A Greek, an Aussie, a German and a Briton walked into a bar. Said the German, “LFG!”. Voilà, this month’s edition of Extreme Measures was born — this time with more Sput guests, more “makes you scream at your screen” bad takes, more words, more… everything. What will be Night’s final jams before he goes on intermittent hiatus? Who is the handsome fella photobombing our special guest? Will Tool superfan JotW be able to endure the pedestrian guitar music perfidiously thrown at him in an act of backstabbery by people he once considered decent chaps? Who is going to taste the forbidden angular-aural-abrasive-aesthetic fruits first? (Spoiler: It’s gonna be May.) Questions upon questions — let’s get digging for some home truths.
Representing Sput this month are two staffers and a fool:
NightOnDrunkMountain, lo-fi glutton
JohnnyoftheWell, Thesaurus rex
Yours truly, naked host
Oh, you’re here for our surprise guests, aren’t you? That would be…
Brendan Sloan (Convulsing) and some bearded bloke (back to front)
Otherworldly Agency — 04.01.2025 — Self-released — Spotify
One of the highlights of my life was getting to watch Goetia play, night after night, while we (Altars) toured a li’l chunk of the USA together. Not least because Aidan is one of the most exciting drummers (and funniest people) on earth, but when you add Demir’s frankly faceripping attitude to guitar playing, and Matt’s post-Carcass demon snarls, you get a power trio exhumed directly from the crypt under hell. Play The Inexorable, Mental Funeral and Stained Class at the same time and you get the fundamental mixture, then put all of them on 78rpm and hold on to something. The second track of this pre-album missive is probably stronger as a composition, with particularly wild lead work from the Mad Turk throughout, but it’s Aidan’s sheer ferocity on the kit opening the first track that I’m gonna use to kick off this column. Storms out of the gate with a fucking roto tom burst, a ghoulish sigh from Matt, and we’re off. Perfection. People are gonna take proper notice of this band pretty fucking soon, and you should get in the front row now before there’s no room left. This release is also short enough that you can easily listen to the whole thing, so don’t stop after the 1st one. Then go buy the records and listen to those. And go to a show, because they tour constantly and rip every fucking time. I have spoken.
This one saves the best til last: it kicks off as a certified faceripper (not my usual speed, but it isn’t exactly taking prisoners), and although the band pull off a pretty stylish change of pace midway through, the following midtempo run of harmonised riffs and soloing bordered on losing its way for me. I was convinced this thing was going to meander off into the distance in that vein, so imagine my joy when that ferocious fucking coda took the full weight of my doubt and threw it right back in my face! Typing through a mouthful of broken teeth right now. I’ll agree that the drummer is an absolute powerhouse and surely the focal player here, but man, can we please take a moment to talk about how tight the artwork theme for their three releases is…
I was torn between Palegrave and Goetia for this week, so I’m especially glad to see this featured here. These Washingtonians have been “up-and-coming” for two years now, and I’m fully expecting them to finally blow up once they release their first full-length, provided that said album will be at least tangent to what we’ve been hearing on their recently completed trilogy of EPs. (Who am I kidding? It will be more of the same, and it will utterly rip.) As for “Crisis Apparition”, I’m in the opposite camp to Johnny in that I thoroughly enjoyed the track’s middle/main segment — self-indulgence be damned. This is another case of a perfectly round wheel not requiring reinvention, the activation of the inertial dampers and the abrupt glitch in the hologram’s subroutines themselves being what sets the song apart from contemporaneous blackened deathrash or thrashy blackdeath. Breaking the initial pace like that and subsequently habituating the listener to a less erosive climate also serves as a proscenium for the raving madness hiding behind the curtain; I’d wager our March Madness quarter finalist’s teeth would have had a better chance of staying intact if the song had maintained a steady (breakneck) pace throughout its whole run.
Get on it lads, put a full-length together! Goetia have been teasing us with short but highly venomous EPs for a couple of years now and their latest one, Otherworldly Agency, opens like a whirlwind with the absolute ripper “Crisis Apparition”. The track’s introduction is extremely fast, launching into a classic death metal riff maelstrom with exceptional drumming that drives the madness. It then converts to a more grounded middle section that leaves space for a soulful guitar solo and an even more intense ending. Despite the EP’s concise package (just two tracks and an awesome Venom cover), and the clear influences of old school death / heavy / thrash metal on their sleeves, the band still manages to wail a voice of its own with Otherworldy Agency, which is totally in line with their previous two mini-albums, both musically and visually. Speaking of which, the reference to “Historia Naturalis: De Piscibus et Cetis” from where the mysterious creature on the cover is taken from, is especially interesting to browse.
Sheer Lunacy — 04.02.2025 — Urealis-Tuotanto — Bandcamp
Wonderfully impetuous and dynamic by nature, Gravetaker’s first demo Sheer Lunacy exhibits a strong inclination towards a rather lesser known but highly venomous style that borders black and death metal in fine balance, and has been fronted in the past by bands like Verminous / Repugnant / Degial / Necrovore, and so on. The chosen track shines in its fury and aggressive style, borrowing the maniacal formulas of legends such as Katharsis or Antaeus, while at the same time being essentially violent as old school death metal is, featuring a series of seething guitar lines, worn out vocals of pain and crazy soloing that doesn’t leave much space to catch a breath or even simply contemplate. The whole demo includes more than your typical “xx” metal band, and Gravetaker chooses to embrace the most unhinged elements from sub-genres of the extreme sound to create this chaotic material. Whenever in the future a full length album takes form, I suspect there will be a lot to talk about then.
I’ll admit that my sample size is negligible, but this seems fairly unusual by Finnish (blackened) death metal standards. I remember checking Obscure Burial’s s/t last year, and this is somewhat reminiscent of that, although in direct comparison Gravetaker take a less temerarious, less playful approach, instead opting to focus on rawness and broken-down, relatively basic ideas. The BM influence is most tangible in the opening and closing figures as well as in the vocal delivery, but also evident in the overall punkish attitude the song exhibits for the majority of its runtime. Whenever the band allows itself to loosen up a little in favor of some welcome tempo change, early 90s USDM leanings shine through, adding to the material’s idiosyncrasy. The production ethos is excellent, but the drums and especially the snare could sit a little higher in the mix for my taste. I appreciate the deep-cut nature of the pick here, because this wasn’t on my radar at all. We’re off to a great start.
