One-Line Reviews: Corona Catch-Up
Time to catch-up and share what new shit you’ve been listening to this week, whether it be quarantined or not.
What’s happened since our first meeting? Well, I kept busy moving all the micro-reviews to their own Twitter account to help collate them for this column rather than sort through a week’s worth of shitposting. Meanwhile, every moron over here decided to panic-buy every last scrap of toilet paper in Australia because of a respiratory virus. Just very normal, rational stuff, ya know. Anyway, here’s a few of the new things I’ve managed to spin through these past few days/weeks/months. What have you been jamming?
Voidfire – Odgień Pustki (out now)
One of the most uneventful, entry-level, and banal examples of melodic black metal you’ll ever hear; undoubtedly a modern masterpiece of the genre.
Hemotoxin – Restructure The Molded Mind (out 16/3/20)
Choppy sci-fi styled death metal that’s better when letting loose Skolnick-esque lead sections than when relying on the incongruent tight-throated generi-thrash vox; does find its flow in a back half though.
FFO: Madrost, Reprisal, 70’s fantasy/sci-fi paperback Jim Carrey lookin-ass clown cover art.
Spectral Lore | Mare Cognitum – Wanderers: Astrology Of The Nine (out 13/3/20)
Honestly the most impressive part of this split isn’t that it maintains your interest across nigh on 2 hours of progressive black metal, it’s that it does so with the word “astrology” in the title.
4 Doors To Death – Vol. II [split] (out 16/3/20)
Nucleus – ★★★★★ possibly their most complete work to date
Ectoplasma – ★★★★ m e a t s t o m p
Fetid Zombie – ★★★½ at their best when evoking Catacomb eeriness
Temple Of Void – ★★★½ superior material to the new album?!??
Jordablod – The Cabinet Of Numinous Song (out now)
What if you got a proggy Norwegian death metal band, gave them occult surf rock equipment, made them listen to Wovenhand-esque Americana and told them to make black metal to fit the Black Twilight Circle roster?
Dragunov – Aрхипов (out now)
Dramatic post-sludgian high-pressure instrumental metal; the kind of dense propulsive stuff that you’d expect from Russian Circles or Shakhtyor if you asked them to make some industrial menu music for a late 90’s Quake-style FPS game.
Ergodic – Ergodic EP (out now)
Tech-death that’s indistinguishable from essentially everything else released in the genre post-2010…probably already crowned the AOTY in any metal group with over 5k members on Facebook
FFO: Vale Of Pnath, Deviant Process, GuitarPro v8.1
