Born from Québec’s metropolis, Some Happy Thoughts is a metal band joining depressive suicidal black metal with doom. The lyrics, in French, talk about depression and the futility of everything, but elegantly so, with short poems fronting most tracks. There’s also a twist to it, an Épiphanie, hence the title. This vision of clarity brings a much appreciated silver lining to the suffocating black fog that the rest of the album represents. The full-length album is slow, heavy, and oppressively bleak, with a constant chirping tremolo guitar, a screaming but not shrieking vocalist, and decent production quality. Its nihilism … Read more
Author Archives: Dæv Tremblay
EXCLUSIVE SONG PREMIERE: Vmthanaachth – Holographic Speleothems Firsting a Hugeness of Twilight
Texan avant-garde chamber music ensemble Vmthanaachth, after expanding our minds with their debut, Fit secundum regulam, prepare for their sophomore release, Inferotemporal. Out on June twentieth, the album, which offers more than an hour of new challenging material, will come out on their bandcamp page along with its physical version. We have the pleasure of being the first to bring you the closing track. At over twenty minutes long, ‘Holographic Speleothems Firsting a Hugeness of Twilight’ is quite a journey (that’s an understatement). It’s harsh and comforting, brilliant and pitch black… It’s its own antithesis, and, instead … Read more
Kaguu – Hawkridge
Kaguu is a new three-piece progressive rock band from Mexico. Their debut EP, Hawkridge draws heavy influences from math rock and video game soundtracks as well, which explain for the most part the dreamy vibe you find yourself in when listening to it. The five-tracker, despite being deceptively short, is a joy to hear. The riffs are soothing, melodic, contemplative and memorable. Each instrument breathes, and sounds bright and clear, which makes the compositions even more enjoyable. Overall, it’s a really good little debut from Mexico’s latest band.
Blumen – Mångata
‘Mångata’ is one of those words that can’t be directly translated. Although one could argue that no word can be translated exactly, because the two words will carry different insinuations and complex networks with a plethora of emotions, meanings, and other words. However, Wiktionary describes this swedicism as ‘the roadlike reflection of moonlight on water’, which is better conveyed by the EP’s artwork than any description. From foreign languages to the musical one, the issue remains. It’s incredibly difficult to put music into words because each chord, each progression, each rhythm, timbre, pitch, length has an unfathomable amount of cultural … Read more
Schammasch – The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite
The Swiss avant-garde black metal quatuor, not satisfied from having released perhaps the best triple-album ever just last year, is already back with The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite. It’s sold as an EP, but crosses the thirty minutes threshold that is commonly used to distinguish EPs from full-lengths; it has seven tracks, but the whole thing feels like one continuous journey into the obscure places of our mind; it’s a work of art that goes above and beyond the traditional scope of black metal and the avant-garde… Indeed, the band themselves wrote that Hermaphrodite is an ‘artistic experiment’, and it’s … Read more