that leave listeners wanting something more; but here with 'Obscura', I'm left wanting less. This guitar wankery (used for the whogivesafuck-tienth time) makes this album so irritating that certain Merzbow pieces look like the best pieces of music in the world in comparison. So, no. I do not want something more. I just want to stop remembering.

Wilytank Since there are people going around claiming that Blind Guardian is the only power metal band that you can wear a shirt bearing their logo and still get laid, I had to go ahead and buy this album (for around 5 or 6 dollars) at a used CD store. What I can tell you now is that I ended up being less than impressed. 'Nightfall in Middle-Earth' promises a whole, literal fantasy landscape and ends up throwing the listener a book (almost literally with the ridiculous liner notes) and telling them to work off that.

I'll start off with what irks me the most about this album: interludes! Too many fucking interludes! They take up around seven minutes of this album and occur right after almost all the real songs on here. They are totally unnecessary and totally unwanted. I thought this was supposed to be power metal, not German time waste! Hansi Kürsch, if you wanted to bow to Tolkien so badly and convince others to do the same, you shouldn't have put such useless filler in. In fact, stupid shit like "The Minstrel" makes me want to do the exact opposite. "What will be next? I still don't have a clue." Go to hell.

However, there are some really good tunes to be heard among the actual songs. There's excellent songs here with catchy hooks and well crafted variations. When Blind Guardian get it right, they really produce some valuable pieces of gold. "The Curse of Feanor" and "Mirror Mirror" are some awesome fast-paced licks, and "Nightfall" is a pretty epic if you're looking for a slower piece. There is one song here though that really annoys me: "Noldor (Dead Winter Reigns)". You know those slow power metal ballads that nobody really likes? This is by-far one of the worst ones I've listened to. I know these types of songs are supposed to be emotional and whatnot, but this is just unnecessary overkill.

And there are also songs like "Blood Tears" and "Time Stands Still (At the Iron Hill)" that are just okay. It's in songs like these that Hansi's voice gets grating, wearing out my enthusiasm. With the interludes added alongside, the album seems to get old faster than it really should. The Middle Earth vibe that seemed intriguing at first ultimately became too much for me and had me looking for something decidedly less nerdy by the end of the album.

There are single songs or parts of songs that were really good in this album, but ultimately this isn't worth getting if you're just a casual power metal fan. There's plenty of power metal material out there (including other albums by Blind Guardian) that isn't as tiring as 'Nightfall in Middle Earth'. Go find them instead.

Wilytank Winter themed atmospheric black metal mixed with depressive black metal was an inevitable concoction, but I am very impressed with the way G.B. pulled it off on 'Melancholie²'. It captures wintery essences very well: bleak and beautiful at the same time. The artwork even goes along with it quite nicely as well. The music does remind me of snow falling hard enough (but not windy/blizzard-like) to obscure the background in a haze of white. It is through this haze of white that the journey through this album took me.

The first four songs seem to represent the snowfall during the daytime while the rest seem to represent the nighttime using the lower key. The process of transitioning through the two types of scenic sounds is quite intriguing. All of the music is slow to mid-paced with a good amount of tempo transitions to be found including some slower blastbeating (definitely faster but not blizzard-like like Paysage d'Hiver). There's also "Tortured by Solitude" which is mostly mid-paced, and two ambient pieces "Winterreise", falling into the daytime category; and "Stille", falling into the nighttime category.

Throughout this album, there's plenty of atmosphere to be found. The slow, melodic black metal music is almost always accompanied with a background keyboard; and, obviously, it sounds cold and sorrowful. I do like the inclusion of a violin/viola/whatever in "Tortured by Solitude" and "Hymn to Eternal Frost"; the former is a designated (by me) "daytime song" and the latter is a "nighttime song", so you get to experience both ends of the spectrum.

What other little tricks are used in the album? The bleak, mood setting intro to "Dream of a Dead Sun"; sweet sounding calm guitar segments in "Dream of a Dead Sun", the end of "Red Snow" continued into "Stille", and in "Hymn to Eternal Frost"; the clean background vocals in "Dream of a Dead Sun"; the semi-choral sounding "ahh"s at the end of "Hymn to Eternal Frost" and in the background at the end of "My Dead Bride"; and "Escape", probably the most experimental piece on the album. "Escape" is really a weird mixture. There's the calm sounding guitar notes and keyboard ambiance, sure, but there's also some electronic style drum track going on in the background for the first part of the song. Another part of the song puts the raw sounding black metal instruments and less electronic sounding drum playing into the mixture along with more prominent sounding keyboard notes and eventually the violin as well. "Escape" is the only song on the album that doesn't seem to fit into either the "daytime" or "nighttime" sides that I establish; it's a dimension all it's own, and for that it was the best song to end the album with.

So that's another winter album for everyone to enjoy. The depressive flavor seems like an obvious variation, but for some reason, ColdWorld is one of the few bands that can actually make it sound great.

Wilytank Look at either versions of this album's artwork. The original, a pencil drawing of a grim, wintery landscape. The re-release, a surrealistic, colored portrait of a grim, wintery landscape. That is what Blut aus Nord is trying to convey with their debut album, 'Ultima Thulee', and they do it much better than many of their contemporaries. 'Ultima Thulee' was actually my first exposure to Blut aus Nord and remains my favorite of the whole legacy.

If you've read my review of Paysage d'Hiver's 'Steineiche', you'll recall me stating that that particular album/demo's take on the winter theme will never find an equal. I guess I kinda have to eat those words as this album will get a slightly higher score than 'Steineiche', but in my defense it's worth noting that this album has more of a heathen flavor to its approach with titles including Hlidskjalf, Ginnungagap, and Bifrost. Therefore, it would be fair to say that Vindsval intended the theme here to be more about heathenism and such (which he would continue with on Blut aus Nord's sophomore album) than just winter in general.

Songs like "The Son of Hoarfrost" and "From Hlidskjalf" are the best examples of the typical tones set forth on this album: rawer sounding black metal with keyboards to generate the cold feeling and plenty of variation to keep the listener hooked. Variations come in the forms of both music played, which Vindsval has written exceptionally well; and tempo, an early example being the faster sections of "The Son of Hoarfrost", an otherwise slow to mid-paced song.

Another nice treat for many of the songs here is the period of quieter ambiance featuring keyboards and/or cleaner sounding guitar in the middle of the song. These sections provide excellent amounts of beauty to this wintry soundscape. On some songs, however, Vindsval made some welcome variation on this. "Till I Perceive Bifrost" doesn't feature one of those breaks at all (unless you count the intro), "On the Way to Vigrid" features clean guitar played alongside the rawer sounding guitar, and "The Plain of Ida" is centered around being more atmospheric with the keyboards in the simple but bleak and beautiful sounding intro and later the series of dark sounding pulses that lead to the eerie sound of the guitar fading back in.

Vindsval does the vocals well here too. The main style he uses is a sort of black metal screech; but amid the black metal blizzard here, it reminds me of howling wind. He does use some cleaner sounding vocals on "The Son of Hoarfrost" during the ambient break as well. I'd love to see some lyrics to go along this; but as most of you know, Blut aus Nord just don't do that.

The flow of the songs on 'Ultima Thulee' is arranged with such skill that it feels like some epic wintry journey. "The Son of Hoarfrost" feels like a journey across the rocky mountainside during a blizzard. Then across the calmer, snow covered "Plain of Ida" to ascend a great mountain at "From Hlidskjalf". A pause at the top of the mountain while the choral howling of "My Prayer Beyond Ginnungagap" plays through is followed by a descent to the beat of "Till I Perceive Bifrost" and it's strangely distinct sound of whale calls (wtf?). Then, we go "On the Way to Vigrid", stop for a pretty ambient break with "Rigsthula", and make our final approach to our wintry grave in "The Last Journey of Ringhorn"'s beautiful sounding finish.

The scenic bleakness and majesty of 'Ultima Thulee' is what makes listening to winter themed atmospheric black metal so enthralling. Now that I'm in this icy prison, I don't think I want to find a way out.

Wilytank The same year that 'Steineiche' was released, Tobias Mockl released another album (demo) in the Paysage d'Hiver name. It's titled 'Schattengang', and though I like 'Steineiche' much more than this one, I still find it to be a very noteworthy album in the Paysage d'Hiver discography. Unfortunately, the original version of this album is hard to come across, so I must make due with the three song re-release from 2006. Though shorter than 'Steineiche', it still features a generous amount of wintery magic issued forth by Mockl.

The journey begins with "Moloch"'s spacey sounding ambiance and whispering vocals. The black metal part finally kicks in two minutes and forty-five seconds into the song. The tempo in this song is slower, but not death doom metal slow like "Der Baummann" on the first album. Throughout the passage of the black metal half of the song, the vocals are growling. The keyboards are also playing throughout the entirety of the song making the atmosphere very dreamlike. The guitars are mostly played in chords and chugs, but the tempo varies noticeably throughout the passage of the song, eventually settling down on one type of style at the 10:45. This outro is played slowly with chords but very extravagantly with the keyboard, which go great with the snow/space/dream type setting.

