23 Nov 2024 - Thorsten
Ambient Black Metal

Paysage d’Hiver is the best Black Metal this side of the millennium that has not seen the value of its music discovered by enough people. Many more should praise Wintherr and his project for the impressive transfer of classic cold Lo-Fi Black Metal into the 21st century. If anyone is a “trve” heir of what the Scandinavian pioneers did in the 80s, then it’s Paysage d’Hiver. His latest opus Die Berge is just another proof for that.

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21 Nov 2024
Progressive Death Metal

There, beyond the gates of the Colosseum, bathing in the blood flowing through the Trevi fountain, covered in ash from the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica — two furious forces wrestle in a locked gaze; modernity and tradition.

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19 Nov 2024 - Thorsten
Post-Rock

“NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” is Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s eighth full-length and their first new released music since 2021, when they released G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! and it once again shows why not many other bands can claim to be as coherent as this collective from Montreal! So good to have them back and point to the problems of our modern world!

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17 Nov 2024 - Simon
Progressive Rock

London-based Dawnwalker return with a new album, lineup and direction, it’s all rather exciting

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16 Nov 2024 - Thorsten
SludgePost-Metal

This split seems like a High School reunion done perfectly well. When some members of Utah‘s finest Post-Metal scene get their bands together to do a split it better be something like this fourth installment of the Legends of the Desert-series released by Desert Records. Eagle Twin and The Otolith give us near 40 minutes of new amazing music in four songs!

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14 Nov 2024 - Knut
Atmospheric Sludge Metal

Blimey! A couple of months ago I reviewed the new high-velocity Norna album and wrote that it might be the heaviest album released this year. Little did I know that its contender was right around the corner. Well here it is: Still´s sophomore album with a barrage of heavy, discordant Post-Metal music.

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11 Nov 2024 - Thorsten
Atmospheric Black Metal

Long tracks are one thing. Single-track records something totally different. A 44-minute-Post Black Metal album completely unusual and not that frequent on top. Mother from Oostende, Belgium have done that again with their second full-length II and I love it!

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11 Nov 2024 - Thorsten
World MusicAmbient

How much purpose and intention can you put into one single note before it becomes stale, over-emphasized or simply “too perfect”? A difficult question, because warmth and idea do not necessarily contradict each other, this is not a general oxymoron. However, we all know those records which are too perfect, too sterile and not personal, not emotional enough to touch our very core. Please insert the record you are thinking of right now in this spot:____ And now I want to give you the record to counterbalance this bad example with: Listen to Leila Abdul-Rauf’s ”Calls from a Seething Edge”!

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07 Nov 2024 - Knut
BlackgazeDepressive Metal

This is a release with music that is harsh and raw - somber and beautiful in its minute details and in its surging swells of blackened music.

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02 Nov 2024 - George
Electronica

Hot on the heels of The Body’s sublime collaborations with Dis-Fig comes this new full-length on the ever-dependable Thrill Jockey label, The Crying Out Of Things, and I, for one, am very excited by the prospect of another voyage into oblivion.

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23 Oct 2024 - PBV
Psychedelic Black Metal

Ecstatic throes of death beckon as the glistening transient scales of a snake detach—the creature insipidly devouring itself while its shell transforms into an oozing mass; slinking into the crevice of an alien gate.

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22 Oct 2024 - George
Indie RockPunk

Australia historically has a knack for honesty, at least in their musical output. The lyrics on the records rarely mess about and, for the most part, get right to the point. With Skeggs there’s a lot of that no messing about attitude and really beautifully so.

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21 Oct 2024 - Stephan
Death MetalProgressive Rock

“Recognize one’s place within the dance / Know thy beat in time and whence to step / Through silent echoes we begin to grow / And seek the Oneness all beings know”
Could it really be that in our age of growing estrangement and divisiveness at least remarkably big parts of the Metal community and even music lovers from Elsewhere - are coming together as one in their shared admiration of a bunch of Demilich and Eloy nerds with an unreadable band logo from Colorado?

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18 Oct 2024 - Daniel Gorman
Hardcore

BACK WITH A VENGEANCE!!!

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18 Oct 2024 - Lucia
SludgeFuneral Doom

There’s music that breaks the mold, that changes and evolves, and that defies the music genre canon - and that is exactly what Fórn’s Repercussions of the Self gives the listener. Not only featuring album art that hints at this next chapter of the band, but also giving the fans that Sludge and Funeral Doom sound that’s characteristic to their music.

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17 Oct 2024 - Thorsten
Noise-RockHardcore-Punk

We all need some time for ourselves. To calm down. To have a lavender infused soy-latte, a cozy, warming oven fire burning down the wood collected by Canadian monks 200 years ago in the company of some First Nation children whom they taught the psalms and how to praise the word of God. … wait shit, what? No, we all need to listen to Chat Pile and their new record Cool World!

Forget the shitty idea of spending Fall and Winter evenings snuggled up together in an attempt at escapism, at shutting out the vengeful, hateful world beyond our cozy little windowsill! The Oklahoma City band once again puts their money where their mouths are and shows up why this world should realistically be assessed a shithole run by pervert, money-seeking, moral-lacking billionaires throwing and/or attending “Freak Outs” and not taking a look at anything beyond their 100-car-garage.

Cool World is a powerful statement and the songs surely hold their necks up compared to its Album of the Year-predecessor God’s Country. If anybody had feared the guys to go soft on their new record and to lose their bite, rest assured, that is not the case, not in the least. Even though the opener ”I Am Dog Now” might seem lullabying us into false security with its opening ambient sphere for something like 20 seconds, the ensuing Industrial Noise Rock attack shows the path forward. Only on first listen is ”Shame”, the second track, a somewhat less aggressive, because listen careful beyond the amazing vocal melody and focus on the near Death-Metal like growls in the background and on the lyrics dealing with the long-termin consequences of a Post-Colonial world in which the former oppressors have withdrawn from their enslaved colonies now only to keep connected to them in the form of a capitalism driven dependence – please mark here that it’s not an interdependent system, but one of a clear hierarchical structure!

