​I. The City as Source
 
Why must darkness always wear the robes of northern forests? Why must black metal echo the tundra and not the tunnel? In New York metal trio Imperial Triumphant, black metal emerges not from a windswept fjord, but from the roaring depths of Manhattan. Their city is their mythology. Where typical black metal evokes mythic pasts and pagan landscapes, Imperial Triumphant turns its gaze forward and downward - into the throbbing veins of the modern metropolis. Their inspiration is architectural, industrial, even economic. Skyscrapers replace mountains, subways replace caverns, and capitalism’s cacophony becomes a new ritual music. The result is black metal as urban expressionism, where discordant jazz, avant-garde structures, and brutalist imagery reflect a reality shaped by finance, decay, and excess.

Rather than escape the modern world, they confront it. Rather than summon old spirits, they forge new mythologies out of city noise and sleepless nights. They turn the genre inside out - its tremolo riffs and blast beats are no nostalgic echo of frostbitten desolation, but weapons of critique and celebration in a world lit by neon and drowned in reverb. 

II. Music Without a Map
 
In the world of Imperial Triumphant, there are little to no signposts. No hooks to hold onto, no choruses to guide you home. You navigate it like a ruined city without a map, where each turn reveals not clarity, but further confusion. Music that demands not just a tolerance for chaos but a love for it.

At first, it sounds messy. Broken. Hostile, even. Instruments scrape and collide, rhythms stutter, melodies vanish before they form. But in that brokenness lies a strange and unsettling allure. This music doesn’t just estrange you from other music - it alienates you from yourself. Why do I love this? Perhaps because, amid the collapse, something gleams. Somewhere within the noise, something will be revealed. A brief moment of clarity. A haunting texture. A riff that breaks through like sunlight in a crumbling cathedral. Something that sets you free. There’s beauty in the dissonance, nothing new there but, more importantly, there is meaning in the dissonance. This is a discord, a constructed chaos, that reflects the world back at us, in all its fractured, feverish complexity.

​The discord has a voice, and it speaks. It speaks in the dialect of traffic noise at 3 a.m., of concrete towers and flickering billboards, of sirens and silence and the ache of modern solitude. It tells stories that beauty alone cannot. 

III. Headbanging to Architecture
 
Imperial Triumphant are not just observers of the urban sprawl; they are its sonic avatars. Their music feels like headbanging in the shadow of a skyscraper, where every downstroke vibrates through rusted steel girders and cracked concrete.

This is the sound of Manhattan devouring itself. Of opulence and entropy entangled. They fuse the angular chaos of big band jazz with the blast-beaten fury of black metal, conjuring the restless spirits of Charles Mingus, John Zorn and the operatic nightmares Scott Walker created later in his career. Everything here is corroded. Guitars clang like twisted metal in heavy traffic (founder/frontman Zachary Ezrin is obsessed by the Doppler effect, the tremolo bar on his guitar is in permanent deployment, he goes as far as putting a Floyd Rose on a Les Paul). Basslines lurch with the weight of collapsing tenements.

It feels ancient and futuristic at once. An occult ceremony conducted in a penthouse suite (Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut is a massive influence). A mass for the end of history. A procession through modern ruin, through flashing lights and choking smoke, where time dissolves and only the architecture remains.
​
The music of Imperial Triumphant, in all its glistening menace and broken majesty, doesn’t seek transcendence rather than it drags you down - into subways, sewers, data centers, dead-end streets. And in that descent, you don’t escape reality. You encounter it, raw and unfiltered. In shapes and forms never imagined before. 

​IV. Total theater 
​
To experience Imperial Triumphant solely through audio is one thing. Their music - already dense, disorienting, and multi-layered - reaches an even fuller expression when paired with their visual work. Their video clips are extensions of the music’s architecture in which next to city of New York, Art Deco, silent movies (Metropolis) and commercials from the 1950s (their latest album Goldstar) are important sources of inspiration. Like a modern Gesamtkunstwerk, they weave sound, image, performance, and concept into a single, overwhelming whole.