This is a good next-in-line for me, as I’m listening directly after revisiting the Goetia track(s), and thus continues the bone-clattering, skeletal, ripping death thrash of same. The deviation point here is Gravetaker aren’t afraid to slow all the way down, or play with signature, structure and pulse a bit more. Perhaps in the way that colleagues in Norway and Sweden might do. I’m hearing echoes of the path taken by Reveal!, Obliteration, maybe Spirit Possession, these sorts of “off-kilter” approaches to more blackened death metal or “deathened black metal”, but Gravetaker tend to live somewhere around the middle-right of this trio and never fully embrace the wonkier elements they play with. For me this is a shame, because that sort of whimsy is increasingly what I’m looking for in the overcrowded “market” of extreme music, but there’s still enough here to prick my ears up. I particularly loved the spooky waltz we arrive at toward the very middle of this track, which occurs directly after what I can only describe as a Candlemass riff that would probably be at home on Nightfall in a parallel universe. Sonically everything about this release is correct for the style — miasmatic and harsh, somewhat indistinct sheets of guitars with spectral leads wailing in occasionally, but the drum performance manages to pound directly through it and drive everything forward. Hardly sounds like a demo to me, I’d change nothing. We also love a singing drummer, and the frantic vocal certainly oozes with the energy of a maniac clubbing his kit to death, screaming all the way. Fucking love that. Where stuff like this usually falls down for me is if you can tell like half the band is deadly serious and going for it, and the other half are just present. In this case we have full on Bacchic Enthusiasm, as the title implies, from both (only two??) of them. It’s been a good year or two for the rerun of this sort of sound already, with Abhorration’s recent record being a standout, and these Finnish demons will now be on my radar to see if they decide to pare down even further, or turn into something more ambitious à la Reveal! or Diskord.
This one was a lot of fun — who could turn their nose up at those stampeding energy levels, or that devil-may-care songwriting ethos? I will say that I found this track considerably more engaging when it fired on all four cylinders than when the band attempted slower sections in the central minute, and part of this is that they made such good work out of pivoting from one bombastic riff to another. Their changes of pace were pronounced enough that the sensory overload of these sections never burnt itself out, though the band navigates these with enough style that I wonder if they might have served up something more distinctive at the very end of the track. Prod-wise, this sounds great to me precisely because it’s a demo, which makes me raise an eyebrow at how far these guys might seek to refine their sound going forwards — I hope they hold onto that raw edge (though I agree with Nex that the percussion could use a lift). I enjoy that this plays so fast and loose with its influences (it’s part of the fun that you can easily imagine the band themselves having a blast playing it), might have to hear how this translates across the whole demo.
Demo 2025 — 04.04.2025 — Self-released — Spotify
Looks like this grave hasn’t been taken yet. Hmm, it’s curious that it’s so pale. Perhaps its melanin level is this low because it doesn’t go out all that often; or maybe the opposite is true and it’s faded from all the UV radiation because its music is so outgoing. In any case, Palegrave’s debut makes for an interesting case study. What’s particularly absorbing to me here is the unconventional technique through which this German duo, aided by a session drummer with the cryptic moniker “D”, creates discordant soundscapes. Instead of solely utilizing dissonant chords, which to be clear they do make use of sufficiently, they’re often stratifying two or more layers that sound perfectly innocent on their own, but form arresting cacophonies when combined. The result reminds me of Ritual Suicide’s To Nothing, although this is obviously a lot more erudite, with only vestiges of the latter’s experimental spirit being left over. Since this demo encompasses only three songs, each with its own characteristics and sui generis elements, it’s a tough ask to pick one that feels like it adequately represents the release in its entirety; in the end, I went with the opener, simply because it’s probably the least outlandish piece of the three. While “Unseen by Light, Unblessed by Faith” greets us with typewriter kicks right from the very beginning and they’re not letting up for a good while, it’s an easygoing yet sober composition all in all. The bulk of its first half may feel a bit too familiar and too safe to enfranchised listeners, but the band earns its prog tag once the track reaches the halfway point. The solo-esque leads (cf. 3:22) sitting atop the absonant foundation bestow an ungirt atmosphere upon the song’s second moiety, simultaneously invoking a sense of Sehnsucht, and constitute just one of numerous components I’m looking forward to whenever I respin Demo 2025.
First of all, I particularly like the cassette-like cover art with a seemingly hand-written tracklist on the left side, which reminds me a lot of the tape trading era and its glorious underground essence. Palegrave however, do not aimlessly cling to the past with the release of their first demo this year, which clinches to atypical songwriting in a way that even if it doesn’t impress you, it surely sticks to memory. There’s scattered prog elements here and there, maybe more evident later on in this mini-release, but already with the first (a little bit contained) tune “Unseen by Light, Unblessed by Faith” the band showcases its non-linear compositional understanding, with tactics that might seem simple but they’re not. It feels like there’s something always lurking as long as the track plays in its meditative, yet distorted pace, picking up a middle-paced tempo from the start to more or less its end. Palegrave have their way with distressing, somber guitar melodies, and the most decisive moment for me was the turn at the end of the third and into the fourth minute, wonderful! Not to mention how casually Nex mentions an über-obscure Japanese death metal demo from the late ‘90s as a parallel line to Demo 2025, it’s proven day by day that we live to learn.
Here we go — I can tell right away this is what I’m looking for in my death metal. I’m going to write this one stream of consciousness as it plays out. I get nervous when I see tags like “progressive death metal” because it’s typically either going to sound like earlier Opeth, which is more or less melodic death metal, or like Obscura which has absolutely no resemblance to anything “progressive”. Happily we have neither of these with Palegrave, rather we have some very interesting, very linear compositions featuring a pretty idiosyncratic harmonic language that one might be tempted to describe as “dissonant”. I would instead describe it as detailed, as I can definitely hear tension and resolution in a conventional way despite the murk. Listening, I have the feeling of being led through a dark corridor to an unknown destination, with an occasional lantern shining in the distance, supplied by a floaty chorused guitar motif in the centre channel, returning a few times throughout. We can identify a musical narrative here, which to me is an important detail in music which claims to be progressive. I need to visualise some event being described by the music even without the lyric as support, and Palegrave execute this very well. It is hard to make the ingredients of Death Metal feel painterly. As Nex mentioned, the arrangement is a kind of laminate pastry of guitars, bass and synth, which when smushed together create the mood for the vocal delivery. Very few artists making “death metal” are brave enough to use keys/synth for carpet in this way, and to lighten up on the overall amount of distortion to try and allow the harmony some room to expand. I’m also pleased that the drums never really “take off” or push the energy too far away from pensive, very smartly chosen parts here by the drummer. I really, really enjoyed this and I’ll once again be keeping an eye on. Closest name-drop I have is probably Phobocosm, but if they wrote more like Esoteric or maybe Funereal Presence. Really cool.
Is it going to be a trend throughout the list that the ‘demo’ releases come off as the production highlights? There’s a certain amount of murk here (likely a cosy 50-50 between inadvertent and intentional), but as Brendan said, it goes relatively light on distortion and emphasises for clarity over dissonant swampiness for its experiments in harmony. These for me are at the heart of this track is all about, and its greatest strength is that any given section will have enough going on in the way of distinctive clashes of notes or unpredictable phrasing to make your ears prick up. I’m mixed on how this translates across the whole song — “Unseen By Light, Unblessed By Faith” is certainly ‘prog’ as you know and love/loathe it in the most one-thing-after-another sense (linear really is the word), and across my listens I found the interplay between individual sections increasingly arbitrary rather than increasingly coherent. That ending could have come a full minute earlier (or one later!) without much difference to me. I’m curious to see where Palegrave take this sound from here, but hopefully they’ll find something more substantive to layer those ghoulish, winding leads over next time.
