Ehlder – Nordabetraktelse (2019)

In art, no shame attaches to specificity, since that is better than trying to be everything to everyone and ending up as the same old thing since nothing pleases all parties. Ehlder make a type of atmosphere black metal based around stomp beats and droning guitars with angular riffs gilded with cryptic melody.

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Sorcier Des Glaces Snowland Re-Issued On Vinyl By Evil Tentacle Records

Evil Tentacle Records experienced some printing plant delays with its re-issue of Sorcier Des Glaces Snowland on vinyl but is still taking pre-orders.

A black metal classic originally released as a CD-R, Snowland offers a highly effective and visionary form of epic melodic black metal. That this was originally released in 1998 is a wonder considering the tepid and downright flaccid nature of black metal at the time.

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Tenebra Re-Issues Through Crying Souls I See What I Was On Cult of Parthenope

Italian late-1980s style proto-black metal (Morbid, Venom, Tormentor, Goatlord) at its core, Tenebra speeds up the process somewhat and incorporates 1990s black metal of the Teutonic and Nordic varieties, eschewing the traditional melodic approach of Southern European bands for an advancing front of sawing riffs, using these to produce the backdrop for the slow emergence of atmospheric melody which stays minor-key without getting maudlin.

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Castigu – Castigà (2020)

History will not remember war metal well, since it took aspects of black metal and intensified them but in doing so, missed the point of the atmosphere and sense of a world changing in parallax, where it drifts backward as time thrusts us forward, that black metal captured.

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