These visuals don’t decode the music, they deepen its ambiguity. In a clip like Merkurius Gilded, featuring guest appearances by (elevator) saxophonist Kenny G and his son, death metal guitarist and vocalist, Max Gorelick, what could have been novelty becomes profound discomfort. The video is an opulent fever dream - gleaming coins, ritualistic masks, warped reflections of excess. The saxophone, traditionally a symbol of sensuality or jazz cool, is recontextualized into something alien and ceremonial. This is not so much genre fusion as it is it’s genre deconstruction, mirrored visually in the clash between sterile modernity and arcane performance. The result is a sensory overload, a bombardment of meaning that doesn’t resolve into narrative, but hovers in tension - just as the music refuses conventional structure or release.

This is closer to Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Totaltheater than to the music video format as we know it. Zimmermann imagined a stage where time collapses, where simultaneous epochs and realities unfold at once, where montage replaces linearity. Imperial Triumphant seems to operate from the same impulse. Their clips craft worlds. Total works for a total collapse. And in that collapse, they find strange, blinding revelation.

​IV. Finding the Familiar in the Chaotic
​
I like music with intensity and substance. Music that leaves me, somewhere in alleged chaos, with a hint of wisdom, a glimmer of knowledge. Something that makes me understand, just by feeling. Music that also, once in a while, grants you a glimpse - something fleeting, melodic, something almost familiar. It’s not comfort, exactly. It’s recognition. Like catching a scent from childhood while standing on a grimy subway platform. Like hearing your name whispered in a crowded room. Like spotting a memory in the corner of your eye just as it vanishes. It happens in the music of Imperial Triumphant and it happens, for instance, in the music of Pierre Boulez whose Répons I recently had the pleasure of hearing it live for the first time - experiencing live that is.
 
In a sprawling, modernist labyrinth of electronics and acoustic fragments, of precision and unpredictability I was remembered of musicals, film scores and crowded city centres. Répons doesn’t guide you. It offers no path, no clear structure. You make your own map. You move by intuition, tracing your way through pulses and silences, through spatial disorientation and shifting orchestral terrain. And when you find something - anything - you weren’t sure you were even looking for, it feels deeply personal. Not because the piece was made for you, but because you had to uncover it. No one handed it to you. You earned it.

The Testament had been unearthed by happenstance, or so the archivists claimed. A single warped wax cylinder housed within a weathered reliquary of brass and wood, etched with symbols whose meaning eluded even the most erudite scholars of the occult. When played, the recording revealed itself not only as a sonic tapestry of sonorous darkness but also as a puzzle that required more than a simple exertion to find its solution.
​
Thus began my descent into the maelstrom of The Last Will and Testament, an auditory grimoire purportedly wrought by the enigmatic collective known as Opeth. It was not my first dalliance with their work. I had been enamored by the brutality of their earlier recordings, their deathly dirges that scratched at the fabric of sonority with melancholic violent claws. Yet this... this was something other.

In the shadowed realms of sonic artistry, where Opeth has long held sway, their latest opus, The Last Will and Testament, emerges as a labyrinthine creation—a tapestry woven from the fibers of the profane, the progressive, and the primal. A dark incantation that unfolds the cursed tale of a family fractured by secrets, bound by blood and damned by greed.

Set in the aftermath of the Great War, this concept album chronicles the reading of a patriarch’s will, a gathering fraught with veiled enmity and unspoken truths. The narrative is mirrored in the music, where the band straddles their death metal origins and their penchant for atmospheric prog rock infused with jazz-like elaborations. This fusion, as eerie as the crumbling halls of Elderwood Estate itself, becomes the foundation for a journey both mesmerizing and unsettling.

From the first strains of §1 to the closener A Story Never Told (the songs don't have titles, only a paragraph number, except for the last one - Editor W&HM), the album offers an experience akin to descending into a mausoleum of sound. Mikael Åkerfeldt’s death grunts, reintroduced here after a dormancy that left many devotees yearning, are still earthy and primal, yet somehow restrained. They punctuate the album’s narrative like an ancient curse, underscoring moments of revelation without overshadowing the lush, multilayered melodies that define this work.

The Architecture of Sound
As I listened, the peculiar blend of styles unfolded like the machinations of some unthinkable intelligence. The guttural intonations of death grunts—voices as ancient as the tomb—laced the intricate harmonies. The voice of Åkerfeldt moved fluidly between falsetto heights and solemn baritone depths, as if embodying a multitude of personas. 