Other noteworthy releases from week 14:
Necrocranium – Reduced, Shapeless… (S)
Namtaru – Cult of Ancient Deities (B)
Rottenness – Fatal Cerebral Lesions (S)
Chestcrush – Ψυχοβγάλτης (S)
Godless – Genesis of Decay (S)
Wrath of Logarius – Crown of Mortis (S)
Tenebrae Aeternum – Profana Veritas (S)
Devil Mass – Communion (B)
Abhorrently – Flagitiousness of Cannibalism
Slaves of Evil – Certain Death (S)
Guillotined – Demo 2024 (B)
Discarnage – Demo 2025 (B)
Imperious Mortality – Eon of Ungodly Entities (B)
Venomous Invokation – The Infernal Prophecy (S)
Traveller Supplement 1: The Ephemeral Glades — 04.11.2025 — Cruz del Sur — Spotify
It’s at this point I need to explain that despite playing a lot of, and being known for, extreme metal — I am actually a huge heavy/power/progressive metal nerd. It’s where it all began for me, and it’s what I have devoted most of my life to. Even if I ended up not actually being a fan of most of the things my old man was playing in the house, if he ever did play it (he is a Maiden/Zeppelin/Deep Purple fan — I am not), it’s Rainbow and Rush in my heart beneath everything. So it goes that I stumbled into Slough Feg as a teenager around 20 years ago, near enough to when Traveller came out, and it immediately became one of my favourite ever records. It has stayed in that spot ever since. For the uninitiated, it can best be described as aggro Priested-up Thin Lizzy with double bass drums, in space. Slough Feg’s discography is diverse (and I love it all) so I won’t burden the blurb with yet more fluff, but when it was revealed they intended to re-visit the world inhabited by Traveller, whose plot is taken from a TTRPG (a “board game” if you’re a coward) of the same name, I was overjoyed. Traveller is their quintessential record — can they really get the magic back? Well, yes and no. Yes — in that Scalzi, Adrian and Angelo still obviously have the time of their lives playing together after all this time, backed by a newcomer drummer. No — in that one should not expect Traveller II. In ways both literal and figurative, this EP is a more mature approach than the one taken on Traveller LP, but in doing so it sacrifices a bit of the raw power, “I FEEL THE X-RAYS ON MY BRAAAAIN” attitude one can find back in the delivery back then. The mix is less oppressive, less aggressive, but in service of the material which is itself more nuanced in construction and still every bit as ambitious. Some of Scalzi’s peak vocal performances (IMO) and tightest guitar duels are here. Narratively we’re “coming back from hibernation”, and this feels like powering on an abandoned starship, as opposed to rocketing out of hyperspace, but it still features some of the best songs these consistently strong songwriters have ever produced. It’s unknown if there’s another “supplement” to follow this up and form a bifurcated whole, but the stage is set. I listened to Traveller and TS1 back to back on release day and it felt as though barely any time had passed. I would encourage you to do the same. I remain hungry for more from a long time favourite band, and evidently so are Slough Feg to deliver it.
This will come as no real surprise, but my knowledge of power-metal-infused heavy metal runs about as deep as the Sea of Azov. Sure, I’ve heard Maiden, Priest, Sabbath and [insert hugely popular dad metal band here], but I’d never arrogate the right to judge any of those in the broader context of the genre. Consequentially, Slough Feg had been a completely blank sheet to me prior to this out-of-the-blue listening exercise. Seeing Brendan pick this follow-up slash epilogue to their 2003 full-length had me suspect it might be at least decent, but golly gee, did it catch me off-guard. It’s not even that “Knife World” is especially inventive, rather it’s the tune’s felicitous translation of 80s aesthetics, helped by the catchy chorus, that hooked me. Moreover, while I was expecting something as unprevaricating as a Rankin/Bass-ian Sunday morning cartoon series’s intro song, it turned out to be a lot more multifarious than that, enthralling me with its faintly proggy, hard-rock-inspired last quarter. After I had come to the shocking realization that I might like some heavy metal after all, I obviously couldn’t bring myself to click the pause button, so I listened to the rest of the EP, which was equally intriguing, if not necessarily as instantly memorable as the opener. Oh, what a fool I was for thinking this would be the journey’s end! In finest anachronistic fashion, Traveller came on right after, and lo and behold, that one is even better!? To condense my opinion on this song and band in a single statement: While I’m none the wiser as to how Slough Feg fit into the puzzle that this genre poses to me and I’m not going to radically stray from my daily listening habits, this left enough of an impression to make me consider putting some heavy metal on whenever my mood calls for something a little cushier.
Woah there — duelling guitar harmonies bottled directly from big ol’ thunderbolts, epic fantasy narration, and not a whiff of dissonance in sight? This was probably the last thing I would have expected to hear on this list (compliment?) and I found myself grinning through those opening seconds and well beyond as such! Both heavy and trad-leaning power metal have always fared best for me as once in a while departures rather than full-on fixations, which suits Slough Feg on an Extreme Measures post down to a tee. I’m a fairweather piece of dishcloth as far as this sound goes, so don’t have much in the way of wider substantiation beyond awful, inadvertently demeaning adjectives like wholesome and cheery, but I will say that – the occasional, forgivably brief guitar spiral-out aside – this whole track is so compact and goshdarned crunchy that its appeal isn’t entirely down to cheese and theatrics. Those vocals go the distance here: where the likes of Priest, prog-era Rush and (sorry guys) Mercyful Fate often lose me in wailing operatics, Mr. Slough Feg Mike Scalzi does an excellent job of going hard on dramatic flourish without getting lost in the hysterical. Very cool!
I feel like I’ve always been on the sidelines with this band, despite its longevity and gravitas in the heavy metal world. Even someone like me, though, is aware of the level of excellence The Slough Feg reached with 2003’s Traveller, which is the quintessential album in their now 35-year lifetime. Since 2019’s New Organon, the band decides to break the silence with an EP that’s actually the continuation to Traveller in terms of concept and somehow, in terms of music as well, with “Knife World” folding classic Slough Feg gallop into a looser form and with just enough grit under the nails. The track’s sharp storytelling, as-catchy-as-can be guitar lines and Scalzi’s top-notch vocals make up for an amazing introduction to the EP, which shout out how the band has grown older, but still dances with the same demons. While I get strong Traveller feels from “Knife World”, it’s unfair to directly compare this effort to their earlier masterpiece, but even like this it seems like the endeavor has been a risk well taken.
