“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” –Bansky Chicago-based experimental doom metal ensemble Drug Honkey are among those artists whose musical legacy has echoed verily with the above-stated quote of Bansky. Ever since their inception in 1999, they have veered into uncharted territories and have developed an unorthodox modus operandi which has distinguished […]

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 think we’ve reached a point in music, metal specifically, where expectations tend to habitually exceed the results beyond even three or four years ago. I’ve never been one to tout innovation for the sake of it, because the supposed brilliance of bands from Botanist to Les Discrets is completely lost on me, and there’s […]

Hailing from Linköping, Sweden, Astolat are newcomers on the melodic doom metal circuit, a two-piece outfit composed of Erik Junling on guitars, bass and vocals and Albert Hanberg on drums (they respectively style themselves as EPIALES and A┼┼ASUERUS, which I think is pronounced something like my howl of frustration as I attempt to traverse Microsoft […]

Whether all of it is intentionally obvious or not, judging books (or in this case, albums) by their covers can be done with fair accuracy these days. An initial glance at the three-headed creature devouring what’s left of some wayward fool would indicate a good dose of classic Scandinavian black metal is at hand, but […]

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 […]

It was back in the late Winter months of 2009 that I had my first experience with Embers.  At the time, they had just released their debut EP, “Memoria in Aeterna”, and had taken the majority of the extreme metal underground by surprise, specifically in this country.  Though the sound was certainly familiar, these were, […]

The world was a dangerous place in the decades building up to the middle of the 20th century, a time in history that many in my generation have quickly forgotten the lessons of as they’ve (thankfully) not experienced horror and loss on that level in their lifetimes, nor had to bear the scars of its […]

Hatred for Mankind, the 2009 debut of Liverpool’s Dragged into Sunlight, arrived on the extreme metal scene like a rocket-propelled grenade. A warty, lumbering, impossibly brutal fusion of every conceivable type of extremity, it achieved something that only a few of their contemporaries could lay claim to; much like their peers in Birmingham, Anaal Nathrakh, Dragged […]