Black metal's shining moments of 2016 part 1
As you might expect, a lot of sick music was released this year. Just like every other year ever and every year to come. It's no different. Chances are even more sick ass music will be released in the next two months.
This is about as awesome as things get. Just completely badass, and very fresh sounding melodic black metal with so many amazing riffs you'll wanna go drive your car off of a mountain. Every riff, really. There isn't a single one that doesn't rule. There isn't a single second of this album that doesn't rule. And I personally think the sound quality is so so nice, really perfect recording here, and excellent atmosphere. One of the best of the year, for all music.
Very unorthodox and relatively experimental and chaotic atmospheric black metal. Didgeridoos and cosmic riff shredding and Satan, noise, evil chaos rituals, saxophones, everything you could ever want but have never heard from black metal. This is certainly one of the most unique bands of today's world of metal, unlike anything else before. It might take some time to appreciate.
Here with more of the whack BM jams. Some dissonant and avant-garde black metal not all that different from Paracletus by Deathspell Omega and some Blut Aus Nord, but not at all playing the same ****. This has a heavy industrial (and a little bit of electronica) influence, and doesn't go too long without fusing in some awesomely weird avant-passage of coolness. If you like those bands, and maybe some Aborym (while this is way weirder), you'll like this.
I dunno what the cover is all about either. But, this is some super heavy and super brutal stuff from Alkerdeel, who have already given us a huge dose of blackened sludge or sludgened black metal with their first album. Back with a really awesome kind of approach to their sound quality, I dunno how to describe it but it's sick, and some more furious black shreds. No art school nonsense here, just destruction.
I was really interested in this band when their first album came out in 2014. I checked it out and it was some really awesome but super strange and original black/death metal, and I really thought they were gonna be big within that whole spectrum. In 2015 they released an EP, which expanded their sound and originality even further. And here we are, with their second full length. Honestly, they are kinda more on the death metal end, but they're so good. Here we have a very dark, surreal, enchanting, unorthodox, dissonant and confusing piece of work. Often overtaken by quite bizarre moments of dark ambiance and other generally twisted sonic experiments, but never does it fail.
Taking a step back from the peculiar sonicscapes crafted by the other albums mentioned thus far, here is a really nice, folksy atmospheric black metal album. Not all that cut and dry, with a lot of influence from all that twinkly clean and fruity post-black metal stuff, but it's a solid work for that area.
Further away from the avant-garde, but at the same time this is anything but formulaic. A highly complex and technical display of black metal here, loaded with amazing musicianship and ideas that pretty much never lets up the intensity. Really great stuff here if you want something awesome that straddles the line between the generic and the completely bizarre. Nonstop shredding, great clean sound.
Oh, hey, if you didn't know, here's the new Darkthrone album. And it's killer. It has a lot of what they did on the Underground Resistance in terms of old school heavy/speed metal stuff, but way back to the extreme as well. It's like Panzerfaust, with much better production, and might I say, even better on the whole. Great work here. Darkthrone never fails.
And slam bang. Finish part one with this monster. This album is as amazing as you should expect it to be from looking at the cover. It's very technical all the way around, psychedelic and mind blasting atmospheres, a heavy kind of sludge/post metal feel, eclectic atmospherics ranging from general psychness, to strange industrial classical **** (like Aborym again). Badass vocals, super badass and totally unique riffs and melodies, badass album that is never not badass.