Under the Eternal Shadow — 04.11.2025 — Wolves of Hades — Spotify
I’ve flirted with enough black metal by now to know that my tastes skew towards high octane yet away from homogenous, and you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone ticking both boxes in so succinct a fashion — Final Dose aren’t wasting anyone’s time on this one! “Rite of Spring” serves up the kind of punkified black metal barnburner you’ll have doubtless encountered however many times before, crusty and sweaty as anyone could ask for, but its successive changes of pace give it a particularly keen edge. The drummer seems to be working overtime to ensure that the punk fury at the heart of the song never lands the same way twice, and the track seems only to grow into itself as that brisk, brisk runtime goes on. I tend to phase out of stuff like this on the more meat-and-potatoes end of the spectrum, but this is exactly how you go about finding fresh possibilities for a good thing and then dropping it before it overstays its welcome.
As much as I am, most of the time, 100% aware of what I will come across once I hit the “play” button, I have a soft spot for DIY-spirited, punkish raw black metal with a dusty production and ardent character. This is also the case for Final Dose’s second LP Under the Eternal Shadow, which embraces this style and goes the extra mile with sneaky catchiness that truly sticks. Several interesting ideas are mixed together in just two minutes in the track “Rite of Spring”, which starts at a slow pace and with a tormented scream that almost touches a DSBM outer layer for a second, then moves to the most direct raw black metal / punk section (possibly invented by the earliest Ildjarn demos), smashing a couple of short-term solos and a clean vocal chanting part at the end, just to emphasize that Final Dose are, above all, driven by their very own inspiration. These little elements can be found scattered all over “Under the Eternal Shadow”, but gladly enough, Johnny’s pick is one I also underlined when I first listened to the album, among a few other of its notable moments.
First off, “Rite of Spring” features around 711 percent more blast beats than I was expecting any of Johnny’s picks to contain. Secondly, on account of my general disinterest in both actual punk music and most contemporary non-avant, non-deathified BM, I don’t have many points of reference here. There’s some passing resemblance to Owls Woods Graves, and I guess one could draw comparisons to Devil Master’s demos on a superficial level with some squinting involved, but that’s where my association bingo card starts to look like a chess board and my selective (read: one-dimensional) perception of “metal” becomes an impediment. Judged on its own merits, this is an amusive little romp fueled by primal verve, with a plethora of comparably simplistic twists and turns. It’s the kind of music that tells your thumb, index and middle finger to steer clear of your chin, and if that’s something you’re into, you’ll most likely have a great time with this EP-turned-album. Personally, I was waiting for the initial scream’s bloodcurdling timbre to make a return, for it would have added that extra bit of spice I’m always on the lookout for, but sadly it never resurfaced. The ever so slightly off-key cleans were a cool touch, though. One thing that jumped out at me while listening to the rest of this 24-minute full-length was the recycling of this song’s main riff on “Wretched” — a technique not uncommon for long-form prog monstrosities, but a funky choice here. Like Johnny adumbrated, the alternation of ideas will probably make for a convincing pitch if you gravitate to this style of music anyways; to me, it was just further proof that my spacetime is curved differently. To cut a long story short, this is a jaunty piece of principled, perspicuously non-artsy art that feels like it wasn’t meant to wow the listener and succeeds in that regard.
Going in cold here, and I’ll admit from the opening howl and miserable Jhva Elohim Meth-esque chord progression, I was expecting a very different experience and became quite excited. Instead I discover I’ve been somewhat hoodwinked, and we shift gears to some sort of crusty, mutant Avsky/Wulkanaz style punky black metal that I’ve enjoyed at select times of my life. The aforementioned bands being two that have remained in my collection, alongside things like Mind Eraser, Impalers, Extortion and so on. These I would generally rather listen to than a black metal band cosplaying as punks, as can often be found in this intersectional style. There’s not much for me to wax poetic about here, everything plays out according to the template after this. No! Give me more of the first 30 seconds you cowards! MAKE ME MISERABLE. It’s not something I would reach for at this time in my life, but it does an extremely good job of getting my blood pressure rising in expectation of clobbering. A brief, 10-second clobbering which arrives at around the 2-minute mark before fizzling out. Good but not brilliant as a singular track.. but for precisely this reason I went back to the top to listen to the whole record and loved it, with this track making total sense in its context. A good reminder to not listen to tracks in isolation, ever. I’m still angry at having been thoroughly edged for 30 seconds on “Rite..”, but they sort of give the finisher to me on track 8. I’ll allow it.
Confutatis (原罪神授) — 04.09.2025 — Self-released — Bandcamp
Even in a week that didn’t exactly leave me spoilt for choice, this wasn’t among the top candidates, but I felt like throwing a certain someone a bone by going with these Japanese gentlemen who disbanded in 2006, reformed with new members in 2022, and finally released their first full-length this year. Let’s address the elephant in the room first: Yes, the cover artwork absolutely shows the inside of your denbu after you gave in to your craving for some geki-kara mapodofu topped with an unhealthy helping of ra-yu. On paper, the mix of genres here should be just as spicy; it’s hard to assess whether this is hardcore baby’s first death doom or a bunch of sans who started out as Incantation zealots and shifted gears after developing an intense desire to see their crowds two-step and perform wheel kicks. “Lifeblasphemer” kicks off in a rather unapologetic manner with some unadorned, been-there-done-that HC, occasionally swapping it for a minimalistic death metal riff. It’s at the 2:20 mark that we finally get a glimpse of the quintet’s self-proclaimed main course, everything coming to a near halt, the guitars taking center stage before vocalist Daisuke Akiyama infuses a suspiciously post-sludgy passage with personality. While none of the incorporated elements are particularly notable, neither for the writing itself nor for their execution, they still make for a peculiar combination in their sum. Looking at the whole album, I would have preferred a more evenly split death/doom/core ratio, more offbeat riffing, more venturesome drumming — anything to help me shake the feeling that this was, by and large, a missed opportunity. As it stands, Confutatis is a competent if overly safely played fusion of contradistinct styles.
Drop A Osaka stomp metal reporting in. As a big time Xibalba fan, this ticks all the boxes I want a band trying to do this sound to tick… on its face. A fuckin’ titantic low end presence in the rhythm section, thick as a brick but with surprisingly clear and not overly crushed dynamic range mix-wide. A novelty can be found here in that while the guitars are predictably heavy and sustained but without leaning on walls of pure overloud clipping, the bass tone itself is virtually clean. Leaves a lot of room for things to carry weight, and come down on you with gravity. Unfortunately, they do leave me a bit cold when it comes to the actual riffcraft. I feel like I could bullshit these riffs to myself in my room any given afternoon as a joke. However, there is a flicker of something greater right in the middle when they slow it all down and try to bring in a few ideas from the playbooks of their countrymen in Corrupted, Belmadigula, Coffins etc. Mind you, they don’t fully land the execution in a way that could be compared to any of these, and I didn’t find myself wanting to investigate the record much further after a quick skim of the remaining tracks to see if they did something particularly clever. Oh well.