The interplay between the death grunt and Åkerfeldt’s falsetto creates a dialogue of duality, embodying the twin themes of inheritance and rejection that run through the story. The melodies themselves are steeped in a 1970s progressive rock ethos, evoking everything from the swirling mysticism of King Crimson to the cinematic grandeur of Goblin’s film scores. Among the manifold aural conspirators whose contributions weave this uncanny tapestry, none proves more eldritch than Ian Anderson of the arcane order Jethro Tull, yet there is a peculiar modernity to this album—a stark acknowledgment of chaos and information overload that resonates deeply in today’s fractured world.

A Cursed Gift of Patience
The effect of all this is... disorienting. At first, I found myself merely impressed, as if observing a grand but sterile machine. The intricate layers seemed calculated, overthought, devoid of the raw urgency I craved. But with repeated listens, the true nature of The Last Will and Testament began to reveal itself. This was not music meant to overwhelm. Each note, each phrase, became a thread in a sprawling tapestry of sound. Patterns emerged, fractals of melody and rhythm that lured the listener deeper into the labyrinth; it was like a ritual to be deciphered.

By the third night, I found myself unable to sleep. The music had imprinted itself upon my mind, a maddening riddle whose solution hovered tantalizingly out of reach. Each replay became an act of compulsion, a search for the elusive nexus that would bind its impressions into clarity. And as the final notes of A Story Never Told faded into silence for the last time, I finally felt as though I stood on the precipice of understanding something vast and ineffable—the vault in my mind opened and released its newfound knowledge.

​The Last Will and Testament is, as one might say, a work like a strong cup of coffee. The sheer complexity sharpens the mind, the layers of sound aligning in patterns that seem to impose order upon the chaos of existence. The death metal elements, far from dominating, act as punctuation, adding weight to the album’s climactic moments without overshadowing the delicate textures of the prog rock and jazz fusion elements.

Legacy and Lamentation
Is The Last Will and Testament Opeth’s finest creation? Perhaps not. The towering monolith of Ghost Reveries (2005) still casts a long shadow, its balance of heaviness and melody unparalleled. Yet this album is a different kind of triumph—a revival of the band’s death metal roots tempered with the wisdom of their progressive years. It restores vitality to a discography that, in recent years, had begun to drift into complacency. It breathes life into the twilight and invites us to linger in its haunted halls, to marvel at its secrets, and to revel in the terrible beauty of its design.

​In a world where the pursuit of truth often clashes with the need for solace, The Last Will and Testament offers both and an escape and catharsis. It's a dark, immersive journey—one that dares us to confront the inheritance of our own fears and desires, and the secrets that bind us to the past. This album is a monument to Opeth’s artistry and like a testament in the truest sense—a covenant between creator and listener, binding us to an eternal quest for the sublime.

In the dim, trembling recesses of the human soul lies a hunger both insatiable and paradoxical — a yearning not to create, but to undo; not to construct monuments to glory, but to dismantle and defile them. This grotesque lust for annihilation, this dark ecstasy that whispers promises of ruin, is as old as humankind itself. Artists and poets, prophets and sages alike, have glimpsed it lurking in the shadows of the psyche. Yet, perhaps nowhere is it as powerfully manifest as within the music and art that dwell on themes of death and decay, where humanity’s own fascination with obliteration is brought to a fevered, howling crescendo.
 
One need only look upon the fevered, apocalyptic visions of Francisco de Goya, the 18th-century Spanish painter who immortalized decay in his series The Disasters of War, and later in his Black Paintings. These nightmarish images, cast in tones as grim as death itself, portray humanity’s own self-destruction with a gruesome clarity. Saturn Devouring His Son, one of Goya’s most infamous works, reveals a god driven to madness, devouring his own progeny — an act not of love, not even hate, but of pure, unspeakable dread. Here is a testament to humanity’s lust for ruin, embodied in myth, that is as ancient as the stars; a need to consume, to cannibalize itself, as if only through destruction might it somehow find peace.

In the vast, chthonic depths of Heavy Metal, perhaps nothing embodies the human hunger for destruction more vividly than the sonic and lyrical landscapes of Death and Black Metal.  Musical exaltations of death and decay, brought to mankind in a way as if only through absolute obliteration the truth of existence can be revealed. In these cacophonous realms, the musicians become mad prophets, screaming into the abyss, unveiling the deepest, most ancient horror: the inexorable drive within humanity to undo itself.
 
