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The Official Ghost Cult Writers Albums of the Year Top 50: 40-31

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The countdown to the Official Ghost Cult Magazine Album of the Year for 2014 continues. Please consume and enjoy the results of our 2014 Writers’ Poll. We hope it will introduce you to some of the incredible works of art you may have missed that we have had the immense pleasure of listening to and writing about this year.

In our second installment we bring you albums 40 through to 31

jfac-new-album-cover-400x40040. JOB FOR A COWBOY – Sun Eater (Metal Blade)

“Evolution from deathcore to a more compact, yet technical, death metal… complex and melodic structures accompany a diversified approach” DIOGO FERREIRA 7/10 Full review here

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39. AGELESS OBLIVION – Pethos (Siege of Amida / Century Media)

Marrying both technical and atmospheric forms of Death Metal, Ageless Oblivion create their own brand of chilling yet punishing aggression, presented in a show of impressive progression.

 

 

Killer-Be-Killed-Killer-Be-Killed-400x40038. KILLER BE KILLED – Killer Be Killed (Nuclear Blast)

“Cavalera, Puciato, Sanders, and Elitch put their stamp on this recording, making a memorable, political-flavored, heavy album that certainly lives up to the hype” KEITH ‘KEEFY’ CHACHKES 8.5/10 Full review here

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37. AEVANGELIST – Writhes In The Murk (Debemur Morti)

“If you’re able to get past the initial disorientation and look inside, you’ll find an album that follows its own perverse ambition flawlessly, with not a shred of compromise, dilution or failure” RICHIE HR 10/10 Full review here

 

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36. FEN – Carrion Skies (Code666)

“Fen are the rawer, rockier, more achingly human cousin to Tombs’ Neurosis-driven thunder, and among the richest and most emotionally expressive Metal albums of 2014” RICHIE HR 9/10 Full review here

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35. JUDAS PRIEST – Redeemer of Souls (Epic/Columbia)

“Judas Priest has released a retrospective that nods to their career, recalling everything that has made them genuine legends of our metal world, Redeemer Of Souls has a beautifully warm and classic Priest feel”. STEVE TOVEY 8.5/10 Full review here

CW_418_lowRes-630x63034. COFFINWORM – IV.I.VIII (Profound Lore)

The phrase “Doom” doesn’t do justice to the ugly, polluted, measured sludgy bludgeon of IV.I.VIII; a beautifully horrible record of nihilistic malevolence, that dissolves doom, death, black and sludge in its fetid path.

 

trap-them-blissfucker-400x40033. TRAP THEM – Blissfucker (Prosthetic)

“My advice? If you have never listened to Trap Them, get on this bandwagon before these guys run you over with it”. TIM LEDIN 8/10 Full review here

yaitw_album32. YOUNG AND IN THE WAY – When Life Comes To Death (Deathwish Inc)

The hardest of hardcore punk fused with the blackest of Darkthrone’s black metal offspring, creating a crusty hell in aural format.

against-me-transgender-dysphoria-blues31. AGAINST ME! – Transgender Dysphoria Blues (Total Treble)

The gutsy pop-punk outfit release a cathartic biographical concept album of frontwoman Laura Jane Grace’s experiences for their sixth album.

Ghost Cult ‘Albums Of The Year’ 50-41 here

Compiled by Steve Tovey


Dreams of the Carrion Kind (Part II) – The Watcher from FEN

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To celebrate the release of their stunning 9/10 album Carrion Skies (Code666 – review here) The Watcher, guitarist and vocalist of England’s atmospheric post-Black Metal band Fen spoke to Ghost Cult on a range of subjects. In the second of four parts, with a further feature to follow in the next Ghost Cult digimag, the discussion turned to changes in the consumption of music…

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The music of Fen inspires a sense of other, and your music is something where, as a listener, you become immersed in the music – it serves to take you away…

“Immersion and escapism… I don’t they are dirty words. People listen to music for a variety of reasons and one of those is to take yourself away from the day to day for a little bit, you can take yourself to another world. And if you’re writing 12 minute long songs with lots of guitar textures, it’s something you’d hope the music would do for the listener. I don’t want to be writing background, I don’t want to be writing backgrounds to somebody’s trip to the shops.”

But isn’t that how a lot of music is consumed now? Listened to ipod shuffle. It’s become the death of the “album”, the rise of youtube, Spotify and playlists, and of flicking from one band to another. I saw the other day Skid Row saying that they are no longer going to do albums, because no one listens to albums, (though maybe that’s because no one listens to their albums any more…)

I still listen to the first the two Skid Row albums quite regularly…!

Absolutely, the first two albums are awesome! But bearing in mind what they’re saying, and you get acts like TRC too, who say they just do EPs or singles… As Fen is an album band, does it concern you that “the album” may become an obsolete format?

“It depends, and it’s all quite subjective, because you can get a band like Moonsorrow that do an EP that’s 58 minutes long, and then you get Slayer do an album that’s 28 minutes long. The digital issue blurs the lines a little bit, but it’s just an expression of music. Album… EP… Single… It’s just a self-contained unit of music and it depends on what your style is and how long it takes you tell that story. I don’t think the album is going to die, in effect that “the album” doesn’t have a defined existence.