Wind blowing, wolves howling, and...sleigh bells? That's how the next major song on the album "Die Zeit des Torremond" starts off. To call this a single song sounds like a bit of a stretch though as it doesn't seem like a single complete thought but several, all crammed into 21 minutes. This time around, the music is much faster with the guitar playing in tremolos and the drum machine playing in blastbeats. The first of the movements in this song is more light sounding, but still wintry and spacey sounding courtesy of the keyboards. After something of an intro passage, the beat stays the same for the length of what could probably be safely called a verse before moving on to a more of a lengthy buildup section that repeats itself once until reaching the climax at the 4:17, where the tempo drops slightly and one guitar begins playing a real awesome sounding leading passage. Over a minute later, it fades away to the sounds of wolves and sleigh bells. The second movement begins at the 6:06 mark and proceeds at a notably slower pace at first, but changes after the first minute as the drums begin to get more furious sounding. The notes being played do vary, but the main key of this section seems to remain largely the same throughout. By the ten minute mark, the section fades out to another interlude. This time, it features keyboard ambiance, the sound of something banging on something else, and whispering vocals. The black metal kicks back in at the 11:58 mark to begin the third movement. Again, it starts off slower paced while still retaining copious amounts of speed. At 12:58, another prominent lead guitar section comes in with the guitar playing some power chords. Then, the key changes at 14:03 to a lower and dark sound; and then back again to a lighter, faster paced rhythm about thirty seconds later; and once more to a slower, darker rhythm at the 15:50 mark. By 17:07, only silence remains. This silence goes on for almost 20 seconds before being interrupted by what seems to be a movie sample with heavy keyboard ambient in the background. After the sound of a door slamming, the metal comes back in for the final part of this song. It's slow paced again and also dark sounding with calm sounding lead guitar which turns out to be the music that the song eventually fades out with.

What remains is an ambient piece called "Atmosphaere". Unlike the ancient sounding "Der Baum", this piece takes a more spacey approach to develop the atmosphere in the music. It works well though, as most of this album seems to be more space/dream oriented than flat out winter themed.

So the spacey and dreamy journey of 'Schattengang' isn't quite as epic as the desolate and ancient journey of 'Steineiche', it's a nice variation of the experience of winter. Consequentially, I find it most fitting to listen to this album in the middle of the night in the middle of a snow covered field while there's not clouds in the sky so that all the stars can be seen. It's pretty cool in my opinion to put music like this in natural perspective anyway, and the sweet trip through the "Shade Course" is no exception to that feeling.

Wilytank Tobias Mockl and his gang made some very excellent music in Darkspace, but I feel that I should give some recognition to Mockl's solo project, Paysage d'Hiver, so that I can avoid looking like an ignorant cad. I did say in one of my Darkspace reviews that Paysage d'Hiver doesn't grab my interest the way that Darkspace does. That obviously doesn't mean I don't like P d'H at all. I'm sure part of the lesser appeal is me not liking to listen to winter themed music in the heat of summer though. However, winter always comes back, and one of the albums I always go back to listening to is 'Steineiche', Paysage d'Hiver's cold-hearted debut.

So how does pure winter work its way into twenty minutes? Exibit A: "Die Baumfrau". Two and three quarter minutes of lo-fi ambient and wind sounds, then a blizzard of black metal. It's a storm of tremolo riffs, blast beating drums, and screeching vocals all in lo-fi production. Is there variation? Yes there is. The original passage is changed at the 4:36 mark, but it is not until the 5:26 mark where the blizzard calms down for the first time. Keyboards and slower guitar notes are played which are continued when the drums and tremolo rhythm kick back into play. At a certain point in this movement, the screeching vocals are replaced by lower sounding vocals (you still can't understand what they're saying). Quieter music comes back again at the 7:43 mark with the keyboard and a lead guitar's soft playing only audible once again continued when the rest of the storm returns. The slower, softer plucking of the lead guitar is eventually replaced by a swarm of tremolo notably more prominent than the rhythm guitar's storm. The song slows down around the second half of the tenth minute, which is nice to have just to acknowledge that not every minute of this song has to be backbreaking fast. The tremolos are mostly maintained, but the drumming slows down noticeably, but finally returns at the 12:30 mark. Yet another quiet section of ambient and calm guitar starts just thirty seconds later. Toby extends this break a little longer with his muted snarling, and a more electric sounding guitar eventually creating a buildup of sorts. Then, the original black metal section near the beginning of the song is given a reprise. Though I can't say that this song doesn't repeat any sections anymore, it's not that big of a deal since it's over ten minutes since that riff was played. Within the latter end of the 16 minute mark, another new passage is played with some choral like wailing and odd percussion played alongside the blastbeating drum machine. Once that ends, the song slows down (without going into yet another calm break) with slower riffs and drumming and the sound of a bell tolling. This is maintained as the song fades out to silence.

"Die Baumfrau" is the only song on the album that gets fast paced the way it did. All the other songs are much slower, but they perfectly maintain the winter atmosphere with other approaches.

"Der Baummann" is slower and doomier. There's a calm guitar providing an atmospheric blanket over the raw sounding riffing and a bell tolling in the background once again. After about three minutes, the bell and calm sounding guitar are replaced by keyboard ambient. The vocals in the first part of this song are low growls. At 5:38, a melodic sounding interlude begins with little activity from the bass and drums. A little more than a minute later, the song switches back to the normal style, different played section. The calm guitar also returns to play a little melody only to be replaced by the keyboard just before the ten minute mark is reached. There's also some violin playing that comes in around the 12 minute mark. When the violin kicks in, the music pretty much maintains the riff it has until it fades out leaving only violin and wind sounds in the final two minutes of this song.

And the remaining track, "Der Baum", is...actually not metal at all. It's the longest piece on the album, but it's all keyboard ambient. You know what, though? I'm perfectly fine with it. Beginning at the 3:50 mark, there are vocals. This time, they are delivered in whispers to add a creepier effect. There's two verses of lyrics to read, but if you don't follow them, they seem to end before you know it; and at that point, you're barely a third of the way through the song. The rest of the song features more glorious keyboard ambient along with bits of tolling bell. Within the final three minutes, a female voice singing in an operatic fashion completes the journey and image, of the song and of the album.

Tobias Mockl has crafted an album/demo about winter in such a way that winter themed metal will never find an equal. The imagery is perfect for it. The fast and raw "Die Baumfrau" makes me feel like I'm trying to survive a blizzard, the slower death doom metal styled "Der Baummann" makes me feel like I'm wondering in a snow covered forest without having any idea where I need to go, and "Der Baum" gives me the feeling of me finding a large stone with engravings on it in the ground in the middle of the snow covered forest. After reading the engravings, I realize that this stone is my gravestone, and my soul is lifted from my mortal shell, becoming one with the spirit of winter. That is the magic of 'Steineiche'.

Wilytank Evoken are another essential funeral doom metal band that I needed to review, but damn! I've listened to their second and third albums before my big FDM epiphany with Funeral's 'Tristesse'. I thought the first, 'Quietus', was quite fine and that the other, 'Anithesis of Light', was pretty phenomenal. After my FDM epiphany, I've given Evoken's debut, 'Embrace the Emptiness' a listen and ended up being immensely impressed.

First, there's an intro track that portrays what can be found on the rest of the album: light sounding guitar played with the regular funeral doom followed by a section of quiet, dark ambient on the second half of the intro. I'm feeling two vibes here. It sounds mournful like most traditional funeral doom, but it also sounds deep and void-like like Esoteric take on the genre. I think Evoken found the sweet spot between the two and made something great out of it.

Then, "Tragedy Eternal" kicks in. To go through all The drumming gets quite quick with the kick drums being given a good exercise, but this isn't entirely uncommon in the funeral doom genre. There are still those slow moments of plodding funeral doom.

Lead guitars exist and do break into solos at least once per song. Production wise, the guitars sound the rawest of all the instruments, but it's barely noticeable when layered with the keyboards and drums which are well produced. The clean sounding soft guitar is one of the key players here and fits in well at any part of the album, be it melancholic pieces like "Tragedy Eternal" or more menacing ones like "Chime the Centuries End", though there is much more of the latter than the former (which I consider a good thing). The keyboards also do their part to augment the atmosphere with the presentation on "Chime the Centuries End" making me feel like I'm staring downward into an abyss. It all feels so dark and empty, hence 'Embrace the Emptiness'.

I feel like Evoken issued forth the modern wave of funeral doom with the cleaner sound. Though they were a little late bringing out their debut full-length in 1998 when Skepticism and Esoteric already belted out two albums each, Evoken's 'Embrace the Emptiness' is still very inspirational. I can see a lot of their style in acts like Ataraxie, Ahab, and others.

Wilytank 1999 saw the release of a notably cleaner sounding tone in Esoteric's music in the form of 'Metamorphogenesis'. Five years afterwards, these guys issue in another short album (by Esoteric standards). The sound is even cleaner on this offering titled 'Subconscious Dissolution Into the Continuum', and the Esoteric atmosphere gets even weirder with it. Unfortunately, I also feel that this is their weakest incarnation yet.

"Morphia"'s intro has everything that Esoteric has had before. Alien sounding rhythm guitar and a lead guitar eventually melting into some heavier, plodding riffs. It feels, however, when the vocals start and lead guitar goes away that the song goes on for an eternity (until about the four minute mark) of a riff that's not as creative as the Esoteric I'm used to. The four minute mark variation only jumps back to the notes that were present in the intro. 6:36 does introduce a newer variation to break this monotony, thankfully. The lead guitar and distorted ambiance that I like in Esoteric kicks in and sticks around for about two and a half minutes before the major atmosphere fades away again. The most annoying aspect of the song is that the tempo doesn't vary and the atmospheric aspects of the lead guitar and keyboards aren't around long enough to leave a lasting effect.

"The Blood of the Eyes" starts off with a much lighter sounding tone provided by lead guitar, keyboard, and rhythm guitar. The light sounding rhythm guitar turns into heavy riffs while the rest of the light sounding aspects continue onward. Already, this is much better than "Morphia". Finally, after four minutes, the song grows darker with the lead guitar disappearing. The keyboard seems to stay around to layer the atmosphere a little better. About a minute later, it shifts back to the lighter sounding tone with the lead guitar returning. This almost feels like a Skepticism song. At the 7:34 mark, the tempo switches up to a slightly faster pace and the tone growing darker until 9:34 where the riffs break into chugging going on for a minute. Then grows slow and darker to finish up the song.