Consider Altars of Madness by Morbid Angel, a seminal work in Death Metal that is soaked in esoteric and mythic references to chaos, anti-creation, and entropy. In songs like Immortal Rites, the band presents rites of summoning ancient horrors to disrupt the cosmic order, painting humanity as mere dust underfoot to be swept away by forces far greater and more malevolent than any we can comprehend. Here, there is no salvation, no redemption; only a brutal acknowledgment that humanity’s most sacred institutions and beliefs are nothing more than illusions waiting to be shattered.
 
Cannibal Corpse, another giant of the genre, drives the obsession with destruction to a grotesque extreme. Albums like Butchered at Birth and Tomb of the Mutilated dive into the violent disintegration of the human body with a detached, almost surgical precision. This isn’t mere violence for its own sake, but a meditation on the fragility of flesh and the ultimate futility of our attempts to stave off death. Cannibal Corpse’s lyrics transform the human form — once held sacred and beautiful — into a decaying vessel, a reminder that no matter how we adorn or protect ourselves, we are ultimately destined for dissolution and decay. It is as if these artists channel something primordial, some ancient desire to rend the very essence of human life apart, exposing the horrific, skeletal truths lurking beneath the flesh.

If Death Metal is a descent into the madness of fleshly decay, Black Metal plunges even deeper, exploring themes of cosmic obliteration, spiritual decay, and the desecration of all things holy. Emerging from the frozen landscapes of Scandinavia, Black Metal is not merely a musical form but a rejection of the sacred, a proclamation of contempt for the light. Mayhem, a foundational Black Metal band, encapsulates this in their seminal work De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, an album that is less a collection of songs than a blasphemous rite, an invitation to witness the desolation of all that humankind holds holy. With tracks like Funeral Fog and Freezing Moon, Mayhem does not simply sing about death; they sing as if they are already in the clutches of it, heralding a world abandoned by light and ruled by shadows.
 
In Varg Vikernes (known for his one-man project Burzum), a man whose fascination with solitude, isolation, and an almost misanthropic reverence for the end, the line between reflection and action vaporizes. His art is a vessel for the same isolation and hatred that fueled his crimes (Vikernes was a session-bassist for Mayhem, shortly after De Mysteriis was finished he killed bandleader Euronymous -- next to being a convicted murderer Vikernes is a convicted arsonist - Editor W&HM). In albums such as Filosofem, Burzum’s bleak, lo-fi soundscapes create an atmosphere of cosmic despair, as if the music itself were a transmission from some haunted, otherworldly void. With tracks like Dunkelheit, the listener is submerged in a sonic field of loneliness and ruin, an evocation of a world stripped of life and light, where only the cold, indifferent cosmos remains. Here, humanity’s self-destruction is not merely an eventuality but a desired state, a condition that brings us closer to the vast, uncaring forces of the universe.

In this accursed manuscript, I extol the grotesque beauty of the grunt—a primordial utterance born from the darkest recesses of the human soul. It is a guttural scream that carries within it the echoes of ancient, tribal forces, a scream where the meaning is not conveyed by mere words, but by the terrifying intent behind them. The grunt, in its raw and feral nature, must clash against the instruments, as though in some ghastly struggle for survival, always teetering on the edge of being subsumed by the very forces it seeks to command. Only then does it ascend to its true, fearsome glory. The grunt thrives in its savage simplicity, and to burden it with melody would be to betray its very essence. Let such concerns be relegated to the over-civilized opera singers, for the grunt belongs to realms beyond their reach.

In the uncharted depths of time, music was but a fleeting cry to the stars, a quest for communion with forces far older and more terrible than the human mind could fathom. Yet as civilizations crumbled and rose again, and the centuries uncoiled like serpents, mankind’s music transformed. It sought to mirror the chaos and terror lurking beneath the placid surface of existence. Among these new forms, heavy metal emerged in the shadowy corners of the late 20th century, calling upon distorted tones and blasphemous noise to articulate that which no sane voice dared utter.

But it was not enough. No, the frenetic, howling guitars and pounding drums, like the cacophony of some ancient and malevolent cosmic engine, could not contain the full horror of what lingered beyond. And so, from the throat of man came a sound, not a scream nor a cry, but a grunt—an unholy articulation of the inarticulate, the sound of something ancient struggling to claw its way from the blackness of human nature. 
​
Through darkened venues, where the air was thick with smoke and the scent of sweat and dread, this new form of vocalization took hold. It was first heard in the abyssal strains of death metal, where the unholy priest of death metal, if there is one, Chuck Schuldiner carved his name into history with sounds that evoked the primeval forces lurking beyond the veil of human understanding. The grunt, the growl, the guttural utterance became a weapon—a distortion of the human voice, a communion with the unspeakable.

