This week, I came across Stranger Aeons, one of my new favourite music blogs, where I discovered Numenorean and Gilded Lily, which I will be reviewing today. Go check this website, and here’s to many more discoveries!
Numenorean is an atmospheric black metal/blackgaze band from Canada, and Home is their debut album. They include a lot of post-rock elements to their songwriting so the contrast between these atmospheric buildups and the apex moments is rather cathartic. Home came out earlier this year, and is a very promising album.
Nova Incepta is a cinematic progressive metal band from Australia. New Initiatives consists of the three-part (plus pro- and epilogue) ‘Inabstain’ and the nine-minute closure ‘Anonymous Oracle’. Their compositions are supposed to be a soundtrack, if I’m not mistaken, but this is far too foregroundish to work. What it works as, however, is being a pretty neat instrumental progressive metal EP with djent affinities. Check it out!
Mongrel’s Light is Gilded Lily‘s debut album. It’s a pretty raw but modern black metal album with some progressive and atmospheric elements to add flavour. It’s a pretty interesting and peculiar album, with its very own sound.
Astrophe is a new melodic progressive metal project from Canada. Star Mirror is their debut EP. The programmed drums are a bit too obviously synthetic, but that’s almost a trademark of the genre, by now, so it would be unfair to blame them for that. Other than that, however, the compositions and musicality are on point, and it’s a nice little underground gem to add besides your Plini, Sithu Aye, Theo Young, and Axel B. Egenæs records.
Ruby My Dear‘s electronic drum and bass – often approaching more drill and bass artists like Venetian Snares – has got a new EP: Strangers in Paradise, coming out on November eleventh. If their latest album, Balloon, didn’t convince you, maybe this will. The four songs, and one alternative version, make up the very short ten minutes on record, but they are some of the most interesting electronic music I’ve listened to, so that’s nice.
Nachtreich is a romantic classical music band from Germany, and Beobachtungen über dem Horizont is their latest piece. At eighteen minutes long, it offers quite a significant amount of material, and imposes upon the listener many emotions. The piano-led composition goes from melancholy to wonderment, and is just a very fine, contemplative track to listen to.
New Deathspell Omega. Need I say more? I needn’t, but I shall anyway. I’m what you could call a neophyte, when it comes to the French black metal band, only listening to them since this year, with their recent Drought EP. The Synarchy of Molten Bones is much less subvert, and more more overtly desecrating. It doesn’t take long before the rampaging blast beats stampede us, and they make up the bulk of the release. It’s a very offensive record, and possibly the best one yet from the French band.
I cannot say that I’ve been impressed by Painted in Exile‘s latest, The Ordeal. The band hit their zenith in 2009 with Revitalized, and brought them worldwide attention. Seven years later, with their new full-length, one would expect something groundbreaking, or, at the very least, something very, very good. Well, The Ordeal is decent, at most. It’s got some interesting ideas, but, for the most part, it’s very generic progressive metalcore. I can’t recommend it myself, but perhaps you’ll find something, in there.