"'Tis but a fucking grey day for me now." I'm sorry, but that first line to the song "Grey Day" just cracks me up. The song carries a more sorrowful tone which goes well with the more depressive lyrics. The most dense alien atmosphere is present in this song. It's not light sounding like "The Blood of the Eyes". This sounds much more dark and disturbing, yet spacey and drifting; the ideal area for Esoteric in my book. The lead guitar's presence is well established in the 17 minute duration of the song. But even when it's not around, the song doesn't get boring. The tempo changes a few seconds before the song reaches the ten minute mark when the lead guitar isn't going. I'm not totally sure when it slows down again, but the slow parts of the song contain the most dense atmosphere. Parts of it seem reminiscent to 'Epistemological Despondency'

So what's left? "Arcane Dissolution" is just a chance reflect on the disturbing passage taken. It's mostly ambient with growling and steady beats of percussion and guitar chords.

So, "Morphia" was mediocre by Esoteric standards, "The Blood of the Eyes" was better, and "Grey Day" was the best of the bunch. Underwhelming when compared Esoteric's more legendary works, but still fine in its own right. And yeah, Greg Chandler is still my hero of doom metal.

Wilytank Let me put it bluntly: even with the immature grotesque elements stripped away, Torsofuck have nothing going for them. Now, I'm usually too busy with other shit that you probably don't care about to pay attention to an album like 'Erotic Diarrhea Fantasy'; but every once in a while, my eyes get burned by that shock value-intensive album cover. In a fitting metaphor, I get fed up with the shit and feel the need to flush it down the toilet where it belongs. So, let's make this happen.

I'm just going to go ahead and get the criticism for the thematic elements out of the way. No, perverse elements are not totally a red area for me. Cannibal Corpse pulled them off just fine with 'Tomb of the Mutilated'. But here, Torsofuck aren't only sick, but they're fucking stupid, unless you find elephant penis, dismemberment during intercourse, or ejaculating while being crapped on entertaining; in which case, you really need to take your mind out of the gutter and your head out of your ass, lest you find having your head shoved up your ass satisfying too.

On to the music. The most immediately annoying aspect is that music here is samples! The first song goes on for over two fucking minutes before actually playing any metal music. I don't like listening to music if I feel like they're wasting my damn time. This album is only thirty minutes long, and it's value is going to be greatly lowered if only 17 or so minutes of it is actually music. If anyone is actually dumb enough to buy this, they're either going to feel ripped off for not getting their money's worth, or they'll be entertained by the stupid samples that are on this album.

There is nothing outstanding about the music that's actually there in between the samples. This shit sounds like goddamn Spermswamp with slightly better production and Waking the Cadaver. Not only do the riffs feel stale, but the so called brutality also feels stale. It's all uninteresting! The fast parts of one song feel like the fast parts of another song. Ditto for the slow parts. Have you fuckers ever considered taking some influence from Cryptopsy? They were able to make some brutal sounding music that was actually interesting, they also had a human drummer who could drum as fast as the machine on this album, and they had Lord Worm's almost unintelligible vocals. That brings me to the vocals in Torsofuck. They sound like Spermswamp and Waking the Cadaver. Farting and belching sounds are another branch off for this band's immaturity. They do not sound dark and disturbed, they sound stupid.

Is it irony that Torsofuck involved themselves with so much fecal imagery that their musical output turned out to be shit? I'd like to think they had it coming. I got as much of a kick out of album as I did that one time I dropped my toothbrush in the toilet when the one who previously used it didn't flush. EDF sucks. Everything about it is horrible, and I don't care to listen to it ever again.

Wilytank How much do I need to emphasize that the tough guy attitude in mainstream metal is really lame? Five Finger Death Punch really isn't ashamed to show it off though. Hell, the frontman looks like a John Cena wannabe. I've been wary on this band before, but I thought I ought to give 'American Capitalist' a listen if only to confirm my distaste.

Well, actually, the music ain't all terrible at first, but it does get old really fast and ends up becoming rather bland and mediocre. What really drags this album down is the vocalist and the lyrics. Moody's clean voice sounds generic of the mallcore style, and his harsh shouting is only made more pathetic by the lyrics he belts out.

"Generation Dead" and "Coming Down" are some of the most painful and generic sounding alternative metal songs. They've got that slow pace with the so-called "anthemic" refrains. Plus, those two songs feature some of the stupidest emotional lyrics that I'd expect from a band like Linkin Park, not from a band full of pseudo tough guys.

But the worst of it comes from "Remember Everything". The emotional lyrics are even worse here and it's dominated by clean vocals and slow paced pseudo heavyness so much that it actually does sound like a Linkin Park/Nickelback song.

It seems to me like they're try appeal to potential male fans with "Over and Under It", "100 Ways to Hate", and "Menace" AND even the artwork with the 'Woah! These guys must be really badass! I want to be just like them! One copy of 'American Capitalist, storeclerk bitch!' mindset; yet they also try appeal to potential female fans with the emotional songs assuming they have some sort of sensitive side. Screw all that.

Five Finger Death Punch, please get out of my ears. Try not to hit your muscleheads on my malleus on the way out.

Wilytank Five years after 'Farmakon', here comes Skepticism again with another release. In 'Farmakon' I was somewhat turned off by how the keyboards tried to dominate the music in places. Here in 'Alloy', the guitar production has been improved to compensate to make this a much better album. And when I say much better, I mean really.

Arriving at "The Arrival", the guitar is more prominent than the organ keyboards. The vocals are also less low sounding and less monotone. Kind of a shock at first, but I've gotten used to it. Another interesting shocker is that this is an organ based song; and whenever Skepticism does one of these, it's usually scary sounding. However, this song is downright melancholic regardless of how clean the production sounds. 3:48 starts a sorrowful sounding guitar solo to furthur show off the cleaner sounding guitar.

"March October" starts off more atmospheric like. With low rumbling and clean sounding guitar for the first minute before breaking into rhythmic chugging broken up by the slamming on the organ keys. The organs in this song return the scary factor to the music that I'm used to with the organ in Skepticism. For some reason though, I feel that some one of the riffs here was recycled from "Forge" from 'Lead and Aether'. Then at 4:18, the song hits its essential transition to a more melancholic sound only to change back as the song reaches the the 5:40 mark. Soon after though, a guitar lead starts up to keep things interesting. It only sticks around for about a minute before the keys transition the song once more to a different key. Throughout the rest of the song, the riffs get more intense and a guitar solo comes along, but it eventually returns to the initial chugging style.

"Antimony" begins with low bass growling with scary organ keyboards. This song is very strongly organ oriented at first, but nearing and after the 3 minute mark the guitar takes the dominant position and at that point, the song starts to get lighter sounding. Noticeable parts of the song totally lack the organ altogether, but it returns to its scary sounding original line at the 6:09 mark. The song doesn't end that way though. It ends on a low bass tone instead fading away.

Skepticism's other keyboard sound, their more ambient sounding kind, finally makes a return in "The Curtain" to layer on some lighter sounding atmosphere and give the organ a break. This is probably the least negative sounding (so to speak) song on the album. The keyboards give that natural feel that Skepticism are known for, but instead of rainy day mood, it's more of a partly cloudy type mood. The music is kept in this type of mood as we go into the penultimate track, "Pendulum". As we go into this song, the keys sound like string instruments to keep the partly cloudy tone, but more melancholic sounding. Around the 2 and a half minute mark, the song speeds up with the keys playing some beautiful notes and the guitar eventually catching up. Through other transitions, "Pendulum" is able to get my full attention and be my favorite song on the album.

That leaves only "Oars in the Dusk". The organs return here, but they swap places with the ambient sounding keys occasionally. Incidentally, this organ based song is more melancholic sounding much like "The Arrival". Around the three minute mark, we also have clean sounding guitar to break up the procession. There's variations a plenty to keep this song interesting including leading tones on the guitar. As the song reaches it's finally minutes, the guitar riffs get stronger and faster with organs pounding and Matti going through his final lines all to end on a single organ note. At this point, I'd break this paragraph off because the last song on the last three Skepticism albums ends, then starts again to finish off the album. That doesn't happen here on 'Alloy'.

'Alloy' is a Skepticism album that sounds least like a Skepticism album, but there is nothing wrong with that. These songs are really awesome in their own right, especially the last three. I actually wouldn't mind if Skepticism called it quits with this as their last album, but I do hope they make more music.

Wilytank With 'Farmakon', Skepticism take on a slightly cleaner sound that features a somewhat clearer tone of their dreamy weirdness. For whatever a reason, this clearer tone made this album a little harder to digest, but it turned out just fine. After all, it's Skepticism we're talking about. It's 2001 at this point, and the band's been at this for quite some time.

The organs on "The Raven and the Backward Funeral" kicks this off. Mostly, the pipe organs in Skepticism songs make it sound scarier, and at certain sections here they do; but they also make the song sound regal. The song is broken up by periods of calm acoustic guitar with drums in the background so that the song still has the necessary melancholic feel. These calmer guitars are present at the start of the next song, "Shred of Light, Pinch of Endless". However, at this point, the organs are replaced by the ambiance keyboards that Skepticism are also known for.

The atmosphere generated remains light sounding and natural as usual for Skepticism, as if the pictures they paint with the atmosphere involve rain. The mixture of calm guitar and keyboards give it the sad rainy day feel while the guitar again and the drums give it the natural feel.

So why does this album not get as good of a score as the two before it? Well, like I said, it's hard to take in even compared to Skepticism's other works. There's definitely more atmosphere and less funeral doom involved. Though I like the atmosphere, it can seem a little overbearing. Look at the so-called "untitled" track. For the first two or so minutes, it's just ambient. And even after that, the ambiance keyboards are really overbearing. I feel like they could have gotten a better result if they kept them more in the back like they did with their other songs from the past years. On the other hand, I don't really dislike it either. It's decent enough to prevent this album from falling bellow the 90 percentile, which is pretty good.

I do like the continuation of the delayed ending on the final song. On "Nothing", the keyboards get intense and loud (but they were like this on the climax on the last songs on the previous albums), then it ends. After a few minutes, the music starts again to play out a final segment before fading away.

In the end, 'Farmakon' is a win/win situation, but ultimately not as noteworthy as 'Stormcrowfleet' or 'Lead and Aether'. Oh well, it's still great for what it is, and I'm glad to see that Skepticism is still playing on.

