I feel like the metal community, as a whole, should club together and get Germany’s Suidakra a dozen roses or a nice box of chocolates or something to apologise and show our appreciation. Over the course of two decades and eleven studio albums, they’ve done nothing but give and have never asked for anything in return, […]

You know, I’d almost given up on Dark Tranquillity. There was a time – not so very long ago – that the original Gothenburg act would have featured on a very short list of my favourite bands. In my teenage years, they seemed like an exemplar of everything modern metal ought to aspire to, proving […]

One of extreme metal’s greatest dividing conundrums of the past decade came in the form of the UK’s now defunct Akercocke. Polarity is truly the mark of significant art; whether the response is love or hate, there was certainly no indifference. The deeply Satanic, sex-addicted death metal collective never stayed within any confined genre trapping, […]

Now here’s a metal band who know what the hell they’re doing. Ænigma, the third album by Norwegian sextet In Vain, is practically an advertisement for my personal principle that savvy songwriters make genre conventions work for them and not the other way around. There are a thousand and one other bands I might name […]

In the modern age, the music industry is truly an unfathomable anomaly in every sense of the word. Artists, bands, and smaller projects surface as quickly as they disappear, completely submerged in the vortex  of ether, dissolving into clouds populated with copious amount of others. Sadly, many of these so-called pop artists are the ones […]

Isolation is something that we humans know all too well. We can spend our whole lives pondering our existence, even to a point of crippling agony. Some of those with an animated attitude in life makes friends easily and bolster compelling social lives, while others can spend many a year in isolation and solitude. It […]

I occasionally spend my free time imagining what my ideal metal band would sound like; being the dreadfully unimaginative individual that I am, I usually end up with some sort of gestalt entity comprising bands and sounds I already like. Even so, every few months I end up falling into a sort of ennui where […]

The Fall of Every Season is a one-man doom metal project from Trondheim, Norway, helmed by Marius Strand. Amends is his sophomore album, coming out on Grau Records a full six years after his debut, From Below, continuing in his established mode of melodic death/doom descended from the original “Peaceville Three“ (My Dying Bride, Anathema […]

Irreverent is one of the two initial black metal bands (the other being Witchery) that Impurath and the gang from Black Witchery were in before Black Witchery’s creation, and the sound is similar in some minute ways, but overall surprisingly different. Irreverent never put together a full album, but Blasphemous Crucifix Profanation pulls together their […]

It’s a shame that the lyrics for this project aren’t available with this release in either format, as the implications that arise from both the name of the album and the name of the artist are many, although the casual one-word track titles seem to hint at a simplification of whatever otherwise grand themes are […]