News and reviews on all macabre melodies: Metal in its many manifestations, dark and synthwave, audio dramas, soundtracks, ambient, and dungeon synth.
Sleepy Town of Winter both continues a previous narrative, as well as carries that oblique story arc with it… a measured continuance of the Murken Hollow storyline given to us in November of 2022, a dreamy, lackadaisical meandering of sound design and smooth jazz over a noir, almost horror-adjacent backdrop.
Read MoreRandal Collier-Ford is back with a collection of remastered ambience celebrating ten years in the cinematic soundscapes. These assembled tracks have been curated by the composer himself and presented in full ephemeral radiance, showcasing Ford’s artistry and the evolution of his style and thought processes.
Read MoreIt is truly the soundtrack to a relaxing Winter, of the kiss of a fire, tinged with the chill of a frozen mountain air upon a resting upon a blanket of snow.
Read MoreThe textures of sound carry the narrative of this masterwork perfectly through an aural escort. This is the ambiance of cosmic horror, and dark, galactic wonder; of hard sci-fi and political intrigue over the backdrop of space.
Read More“What we can see is just a small part of reality... there's a whole invisible world existing along with our 'real' world, and there are places where the fine line between them becomes blurred until it dissolves.”
Read More“...dark and atonal atmospheric journey... by following the river that flows between two worlds, all the memories, the fragments of life melts away…”
Read MoreFinnish underground stalwarts, FÖRGJORD return to the fore with their latest exhortation into black metal miasma - Laulu Kuolemasta. A well-kept secret from Finland, the band is not quiet on their musical offerings, rather, delivering a high intensity, thoughtful evocation of raw, yet cogent black metal. Raw, bleeding, and with plenty of cadences to keep the rhythms moving forward, the production on Laulu Kuolemasta is laceratingly chilly, tinged with bitterness, and sung in native Finnish tongue.
Read MoreThere is a delicate balance to black metal, a dichotomous dance of traditionalism and exploration - of maintaining the old, and yet exploring new horizons. Such an introduction may seem pompous, yet this is the very nature that I would use to describe The True Werwolf, and certainly the new full-length offering from Hell's Headbangers, The True Werwolf's "Devil Crisis". Having a decade-spanning career in underground prominence, the artist known as Graf Werwolf (Satanic Warmaster / Horna) is no stranger to this very methodology, and in fact, is one of the mainstays in the underground black metal presentation.
Read MoreI find myself growing pickier and pickier when it comes to Death Metal as I get older. The genre has, undoubtedly, produced more than its share of classic releases: Altars of Madness, Onward to Golgotha, Close to a World Below and None So Vile are where my preferences lie. I will never be able to get into the over-produced, sterile exercises in musical masturbation that make up a lot of the modern Death Metal scene, however.
Luckily, I don’t have to clear that hurdle with Hegemony’s Enthroned by Persecution. Available April 24th on Hell’s Headbangers, it’s a raw, bludgeoning, filthy mess of an album that manages to be a breath of fresh air while simultaneously calling back to genre greats in a manner that isn’t just flat-out aping the source material.
