New Zealand war metal band Heresiarch, one of the few good bands in that style, is headlining the otherwise lame Invoking black Death Fest on May 4th and 5th, 2018.
2 CommentsTags: Abhomine, abysmal lord, Adversarial, Ascended Dead, black witchery, festivals, heresiarch, news, Pseudogod, sacrocurse, triumvir foul, upcoming shows, War Metal
Some bands have promise; these have veered off the road and are currently charring in a gasoline fire. Will they crawl out? Let’s find out!
44 CommentsTags: Ascended Dead, barrow wight, beer metal, black 'n roll, black magick ss, chain, eternity's end, hetroertzen, hipster bullshit, nan elmoth, pop, sacrificial massacre, sadistic metal reviews, trends mosh core fun, tuman, tymah, Туман
This is a “best of the month” list for this month, but making the title “Best of May 2015” sounds like giving too much of a spotlight for such a short span of time, and devaluating the word “Best of” somewhat, in my opinion. Therefore I chose a title to reflect reality more clearly: these are the only albums we heard of on this website this month that were decent enough to not be considered utter disgraces to the metal genre (those were in the SMRs or were ignored). The “decent” are those that show consistency in style, coherence, a direction and a clear artistic voice and goals. The “rescuable” are those that are still confused in their composition — unclear, or that seemed to be impeded from development by their own approach to music-making (or that of their own genre).
The Decent
The Rescuable
Tags: Anticosmocrator, Ascended Dead, best of May, Beyond the Red Mirror, Black Metal, blasphemic cruelty, blind guardian, Bureviy, Concealed Beyond the Space, Cosmic Horrors, Crucible of the Infernum, death metal, Dew-Scented, Doom Metal, Døden Læger Alle Sår, Exhumation, Exterminatus, False Prophecies, Intermination, Luciferian Rites, Maruta, metalcore, Necrophor, Nekromanteion, Opus Death, perversor, Remain Dystopian, Shroud of the Heretic, Speed Metal, The Advent, The decent and the rescuable, Undead, undergang, Unorthodox Equilibrium, Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, Wende, When the Light Dies
Ascended Dead is a death metal band that intentionally keeps the production of their music lo-fi. Here, we may recognize two things. The first is the appeal to a sense of nostalgia that this sort of distorted tone may cause in fans of old underground metal. The second is that this choice is part of the band’s aesthetic choice and it contributes in a musical way. The latter is never fully acknowledged even by fans of this particular sound, resorting to embarrassed appeals to “guilty pleasure”.
Now, onto the music. In The Advent, Ascended Dead have brought together a collection of distinct but compatible sources in which, if we squint really hard and try to pierce the fog created by the artistic voice of the band, we can recognize the grindy, obscure, riff-salad Finnish spirit. One or two of the songs even betrays the influence of Demilich in its use of short, clear but twisted melody line motifs, but doesn’t go as far as to imitate the older band. The reference is no more than a head nod.
The Advent consists of a solidly integrated style. Ascended Dead’s songs are balanced and clear-headed in direction, while remaining organic, in line with the riff salad tradition. Riffs balance relationship with each other while introducing the tension needed to move forward, towards a new idea that comes as a massive waterfall releasing the potential energy channeled and incremented in the perfectly-defined course of a river of tumultuous waters. Despite all its merits, the artist’s most difficult task has yet to be completed in this project: finding its own voice. Displaying a musical awareness with which only true musicians are blessed, Ascended Dead give us an album that, although itself powerful, foreshadows possible works that will tower above the vast majority of death metal of our times.
1 CommentTags: 2015, Ascended Dead, death metal, The Advent
