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The cut above: a look back at 2016 part 2
By Bryan Camphire. Coven, or Evil Ways Instead of Love, the 2016 album by Polish black metal horde Cultes des Ghoules, has five songs and clocks in at one hour and thirty-eight minutes. To refer to...
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Age of Woe - An Ill Wind Blowing
By Ulla Roschat. Age of Woe is a quite young five piece band from Gothenburg/Sweden. They founded in 2010 and An Ill Wind Blowing is their 2nd full length album. At first listen the album may appear...
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Planning for Burial - Below the House
By Justin C. When I first saw the cover for Planning for Burial's new album, Below the House, I immediately said, "That's Pennsylvania." There was probably a brief spike in my blood pressure, maybe the...
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Pillorian - Obsidian Arc
By Sean Golyer. For many, Pillorian’s debut will be a place both familiar and new, fraught with some heavy baggage from the past. Understandably, some will color their idea of this band with past work...
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Doomed and stoned in Brazil
By Karen A. Mann. I’ll admit that my knowledge of Brazilian metal (and Brazilian music itself) doesn’t extend far beyond the major players, but when Max sent me links to about a dozen current doom...
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Behexen - By The Blessing of Satan
By Andy Curtis-Brignell. The lazy man’s Behexen review goes like this: use the typical ‘raw black metal’ signifiers; talk for a paragraph or so about the so-called ‘Finnish Filth’ movement; mention...
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Woe - Hope Attrition
By Andy Osborn. I hold Woe in ridiculously high regard: their debut is the absolute pinnacle of USBM. Ferocious, blistering tremolos at the forefront of everything with a burning punk edge is what...
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Dodecahedron - Kwintessens
By Justin C. I really liked Dodecahedron's debut album, although I found it to be a bit uneven at times. Some tracks stretched a bit too long without a tight enough focus, particularly in the first...
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Jute Gyte - Perdurance
By Bryan Camphire. The music of Adam Kalmbach, under his Jute Gyte moniker, exists at the outer regions of that which is far out in heavy metal. The music paints harmonies beyond the capacity of modern...
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Pallbearer - Heartless
By Calen Henry. Pallbearer's first two albums are modern doom classics so expectations are high for Heartless. By splitting the the difference between Sorrow and Extinction and Foundations of Burden...
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Vagrond - Regret
By Hera Vidal. Sound expansion in black metal usually leads to a polarizing reaction. On one hand, you have people who applaud bands who use different tonalities and incorporate them into their music....
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Root - Hell Symphony
By Andy Curtis-Brignell. Root are one of those bands that never quite seem to get their due. As part of the preternaturally influential but still obscure crop of early Eastern European black/death...
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Short and to the point 8
By Aaron Sullivan. From the great Rising Beast label comes the latest from Dargar, The Shores of Space. They originally started as a Blackened Noise band. Very in your face aggressive and gritty. I...
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Falls of Rauros - Vigilance Perennial
By Justin C. I feel like I just reviewed Falls of Rauros' Believe in No Coming Shore a year ago, but I was surprised to see it was way back in October of 2014. I think that speaks to how closely that...
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Vanum - Burning Arrow
By Justin C. I had some trouble starting this review. I really enjoyed Vanum's debut, Realm of Sacrifice, very much, and my feelings about their new EP, Burning Arrow, are similarly positive. Putting...
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Extremity - Extremely Fucking Dead
By Matt Hinch. As an album reviewer (I don't like calling myself a writer) I get inundated with promos all day. You have to throw up filters. There's just too much sometimes. One filter is “fucking” in...
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Vaee Solis - Adversarial Light
By Hera Vidal. Vaee Solis is a relatively young band, but with Adversarial Light, they show that they are not here to mess around. There is something so compelling yet ominous about this record that it...
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öOoOoOoOoOo - Samen
By Professor D. Grover the XIIIth. Greetings and salutations, friends. This is a review that has been in the works for months, in part because of my status as both a chronic procrastinator and as a...
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Satan's Hallow - Satan's Hallow
Satan's Hallow piqued my interest on the strength of their advance streaming track, "Beyond the Bells". Sounding like Christian Mistress but faster, it’s a blistering traditional metal track kicked up...
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All Hell - The Grave Alchemist
By Karen A. Mann. It’s a long way from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Carpathians, and the only “castle” in the area is an opulent tourist attraction that was built less than 150 years ago. Still,...
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