But I find myself at odds with much of melodic death metal—a genre too often marred by the polished facades of bands like Dark Tranquillity, Amon Amarth, and the unfortunate Fleshgod Apocalypse, whose very name promises wonders but whose music, alas, is tainted by a veneer of insufferable posturing and lifeless precision (the proprietor of this accursed site dared to present me with their latest musical offering, an album grotesquely titled Opera, as though it were some eldritch relic I might appreciate). These are bands that try to evoke the spirit of death and embellish it with musical confectionery with no deeper meaning. 

I glorify the darker, more arcane rituals of the death and black metal where the instruments and vocals transcend the boundaries of expectation, becoming conduits for something far less predictable—something that, at its best, touches the very edge of the ineffable. In those fearsome strains, one hears the trembling echoes of the void, the music climbing toward a transcendence that bands like Dark Tranquillity, in their adherence to bombastic emptiness, cannot reach.

No, the true essence of the guttural growl lies in the abyssal depths of blackened death metal, that most blasphemous and soul-devouring of sonic abominations as currently still found in diabolical entities such as Waitan and Wachenfeldt (the latter a band that eerily reveals that even the violin, that relic of forgotten harmony, may weave its alien strains into the monstrous dirge, without falling prey to the pretentious or the insipid). It is within this dread genre that one glimpses the same eldritch beauty where the mundane warps into the grotesquely sublime, the ordinary reveals a hideous, unutterable secret, and the finite, driven to the brink of madness, peers trembling into the limitless void, beholding the nameless terrors that lurk beyond human comprehension.

In the grim, shadowy recesses of our world, where sanity falters and reason is cast aside, there stirs a sound so intoxicating and alien that it threatens to unravel the very fabric of reality itself. Such is the music of ARKA'N ASRAFOKOR, a band whose dread harmonies hail from the distant land of Togo. Their fusion of African chants, rap, and thrashing metal evokes primordial spirits from forgotten eons, from before mankind's brief dominion over this fragile earth. Their latest album Dzikkuh pulses with a vibrant, primal energy that seeps into the marrow of the listener, rejuvenating and yet unnervingly brilliant. One might feel an eerie surge of youthful vigor, a sensation akin to receding into a time of reckless abandon, the time when one is immortal and unlimited young. Beware, for their sound is infectious, creeping through the senses like a frenzy wind from beyond the horizon. To listen is to dance on the precipice of madness, the kind of metal mayhem we all so gratefully embrace.
 
The convergence of disparate musical styles and cultural ingredients within this band’s craft stands as a testament to the very zenith of artistic synthesis, a creation rare and potent. One can only hope that this group, whose sound pulses with an intensity that verges on the primordial, shall not dilute their essence in future endeavors. Yet, within the final track, The Calling, there lies a subtle but insidious warning—a foreboding glimpse of what could come to pass should they stray too close to the precipice of the mundane. This power ballad, though structurally sound, betrays the band’s uncanny origin through generic English lyrics that falter in their pronunciation, an unintentional reminder that they are not mere imitators of their sources of inspiration in the West, but something far more unique and formidable.

Yet, if the mayhem of ARKA'N ASRAFOKOR leaves you yearning for something even darker, more abyssal, then turn your attention to NILE, eldritch  harbingers of death metal and the grotesque. Their latest album The Underworld Awaits Us All is a monstrous invocation of progressive death metal, a testament to the horrors that lie beyond the veil of our feeble reality. In each thundering note and guttural growl, one can hear the echoes of ancient tombs, the whispers of unspeakable deities whose slumber we better not disturb. The density of sound, in instruments and words (Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down on a Stake in the Underworld and Made to Eat Feces by the Four Apes--and yes, that is a song title), mirrors the abyss itself, a cacophony so dense and impenetrable that it threatens to consume the soul of any who listen too intently. This album is a gateway to the unknown, a manifestation of that which should not be, yet is.
 
