Sweden’s band Palmless just released their debut album, The Nine Exits, on bandcamp. If I were to be bold, I’d say they play post-blackgaze, but this wouldn’t paint the whole picture. Indeed, they seem to pour post-rock tendencies into their blackgaze compositions, or perhaps it’s the other way around, and, on top of that, there is a bit of noise rock and dark pop all wrapped in an indie vibe that permeates throughout the album’s half-hour runtime. The guitars are barely distorted, mostly receiving the overdrive treatment, and the bass guitar is almost totally dry, too. The drums don’t … Read more
Tag Archives: black metal
Some Happy Thoughts – Épiphanie
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
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
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
EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE: Les chants du hasard – Chant I: Le théâtre
French avant-gardist black metal project Les chants du hasard release their debut, self-titled album on June twenty-third. We’ve already reviewed the amazing and forward-thinking album right here, but, today, we team up with the band and I, Voidhanger Records to bring you a new song in anticipation of the release.
‘Chant I: Le théâtre’ is the album’s first track, and it puts all on the table. You’ve got the whole orchestra with their melancholic and slightly dissonant beauty, the gravelly and pitiless vocals, as of a decadent opera, sing hopeless lyrics in this devoid of any light chant. It … Read more