Cirith Ungol are headlining the fourth annual Defenders of the Old heavy and speed metal festival in Brooklyn, New York. Also playing are Frigid Bich, Sumerlands, Nekromantheon, and Night Demon.
16 CommentsTags: cirith ungol, defenders of the old, festivals, Heavy Metal, Nekromanteion, night demon, Speed Metal, sumerlands
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
Cosmic Horrors is a Lovecraft-inspired affair standing somewhere between the primitive black metal of South America and grindcore-influenced death metal. Unlike most bands that could fall in this general description that encompasses a common cliche in underground metal, Nekromanteion stand out as a focused band making music balancing music aesthetics with a drive and intention that seems to lead the music, rather than the common mistake of letting the outer traits themselves dictate the music.
Displaying a progressive tendency in construction within healthy bounds alongside a reserved and rough technical expression, Cosmic Horrors present us with the ideal “atmospheric” death metal that war metal bands, for instance, are trying to deliver. The mistake of these or other atmosphere-oriented death metal bands like Phobocosm is that they are too steeply bent on trying to make the music have this effect. So much that they push the music to become the mood itself. Nekromanteion keeps a balance between evocation and satisfying musical aesthetics, which together have resulted in an outstanding EP.
2 CommentsTags: 2015, death metal, Nekromanteion
