The ritual complete, the circle sealed, Richard Benton steps back from his grand working, the fifty most repellent shades conjured within the last year now bound harmlessly to ink and paper. But wait! A shifting of movement in the periphery catches his eye, as fresh horrors pull themselves from the shadows and chitter seductively.
ONI – Loathing Light (Ironshore Records)
The development and progression from Jake Oni’s 2016 debut, the tech metal minded Ironshore to second offering Loathing Light is something quite notable. Always technically proficient, Oni has made the most of his exposure to a host of successful musical others (for one, he worked with Mark Morton on the latter’s solo record), and their class has rubbed off. That isn’t to say that ONI is reliant on the guest interventions and mentorship and guidance of others, more to say that the eponymous mastermind has become the proverbial sponge, moving on his ability to write engaging, memorable metal tunes, with the emphasis on energy, and setting a series of barbed aural traps to ensnare both the willing victims and the unwitting.
I Am The Night – While The Gods Are Sleeping (Svart)
While The Gods Are Sleeping is the debut album from Finnish black metal artists, I Am The Night. The band is made up of veterans of the scene that includes members of Insomnium, Paradise Lost and Omnium Gatherum. Here is an album dripping with nineties Norwegian black metal goodness clearly inspired by the works of Mayhem and Emperor. The traditional style and sounds are performed flawlessly by I Am The Night. The band not only plays a great tribute to the classic second wave of black metal but still manages to stamp their own signature on it.Continue reading
Tenebra – Moongazer (New Heavy Sounds / Seeing Red)
There is something evocative about the retro / occult rock of Italian quartet Tenebra that is encapsulated in a most vigorous way on the third track of Moongazer, ‘Black Lace’. A steady, spacious build from jangled, careful chords that takes its time gives room for the powerful smoke-and-whiskey vocals of Silvia to take centre stage, before a Zeppelin-esque vocal-led coda closes things out. It is not the only, nor possibly even the best, song to do this, but as a drawing together of the best elements of the Tenebra sound perhaps serves as their best showpiece. Continue reading
Mourn the Light – Suffer, Then We’re Gone
Mourn The Light offers Traditional Doom Metal with a few twists on their first full-length album. It doesn’t quite hit the full operatic scope of Epic Doom or reach the speeds of Classic Metal, but influences from both at work throughout Suffer, Then We’re Gone (Argonauta Records). The riffs and song structures are in line with the busy nature of Psalm 9-era Trouble while the vocals offer a husky but theatrical bellow, drawing further comparisons to groups like Altar Of Oblivion and Argus.Continue reading
John The Baptist – John The Baptist (1/3)
Following in the footsteps of their fellow Finns in Reverend Bizarre, John The Baptist’s self-titled debut pushes Doom Metal to its most excruciating limits. Befitting the incredibly drawn-out track lengths and overall runtime, the tempos crawl at an agonizingly glacial pace with the climactic speedups coming up as long overdue rarities. The production is raw without getting too lo-fi as the guitars and bass sit in near equal prominence while the vocals aim for an unhinged, operatic character. It’s decently made but also seems designed to have next to no appeal beyond the deepest of niches.
2019 may only be two weeks old, but as shown by our Underground Albums Roundup, the great and the not-so-good of our world are determined to start the year with a bang. Or at the very least, to bury us in a deluge of albums. Seeing as the mean and the nasty had been given a platform, we thought it only fair to shine the light on some of January’s releases beholden of a more melodic or traditional Metal bent to their finery…