After their Ages EP tetralogy, Australian progressive black metal band Hybrid Nightmares gaze upwards towards the skies. Almagest is their new conceptual full-length album, and takes you on the journey of the Pilgrim, an unnamed automaton, going to various cosmic spheres in a quest to balance spirituality and reason. Basically, it’s a science-fiction retelling of many classical philosophy concepts. It’s quite rare that black metal bands of that ilk look to the future and out into space, although not unheard of, and Hybrid Nightmares is a strong quintet capable of putting this idea into reality and making it truly enjoyable … Read more
Naeramarth – The Innumerable Stars
Naeramarth is a progressive metal band from Salk Lake City, and their debut album, The Innumerable Stars is coming out on 20 October. Stating influences as varied as Ihsahn, Leprous, Enslaved, and Opeth, Naeramarth cover an impressive range of metal genres, from black metal to doom metal, with a lot of straight-up progressive metal and prog death in-between. “Asterisms” is a pretty much perfect example of this, it covers well progressive black metal, with a very Opethian acoustic guitars corridor in the middle. Thanks to its 8:50 runtime, each part has the time to breathe, but its only about half … Read more
Brandon Seabrook – Needle Driver
Needle Driver is the latest experiment of Brooklyn musician Brandon Seabrook. The hard-to-describe EP seamlessly bridges contemporary classical music, experimental jazz, and mathcore into a nasty instrumental tapestry. The trio even includes some microtonal intervals, spotted in the song “Venwhorerisin'”. The five compositions are too quickly gone, but they provide an endless amount of entertainment while they last: uncommon time signatures, odd harmonies, complex and exhausting melodies, as well as a knack for deranged structures that somehow hold themselves together. Needle Driver goes left and right, up and down, forwards and backwards, and I’m sure it also goes wild … Read more
Tvivler – Negativ psykologi #3
The punkish hardcore-n-roll quartet Tvivler, from Denmark release their third Negativ psykologi seven-inch tomorrow. I covered their first one in 2015, but since then they released #2 last year – of which I had no word –, and #3 just now! In the same line as #1, the two most recent ones range from ten to fifteen minutes and boast some aggressive neck-breaker tracks. One of the most interesting, however, is “Oprydning”, which is almost entirely a drums and vocals duo, that is until the bass hits a few notes near the end as a sort of … Read more
Breadcrumbs: Jackie Frank Russell III, Omega, The Earth and I, Vincent Jourde & Joffrey Dahonnet, Jiggly, Jyocho, Reflection Nebula, Namibian Tales, and Bingo Bandy Club
Site update: You remember a while ago we switched to writing sets of eight, and then nine mini-reviews, for the sake of covering a wider range of releases, and to be able to share the highest amount of quality releases we could manage? Then, remember how we switched to making solo mini-reviews, because I didn’t think these sets made justice to the best releases we covered? Now, I think it’s time for a sort of middle ground. I often find myself with albums I enjoy but don’t have much to say about, not enough to write a mini-review for them … Read more