Empirine – Oculi

by Dæv Tremblay

Empirine‘s fourth EP, Oculi, has really made the light shine on this Swedish progressive death metal duo. It will crush you and amaze you, and that will be a good death.

The band goes straight to the point and hits you in the face with all the musical glory that it’s capable of. It’s fast-paced, it’s heavy, but most of all, it sounds incredibly good! The production work here is marvellous. They’ve got a little “standout” element of style akin to what Cynic used to have: the vocoder. And, unlike others, they actually use it … Read more

Jute Gyte – Ressentiment

by Dæv Tremblay

Missouri’s marginal quarter-tone experimental black metal one-man-band Jute Gyte returns with a new album that is like the previous ones: worth your time.

Black metal can be a tough thing to approach if you’re not into the genre already: the purposefully bad production, the vocal style, the often fast and relentless drumming, and the tremolo picking all support this. On top of that, Adam Kalmbach, the mind behind the music, adds microtonality, in the form of a 24-EDO (24 equal divisions of the octave) musical setting. Compare this to your usual 12 notes per octave guitar, … Read more

Lulu is Metallica’s best album

by Dæv Tremblay

Even though it’s been wildly and almost unanimously massacred by both critics and fans, the one-time collaboration between Lou Reed & Metallica has become the latter’s most adventurous, and strongest release in a more than 30 years career.

Lulu appears like a Swiss knife in a battle axe collection; I don’t need to tell you it’s out of place. Indeed, I believe the reason why it was so broadly bashed is that it was seen as a Metallica record. The amount of “Metallica” sound throughout the album is so few that it could’ve been sold as something completely else and … Read more

vod – deciduus

by Dæv Tremblay


vod is a one-man experiment aiming at using the sub-bass frequency range to make utterly terrifying and tremendously heavy music.

The first full-length album, deciduus, was written and recorded in under two days completely. In order to play that low, the guitar parts are played on bass. And even then the string is really flubby! The tone on which most of the album is played to is A-1. To make sure you all understand well what this implies, let’s do some explaining.

The standard A string on a guitar is tuned to 440 Hz, it’s called … Read more