Wilytank Today, we have Skepticism once again. This time, they release this 'Aes' EP featuring a single 28 minute long song. Skepticism aren't well known for making songs THIS long; but with a funeral doom metal band, it was inevitable. You know what else it was? Pretty awesome, that's what.

The beginning is calm with soft sounding guitars and atmospheric keyboards and drums already playing the main beat. The soft guitar and the not so soft (though somehow not that heavy) funeral doom chugging guitar play together throughout the song to create a really nice sorrowful harmony. The music goes on and transitions steadily from variation to variation. 4:51 marks the biggest change so far with the metal guitar going into faster steady strums not held down. During this section, the keyboards kinda go out on their own to paint their own natural and beautiful picture. This transition is broken around the 7 minute mark with the guitar switching to some sweet sounding melodic playing eventually to be joined by the metal rhythm guitar and keyboards. This melodic lead guitar pretty much replaced the soft sounding lead guitar that was present before, but it does switch back to the soft guitar at the 10 minute mark of this song.

After the 12:30 mark, the song begins to get heavier sounding with the guitar riffs getting heavier and drums getting echoy. The guitars and keyboards play the same notes during this movement in a rhythmic dance with the drums. When this movement ends, the song gets quiet again with the drums going into a steady beat once again, guitars becoming soft, and keyboards being the main generator of the atmosphere. Eventually, the guitars begin to get tentatively more prominent, but maintaining a softer side. Up to the 19:40 mark, the keyboards have sounded like violins. Beyond that point, they break into a more atmospheric, spacey sound with the heavy rhythm guitar becoming heavy once again and the lead guitar returning to the soft strumming. By the late end of the 21 minute mark, the lead guitar goes into a more electric sounding lead going off into something of a slow solo. When it ends, the song gets heavier as it begins it's outro climax. The barely recognizable bass becomes a little heavier. The lead guitar transitions back to the soft sound. When the song finally reaches it's final stretch, the heavy instruments back off to let the soft lead guitar, drums, and quieter keyboards finish.

I love how light the lyrics are. It's like Matti is singing about slow flight:

"mountains become heavy like dust, towers will stand like smoke, ages tighten to become aes, entering the levitation, feet would crave for solid ground, lost in vast forbidden ground, fell from clouds on sacred ground, in the mills of thought are being ground..."

This song is light as a feather but heavy as a brick, giving the perfect accompaniment to the words in this song. The slightly cleaner production also helps. Skepticism fans need not be skeptical about Skepticism doing a 28 minute long song. They've pulled it off well.

Wilytank There's some changes going on with Esoteric's third album, 'Metemorphogenesis'. One minor detail is that frontman Greg Chandler has picked up a guitar, which would become a permanent arrangement. The bigger change is that there's only one disc! Esoteric have been known for releasing two CD albums; but here, there's only one. There's only three songs, each of them getting progressively shorter in length for only 44 minutes of music. Maybe that will make this album easier to get into for outsiders.

Upon pressing play, there's one other little difference from the past albums: there's no creepy/spacey sounding intro. All the instruments and even vocals are going right from the get go at the beginning of "Dissident". Of course, we still have the same funeral doom sound with echo vocals and haunting lead guitar, but the production on this album has improved since 'The Pernicious Enigma'. Though starting out a bit fast, the initial pace begins to slow at 3:44, eventually reaching a slow section filled with atmospheric weirdness provided by keyboard notes and ambiance that Esoteric is very well known for by this point. They play around with that mood for a good while. Around the 10 minute mark, the rhythm guitar chugging starts to progressively get faster, but there's still lead guitar and/or keys to make it sound alien. Eventually, the sped up chugging gets really, really hypnotic before it stops a little after the 13 minute mark giving way to ambiance and noise going on for the last minutes of the song.

Yep, it's Esoteric's musical mind-fuckery at it's finest, but there's still two more songs.

"The Secret of the Secret" (what the hell kind of name is that?) comes next. It starts with slower, calmer spacey guitars with the pace with 1:15 signalling the intro of funeral doom chugging. Afterwards, the next big variation comes in at 2:45 with the tempo picking up slightly and the keys and/or guitar playing a scary lead line before the riff drops and music changes at 3:20. That scary, faster music comes back at 4:50. After it goes away again, the music that comes in to replace it is silent guitar playing with noise until the funeral doom music comes back in with a more melancholic tone that is maintained for the rest of the song with something of an extended spacey guitar solo playing to amp up the atmosphere.

All that is left is "Psychotropic Transgression". Another sorrowful sounding piece, the pace doesn't change too drastically, but there is another one of those extended spacey guitar solos among all the other atmosphere until the 7 minute mark where it all begins to quiet down and slow up keeping that pace for pretty much the rest of the song. Aside from the steadily changing atmosphere from the lead guitar and keys, there isn't much changing at this point, but it's funeral doom. What did you expect?

Esoteric is moving into the modern funeral doom sound with this release, and this transitional album is really quite astounding. Obviously, it's not quite as excellent as the legendary 'The Pernicious Enigma', but definitely better than the still great 'Epistemelogical Despondancy', making 'Metamorphogenesis' a most excellent addition to Esoteric's legacy.

Wilytank Since 'The Work that Transformed God', Blut Aus Nord have been known for posessing a unique black metal style that bend the properties of reality. However, with '777 - Sect(s)', I'm lead to believe that they don't just want to disconnect us from our reality. In fact, after listening to this, I'm starting to speculate that the elusive Vindsval has schizophrenia.

All the songs in this 777 series begin with the prefix "Epitome". The first of these begins without any bullshit intro and simply dives head first into chaos. The music is very fast paced, and the riffing style makes it sound chaotic. 1:50 marks a slow down point while still maintaining dissonant guitar sounds. It breaks back into the fast paced chaos at 3:55, but different music is played than before the slow break. The "schizophrenia" feel really makes itself well known as the riffs sound like the listener's sanity spiraling down the drain. Eventually, it all stops leaving a very creepy industrial/dark ambient outro.

The second song starts out dissonant sounding chords leading into a slower song. Keyboards add layers of atmosphere already constructed by the guitars. The first half of the song doesn't offer a lot of variation. The dissonant chords give way to a series of lead power chords on guitar. Then, there's a break in the rhythm. This is repeated twice. 4:28 introduces some new notes though that lead into something of a slow guitar solo/lead that plays through the rest of the song. More calm sounding than the first song, but decent all the same. It's good to see that BAN still play the beautiful melodic sounds on guitar that they've been known for.

"Epitome III" is shorter and faster, but is different sounding than the insane sounding first song. The atmosphere is a little less on the schizophrenic side, but there's keyboards in certain parts the music that make it sound like some collage of distorted church music. There's a false end at 3:10 to give way to a slower, creepier tone portrayed by the keyboards and dissonant guitars. The song goes by really fast at such a short length.

The fourth song is the longest one just short of 12 minutes. It's also another slower song. There's dissonant chords and keyboards, but there's vocals that sound like they're being played backwards to reinforce the schizophrenic feel of the music again. 2:02 introduces some melody into the guitar work, but it doesn't last very long. However, it does come back after another series of backwards vocals. After it ends this time, new music is introduced with more dissonant chord structures. Another pause around the 6 minute mark signals another change in the music featuring dissonant guitar work without accompaniment from drums, bass, keys, or vox. About a minute later, a faster section is started with the drums breaking out in blast-beats again. The vocals no longer sound like they're being played backwards. The music finally returns to the slow pace a minute and a half later. Different music is played than other parts of the song. The next time the vocals come in, they are in the form of distorted howling like some unholy choir. Melody is very scarce in this song, making it one of the best examples of the schizophrenic style that Blut Aus Nord seems to be emphasizing in this album.

We return again to fast paced music with "Epitome V". There are parts where the drumming slows down while the guitars continue in their dissonant tremolo riffing. Eventually, this is furthered around the 2 minute mark. The guitars finally do slow down to fit the drums to prepare for a lead. The slow dissonance continues until the music finally speeds up again at the 5:30 mark. You ought to know what it's like by now: reality bending, dissonant, warped, and of course schizophrenic.

And of course, the even numbered songs would be the slower paced ones. Such is the case of the final song. This song has more melody than the other ones here making it a fitting closer to this album by giving it a feel of catharsis (reaching the epitome if you will). The dissonance is still going on underneath the melodic guitar and later the keyboards as well. There are no vocal sounds in this song at all. As teh song goes on, the layers of instrumentation dissipate as the song (and the album) reach the end seemingly slowing down the music even more before finally ending.

Blut Aus Nord are one of those bands that have to try hard to disappoint me. '777 - Sect(s)' is an excellent addition to their legacy. But apparently, they aren't done yet. Two more 777 albums are coming out with even more glorious Epitomes. If 'Sect(s)' was any indication, those albums should be glorious as well.

Wilytank Even though they've only released a few albums, Mournful Congregation have received a nice amount of funeral doom fandom. They've actually been around for a while, but have taken some time to actually get some albums out. 'The Monad of Creation' is my first album by this band that I've listened to.

It's a very interesting mixture to be sure. The atmosphere generated by the music here. Melodic lead guitars are abundant and there are also elements of background clean vocals, acoustic guitars, and keyboards (especially on the final track). There's also some skillful use of key changes in this album to fully take advantage of variation. "Mother - Water, the Great Sea Wept" is an excellent example of this with it changing from a lower mournful tone to a slightly lighter tone and back again. At one point in the song, there's also a point where the tempo picks up and becomes like an October Tide song. In fact, those of you familiar with October Tide may find other similarities with this album. I myself find it similar to a funeral doom version of the atmospheric death doom of 'Rain Without End'.

The first of the shorter songs on this album, "As I Drown In Loveless Rain", presents one of the bigger let-downs of the album: parts of the atmosphere are weaker resulting in more boring elements to some of the songs. This is mostly attributed to the melodic lead guitar in this particular song getting kinda monotonous. There are other elements to help counterbalance this however like vocals that are almost whisper like in places in this song. The other shorter song, "When the Weeping Dawn Beheld Its Mortal Thirst", is entirely acoustic. It's a nice change of things, but the final track is made twice as refreshing as a result.