It is a nearly inconceivable task to single out highlights when speaking of a band as ancient and storied as NILE, whose very existence seems woven into the dark fabric of time itself. Yet, in their latest offering, The Underworld—an abyssal realm hinted at in the cryptic annals of forbidden lore—calls to us with a voice that resonates from beyond mortal comprehension. It beckons with an unsettling familiarity, drawing us inexorably into its shadowy embrace, where the eldritch forces of the unknown welcome us with open arms, promising a descent into depths from which few have returned unscathed.

1. How aware are you of your influences when you write?
Difficult to say. A song will typically start with one of us coming up with a riff at home, which may have been influenced by something we were listening to or just through playing around on guitar. Once the riff or fragment is brought to the rehearsal room it will go through various changes and new sections will be written on the fly. Sometimes these sections will be labelled ‘the x-band riff’ if there’s some similarity to another band and for ease of communication, but any similarity will usually become apparent a bit later on. The music, particularly with the new album, passes through a lot of different styles (black metal, death metal, heavy metal, punk, doom metal) partly because we want a song to take many unexpected turns and also just because that’s the kind of music we’re into. I think the care we take when arranging makes the music sound cohesive despite being so varied, and the band’s personality makes the music sound like its own thing rather than a sum of its parts.

2. Burn In Many Mirrors means again that the band has expanded its sound compared to its predecessor(s). Is every new record a conscious exploration of new territory? Do you think it's important not to repeat things? How do you see the development of the band's music?
We try not to repeat ourselves too much and tend to view each album as a separate statement but we don’t have a preconceived notion of how an album will sound before we start writing. Once we’d written the first song for the album (Sulphuric Glow) it became apparent that we were tapping into something that felt new to us, more dramatic and with a lot of different elements. But again, that exploration was quite an organic thing, aided by a few beers and the enjoyment of following a song down the rabbit hole rather than writing with some grand plan in mind.
Of course some elements from the previous albums are going to be present either intentionally or subconsciously, simply because it’s mostly the same people writing the music, but generally we are always trying to push things into different territory.

3. Does each band member bring their own specific influences or are all the band members into the exact same music?
We’re not all into the exact same music but our tastes tend to align when it comes to the fundamental music that the band draws from. We all contribute riffs and sections when we write together and each of us has a different way of writing and type of riff that we tend to come up with, which is what makes the music quite diverse.

4. Beside influences inside metal (Judas Priest etc.), do you have any influences outside metal?
The music we write is fairly oblique in nature so we’re open to inspiration from a wide range of sources outside of metal as long as it fits the right kind of mood. For example, the nihilistic heaviness of a band like Swans in their early days, the raw power(!) of the Stooges, darker 80s punk/post-punk like Amebix, Die Kreuzen, Christian Death, Killing Joke, the atmosphere and synthetic elements of groups like Coil, Dead Can Dance and Popol Vuh all feed into what we’re doing in some way.

5. How do you rate the importance of the lyrics? What inspires the band the most when it comes to writing lyrics?
Lyrics and themes are very important in building a world which an album inhabits. Much like the music, lyrical inspiration comes from a lot of different sources. Our environment - the post-industrial gloom of Manchester - is a constant source of inspiration, films, conversations, dreams, folklore and mythology, writers like William Blake, Arthur Machen and Robert Macfarlane are all points of reference for the new record. As important as the lyrics are, the vocal delivery and phrasing is just as important. I’ll always favour a lyric that sounds good amongst the music rather than trying to shoehorn in something that reads well but doesn’t necessarily fit the structure.

6. Final question: does the band have any specific goals in mind (besides world domination)?
Right from the start the goal has only ever been to write the kind of music that we’re proud of and would want to listen to. Any praise or tours that come along with that are obviously a bonus but the main thing is that we continue to be excited by what we’re doing.

​Looking for the sounds that seek the mystery in the mundane. Wandering around where an unknown master of the senses, far away from everyday worries, pulls the strings. Music for those who are not satisfied with this world, who want to cross over to that area beyond consciousness where fear and desire can roam free. The art that takes you away from the all too crushing normality of things comes in many forms, and heavy metal is one of them. Of all the styles in metal, black metal is probably the most romantic one, and the sub-genre that is already so generous with great releases, once again delivers a marvel of a record.

