Hailing from the frozen lands of Ontario, Canada, Solarus offers a more complex and progressive variety of power metal. Of Sin and Ruin is their fourth album and they’ve got their sound down to a science. Expect the standard triumphant, soaring melodies and ethereal keyboard arrangements, but tempered with pounding drums, chugging guitar riffs, and even some growled vocals. It’s highly enjoyable if you have a tolerance for this kind of cheese.
For fans of extreme metal, it’s no surprise to see bands seclude themselves, giving us nothing until their next project drops. Sex Prisoner have been completely silent since their 2017 split EP with fellow powerviolence group Harm Done (who have since disbanded), leading fans to believe they were finished. 10 years since their debut album, Tannhäuser Gate, Sex Prisoner is back and just as quiet: no singles, no comments from the band, just a bunch of pre-orders popping up on merch sites. Their previous work brings hope of punishing powerviolence with droning bass and drum blasts like Uzi sprays. Vicious breakdowns that halt the 200-mile-per-hour pace will stomp our ribcages to the tune of disgust in humanity. There’s only the band’s history to set expectations, but their history has given us one of the most exciting discographies in modern powerviolence.
If you like your black metal to be unsettling, dissonant, and just slightly off-kilter, Mourir’s third album, Nous, Le Venin, should satisfy you. Black metal is known for being cold and arboreal, but that’s not what is on display here. Instead, it’s something more urban, though certainly not any less inhuman. The songs have grandiose and theatrical arrangements without being overly technical or obtuse. At times, the guitar riffs are twisted and thorny; elsewhere, they are straightforward and driving. Cloaking it all and bringing it together is a feeling of tension, darkness, and death.
Now this is some old-school black metal! Escumergamënt is an anonymous Swedish black metal group that may contain members of Swedish cult legends Setherial. Only one song is available for listening at time of writing, but it is a dense, icy torrent of second-wave style black metal. Miasma, tremolo-picked guitars? Check. Haunting keyboard pads? Check. Primitive production? Check. Embrace the darkness and let this into your soul.
“Negative Desire” is the sole track available preceding Cosmic Vertigo‘s release, but it shows Black Death Cult slightly demuddying their psychedelic blackened death metal. They’re more direct than they were on Devil’s Paradise, but still atonal. They weren’t going to ditch the latter quality nor their desire to disorient. After all, the record features a Uriah Heep cover and was mastered by Colin Marston. It has to be weird.
Cabinet’s sole member maintains snowmobile trails in a PistenBully as a full-time gig. It’s a lonely, cold, and punishing endeavour, much like Cabinet itself, which transposes death metal into music suitable for long treks in the Californian backcountry during the winter. So, it’s death metal cosplaying as ambient. Texture and mood overtake any riff or groove, with every moving piece being suffocated by fuzz. More interestingly, the song structures are there, they’ve just been overtaken by dust. Deracinated Into Soiled Reliquaries (Sarcophagus Odyssey) is, as such, more complex than its Mortician influence implies.