Though not containing some of the desired elements to make 'The Monad of Creation' a major masterpiece of funeral doom, it still is very noteworthy of an album and definitely a worthwhile listen for fans of the genre. As I am still new to the band, I definitely will check out their other releases to check on their musical progression.

Wilytank There's something special about 'The Dwelling' that sets it apart from other magnificent albums that I have listened to. For the longest time, I've considered this album my personal favorite album ever in heavy metal or in music in general. Sabbat have gone through four albums of awesome evil sounding black metal; and when round five comes along, they spring an hour long song at us. This would either be really awesome or a waste of time. Not only did 'The Dwelling' fall into the former category, it went beyond awesome and made itself a very personal favorite of mine. Even any complaints I see about this song's length I consider shallow.

With such a lengthy song, there really is no proper way to listen to this album besides just hitting play and listening to the whole thing. The first few minutes start the song off slower with lead guitars and scary sounding vocals coming in after a bit. The production is perfect for a black metal album. It's not fine, yet it's not raw enough to make it totally sound like shit. This makes the song almost scary sounding. Before even entering the 3 minute section, the guitar breaks into tremolo riffing.

Sabbat have the good taste to keep things well varied in this piece. Only three minutes later, the tempo drops with the scary sounding ambient keyboards coming back into the background and a solo starting up. The tempo then speeds up while Temis continues his solo. It ends before the speedier section stops again; but when this section does end, the slow part before the solo comes back and his soloing starts up again. With that, a grand piano also comes into play eventually creating a auditory vortex of chaos as Temis's soloing, the piano, the bass drums, and Gezol's lyrical recital churns up the fires of hell stronger than they have ever done before.

However, we aren't even ten minutes into this beast! After the vortex ends, another tremolo riff signals the beginning another speedier section. When the slow it down again, they keep the ambiance and piano out of it and make it more of a mid-paced rhythmic section. It does acquire a scary tone around the 16:38 as it builds up to a slightly faster rhythm. In this faster rhythm, Gezol's clean lyrics are really haunting in sound. Once the lyrics end in this section, the rhythm slows down again with more frighting sounding musical section. Temis begins another lead with it going into another fast rhythm and Gezol's same haunting clean vox.

Finally we go into a totally new rhythm at 20:18. Gezol goes back into his black metal shouting/shrieking. After he's done with his vocal lines, the song speeds up with drums going into an almost blast-beat-like rhythm. This type of passage is repeated once. After the second time, a new rhythm comes in that soon slows down. Soon another, more mellow sounding, lead from Temis comes in with it eventually playing in melody with Gezol's bass. After a brief section of vocals and partial blast-beating drums, another lead comes in from Temis. This time it's less mellow and, when played with a blast-beating section, becomes really furious. Everything then culminates and builds up...

And then it all stops. Or rather it fades away to be replaced by acoustic guitar. We're just about halfway through the song at this point, and what better to celebrate the halfway mark than a haunting oriental sounding acoustic rhythm. This acoustic rhythm gets some accompaniment after a bit with a lead guitar playing with it as well as the bass and drums. The song speeds up again after the 31:30 mark with another lead from Temis. Then slows down with only the drums and acoustic guitar playing, followed by only electric guitar and bass.

This rather mellow section is finally ended at the 34:29 mark with a notably faster rhythm being played in tremolo and vocals soon coming back in. It eventually speeds up more with Gezol continuing his vocal lines eventually ending in "LAH-NAH-NAH-NAH-NAH-NAH!" This section is repeated with the same type of ending on the vocals. Then all instruments except bass. After a bit, the guitar, bass drum, and even the ambiance from earlier in the song come back in to buildup to a slow section of melodic playing on both guitar and bass. This instrumental section goes all the way up to the later end of the 41 minute section with the buildup returning to introduce a similar rhythm with different rhythm and no leading, but vocals do return. After one vocal passage, the leading begins again.

We're running out of time at this point with just a little more than 15 minutes left of the song. The rhythm stays mid-paced around here. When the vocals come in again, it sounds like Temis singing. His voice is distinctly higher than Gezol's. Though at one point, Temis's shouting and Gezol's lower haunting voice play through together. More sections of tempo changes and leads go in and out until Temis does another verse without ending in a duet with Gezol. The next run begins around the 49 minute mark. Gezol takes the lead vocal role once more with the music sticking to a mid-paced rhythm. Then, the music gets really fast with the guitar and bass playing together in a flying dual tremolo rhythm interrupted by the bopping on the grand piano. The flying dual lead and piano section are repeated again before mellowing out once more to a mid-paced rhythm. Gezol's vocals are recited in unison with Temis's lead before the lead totally takes control of the song. The lead continues on before returning to the original rhythm...

...and then we're back to the beginning? The rhythm is very much the same as the very beginning of the song. And you know what? What better way to end this? Closing vocal lines and lead guitar playing are gotten out of the way. Afterwards, the guitar plays some more notes by itself with bass and sparse percussion joining in a final push to close the song. The bass itself gets a little more prominent than the guitar even. The ambiance begins to fade back in with all the metal instruments still playing. Finally, the metal instruments all fade away leaving the dark ambient sounding keyboards to reflect upon the hour that just passed into the ears.

Wow. Just wow. Sabbat have seriously outdid themselves here. Gezol, Temis, and Zorugelion have played their respective instruments masterfully. Gezol's vocals are haunting and awesome as always, and his bass playing is inspirational as always. Temis's guitar prowess shines to it's maximum potential given all the room to do so. Zorugelion doesn't miss a beat on his drums, and he is the one who really signals the changes in the songs structure. 'The Dwelling' to me is the greatest musical production in the history of music. Though there may be other albums that I give the 100% to, I still give this album much more praise; and every time I listen to another album that might get a 100% score from me, I ask my self "Is this better than 'The Dwelling'?"

And the answer has always been "no."

Wilytank If you were worried about being disconnected from reality for two hours in Esoteric's debut album, don't listen to 'The Pernicious Enigma'. If you do, you'll not only be disconnected from reality for two hours, but you will stay that way long after the music ends. However, to people like me, this is not a bad thing, and 'The Pernicious Enigma' is totally superior to Esoteric's debut. There are two CDs full of long songs here so let's get started.

"Creation (Through Destruction)" begins the trip...emphasis on trip. The opening chords are really spacey sounding and are the most dominant sound when the full music gets going. The keyboards are mixed into the dominant spacey sound to augment the atmosphere. This all goes on for four and a half minutes until the instrument lay off for a minute to let some vocal work in. These vocals are delivered in pretty much the same way they were in the previous album, but it's mixed up in a bunch of noise to make it sound more incoherent for a minute and a half until... SURPRISE SPEED SECTION! Yes, Esoteric. You are not a typical funeral doom band. When this speed section ends, the funeral doom riffing is apparent for the first time in the song; but the keyboards still add to the atmosphere, eventually getting replaced by a lead guitar's melody. There's another speed section not long after with a disturbing and furious guitar solo being played. This song isn't incredibly long to start out with. The speedy section shake things up quite well, but the drawn out atmospheric doom metal sections that pretty much are Esoteric's claim to fame are also present and highly appreciated.

"Dominion of Slaves" begins with a scary sample. When it ends, the funeral doom begins immediately with a spacey lead guitar. The guitar doesn't go on for long, but within the next few minutes there's plenty of ambiance and noise to mix up the funeral doom. The music goes on relatively unchanged for several minutes. Around 9:40, spacey guitars and noise come in with the spacey effect even going into the vocals a few minutes later. As the song enters it's final 3 minutes, the instruments get more intense sounding with the spacey guitar fading into a violin and back to lead guitar...unless it's all lead guitar. I don't care.

Next comes "Allegiance", which starts out with the feed backing from the previous track with some noise added on to make an initial effect. Sample, then funeral doom. Spacey lead guitar again, basically a staple for Esoteric now. The keys get really intense in the song's first section, but eventually take a break. The rest of the song plays out with just the amount of atmosphere as there was before: enthralling vast destitute, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

One more to finish off the album: "NOXBC9701040". This one contains no lyrics at all, but the sound of vocalization isn't totally absent. I can still hear Greg Chandler howling to an echoing effect whilst the instruments are played in a spacey style with no actual funeral doom style riffing in the song. This may actually may be the most trippy track on the album because of it. All the dissonance, ambiance, and noise are gaurenteed to disconnect you from reality like I warned about in the intro to this review. Listen to this while laying on a bed in a dark room. You will lose track of where you really are. Awesome right? It's why band like Esoteric are so great! It's all the fun of drugs without doing them!

But there's still another whole CD to be listen to!

Disc 2 starts with the fading in of ambiance with the atmospheric guitars coming in soon later. This marks the beginning of "Sinistrous", and the creepiness goes on without any orthodox funeral doom even when the vocals start. In fact, there are no funeral doom chugs until 3:53 while still going at the same pace the song was going before. The keyboards have this real hypnotic tone to them that they keep throughout the entirety of the song. It gets in my head! The rhythm is actually maintained for a good number of minutes until the song enters its outro.

To mix things up, we have a three minute long piece titled "At War With the Race". It begins with noise, and then a sample with a guy saying "I want a rifle. I want a bullet. I want weapons. I want anything that's going to kill my enemy." This is a mid-paced death metal piece similar to "Only Hate (Berserk)" on the first album. However, this is much more well executed as the jazzy influences are taken out.

Returning to the longer songs, next we have "A Worthless Dream". This song starts out with the spacey keyboards and guitars that should be familiar by now, but then goes off into a series of thundering plodding of funeral doom. The drumming is a little more atypical and the rhythm even makes it mid-paced. Then it speeds up to slow blast beats, before all crashing down to the slow despondent pace once again. This pace is maintained for the greater part of the song, but the variations in atmospheric elements do not break me from this trance.