Their first record was one of scorching and intoxicating black metal. On their second record they sharpened their riffs to more punchy songs and now there is a third record, BURN IN MANY MIRRORS, with which WODE expands their sound further. BURN IN MANY MIRRORS is a black metal record with a death metal flavour that also feeds on classical metal (Judas Priest, New Wave of British Heavy Metal etc.) and is not unaffected by the atmosphere-enhancing sound-expansions of prog rock (we will continue to call the music, in a genre that seems to create a new sub-genre with the release of every new record, Black Metal).

By adding extra layers to their sound, WODE has taken another step forward, stretching the boundaries of black metal (the genre that possesses hallucinatory qualities like few others) and pushing themselves to further explore a musical landscape in which demonic realms and punkish energy refresh the mind, and blow the inertia that thrives so well in Covid times out of the window. (Introverts thrive with Metal. And Metal thrives in lockdown it seems, if you look at the many, good releases of last year.)

The pandemic threw sand in the machine of a lot of things a year ago and WODE have used the extra time Covid created in their agenda to give some extra attention to the synth parts for their new album. It's very nice to see the prog rock influences adding to the atmosphere and substance of WODE's black metal without sacrificing the all-encompassing, hallucinatory power with which the black metal of their debut impressed so much. The synth parts form an organic whole with the undead glory of guitar parts that sail like surf riffs on distortion over pitch-black waves.  Michael Czerwoniuk's vocals are like the scream of an obscure, half forgotten god who, together with the instrumentarium, paints a multicoloured greyish sound spectrum in which the melody is interwoven throughout the music. In full awareness that life can only be captured and understood with poetic dedication, one embarks on a quest with musical means that leads to a place where the boundary between dream and reality fades away. With songs that engrave themselves in memory, one crosses over to that part of the mind where, free from gravity and time, liberation and redemption can be found.  The infinite journey to liberation, starting point for so much beautiful art, is evocatively started here with Lunar Madness, a howling at the moon in which the intro establishes a perfect, organic connection with the all-crushing madness that follows, an incredible album opener. WODE does not waste any time after that, intros are atmospheric but do not detain (a small reservation can be made for the intro of the album closing track Streams Of Rapture that lasts almost 2 minutes) and rounds off BURN IN MANY MIRRORS in about 40 minutes (the playing time of a vinyl record, an invitation to put it on repeat).

BURN IN MANY MIRRORS extracts a theatre of the mind from a swamp of dark sounds, a realm of images brewed by sulphur vapours in which the delirium tremens of blackened metal casts its own intoxicated  gaze at the world. You can face life with renewed energy when the 40 minutes of BURN IN MANY MIRRORS are over. A record with which WODE, with a demonic sense of decorum, settles down in the vanguard of the present-day metal scene.
​

LINE-UP:
M. Czerwoniuk - Vocals, Guitar, Synth & Keys
D. Shaw - Guitar & Backing Vocals
T. Horrocks - Drums, Guitar, Synth & Keys
E. Troup - Bass Guitar

What a pleasure I have had in recent days listening to the latest black metal creations of ELFSGEDROCH. In an attempt to do justice to my listening experience, my words—dragged up from a basement of available and hastily assembled imagery—nearly run wild. After Op De Beenderen Van Onze Voorvaderen (On the Bones of Our Forefathers) and Dwalend Bij Nacht en Ontij (Wandering by Night and Unholy Hours), there is now Gedoemd tot de Eeuwige Jacht (Doomed to the Eternal Hunt).  

"Elfsgedroch" is a term that dates back to the 12th / 13th century, to Marlaent's "Spiegel Historiael" and the medieval poem "Karel ende Elegast" in which "Elfsgedroch" is described as the work of fallen angels who, as the devil’s kin, descend to earth to do their stinking work. Elfsgedroch, the music, is, by analogy with more recent mythology, Tolkien on steroids. Fantasy in overdrive with a grunt from the underground. What if Sauron had a guitar and gave voice to his inner turmoil? Elfsgedroch, the band, forges songs soaked in blood and mud, carving runes into the soul. In the music of Elfsgedroch, the beast with blackened heart comes with many names - from Boezenhappert, Okkerman to Waternekker.​

The grunt comes as the roar of the siren, buried deep into buzzing guitars and rolling drums, irresistibly resounding in the distance. It stretches the vocals to the edge of audibility, giving it a meaning beyond words. Here, in the basins of the North Sea, a gruesome reality is mythically framed. The music, constructed from reinforced concrete and braced by steel horizons, defies restrictive formalism and pulls you away from the  daily craze—something of particular value in this time of quarantine. Music as a landscape that reports of a journey that both purifies and alienates. With that rare quality to bring out opposites together in a non-conflicting way, the music is robust yet swift, dark yet full of life. These are soundscapes in the best sense of the word. Here what is served makes you hungry for more.

