TWELVE YEARS OF UNWANTED OPINION
Oh, she’s a depressing one! Dialling back a bit from the slightly more sparkly offering of October Rust (an album made to attract female fans), Pete’s doomy wrecking krew instead hit us with tales of death, depression and drug abuse. How cheery! Of course, that wicked Type O humour is there, but as a whole this is back in the Bloody Kisses realm of misery. Good stuff gents!
Keyboards in death metal is usually a something of a turn off for me. Even in black metal, it works probably about 50% of the time. Nocturnus however, are something of an exception to that narrow minded rule of mine. The debut record from this excellent band, The Key, is not as muddy or confusing as its follow up, but is still a maddening and punishing descent into some glorious sci-fi tinged metal ov death. Just look at that record sleeve!
Undeath is one of the more heavily hyped death metal bands around right now, and its easy to see why. Sentient Autolysis is a perfect showcase of the sickness that was to come on the Lesions… record. Dirty, horrible, disgusting death metal, the way it should be.
This is my first foray into the world of Pestilence. Right off the bat, everything sounds fantastic, with tbe exception of the drums, which sound flat and horrible. I’m sure there’s a grainy and decent analogue recording buried somewhere in there. Perhaps one for the remaster treatment?
Satyricon gets a lot of shit. Personally, I would say most of it is completely undeserved. I suppose that is the nature of the beast that is black metal; anyone who transitions or meanders out of it (or blends it with something else) is unavoidably going to catch flak from genre purists. Brass tacks: Deep… offers very little in anything new, but is another solid offering in the bands now almost two decade long vein of “riffs, innit”. Frost’s drums once again feel like an afterthought, but this almost works in its own way.