What's in store for the rest of the album? Basically a continuation of the enthralling sound that you should already be experienced with by listening to the album up to this point. The songs are different, but describing them at this point is somewhat pointless. Just let it play through and find out for yourself what happens.

At the end, we have Esoteric. They have a very unique sound established with this album that they carry on with them with the rest of their works. If you care at all about funeral doom metal, you will get this album. Definitely.

Wilytank Here is Nortt, a funeral doom metal act that draws influence from black metal. I've heard a good amount of good things for Nortt's debut, 'Gudsforladt'. Before listening, I did notice that none of the songs reach six minutes in length, which kinda worried me. But as it turned out, 'Gudsforladt' was an intriguing trip all the same.

The intro "Graven" starts out with rainstorm samples. After a loud clap of thunder, the keyboards come in with the rainstorm still going in. The tolling of a church bell can also be heard. When this intro ends, the rainstorm plays right into "Doden". Opening with the rain and a weak vocal moan, the funeral doom gets kicked off to a start relatively quickly.

The vocals in the album are either seen in black metal growls/screeches or slow spoken word (lyrics are in Danish). They fit to the lyrics dealing with death, darkness, and solitude. Musically, the most prominant instrument in any of the songs is the keyboards. The keys are easily the most likely to make an impression on the album, and they vary from either piano to ambient-like synths such as those seen in the first two songs. The guitar riffs are pretty standard for the funeral doom environment, and they don't ever take any big leads.

Perhaps the biggest letdown of the album is the lack of variation or room for variation. The songs are short by funeral doom standards and only allow room for about two different rhythms per song. The keyboard fights hard to make the songs interesting, but it often isn't enough. I'm not saying that any of it is bad in any way. Most of these songs are really amazing when listened to singular; but when put together on an album, it gets a little worse for wear.

I know this review is short, but there really isn't much to say about this album. It's a simple funeral doom metal album that I can certainly see many die-hard fans of of the genre enjoying (myself included). Perhaps if Nortt put a little more music into these songs, he would succeed in making something really, really interesting.

By the way, listen to this album in a thunderstorm. If the awesome artwork is any indication, this is an excellent choice of music to listen to while staring out a window at the outside rainy environment.

Wilytank I've been doing a good streak of funeral doom listens, but now I'm writing a review for Abyssmal Sorrow's 'Lament'. While the majority of bands out there have their funeral doom played in the tone of death metal, Abyssmal Sorrow play with a black metal tone. No, they are not the first band to do so; but 'Lament' still is one awesome melancholic trip all the same.

They take a direct approach in on "Bound by Lifeless Affliction". All instruments fading in out from nothing. The black metal inspired variant of funeral doom is quite distinguishable here. You still have the slow tempo and sorrowful tone. There's even keyboards. But instead of the plodding heavyness of most funeral doom guitars, the guitars are much more melodic sounding, even in the rhythm section. Plus, the vocals are in black metal shrieks, though with something of an echo effect applied to them. All these factors make this black metal variant of funeral doom just as, if not MORE, sorrowful sounding than the more death metal sounding bands.

Next, there is "Requiem For the Dying Moon". A lighter sounding strumming of guitars makes for a much more notable intro, and it's so nice that I don't even mind it going on for a minute and a half. The song's longer than 10 minutes anyway, so there's plenty of time to spare. At the 8 minute mark, the calmer sounding guitar comes back and soon plays along with the drums, keyboards, and vocals too. A black metal guitar is played too, but the calm guitar thankfully keeps playing right to the end of this song. It even ends unaccompanied starting at the 10:21 mark to give the song a proper sorrowful tone to go out on.

The calm guitar comes back again to introduce "Cavernous Sorrow and Worthlessness", and it plays a mournful rhythm that has really stuck to my head. This rhythm stays with the song when the rest of the instruments come in. It does change around the 1:24 mark, which is always good to keep the song from getting monotonous. The original melody returns around the 4:11 mark, but is initially played by one of the black metal guitars. When the rest of the music finally stops, the calm guitar plays that beautiful rhythm that has stuck to my head ever since.

"Echoes Through the Field of Death" begins without any calm guitar. There's a melodic rhythm that starts out the song and returns at a certain point, but there is variation. Near the half way point of the 6th minute, the calm guitar does return to introduce one rhythm which is again continued when the rest of the instruments come back. The songs sticks to this rhythm and ends with it.

The remaining two songs both bear the "Austere Lament" name. The first is an instrumental and is dominated by that calm guitar that I've come to really appreciate. There's also a rainy effect. Around the later end of the song, there's a sample of a despondent man talking of (and actually acting out) killing himself. When part two comes in, it begins with keyboards fading in and the rest of the music clapping in like a clap of thunder. At 12 minutes, it's the longest song on the album. To make it seem longer, sections of the song have sparse work on the cymbals on the drumming. This makes it feel like I'm ascending out of a valley of darkness and sorrow (corny right? I know.) when they cymbals start again just to fall back in when the cymbals are dropped once more. And once again, the calm guitars signal a rhythm change. They begin at the 7:29 mark. This rhythm goes on accompanied for a little over a minute before being followed up by the rest of the music. This is the final rhythm of the song as it is not discarded for the rest of the song. The calm guitars that come back at the 10:21 mark do change up the rhythm by playing the notes a little more articulately, but the basic rhythm remains the same for the rest of the song.

This funeral doom metal album is very sorrowful, very mournful, and very impressive. It's a rare one to be sure, but not one that fans of funeral doom metal want to miss out on. It's really too bad the band didn't stick around long enough to record any other albums, but maybe it might be better that way because 'Lament' as a standalone album might actually be better when not compared to anything that might have come afterward.

Wilytank After going through several classic funeral doom metal albums, it's sort of a new experience going back into the embrace of more fine production even though it was the avenue that I used to get into the genre in the first place. So why Monolithe? Well, let's just say that as a person who adores long songs, a 52 minute piece of funeral doom should be right up my alley.

As I start the music, I realize that there's even more. The first notes played are of a piano, but they are not sorrowful sounding like I'm used to experiencing in funeral doom. The music isn't dark at all even when the rest of the instruments come in. In fact, the atmosphere is light sounding! Though with the lyrics about being the origin of mankind, the atmosphere is kinda fitting. It feels as if I'm staring into a portal of infinite light in the middle of a wasteland. Kinda like what's on the album art. 'Monolithe I' is, for once, a funeral doom album that would be just as fitting if listened to during the daytime as it would in the nighttime if not MORE fitting!

There are plenty of variations to be had in the music. Though the tempo stays mostly the same with a steady drum beat, the keyboards play a large role on the "staring into a portal of infinite light" aspect of the music here. Time from time, one of the guitars takes a prominent position. There are even parts where the guitars tone themselves down to allow even calmer parts of the music to come in. Vocal wise, the standard low growls of funeral doom are present, but in the calmer parts of the music, there may be clear spoken word verses spoken. Actually, the musical pauses aren't limited to the guitars. At 18 minute mark, the drums stop and the guitars play some leading notes with the keyboard there to back them up. The guitars keep playing this rhythm as the rest of the instruments continue. At the 28:13 minute mark, the pace changes the most notably with the key changing a bit as well before returning to the same key and pace. As the thirty minute mark comes and goes, the guitars go into a faster chugging rhythm and build up this rhythm for about three minutes until lone piano notes break it up to return to the normal pace with lead notes. The chugging returns around the 38 mark, but with lead guitar to provide some layering. The lead continues when the chugging guitar returns to normal.

At the end of this journey into creation, I look back and see this wonderful funeral doom album by a promising funeral doom band. Its tone is rather unorthodox for the genre, but that's a good thing for funeral doom. If you're a fan of the genre and have 52 minutes to spare in your day, this album/song should be looked into.

Wilytank The next stop on my classic funeral doom metal tour is Esoteric. And like the other bands I've explored, this band has an experience all its own to explore. Now, if you're read my review of Skepticism's 'Lead and Aether', you'll recall that I thought it was interesting that there could be some short funeral doom songs. On 'Epistemological Despondency', you have one song that's not even three minutes; but other than that, there's some very long songs. One around 12 minutes, one around 19, one around 20, and one around 26. If that's not enough, they are split up into two different discs, which may make this album an exhausting listen. However, the separate discs aren't even 50 minutes each. Split up, it's not as an exhausting listen as it would be.

The first mammoth song is "Bereft". Some haunting sounding string pluckings are played with some droning noise fading in, then disappearing when the funeral doom metal starts. Instrumentally, the funeral doom is nothing unlike I've already experienced, but the vocal style grabs my attention. The low growls actually sound like some angry predatory beast growling at one point. The echoing effect put on them makes them even creepier, making one of the most disturbing vocals I've heard in any album ever. At 3:26, the funeral doom pace is broken by an odd section of guitar, noise, and piano getting at higher and higher keys. Screamed vocals (probably not reciting lyrics) are also thrown into the mix. This sequence goes on for five fucking minutes until the funeral doom rhythm begins to re-establish itself around the 8 minute mark. Spacey keyboards are also played at this part, but go away when the vocals start again. Around the 11 minute mark, the guitar goes off playing a few power chords played in a way in which, combined with the music, kinda gives this song a stoner feel as well. This tone doesn't leave until the 17 minute mark where a more standard funeral doom tone takes the reins one more time, and it is this way that the song ends. I enjoy my variations in music such as funeral doom, but damn! That is one scary as fuck experience!

...and that was just the first song!

Now after that, there is a shorter song, "Only Hate (Berserk)". This song seems somewhat out of place on a funeral doom album. The instruments are played in a rockin jazz meets death metal style. Vocals are the same as they were on the first song. After the first minute, there is a pretty awesome sounding guitar solo. All in all, I don't think very highly of this song, but it definitely does help make Esoteric one of the more "WTF?" bands out there.