I would swear that I have come across this band’s 2022 EP Desecration somewhere, and I was unaware that they have finally come together with a full album by 2025. Going into Nex’s song suggestion, we come across chunky and direct death metal riffing that secretly loves traditional hardcore and doesn’t try too much to impress anyone, the kind that makes you slowly start nodding along to the music without even noticing it. The distinct doom / sludge turn towards the middle / end of the track has already been correctly identified, and the band makes a respectable attempt to balance out straightforward, alley-brawl kind of playing with just the right ounce of doom / sludge, and it more or less eventually works. Personally, history has shown that such bands have had a hard time leaving a considerable mark on me, but it’s clear that Burden of Despair at least head towards a slightly more uncommon combination of styles, which is something to commend them for.
This faced a pretty brutal uphill struggle against my personal preferences, given its extremely chug-happy riff game and that all too familiar vocal styling that immediately makes me picture someone trying to strangle a pig wearing a gas mask. The opening minutes came and went as they have done for however many similar outings, but the sludgy meltdown that drops around the midway point definitely caught my attention — the opening minutes are so dialled in that it goes a long way to hear a looser converse, and I found the vocals a good deal more convincing in this mode. Burden of Despair have apparently placed all their chips on the bottom end of their fretboards, and I’ll concede that when they hit, they… uh, hit. If the bulk of those hits come around in churning sludge and miss their mark in the band’s boilerplate riff templates, then, well, goodness knows there’s a market for this sound all the same.
Other noteworthy releases from week 15:
Diabolizer – Murderous Revelations (S)
Sonum – The Obscure Light Awaits (S)
Oceangrave – A Bouquet of Words Forlorn (S)
Dysmorphia – Morbid Atrocities (S)
Putrid Offal – Obliterated Life (S)
Serpentes – Desert Psalms (S)
Roots of Deception – Heinous Disfigurement (S)
Bloodshower – At the Mouth of Anticreation (B)
Fragile Wings — 04.16.2025 — Self-released — Spotify
Since blipping on to my radar a few years ago (and later sent to me by a friend asking me “is this you?” — I wish), I’ve made a mission of insisting everybody listen to Charlie’s music. So it goes that I do not hesitate to nominate him here. We (now) live in the same city, share a lot of the same ideas about art and music, and draw from much the same sources in the creation of our silly introspective noises. The previous record clipped the edges of the canvas that the prior EPs and demo had begun painting on, but with the (entirely unexpected) release of Fragile Wings, Charlie has successfully burst out of the frame and into a wholly unique, emotionally sensitive place that was previously in the margins. In the past, songs felt a tad academic and almost restrained by a sense of needing to be quantifiably “metal” or sufficiently aggressive. But now, while Cave Sermon is a metal band and Fragile Wings is obviously a metal album, listening provides the sensation of being unburdened by such basic problems. Songs flow naturally through their anxiety, brutality, serenity and sensitivity without friction. “Heaviness” is delivered as frequently by the riff as it is by an inherent poetry. Reading the lyrics (you must) will hint at the internal world providing Charlie with this inspiration. While Divine Laughter was crowned by a thoroughly brutal vocal performance from MICO (and also Flagelo) mastermind Miguel Méndez, Charlie has since found the courage to do them himself. It’s now his voice you hear, and it’s his world you now fully inhabit. I’m avoiding talking too directly about “Sunless Morning”’s features as a track, or providing a play by play, for the express purpose that one should listen to music like this for the art that it is. Everything in its right place, in the order, all at once. What you’ve heard and what you’re yet to hear add as much to “Sunless Morning” as what is contained within it. What is within it is the best song Charlie has written to date, I think. I wish I wrote this shit, frankly. A precious thing to give to the world. Anyway, I feel a pretty strong simpatico with what’s transpiring here — with the arc of this project, and of Charlie as a musician finding himself and his voice (literally) through continued musical/artistic excavations — and I can’t wait to see where his journey as an artist (and likewise his partner’s, who painted this cover as well as the previous) takes him. Will undoubtedly be my number 1 record of the year.
Show of hands, who remembers what an insane year for music 2024 was? Oh, literally every single one of you, huh? That’s actually perfect, because it makes it easy for me to illustrate how much Cave Sermon’s Divine Laughter must have impressed me to have ended up somewhere near the top of my year-end list. Charlie Park’s second album came out at just the right time and offered just the right vibe to stick with me, its individuated, posty death metal adroitly interlarded with prog and black metal cues bursting with distinctiveness and emotional efficacy. Rightfully hailed as a celebration of bedroom metal, it would have been an awe-inspiring accomplishment had it been conceived by a full-size band, but it was even more extraordinary as an objet d’art devised by a single person. Fast-forward to 2025 and we’re already blessed with the project’s next offering, Fragile Wings, which represents a drastic proverbial change in tune. Gone is the overarching ambience of dejection, dissipated the apprehension of breaking under the weight of isolation and struggle. In their stead, we are treated to placid, often uplifting melodies and an increased focus on progressive aspects. “Sunless Morning” exemplifies this in an eidetic manner: After a muted, pensive intro rendered by clean guitars, the Odyssean song slowly but surely gains steam, segueing into what could be described as a diffuse callback to the crushing anxiety which defined last year’s epos. In contrast to the latter, though, the auditory construct carefully pieced together up to this point never feels as if it were on the brink of collapsing; it peacefully abates, giving way to a sped up interpretation of 70s prog rock, which eventually turns into “Jethro Tull meets blast beats” for a brief moment. While the enveloping theme of newfound gaiety makes for a very intriguing listening experience, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t missing the Cave Sermon of yore. Fragile Wings is undoubtedly Charlie’s most mature work to date, but I much prefer the predecessor’s heaviness, intimacy and relatability.
The songwriting here is an odd mix of linear and slapdash decisions, and I’m somewhat on the fence as to whether these are perplexing or refreshing: following two and a half minutes of clean introduction with a second, heavy introduction? Devoting the bulk of your track to an ultra-streamlined suite of diminished progressions within the cosy confines of post metal dynamics and squeaky-clean production, only to dovetail into folkish riffage for a surprise finale (Kostnatění springs to mind here, which is as positive an association as any you could hope for)? Between its initial build and this final minute, “Sunless Morning” boasts two centres of gravity, one of which is far more prominent than the other — and whether or not these complement one another, they’re individual satisfying enough that my judgement here is going to have to be some variant of hats off, balls out.
