Monstrous Dutch war metal with tinges of traditional black metal band Kaeck have announced their new album, Het Zwarte Dictaat (The Black Command) and released a teaser showing off a couple riffs for you to try to play during the seventh lockdown.
11 CommentsExorcizphobia – Digitotality (2020)
When a genre fails, its heroes dies as martyrs, their glory never dimmed by the entropy of time in which mistakes must be made and meaning slowly erodes through too many individualistic interpretations, revealing the weaknesses of individuals. When a genre succeeds? It labors in the shadow of the past.
3 CommentsTags: exorcizphobia, Speed Metal
Grandeur – Aurea Aetas (2021)
Exploring the New Wave of Sentimental Black Metal (NWSBM) pioneered by bands like Fourth Monarchy, Black Funeral, and Infamous, Grandeur mixes a bit of power metal consonance and whole scale positivity into the end of its long riffs and melancholic dirges, but works within the late black metal template.
No CommentsTags: Black Metal, grandeur
Flesh Pit – Monolith of Flesh (2021)
Showing influence from later Immolation blended with early thunderous Florida death metal, Flesh Pit attempts to reinvent a genre by going back to its roots and carrying forward instead of changing paths. This produces a highly listenable demo that balances the primitive with the cerebral.
1 CommentTags: death metal, flesh pit
Oscenrad – Beyond the Fells (2021)
On the surface, this band aspires to be the next Primordial or Windir, but underneath the skin, the melodies resemble more of what Summoning, old Enslaved, and Infamous did, which is to take a sensation of ancient harmony and bend it into war songs for a modern youth raised on pentatonics and minor keys.
No CommentsTags: oscenrad, Viking Metal
Under A Banner Black As Blood – Under A Banner Black As Blood (2021)
Genres flowered with technology, differentiated themselves, and starting in the 1990s with basically all variants known, the music industry began focusing on mash-ups and re-mixes, sometimes producing interesting results but not really new genres. This release mashes up martial industrial, dungeon synth, and something like darkwave or the farther edges of electronic body music.
No CommentsTags: darkwave, dungeon synth, electronic body music, martial industrial, soundtrack, under a banner black as blood
Black Mass – Feast at the Forbidden Tree (2021)
Most extreme metal bands would be happier just reverting to speed metal, since that lets them mix in Cirith Ungol or Atheist riffs without breaking the integrity and continuity of the work, and Black Mass acknowledge this by unabashedly crafting speed metal that borrows freely from other subgenres and genres by translating those ideas into speed metal orthodoxy.
4 CommentsTags: black mass, Speed Metal
SolarCrypt – Rot in the Multidimensional Sewer (2021)
Paying tribute to the riff-language and moods of classic death metal, this one-man band ensures that all parts of each song relate to each other and the central theme, which makes for an easily-listenable form of highly textural death metal.
1 CommentTags: death metal, solarcrypt
Cult of Scarecrow – Tales of the Sacrosanct Man (2021)
Alternative rock emerged from punk, looking for a way to be melancholic like the Goths and rebelliously cynical like the punks, but without becoming the same whiny bleat-beat material that 1960s rock made mundane. It went too far into rock, but eventually came back around to punk.
1 CommentTags: alternative metal, cult of scarecrow, punk
Perfect World – War Culture (2021)
New York Hardcore after the 1980s tried to work in the cosmopolitan sound of universal urban life, bringing in rap rhythms in the vocals and slightly bouncier, rock-style riffs, but Perfect World dials back the balance so that the influences come second to punk and metal riffs.
3 CommentsTags: Hardcore, perfect world