"The Noise of Depression" wraps up the first disc. The funeral doom comes back after being interrupted by the previous song. If "Bereft" wasn't enough to describe Esoteric's atmosphere of funeral doom, you can easily tell here. It does have a melancholic feel to it, but it also seems disturbing and distorted, even spiteful. The song doesn't vary for the first 5 minutes until the lead guitar playing disappears and the rhythm changes to include some regular stops in the beat. They ditch these stops around the 7 minute mark to go to another rhythm. A noiseish keyboard sound comes in at 8:51. Rhythms change and other elements come and go such as the guitar lead around the 12 minute mark which eventually gives way to another session of creepy keyboard action. As the song reaches the end, it slows slightly more; and for one more go at weirdness, at the 18:39 minute mark a sample is played that sounds like some man-child throwing a temper tantrum. What the hell?

At this point, it is wise to take a break to avoid losing your mind. The first half of this album was without a doubt an otherworldly experience with "Bereft" being the biggest highlight.

The second disc has a noticeable stoner doomish feel to it. The first song, "Lamented Despondency", begins with a psychedelic guitar effect, and the first vocal lines are delivered without the echo effect. The echo does make it back into the music eventually though, much to my rejoice. Another cool effect comes in at the 4:52 mark with some steely effect on one of the guitars. The guitar solo at the nine minute mark also feels like it was derived from a stoner doom album. The funeral doom is still here, but this half of the album is beginning to feel like stoner funeral doom! Good for Esoteric for being more experimental.

Then, another notably shorter song to fill the gap. "Eradification (of Thorns)", unlike "Only Hate (Berserk)" is definitely more fitting to the rest of the album. It's funeral doom, but at a faster pace. High echoing effects and weird keyboard noises can be found in this. It speeds up notably at the 4:30 with some sped up riffs. As the song reaches the end, the stoner feel comes back in a lead until it goes off into a storm of confusing notes/noise to end the song suddenly in a jolt.

At long last, we arrive at the 26 long behemoth known as "Awaiting My Death". Surprisingly, there's no weird ambiance or noise in the intro. Instead, the stoner funeral doom is present right from the beginning. Spacey ambiance and weird effects on the guitar are present for a good amount of this song at the beginning giving it a more relaxing feel. I do like it, but I was really hoping for another disturbing song like "Bereft" the first time I listened to this. It's a slight disappointment, but this funeral stoner doom metal still is very worthy of listening. It eventually goes away around the later end of the five minute mark to soon be replaced by keyboard sounds and the introduction of the vocals into the music. Though not as menacing as I've said before, the music does send the listener into a trancey environment looking at stars and the like. Rhythm changes are present throughout and are most certainly welcome. What else is welcome are the other anomalies such as guitar leads, noise and keyboard ambiance.

I didn't think too highly about this album at first until I received the epiphany I got from Funeral's 'Tristesse'. Now, I've really warmed up to this album. The two longest songs are the best with my preference leaning toward "Bereft". It's definitely an album to listen to at night, and in fact, doing so with "Bereft" was a scary experience. That is how awesome that single song is. Imagine what would happen with the rest of this album...

Wilytank 'Stormcrowfleet' was more than enough to establish Skepticism's place in the then new funeral doom pantheon. With the great music on that album, one must wonder what would happen in a follow up? Well, approximately three years after 'Stormcrowfleet', 'Lead and Aether' arrived to answer the question. Before even listening, it is worth pointing out the overall length of this album is shorter than its predecessor which might make it yet another good starting point for those new to funeral doom. Let's go!

"The Organium" starts off with pipe organs that continue when the funeral doom music starts. The keyboard production has notably improved since the last album, making them more present than ever before. With a shorter song like this that falls just short of seven minutes, it is good to see some variation here. The first big one starts at 1:18, with the guitars moving to a more prominent position and the drums going into a tribal like rhythm. The keys are still there providing the atmosphere effect. Another variation occurs around the three minute mark slowing the pace back to the original one. The pipe organ effects make you feel like you're sitting in church. But it's not you're normal church where preaching of love and peace occur. You are in the church of hell. The preaching is of despair. Oh, and you're alone; but in these funeral doom metal visualizations, you're always supposed to be alone.

"The March and the Stream" comes next. Ten plus minutes. Now we're getting to some true funeral doom taste. We begin this procession with ambient keyboards and tribal drumming with light sounding guitar eventually coming into the mix. When the vocals and the heavy guitars come in, the drumming stays the same; but the keyboards start layer the ambient and pipe organ sounds together to generate the atmosphere. The single guitar gets a little more ambitious in this song playing a slow melodic lead at one point to break away from the plodding riffing. The biggest variation here occurs at the 6:17 with the guitar tone drastically changing and at a faster pace. It keeps that tone when the vocals return again at 7:05. Plus, the keyboards get strong again at that point to make the song extra melancholic sounding. Mixtures like this make this song an interesting counterpart to the more frightful "The Organium".

Then, we have "The Falls". It begins with a mournful atmosphere portrayed through the keyboards and guitar. Indeed, I imagine being cleansed in a waterfall in the middle of a forest when I listen to this first part. It leaves us at 2:13 to be replaced with a more astral mood as the riffs and key. There's even spacey keyboards to go along with it. Then it changes again at 4:21 with acoustic sounding guitar plucking notes. This goes on for over a minute in a sorrowful passage. Funeral doom does come back to continue, climax, and end the song.

Who makes a funeral doom song shorter than six minutes? Well I guess Skepticism does because that's just as long as "Forge" is. The key is different here than the few songs before it. This song seems to be more uplifting too as if to make you arise from the lamenting depths portrayed before. The keyboards and other instruments, played in the key that they are played, makes me visualize a castle in the sky. The key returns to the way it was at the beginning of the song to climax and end this song. The keyboards really get strong here and get very powerful on the final note.

Moving on, there is "Edges". It sinks the mood back to the gloom established earlier in this album. The regal keyboards at 1:01 are quite epic, then shift over to more spacey sounding effects almost a minute later while keeping the pace and tone of the rest of the music. As we reach the climax, the pace increases and the bass plays some more notable notes.

"Aether" ends it all. It starts out with funeral doom right from the get go. The keyboards are spacey and astral sounding again. At one point in the music, the keyboards get really extravagant and even resemble violins. On the contrast, there are parts where the keys are toned down to let the guitar take the lead. Not unlike the rest of the songs, the music gets more powerful towards the end to reach a climax. The guitar blurs into a continual stream of constant noise that ends abruptly with the song...

But like "The Everdarkgreen" on 'Stormcrowfleet', there's a false ending. After several seconds, the music begins again with all the instruments playing and the guitar and keyboards playing at an intense pitch and different key than the rest of the song only to fade out to close the album officially.

Actually, this album is superior to 'Stormcrowfleet' in my eyes. The songs are more varied and interesting, the production is slightly better to make the atmosphere seemingly heavier, and the keyboards are used in a somewhat superior way to project this lonely, solemn atmosphere. That's two for two for Skepticism!

Wilytank Time to explore another funeral doom metal band. Funeral's first two albums gave a brooding atmosphere of brooding lamentations. But let's try a different flavor: Skepticism. Unlike Funeral, Skepticism are given credit where credit is due. It might seem kind of unfair to hog all the attention; but frankly, 'Stormcrowfleet' is a damn good album.

The funeral doom starts right off the bat with "Sign of a Storm". The mournful atmosphere is here as expected, but keyboards are present in the music as well to add a different atmosphere than Funeral has. The keyboard really works wonders in this album as far as generating a thick atmosphere. They seem to generate an image of a mostly gray colored world. The sun is obscured by thick clouds that bring rain. This world is empty of life besides yourself. Even some of the grasses are decaying. Bottom line: you're by yourself walking through the aftermath of World War III, and that is what makes this album so unique. 'Stormcrowfleet' is not about the war but the aftermath.

A nice break after going through two Funeral albums full of lengthy songs is that Skepticism makes notably shorter songs such as "Pouring", "By Silent Wings", and "The Gallant Crow". In "Pouring", the pace is increased to give the atmosphere a regal sounding, underground cult atmosphere supplemented by the pipe organ sounding keyboards. With only one guitar, Skepticism actually do an excellent job of keeping the atmosphere even when the keyboard is absent, though it may be due to the production present.

"By Silent Wings" continues the ceremonial sounds established by the previous song. There's a clear initial pace that changes halfway through the song; and with the pace change, the keyboards change back to the way they sound on "Sign of a Storm", but eventually go back at the 4:47 mark until at one point they seem to layer themselves and ending on the "Sign..." style sound.

"The Rising of the Flames" features slightly faster pace to march by. Eventually, it does slow down to add some welcome variation to the mix. The keyboards develop a memorable section of notes to make this song more memorable. At the 8:07 mark, the keyboards stack up even more to further strengthen the atmosphere. After hearing this song the first time, that keyboard rhythm stuck to my head without me even recalling what song it was from; and at one point, I even thought it came from a Funeral song before realizing that they didn't use keyboards.

"The Gallant Crow" is another track that is really keyboard heavy, perhaps even more so than the previous track. The riff varies, but only very slightly. Actually, it's the final track "The Everdarkgreen" that truly climaxes this album. It starts with with an eerie pipe organ keyboard rhythm accompanied by funeral doom. Even the lyrics go with this post-apocalyptic vision: "As the crowds are now left behind I enter the vastness of green I was weary of all the noise around For my ears silence is the ultimate sound

The forest is around me In silence the pines stand tall With the wind they whisper their tales As their wisdom is everdarkgreen"

Notable variations begin at 2:42 with the timing dropping and riff changing and guitar even trying to stand out more. The keyboards pause at 4:02 to leave the funeral doom to continue on with the drums increased in timing. The timing slows at 5:08, and a swirling wind sound comes in as if to show little dust devils forming with the dust from the ruins around the empty world. The swirling eventually disappears and the keyboards return at 6:46 with the timing increasing once more. After all the lyrics have been said, the slows again with the keyboards keeping their dominant position. As the rest of the song plays out, the keyboards and funeral doom riffs continue to go on until it climaxes and ends at 10:39.