Considerable attention was brought to the name of Cave Sermon when second album Divine Laughter was released last year, and rightfully so. There was a lot of unpredictability in the multi-dimensional soundscapes conceived by the project’s mastermind Charlie Park, rooted in post-metal but with frequent discordant death / black metal flings, and with an emphasis on variety and heaviness. Since genius minds are often restless, Fragile Wings falls in our laps just a year later and unveils more of the same unfiltered inspiration, but now expressed in a different, quite brighter way. “Sunless Morning” is one of the most memorable pieces on the album, due to its characteristically more animated character, from the gripping clean guitar introduction to the perplexed prog doom / death metal parts that follow. Something felt inherently familiar with the guitar melodies from the sixth minute onwards, realizing how much of this Eastern, almost rockish folk I have experienced in the past, just without the growling! The track beautifully sculpts emotion and depth, yet it makes me curious how it (and the whole album) will be received by fans who enjoyed the more straightforward Divine Laughter, and would expect something similar.
Insaciable — 04.14.2025 — Self-released — Bandcamp
Thanks to Brendan, who turned out to be a bottomless well of metal lore knowledge, I am now aware of an interesting connection between his pick for this week and mine: Legend has it that our disso mastermind from Down Under was asked to record vocals for Divine Laughter. Since he was tied up with other matters around the time, Miguel Méndez, guitarist and vocalist of Colombian blackened sludge grind outfit MICO, filled in for him. Compared to Mico’s helter-skelter style, Insaciable, the debut EP by Miguel’s new band Flagelo, sounds a lot more conventional, dishing up a hefty serving of doom-tinged death metal with a blend of stygian and lugubrious black metal fragments mixed in. While it’s not exactly a potpourri of unheard-of ideas, each of the five songs has enough of a strong identity to warrant being highlighted here, once again making for a tough choice. “Historia Animal” starts off as a typical, albeit chunkier-than-usual mid-tempo blackdeath stomper, but unfolds into a ponderous and appropriately saturnine train of introspection not long after. The writing chops demonstrated here are of the highest order, the band’s sense of engrossing melodies and captivating structuring being put front and center. This is how you guide the listener with precision and transport them to a clearly defined sphere of thought without curtailing their ability to construe what they hear and make it their own.
When seeing logos like this and before listening at all, I really wish I’m gonna like the music too. “Historia Animal” begins with a distinctive war metal riff that makes you think Flagelo is yet another band like that, yet that’s not the case at all. The track is seven minutes long and quickly ventures into more atmospheric territories, with intricate riffwork at mid-to-fast tempos and an incredibly dense atmosphere, underpinned by abyssal growling that produces a truly terrifying outcome. Only a short clean guitar section offers a brief respite, but the tension is constantly nurtured and elevates the track towards its epic, but also awfully savage ending. The production of Insaciable provides a massive sound, and particularly endearing is the sound of the snare (listen to that echo), and the whole EP plainly brutal, but also fairly inventive in the manner it recites known black / death metal scriptures. A band to look out for in the future.
That opening buzzsaw riffage set this up as a straightforward ripper, and I tapped my feet dutifully as such — but that switch two and a half minutes in changed everything! Flipping the table, spilling all the tea, and refurbishing the carpet as a doomy swampscape was a bold call, but as someone who cares little for self-flaunting brutality in death metal generally, I certainly feel adequately pandered to here. I enjoy the mercurial stew the remainder of the track dissolves into, its progression unpredictable and its dynamic shifts successive and abrupt (if incrementally more frantic), but more than anything else, the leads are surely the standout here, whether in that song-defining midway solo or in furnishing an edge for the opening sections. I’ll second that the vocals bring exactly the right level of cavern-sourced gravel for death/doom; perhaps wholesale death/doom would have been a more tenable prospective for Flagelo, as they certainly hit the mark there more squarely than in their flirtations with meat and potatoes death metal.
Responding to Nex above — Charlie did ask, Miguel did more than “fill in” for me. Miguel is a formidable musician, great person, and the perfect selection to have made for Divine Laughter. I had no influence, and I’m not sure I would have done better if it had transpired that I could participate. Shifting focus to Flagelo now, we prove my claims of formidable musicianship easily. Miguel is on guitars and BVs (and the engineering desk as always) here, with other members coming in from bands across the diverse Colombian underbelly — Cadaveria, Gutgrinder and the brilliant Escara. On Insaciable, fans of things like Malignant Altar, Innumerable Forms, Dead In The Dirt/Infernal Coil and Funebrarum will find great satisfaction. Utterly brutal, dismal death metal with a li’l flicker of the grindcore/powerviolence Miguel & Carne Debil associates are known for in MICO and Escara. I once heard Andrew of My Dying Bride in an interview describing his ideal death/doom vocals as resembling “a concrete slab being scraped against another concrete slab” (in reference to Shape Of Despair) and that’s what we have here from Francisco – a standout feature. It’s not (yet) winning any awards for re-inventing the genre, but you don’t always need to do that to meet the brief. It’s an expertly written, expertly delivered, and expertly crafted debut as good as anything being made by more household, “more American” names. I’d argue it’s better on balance than the new Caustic Wound record everyone is frothing about, as much as I love them. Killer shit, as expected from Colombia’s young wrecking crew.
Killing the Flowers Will Not Delay Spring — 04.14.2025 — Self-released — Spotify
So this two-track EP caught my ear while I was on my trawl — as a fatigued, strictly part-time skramz enjoyer, Teardrinker got my pulse racing more than I initially expected, and much of the credit for this has to go to the way it balances its metal influences. There’s obviously a fair bit of black metal in “Equilibrium”‘s DNA, per those hornet-like tremolo riffs, but I’m a big fan of how it shies away from importing any of that climactic Envy-cum-Deafheaven parp back from blackgaze and anchors itself in sludge textures that lend themselves perfectly to the despair and desperation these guys fooking wallow in. Throw in that show-stealing vocal performance, and we’re home free. The production here is so carefully handled that it makes more sense to term Teardrinker gritty or what have you rather than traditionally raw, but either way, they go some distance to restoring the abrasive edge I miss in a lot of contemporary skramz highlights. Even last year’s State Faults record (which for the record I still thought was excellent) posited an extremely glossy, blockbuster-adjacent vision, hearkening less to the genre’s frantic routes than to 2nd wave post-hardcore and the emergence of *shudder* Anthony Green as a figurehead for that genre. Maybe that’s not the most representative example, but even the Ostracas and Frail Bodies of the world sound a little dialled-in to me with their endless minor 3rds and perfunctory crescendos. Teardrinker aren’t changing the game quite yet, but they have brought a distinctive aesthetic and fresh voice to a sound whose tropes I’ve long since begun to tire of — and as a bonus, it turns out that the title Killing the Flowers Will Not Delay Spring is a free Palestinian slogan, which would certainly square with their Bandcamp bio (“No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.”)