Gedoemd tot de Eeuwige Jacht is a black metal mass, decorated with mythological aesthetics, that testifies to a deeply romantic longing for meaning and something beautiful in a disenchanted world. A listening experience in which, to paraphase Novalis, the banal becomes exalted, the ordinary mysterious and finiteness is given the guise of infinity. Listen!​

Gates to the Morning is a band project that originated in the bedroom of Sean Meyers. With the debut album, Return To Earth, Meyers now set sail for the whole wide world with a wide range of styles in his backpack. He started out as a jazz musician - his influences range from Art Blakey to bands like Opeth and Tool - and he labels the music of Gates to the Morning as Post Black Metal. Return To Earth is an invitation, especially for those listeners who want their music spiced with strong theatrical and storytelling elements. A listener, with a predeliction for concept albums, that likes to take, in the etheral atmospheres of a panoramic musical landscape, a mind trip. On Return to Earth you can hear the love for fantasy, for Tolkien, the love for grand gestures. Return to Earth takes one on a journey of life; an encounter with many challenges, inevitable disappointments and victories. A musical journey, Mahlerian in ambition, that eventually leads to self-realization and enlightenment.
 
For what the genre-name Post Black Metal is worth: Return To Earth is a record that surely will appeal to the lover of symphonic rock. The album provides mood-creating soundscapes that are broken open by changes in tempo and atmosphere. A carefully prepared musical meal, a skillfully built theater of kaleidoscopic sounds in which Sean Meyers gets help from studio engineer Kevin Antreassian (The Dillinger Escape Plan). Return to Earth is an exciting musical enterprise that doesn’t go where nobody went before but where its creator succeeds in making his personal and musical interests and preoccupations palpable for the listener. Towards the end of the album, that journey loses some of its momentum and its excitement. Atmosphere goes at the expense of musical substance and variety. Here some more "Art Blakey" instead of "late period-Opeth" would have kept the tension arc better. Album closer is the title track, beautifully sung by Meg Moyer, with which this journey, the accomplishment of what once started in the intimate environment of a bedroom, ends in a great and magnificent way.
​

Happiness & joy because PANDEMMY releases new material and the Brazilian metal band again does not disappoint. After the fantastic "Rise Of A New Strike" from 2016 comes Obliteration, a split-record with Italian metal band ABSCENDENT. The opening Monstera may sound a bit like an atmospheric warming-up with a not too strong musical aftertaste,  the follow-up, however, is ear-shattering. In the music of PANDEMMY a lot happens; the grunt is deeply buried in the music but the relative lack of melody in that department is sublime complemented by the instruments; the  inventive melody lines coming from the guitars (shredding as if they play their own metal variations of Flight of the Humble Bee) fill in an important part of the songs and the shifting  time signatures are breathtaking. PANDEMMY is total music in which the several influences are not too difficult to trace (from Carcass to Megadeth, see also this interview with the band), but these are absorbed in one organic whole in which the sum is many times greater than the parts. 

Four new songs and a Motörhead cover (Them Not Me from 90s album Overnight Sensation thrown in the trash metal shredder) are PANDEMMY’s contribution to Obliteration and in those songs happens more than on many other bands' full albums. PANDEMMY condenses their ideas into bold, catchy songs that can best be described as mind-expanding knuckle sandwiches. Just like with "Rise ..." the songs (and yes, it's a pity they're no more of them) ultimately string together as movements in a metal symphony. 

In the same ultra-heavy niche as PANDEMMY we have ABSCENDENT. The Italians stay more at the trashy side of things than their Brazilian colleagues, their metal sounds a bit less hallucinatory, but also their songs kick frantically ass. They also bring four own songs to the show where the final cover -Spirit Crusher of death-metal legends Death- can be considered as an ultimate prove of metal competence. On Obliteration death breathes life. It energizes and makes one attack the day like a bird of prey. A mind blowing metal heist.