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“People are still going to release music in a discrete unit of how long it needs to be to tell their story. We all have our personal definition of what an album is, be it 6 or 7 songs, 60 minutes, or however long it’s going to be, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. What you’ll see as the digital age gathers pace is that people might start releasing collections of EPs, and have more regular release cycle of shorter pieces of music, whether to keep interest sustained, or because it’s now easier to record things yourself.

“Equally there are certain bands and genres where the album is a necessary vehicle to deliver what they want to deliver, and certainly for a band like Fen where we write long songs, we want people to become immersed in our songs and an album for us is an important way of actually spreading atmosphere. If anything we might in danger of the opposite; [with Carrion Skies] we actually recorded too much music for a single CD and one of the tracks had to come out.

“I think the boundaries of what might make an album will dissipate. If we’re not tied to the limits of a CD, then a 90 minute album is fine. If that’s what is needed to fully to tell a story, or evoke the atmosphere trying to be evoked, then so be it. All the boundaries can crumble.”

That’s a fair point, Contradiction by Schammasch (Prosthetic) and AEvangelist’s Omen Ex Simulacra (Debemur Morti) both chip in around the 85 minute mark…

“And you have the last Dødsengel album, Imperator (Terratur), that is two and a half hours long and it’s really, really good, and that really underlines the creative power of some bands. If you have a band that says they’re going to do a two hour album, and they pull it off, fair play to them. I think bands will feel less beholden to the album cycle, and rather than ‘Here are 10 songs, 45 minutes, bang, here we go’, maybe you think ‘Do you know what, I feel really inspired this year, so we could put together a good hour and half of an album here’. Or, another band might think, we’re the sort of band that thrives on short, sharp shock, so let’s do a series of 4 track EP’s.

“It should be liberating. With digital, downloading, it’s changed the way music is presented and digested, and consumed, and I think it’s pointless to rail against it. Bands should see it for the liberating creating force it could be.”

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Fen on Facebook

Order Carrion Skies here

Words by STEVE TOVEY


Dreams of the Carrion Kind (Part I) – The Watcher from FEN

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To celebrate the release of their stunning 9/10 album Carrion Skies (Code666 – review here) The Watcher, guitarist and vocalist of England’s atmospheric post-Black Metal band Fen spoke to Ghost Cult on a range of subjects. In the first of four parts, with a further feature to follow in the next Ghost Cult digimag, he enthuses on the conscious injection of metal back into their sound that facilitated the statement album that should propel them to the head table…

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“You look at a band like Paradise Lost. When they started out, they couldn’t be more Heavy Metal. Then they get to 24, 25 years old and then it’s ‘Heavy Metal is for losers. I’ve been listening to this for 10 years, it’s old hat. I’ve heard all there is to hear of this, it’s for bozos. I like Depeche Mode, let’s do that and let’s be all grown up’. But then it goes full circle, and when they hit their late 30’s they’re ‘God, I think I was a pretentious little twat back then! I actually do like Heavy Metal and I wasn’t anywhere near as clever as I thought I was when I went all experimental’.

“You see it a bit with the Norwegian scene, too, that all went ludicrously avant-garde in the late 90’s. It’s like they all went to university and thought ‘Ooh, I want to be clever now. What’s clever? Well, heavy metal definitely isn’t, so…’

“The thing is, I like Heavy Metal. I want to play Heavy Metal. It sounds a bit Bad News, but I love Heavy Metal. I listen to Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal.”

Once people stray away from the metal part of their sound they’re moving into a shallower pool of influences, and have a shortfall in their depth of knowledge. The problem is, bands not understanding these additional elements of their sound as much as they do the metal… I’m not saying don’t utilise these additional, non-metal influences, but make sure you understand what you’re doing…

“Exactly. It is dabbling. It’s going ‘I’ve been listening to a load of synthy 80s new wave bands recently, we can do something with that’. And there’s a danger for bands to get really carried away, and I think this is what was happening with us.

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“At the start of last year, the end of the year before, we’d done Dustwalker (the band’s third album, also on Code666) and me and our drummer, Derwydd, had been listening to loads of Sad Lovers and Giants, The Chameleons and Snake Corps, all these guitarwave bands. Then, in rehearsal I thought I’d turn the distortion off, put a bit chorus and delay on it and, oh, we can sound like that… and it’s easy to carried away with it when you’re playing one style so much. But to your ears it’s a really fresh sound, and you’re like ‘Yes! We can do this!’ At points we were even talking about doing a whole album like that, a whole album with clean guitars.

“It was only when we got back from touring with Agalloch that we realised that we’d got completely over-excited about the fact that we do listen to some non-metal stuff and we can do a passable version of it. But it’s not really enough, and we did have to put the brakes on and take a look at it, and say ‘Are we just playing a slightly rubbish version of The Chameleons with some guy shouting over it?’ And in all honesty, we were.

“We took a really objective step back and looked at it, and a lot of the stuff that was originally pencilled in to be on the album was binned off. We had gotten carried away and were disappearing up our own arses.”

