Et Moriemur – Επιγραμματα (Epigrammata)

Czech atmospheric doom purveyors Et Moriemur released their latest album, inspired by Ancient Greece. The music hardly sounds Greek (at all), but the concept, imagery, and a few excerpts here and there definitely are. Επιγραμματα is funerally slow, and what I like is that they often include acoustic passages, which offers a nice change of pace. The vocal work is also of note: it often sounds like monophonic choir chants, and that’s always a good thing to have in a doom album!

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Them Moose Rush – Don’t Pick Your Noise

We don’t often get news from the small falciform country of Croatia, but Them Moose Rush are good news! The Mars Volta-inspired progressive rock bands are not a rarity by any means, but they’re almost always worth listening to, as they all offer different perspectives on this subgenre. Don’t Pick Your Noise somewhat follows Wild Throne’s punkier trail, but doesn’t go as far into unbridled energy as them. Still, if you crave for psychedelic, hard-hitting progressive jams, don’t sleep on it!

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Bernhard Meyer – Murmuration

Here we have an album from February that slipped through the cracks and under the radar. Murmuration has been called post-jazz, and you can clearly tell why… The compositions of bassist Bernhard Meyer take the basic principles of post-rock and apply them to the world of jazz. I guess you could call this modern jazz, if you didn’t want to create a new genre tag, but post-jazz embodies almost perfectly the sound of this album. It’s a wonderful album that shouldn’t go unnoticed, so take some time alone with it.

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Order ov Riven Cathedrals – Göbekli tepe

The Italian sleeper hit Order ov Riven Cathedrals has released a second album without so much as a warning. Göbekli tepe is forty-six minutes ov relentless tech-death filled to overflowing with synths and atmospheric elements, despite not being atmospheric at all, if you only look at the unending lineup ov unforgiving riffs. This is a hard-hitter, so listen to it well prepared.

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Noir Voir – ER

Noir Voir is an interesting post-math rock band from Czechia with a permanent violin player as main characteristic. Depending on the songs, their sound will lean more on either the post or math part of their sound, but there usually is a bit of both. The instrumentation is well played and arranged, and the songs are put together nicely and coherently. They really are a cool little band that deserves more exposure!

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Nightmarer – Cacophony of Terror

Florida’s Nightmarer play the now-hip dissonant death metal genre. Following the trend started and fed by the likes of Ulcerate, Coma Cluster Void, Baring Teeth, and Deathspell Omega, Cacophony of Terror is a terrific album! It certainly helps that the band includes members from The Ocean, War from a Harlots Mouth, and Gigan, but, their pedigree notwithstanding, this is a killer release. The riffs move seamlessly from slow and heavy to fast and blasting, and always keep a close watch on that dissonance metre. Worth it!

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Lou Kelly – The Vulgarian Philharmonic

Orchestral mathcore, I guess? Lou’s music is often hard to pin down, as it almost always tries to combine different things together to create something yet unheard of. The EP is made with a focus on different parts of an ensemble: brass (on “Buzz”), wind (on “Blow”), strings (on “Scrape”), and keys (on “Strike”). That gives each track its own personality and sound, and then add the random vocal screams from many people, and you’ve got quite an interesting, albeit short, musical experiment!

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Tierpark – 바캉스 (Bakangseu) Vacance

South Korea’s Tierpark call themselves dreamgaze. That gives you some insight on their sound — dream pop and shoegaze to be exact —, but there is more to this story. There are heavy influences from math rock and post-rock (as with all music nowadays, apparently), and their dreamy-gazy sound is completed rather perfectly by the soothing voice of Sehee Kim, around which all seems centred. They released an EP, last year, titled 여름잠 (Yeoleumjam), which was more or less a demo version of this album. It was already very good, but this final version is even better still!

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Æpoch – Awakening Inception

Ontario’s tech-death act Æpoch will soon release their sophomore album, and it’s a massive stomper! Awakening Inception takes all the tropes of modern tech-death and puts them together into a tasty puree. One thing of note is the fretless bass, once again this is now commonplace in this genre, but it’s so well executed that I had to look up who was playing it because I thought it might be one of the many session contracts of Dominic “Forest” Lapointe. The bass’ sound is similar, and some of Brett’s lines recall Dom’s. In any case, this is an impressive album that certainly will scratch that tech-death itch.