The first meditation is actually just the atmosphere you might expect one to meditate to, before they blast off into the second meditation that is more snarling and finds them returning to the use of harshly screamed vocals. The songs are all just labelled as meditations. This Dutch band is one of my favorite weird black metalish projects. It’s one of the more impressive metal releases I have heard recently. They also cover way more ground in one song than half of the bands who drag things out for fifteen droning minutes. They get things sonically heavy it is heavy metal with a juicy coat of darkness draping it, so all the basis are covered here. The production really complements the depth of their dynamics. Thanks to Billy Anderson this album sounds good. We have a dark hybrid of many styles meeting, none of them trying to be as cool as the other metal bands from New York work so hard at. After the intensity of the first song, I became okay with the shift away from the Immortal sound.īlast-beats do show up upon occasion, but are not the sole force propelling these songs, even when they are at their most raging. It is as if the material on this album are the songs that were written as the follow-up to the 2009 full-length All Shall Fall. So, an Immortal / Gorgoroth super-group is what we are looking at here. Leading guitarist and frontman Abbath Doom Occulta decided to just release this album under his own name, enlisting Creature (aka Kevin Foley, who is Benighted’s drummer) to pound along with Gorgoroth bassist King ov Hell. Immortal has been slugging it out longer than Queensrÿche over who owns the rights to their name.
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Nasty and real, these song stuck to my bones. It’s a forceful thrash narrative, snarled more than screamed or sung. They keep up the speed for “Live and Burn”. They lash out with the chemical warfare of their riffs. I can hear a little Venom in the vocals, but right from the first falsetto scream it’s showing you no mercy. It’s clear that early Slayer is engraved in this band’s DNA. This is both a blessing and a curse as it does push their brand of black metal into new places. This album is much more progressive than the first. When the vocals come back in to help build things to more of a boiling point, the guitar gets weirder and then they continue to ebb back and forth like a breeze between roaring thunder storms. These songs are looser jams than what they gave us on the first album. Around the two-minute mark it begins to gain speed. There is a cleaner and more jangling guitar tone to the second song.
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In the last minute bellowing vocals come in after they have ridden a droning groove for the bulk of the opening song. The atmospheric black metal duo from Portugal that brought the masterful Absence of Void are back with a darker and denser offering this time around. So here are my top ten black metal album of 2016: These albums have dynamic layers and songwriting that inspired me to return to these songs throughout the year. I need more from black metal than just a collection of boring blast-beats recorded in a trash can.
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Veterans are being honored alongside new American bands who are taking risks to push their music into new places. The albums here have been gathered from every sub-genre. The genre flourishes in even the most obscure corners of the world as it becomes the sound of anger for the isolated souls of this doomed generation. The second, focused on death metal, is here.)īlack metal continues to spread its curse, having left its stain as an influence on everything from punk rock to doom. The first installment, which focused on doom, is here. ( Wil Cifer delivers the third of his year-end lists, and in this one he names his top 10 black metal albums of 2016.