The way the musicians have incorporated a few more Shoegaze moments into their structures might become clear when listening to ”Frownland” and it still gives me the creeps to find the parallels in sound between Stin’s bass style and Rage Against The Machine’s Tim Commerford – bouncy but not in the Fieldy sense, much more with some basic HipHop-allure. Fortunately Cap’n’Ron doesn’t try to emulate Brad Wilk, so no one can call them a clone for another politically driven US rock band. But one thing might be similar: Chat Pile could be as important for this period of time as RATM was originally – and therefore it doesn’t come as a surprise that they covered the L.A.-quartet’s track ”Bulls on Parade” before. The track contains one of the critical point that both bands surely share: ”Weapons, not food, not homes, not shoes / Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal”. And indeed that is something that Raygun also hinted at in our interview stating he doesn’t see a party which would not screw the people over. Chat Pile are here to point out the deficits and the accompanying misconceptions our society holds for many people. Seemingly the only thing it holds for them.

The soundscape on Cool World are still noisey, but there are more elements of a kind of dragging Industrial sound, which become pretty obvious at the end of ”Camcorder” with is slowly fading outro which is then followed by the rather eruptive ”Tape” (notice the combination of “camcorder” and “tape”?). The tracks focus on the creation of violent content (”If I could, I’d kill them all” and ”They made tapes”) and then the consumption of the latter (”It was the worst I ever saw” and ”Let’s watch it again”) – one of the horrible side effects of our virtual reality life form. There is always someone to watch something even more horrifying than the last thing.

Even though there is a shift from the national (“God’s Country”) to the global (“Cool World”) the urgency, the demand and the saltiness of the presentation of topics occurring on a supra-national scale has the same fervor, passion and even anger as the first record. Musically, this band is untouchable and should keep on rubbing salt into the wounds which many try to neglect, forget and simply deny. The somewhat more varied and more diverse soundscape of the new record is still rooted in noisey Punk of the early to mid-80s and as Raygun dropped several bands to compare them with one clearly comes to mind: Dead Kennedys. The similarities are obvious, not only on a vocal or topic level but also in the way that both bands are never background music. You can neither put on Frankenchrist nor Cool World and not be sucked in immediately, finding yourself screaming along loudly, pumping fists frantically, radicalizing yourself mentally. This is the band the world needs now, not soft-pop vanities like ”What the World Needs Now” but rather ”No Way Out”! And now please excuse me, I have some wounds to scratch open as I shall not forget.

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06 Oct 2024 - Gökhan
Death Metal

By now it is safe to say that the old-school Death Metal revival proved to be nothing short of a mere trend. It is here to stay and what is even more exciting is that we are witnessing a period where the bands of this wave are starting to evolve and come to find their identities more and more with each release. One of the forerunners of the cabal is Undeath from Rochester, NY.

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05 Oct 2024 - Knut
ShoegazePost-Rock

An album with sublime Post-Rock music - meditative, ethereal, and dainty, sometimes with a timbre of Blackgaze when exploring the denser side of the musical scope it is immersed in.

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04 Oct 2024 - Stephan
Jazz Rock

Be it from expected suspects like Kamasi Washington, as a stunning surprise from Sean Ono Lennon, with the Psychedelic touch of Ivan The Tolerable or as one of many ingredients in wild melting pot albums like the latest release of Zeuhl Metal sensation Papangu… I would definitely count this year as a good one in regards of Jazz Fusion. And that’s of course only a small peek into my personal narrow horizon. One thing is for sure though: You shouldn’t even have this conversation without looking into the music mines of Norway, which are always ready to unearth an exciting new gem glinting in the lights of Prog, Krautrock and Jazz!

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03 Oct 2024 - Knut
Post-HardcorePost-Metal

”Passion and enthusiasm, walking on a thin thread”

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30 Sep 2024 - Stephan
ShoegazeDream Pop

In modern digital communication, whenever two parties are actually verbally talking to each other, be it via telephone or other devices, the service provider always feeds technically unnecessary signals into the line. Because if there suddenly was an absolute silence as soon as both participants of the call are just pausing in the same moment, it would feel as if the connection broke off. The soft comfort noise in the background however assures us that someone is still out there on the other side. We are not alone.

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27 Sep 2024 - Daria
Doomgaze

For me, autumn is the best season for gloomy and introspective music, whether it is Dark Folk or more heavier music, perfect time for Iress’ new record Sleep Now, In Reverse.

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27 Sep 2024 - Thorsten
Post-RockPost-Metal

One of the major problems for many Post-Metal bands is to balance fragile, intimate moments on the one and hard, crushing parts on the other hand. Enter Glacier who seem to have taken this formula to new heights for themselves and also for their genre.

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26 Sep 2024 - Lucia
Death MetalExtreme Metal

What would it be like to disappear into thin air? Dreamless Veil gives us an answer to this in the most eerie and introspective way, with music that transcends the realms of the corporeal. The body being portrayed as a mere vessel, that just as the blast beats and shrieking vocals can be shattered, dissolved into nothing in the most gruesome way. Let’s travel into this sonic tale, which is beautifully crafted and materialised with Every Limb of the Flood. Be prepared to venture into this concept album with the idea that we, as listeners, will fully evaporate into its sound.

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24 Sep 2024 - Knut
Hard RockProg

A stunning release with constantly shifting heavy Hard Rock with some dazzling, melodic female vocals.

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