An integral part of the Fen sound has always been that it comes from black metal and the inherent extremity of black metal first, despite the fact that you are often compared with bands like Agalloch and Alcest, who are much lighter, much “nicer”…

“I like Agalloch and I like some of the early Alcest, but it’s a bit of a lazy comparison I think. Particularly with this new album, we’ve set ourselves apart from that. I mean, touring with Agalloch for a month… they do that stuff really well, but we don’t want to sound like that. They’ve got that sound nailed. We sat down and said we needed to define ourselves, we needed to really underline what we’re about.

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“Unfortunately there are bands out there who don’t take that step back until it’s too late, until it’s ‘Oh shit, we’re not as clever as we think we are’, but I can see it from the other side of the fence, that it’s easy to get swept up in it. Everyone gets whipped up into a fervour, and gets all ‘We can do it! This is so different! Look at how versatile we are!’ , but any competent musician can turn their hand to doing a vague version of another style, but doing it well is a different thing.”

“Dustwalker is a metal album, but we did go down a certain route. There’s a lot of atmospheric stuff on there, there’s a whole song on there that’s got no distorted guitars whatsoever. With this one, we thought ‘We’re in the mood for metal, we want to do some metal!’ We’re an extreme metal band and it’s almost become a cliché for bands that are in the post-black metal scene to shed the trappings of black metal, and that’s not a game I’m interested in playing.

“I want to reassert our credentials as a metal band.”

Fen on Facebook

Carrion Skies can be purchased here

STEVE TOVEY


Fen – Carrion Skies

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There are two things I want to get out of the way before I get into this. The first is that I’ve never really seen the appeal of the whole Atmospheric Pine Forest BM thing – even ignoring the uncomfortable nationalist overtones, Winterfylleth, Wodensthrone and Drudkh et al leave me cold, and A Forest Of Stars seem like a band who had a great idea for an image, but rushed into the studio before they’d written any songs. It’s not a style I’m inclined towards, despite its current popularity, so when an album in that style does click with me it’s something to pay attention to.

The second thing is that Fen have made me rewrite my End Of Year List just over a week before the deadline, and for that I am not happy with them.

On paper Fen are very much part of the aforementioned Black Metal subgenre, and their previous albums have all passed me by much like their peers, but despite no obvious shifts in style Carrion Skies (Code 666) manages to transcend the limitations of its chosen style. A big part of the problem with this music for me is that “atmospheric” is frequently an excuse for nothing to happen – big, heart-rending riffs take their own sweet time to float majestically past, and everything is filled with a sense of mounting tension that never goes anywhere – but Carrion Skies is dynamic. Songs are long but eventful, striding purposefully from huge riffs and tormented shrieks to more contemplative passages as if THERE’S ACTUALLY A GOOD REASON FOR THEM TO DO THAT, rather than it simply being lazy musical short-hand for “we are interesting”. There are suggestions of latter-day Enslaved at several points, but without the sense of lazy back-slapping and tedious “maturity” that plagues their recent albums.

Another thing that’s frequently absent from the more “atmospheric” or “progressive” Black Metal bands is passion. Indeed, it’s a concept that Black Metal bands frequently struggle with balancing effectively, either overloading on it to the point that they’re constantly spitting fury anger and nothing else, or they’ve traded in all their feeling for vague “atmosphere” and ripping off a bunch of second-hand Pink Floyd references (hello again, Enslaved). Carrion Skies is a passionate album, charged with fist-waving bravado, teary-eyed loss, bits that go Duh-Nuh! Duh-duh-nuh! and all the other ridiculous stuff that makes Metal great, but it balances that passion with a thoughtful, contemplative approach to song-writing which strengthens rather than detracts from it.

What really makes Carrion Skies stand out not just in its own subgenre but in Extreme Metal in genre is the depth and range of expression. Extreme Metal is by nature monolithic – that’s frequently one of its selling points – and it’s rare to hear an album that spends much time exploring more than one mood. We can have Angry, Sad, Majestic or Bat-shit Insane, but having more than one of them across an album is ambitious, and blending several together in a rich, unfolding tapestry of more than one feeling? Is that even legal?

Carrion Skies is certainly one of the Metal albums of the year in any sub-genre, and a genuinely impressive achievement for a band who until now have usually been mentioned in reference to other, similar bands. It ranks alongside new releases by Pyrrhon and Tombs (with whom they share some similarities, but Fen are the rawer, rockier, more achingly human cousin to Tombs’ Neurosis-driven thunder) as the richest and most emotionally expressive Metal albums of 2014, and should have something to offer even to people who haven’t previously found Fen and their peers terribly interesting.

9.0/10

Fen on Facebook

RICHIE HR


Eibon La Furies – The Immoral Compass

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EIBON-LA-FURIES-The-Immoral-CompassUnderground metal is often a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” playground. Fall in line, play it safe and fail to stand out from the crowd but avoid the slings and arrows, or produce something distinctive and open yourself up for criticism if it doesn’t quite come off (and sometimes, even if it does).Continue reading →