Screamo just filters me. You could tell me that Los peores 7 km de mi vida was the best album you’ve ever heard, and I’d shrug and reply that I didn’t even get the hype for last year’s Children of the Moon. Such being the case, I’m not going to make a fool of myself by pretending to understand the nuances of what makes Killing the Flowers Will Not Delay Spring great to genre connoisseurs, but I will say that the black-hued cladding sits well on the post-sludge ossature and helps making this two-track EP getatable even for a philistine like myself. Truth be told, I’d probably enjoy any schmaltzy, pitch-corrected Kid Rock abomination to some extent as long as it was underlaid with 240 bpm 16th blasts, so it’s not exactly high praise. Outré vocals? I’m at home in them, and yet the ear-splitting, agonized highs here fail to click with me, which I believe is owed at least in part to their interplay with the instrumental foundation’s melodic motifs. It’s not that they’re not well done, quite the contrary (though I’m not big on yell-scream/scream-yell transitions in general), just that they clash with the rest of the composition to my ears. I’m aware that’s the whole point of the genre, which to reiterate I just can’t seem to crack. Filtered yet again. Even so, this was a fun jam, and I’m happy to acknowledge that it’s infinitely better than Kid Rock.
What can go wrong with a band named Teardrinker? There’s several points to instantly approve with this release, firstly the title: Killing the Flowers Will Not Delay Spring, a phrase that alone can spark some discussion even before the raw, emotional music in it takes off. Then comes the beautiful cover art, which could have been a way brighter version of a Fall of Efrafa b-side, but maybe my brain just hallucinated for a second when I first had a look. Selected track “Equilibrium” is a five minute textbook example of what a great track is for me, with powerful and expressive riffs (much like what you’ll find in EPs by Fluisteraars, but not the same style), semi-dusty production and passionate vocals, gripping sequences of ideas and just at the right duration. I absolutely love Kim Hoorweg’s distraught, high-pitched vocals here, reaching Ultha levels of larynx torturing at times, and then immediately switching to more evocative cleans, while the most charged sludge / black metal / post-hardcore riffs howl in the background. Somehow, this track makes you wanna cry, but in anger. What a beautiful mini-album and how well it juggles the genres it touches.
Fall of Efrafa mentioned, wee-ooo wee-ooo. Netherlands seems to be one of the last holdouts for this kind of post-punk/metal/skramz/sometimes black metal hybridisation project. I listened to so much of this shit 10-15 years ago that hearing Drop C guitars do I-VI-V in G natural minor chord progression over blasts at ~170bpm triggers an immediate wince. Academic description perhaps, but that’s the formula. It’s also present here in this song. Remember when Oathbreaker was all anyone wanted to talk about? I was already long off the train by then. In saying that, there are a number of great Australian bands relighting the embers of our nascent skramz scene (namely Gil Cerrone, Blind Girls, Keratin, Craning, and many others) that have brought me back into the genre which I felt was thoroughly rinsed. Teardrinker nearly occupy this same space — I didn’t immediately become bored and turn it off — and I think a lot of that is down to the integration of the vocal and how it leads the arrangement. It’s not pure whistle register shrieking, instead giving a little bit of what you might find on a Fuck The Facts record — a band I absolutely love. Likewise there isn’t strict adherence to the melodic template from the instruments, but it’s not far enough away that I’m trying to spend 65AUD importing a 7” from them. They might be about to make something that I rate as high as Pleine Noirceur, but time will tell. I just hope they can find some more fertile ground.
Enthralling Euphoric Putrefaction — 04.19.2025 — Rotten Music — Spotify
Corpseification are a salt-the-earth type brutal tech band who formed with only one goal in mind: to overload the glucocorticoid receptors in JotW’s auditory cortex with cortisol. As such, it’s only fair we help them achieve that commendable objective by featuring them here. “Anomalous Convulsive Corpseification” is an eminently savage sample of the band’s craft, indulging us with dazzling, rugged sweeps and acute pinch harmonics that easily pierce through the barrage of whirling sticks and feet (emulated limbs at that, programmed by Livio Wellinger, who was also responsible for last year’s excellent Dystopian Elegy). The vocals sound like vehement wind cutting its way through the crevices of a drafty window, which is to say they fit perfectly here. While I feel like real drums would elevate the sound significantly, this is some proper modern tech bdm that should be checked by anyone who feels a blissful sensation listening to bands like the ones mentioned at the tail end of Brendan’s blurb below.
It’s strange to say “ah yes, the songs of my youth” about a thing that sounds like this, but I really did grow up and teach myself to play guitar in “Brutal Technical Death Metal” peak hour. There is a riff tacked on right at the end of one of my songs (shattered temples) which was marked in the DAW with “2004” as a hat tip to this period of my life. I was 13 when Epitaph came out, and it took about 6 years for Muhammed and Christian’s neoclassical style to fully mutate everyone into playing sequenced 5 string sweep arpeggios and harmonic minor legato scale runs all the fucking time. Prior to that final tipping point though, we had the heyday of labels like Comatose, Xtreem and Unique Leader pumping out gem after gem from bands like Disavowed, Severed Saviour, Decrepit Birth, Odious Mortem, Spawn Of Possession, Pyaemia, Vile, Beheaded, Internal Suffering, the inimitable Disgorge (US), still reigning champs Defeated Sanity (who released Prelude to the Tragedy that same year), and of course Lindmark’s Own™ Deeds of Flesh. There are so many more, but these are some that spring to mind which I spent countless hours with – spewing out of my 3rd generation iPod on the bus home from school eager to log on to SMN forums and Rivers of Gore to look for more — and it’s where my mind immediately returns when I play this Corpseification release. Admittedly we’re in 2025 now, and the 25-year-blinding-soup of brutal death metal has become more complex and more blinding, so there’s far more wild shit going on here in terms of guitar texture and experimentation than what many of the old guard managed. Thankfully it never disappears up its own arse in the way(s) that inevitably led to Rings of Saturn and other such contrivances. This is wet, meaty, gore soaked metal, but we’re chopping up the chunks with laser-guided cleavers instead of blunt bonesaws. There’s a certain Nespithe-esque wonkiness to the guitars, and lots of harmonic activity that Jon Levasseur would be proud of. This is the kind of “brutal tech” that very few people seem to make well anymore — and all of them are on New Standard Elite in a band with Polwach or Nikhil — so I’m pleased to be exposed to another band (and perhaps a label) that is trying to keep the dream alive. MA tells me a couple of these dudes are in a band called “Awaken The Misogynist” which absolutely fucking sucks, and most other bands they’ve been in are far more boring to me than this. This is good. Evidently guitar player Ste Moses is only a couple months older than me, which explains everything I’m hearing. See also Nithing, Theurgy, Anal Stabwound, Deliquesce… Warm and comfy like an old unquantised blanket. Ahh…
I was about to say that the most impressive thing about this is how the drummer somehow holds it together while the guitarist shoehorns one immemorably convoluted fretboard mangling after another under the voiceperson’s arbitrary belches/gurgles, but it surprises me not one bit to read that the drums were programmed (credit to the guy credited for programming duties — I guess he either wished to keep all four limbs attached to his body, or just had reasonable doubt that he could keep a straight face backing this from behind a kit). Yep sorry, this is just silly to me — I guess I can see the fun in it, but it’s too overcooked for shock value and too dense for moment-to-moment entertainment that doesn’t involve using irresponsible amounts of energy drinks to bypass the limbic system and give the ol’ lizard brain its stupid primal fun. Where does the brutalistic tryhard faff end and the art begin? Consider me adequately tormented and do not answer that question!