But nay, it is only a false ending. The music starts again to a different key than earlier in the song and different riffs. The keyboards grow strong, but the song fades out ending the album.

There you have it: 'Stormcrowfleet', a truly awesome funeral doom experience worthy of the praise it has gotten. And it's funny too, because on my initial listen I thought it to be mediocre. But was I so wrong! Do not miss this storm!

Wilytank Although 'Tristesse' was something more of a demo, I still think it's one of the most influential funeral doom metal releases. Now, there's 'Tragedies', a much more filling album than its 40 minute older brother. So, obviously, there's going to be some amount of expectations of this album. Five songs this time around; let us begin this melancholic journey.

The opener, "Taarene", starts off with acoustic guitars. Nothing out of the ordinary since the first album. After it ends and the funeral doom begins, we see the first major difference: female vocals. I definitely thought that Funeral had a gothic appeal in 'Tristesse' with the way they layered the clean and harsh vocals, but they just take it to the next level now. There are some harsh vocals in this album, but they take more of a secondary role. Looking at the instrumental aspect, Funeral have improved on their production slightly. With the melodic sounding guitars going along with the female vocals, the album is made more sorrowful sounding. We have a guitar solo around the six minute mark of this opening song, and I'm glad they didn't throw those away. I'm also pleased to see a break in the song with only acoustic guitar and the female vocals.

"Under Ebony Shades" begins with both the acoustic guitar and the female vocals. This time, the vocals are singing a bunch of "nah-nah-nah"s before returning to actual lyrics when the funeral doom begins. There are some harsh vocals here too; and at one interesting point, they're actually layered with the female vocals. All the correct elements in the first song are in this song too. Beautiful sad atmosphere, female vocals, and a nice guitar solo. I'm glad this one is in English though because the lyrics are so solemn yet effective:

"Emaciated by their faulter moves, they hide under the cloak of blasphemy. Desperately yearning for love, finding only misery Avount

Now I loath the presence of God, whom I had such trust in. Only to be abandoned, my hardest of times."

Anyway, next we have "Demise", a nice break from the songs exceeding twelve minutes in length; but it still is almost nine minutes long so keep your attention span from drifting.. Here, the harsh vocals are given a twisted and distorted effect to them at one point as if recorded backwards or something.

The only other thing special about the remaining tracks is the violin/cello/whatever played in "Moment In Black" to further increase the already high flow on the melancholy aspect. Otherwise, pretty much everything about the songs has been already been described by me.

This is quite the step above 'Tristesse' and yet another example of how Funeral are one of the most unique, yet under-appreciated funeral doom metal bands to exist. Their gothic flavor is a welcome way to further set them apart from their contemporaries. Yet, this may be their last funeral doom metal album as they would later go onto make some more clear cut gothic doom metal that is definitely impressive on its own. Nevertheless, 'Tragedies' is definitely a sad trip, but one you don't want to miss.

Wilytank As influential they were to the funeral doom metal genre, Norway's Funeral haven't totally gotten the respect they wholly deserve. Any of the attention and praise that could have gone to Funeral's debut 'Tristesse' instead went to Skepticism's 'Stormcrowfleet' or Esoteric's 'Epistemological Despondency', both amazing albums in their own right. But no, I am here to shine the spotlight on Funeral.

We start off with "Thoughts of Tranquility". The first minute or so is taken up by mournful sounding acoustic guitar, a perfect mood setter for a funeral doom album. Within this song, we have the typical early funeral doom atmosphere and tone. Production is raw but now too raw. There are clear points of the song where the change in the riff occurs, which is good to know so you don't think of it getting too monotonous. Another interesting attribute I've noticed is the layering of the death growls with cleaner sounding vocals. This is somewhat of a precursor to Funeral's gothic phase they're involved in now, but it's appeal that helps Funeral set themselves apart from Skepticism and Esoteric even more.

Next comes "A Poem for the Dead". Another acoustic guitar intro present, but this one only goes on for about 30 seconds. The other eighteen minutes is funeral doom sorrow. Though initially slow as usual, the song does vary by breaking into a faster chugging at the 1:25 mark, then returns to slowness about thirty seconds later. The song varies again with the double bass drums pounding at 2:32 with the guitars still playing long chords. This double bass rhythm reappears at 4:43. The rhythm goes on for 45 seconds until the break signals a speed up to chugs on the rhythm guitar as well as a well placed guitar solo. There are more timing variations present after a prolonged period of crushing funeral doom atmosphere. Another cool guitar solo comes in at 13:07, but then that fades out to an acoustic guitar passage before finishing the funeral doom trip. This single song was an amazing presentation of funeral doom metal.

Last song is "Yearning for Heaven". No acoustic guitar to start this song off. Instead, there's a slow bass rhythm before shortly cutting to the actual funeral doom riffing. Though the riffs clearly change in the song, there are otherwise no outstanding variations in terms of timing changes. There is a guitar solo in the later end of the 7 minute mark. Oh wait! They stuck the acoustic guitar in the outro. Nicely solemn way to end this album.

I actually credit this album for making me truly understand the funeral doom metal genre. I've listened to Skepticism's 'Stormcrowfleet' before listening to this and didn't think too much of it because of the lack of clean production. Then I listened to 'Tristesse' and found it mind-blowing. On my return listen to 'Stormcrowfleet', I totally loved it. 'Tristesse' may also be the most ideal path for outsiders of funeral doom metal to get in due to it being about 40 minutes with three songs, shorter than most funeral doom albums. Well done, Funeral!

Wilytank So this here "mathcore" stuff is supposed to be somewhat weird right? It kinda is. From what I've heard from Converge so far is some punkish/crossover sounding metal with some grindcore appeal.

So what makes 'Jane Doe' stand out by critics and fans alike? Well, the way I see it, their genre of music is executed. 'Halo in a Haystack' seemed like the band was drifting between punk and metal sound not knowing which one to play. 'Petition the Empty Sky' was the first album to feature the mathcore approach and some cool tracks were featured such as "The Saddest Day", but it wasn't totally interesting. 'When Forever Comes Crashing' came next and was much more mundane. With 'Jane Doe' though, Converge manages to at least not make the music sound overly pretentious or boring. Unlike the previous three albums, I didn't feel any need to stop the album prematurely and pass my judgement. And the production makes it sound like Mastodon's 'Leviathan' (which came out three years later).

I feel like saying something about at least one of the individual songs here, so I think I'll talk about the 11 minute title track "Jane Doe". It's a slower song and the only song on the album that features any clean vocals. It provides a nice ending and a break from the mathcore chaos. Of course, I'm a sucker for long songs; and it builds up to a notable climax beginning at the nine and a half minute mark.

I'm quite pleased with this album. Though my listening experience with Converge got off to a rocky start, this album helped change my attitude. I only hope that the rest of their albums are at least somewhat as good as this one.

Wilytank So here we have a Christian metalcore band with nu metal influences. Should be shitty right?

Actually, not necessarily.

Though the riffs aren't totally good, they are quite catchy and groovy. They don't try to pull any big feats of musicianship here, but from what I hear I'm kinda getting a Crowbar esque sludge metal sound mixed with some metalcore.

Vocal wise, there's the standard Phil Anselmo hardcore worship with the vocalist's own tone. Like most metalcore bands, there's also wimpy sounding clean vocals which I usually HATE, but this time I find quite tolerable.

Though probably something I wouldn't buy, Demon Hunter's debut album is rather intriguing. I might as well look into their other albums to see if they got any better.

Wilytank Peste Noire's 2011 album is pretty zany, but at the same time pretty good. Compared to the first two albums (I haven't checked out their third), this has a lot of experimentation in it. Song 1 (I don't want to type out all the long-ass French song titles) has some overbearing Oi! influence while Song 2 has electronic/dance influence, especially with the electronic drum kit used.

Song 3 is yet another milieu of weird ideas. It is twenty minutes long, but executed quite pleasantly. There's still some electronic influence in the intro along with the sounds of a gun being cocked. After that, we get a somber sounding acoustic segment with female French vocals. With some more legit black metal elements eventually coming in, the song goes forth in a mid to slow paced tempo. The mid paced tempo eventually picks up as the song goes on. More Oi! influence near the end.

Song 4 is the most black metal esque song here so far. It's dark and crushing. The biggest amount of experimentation is around the later end of the 6 minute area wear the guitars sound like they belong in an Agalloch song (in terms of tone) and some samples of a monkey screaming in the background at one point. Song 5 starts out with an atmospheric sounding guitar playing and stays slow paced and somber for some time. Electric instruments do come in, but so does a cello. Around the 3 minute mark, the pace picks up to make the song somewhat more interesting.

I don't know what Famine was smoking while he was writing some of these songs, but this album turned out to be worthwhile. Guitar work is nice and reminiscent to Agalloch. Drums (acoustic and electronic) are well played. And production is decently clean. Definitely an oddball, but worth picking up.

Wilytank Melechesh's 'Djinn' album was a very awesome middle-Eastern inspired black metal album; but after that album, they started leaning more towards a more intense blackened death metal sound that wasn't bad, but wasn't all too interesting either. 2010's 'The Epigenesis' changes that.

I'm not sure what it is, but the intensity mixed with the Middle-Eastern tone seems more at home here. The blasting power of "The Ghouls of Nineveh", "The Magickan and the Drones", and "Defeating the Giants" are awesome to behold. Meanwhile we have the slower and more mystical sounding "Mystics of the Pillar". Then we have the epic 12 minute closing title track that brings it all home. I'm a sucker for longer songs, and one of the reasons I like this album more than the similar sounding 'Emissaries' may be this 12 minute song; but frankly, it's fucking awesome.

The instrumental talent from all the players are really tight. Ashmedi and Moloch both play awesome guitar and Xul is a really talented drummer. It's got clean production to it as well, similar to 'Emissaries' making it sound more intense.

Recommended for fans of Absu, Enthroned, and Behemoth.