Other noteworthy releases from week 16:
Anoxia – Revel in Sin (S)
Inoculation – Actuality (S)
Teraset – Burden (S)
Panpsychism – Imperfect Mortality (S)
Övervåld – Vigarv (S)
Landfilth – Control (S)
Murder of Life – Emptiness of Oblivion (S)
Chaos Insignia – Mechatronic Carnation (S)
Satanic Black Blood – Sulphuric Demonomancy (B)
Voluptas – Where Celestial Bodies Guide Not (B)
Blastanus – Land of the Weak, Home of the Slave (S)
Exterminatus – Echoes from a Distant Star Part I (S)
Otherlike Darknesses — 04.25.2025 — Transcending Obscurity — Spotify
I was lucky enough to master this for Mason (a former coworker for a brief time before he relocated to a little town outside Oslo) — I completely forgot it was due to release this week. Not at all sorry for making my associates here spend 18 minutes listening to what is merely a third of this titanic work. If anything recent could summarise my tastes in the more extreme vertices of metal’s 5-dimensional plot, it’s this record. Unrelenting, maximalist, interplanetary metal of death. A vehicle somehow escaping the intense gravity of Mason’s internal world for us to climb into. I’m not really a fan of “for fans of”, but I would put this firmly in the same category of ambition that Abyssal’s Antikatastaseis, Ingurgitating Oblivion’s Visions Wallow… and Edge of Sanity’s Crimson (I and II) occupy — the very space I try to visit in my own art (with mixed results). This is the artist creating desperately and with every possible tool he has at his disposal. Expressive and dramatic, sombre and subdued, crushingly heavy and delicate… all these and more. My favourite moment in heavy music of the last 5 years (I think) is the transition between the “bridge” of this song and the final movement of the album at around 12:45. When I got there on my first listen I fucking yelped with joy. That’s how you do it. He somehow keeps finding new intensity in a work already boiling over from the very start. Metal for the brain, body and spirit. Perfection. If you listen to only one entire record out of the ones I’ve chosen in this column (which is the only way to listen to anything as far as I’m concerned) — make it this one.
For all the noise I’ve made elsewhere about janky songwriting in bands intent on having their commercially-proportioned cake and eating it (shoutout Loathe, Boundaries, Sleep Token, and however many other core acts from the more embarrassing side of Sput metal), I’m not inherently opposed to fuckoff massive tangled epics if they can carry their weight and pull off a spectacle (granted I look for this less in death metal than on the sludge/math end of things from the likes of Comity and Cleric). So let’s see! The order of the day here is black- and death- metal delirium with the occasional nod to doom (a running theme for this whole list) and don’t you bloody know it from the word go! “Otherlike Darknesses”‘ first six minutes thunder their way between successive incarnations of death metal clamour that I didn’t find individually engaging, but did respect for how it kicks off on a pushy note and refuses to sacrifice an inch of momentum despite ample lateral sidesteps. The more pronounced shifts at the six- and eight- minute marks are deftly navigated – Felgrave’s grip on dynamics and pacing is firm enough that both micro and macro transitions are spotless – but even with such proficient delivery, I found my investment in the *holds nose* overall trajectory slipping rather than tightening as the track went on. The eleven-minute mark plays as a very clean cutoff, and I’m not convinced that the preceding, clearly-defined sections serve as a salient prelude with the gradual descent into miasma that the rest of the track occupies itself with — pre-11:00 and post-11:00 are all cohabitation and no codependency. I’m unfortunately also less enamoured with the final run than the middle sections: those closing minutes remind me a little of Thantifaxath in their fixation on serving up a psychedelic meltdown from the dissonant harmonies between comparatively straightforward, often conspicuously scale-based riffs that feel increasingly predictable as the song goes by (not to rubbish all the riffwork here: from the sixteen-minute mark in particular, there are a few goodies). Perhaps the overall spectacle here eluded me, but I found this track’s scale and ambition were almost a distraction from the lightning that greases its wheels on a moment-to-moment transitional level. How many successful transitions does it take before we end up in one-thing-after-another territory? Hold that beer (this song is too big I should analyse it again ciao.)
Brendan must have felt like Gimli from Lord of the Rings when he picked up the colossal self-titled piece from Felgrave’s Otherlike Darknesses, shouting that it “still only counts as one”. There’s a lot to unpack in its 18 minutes of length, but the track rewards attentive listening as it reveals a new wilderness of sound beyond death metal’s increasingly rigid realm. It’s also quite striking to me how covered I feel by Brendan’s words for this, especially the childlike feeling of joy that also passed through me like electricity when the composition progressed from the 13th minute until the end, and the levels of chaotic energy it emits in that part, but also as a whole. Cinematic and grandiose, the composition is full of jaw-dropping transitions like this (another example: minutes eight to eleven), flows perfectly despite its complexity and carves jagged, immense structures of fleeting melodies and dissonance like it’s a cakewalk. I am not sure if this album gets the exposure it deserves, but what I am sure of is that anyone who actually listens to it, will be at least overwhelmed and awe-stricken by the incredible talent of M. L. Jupe and what he has accomplished with Otherlike Darknesses.
I’ve touched on prog monstrosities, I mentioned self-indulgence, but Otherlike Darknesses takes both of those concepts to a whole new level. Let’s get one thing out of the way: This latest Felgrave album is a phenomenal work of art — one that should garner attention and collect tons of Sput 4s and above from anyone with a preference for the prog/avant-garde side of extreme music. It is, for lack of a better term, outstanding. As someone who is no stranger to the pleasures of the temple-chin thinking man’s (guy from Pelican shoutout!) pose, I should be gushing over M. L.’s triumphant achievement here, but the sobering truth is that I fail to see why these songs had to be this sprawling. Your mileage will unshirkably vary and, to be fair, the moving parts are bolted together in such masterful fashion that it would be impossible for me to point at any single time stamp and declare it a potential cut-off point, but to me there’s not enough cohesiveness, not enough adhesion between the individual motifs to warrant the material’s daunting expanse. This is less of an issue for the “shorter” (12 and a half minutes long) “Pale Flowers Under an Empty Sky”, but bothersome enough to spoil my enjoyment of the opener and the closer picked by Brendan here. On repeat listens of “Otherlike Darknesses” I thought to myself, “Do I really want to sit through eight minutes of foreplay to get to that fantastic crescendo?”, and eventually came to the conclusion that, no, I didn’t — despite the sections I inconsiderately labeled as “foreplay” being beyond enjoyable by themselves. Again, this is not about the track’s length per se, but solely pertaining to the fact that many of the ideas presented here could have been developed into individual, full-fledged songs in order to allow the listener to take a break without losing the plot (which I understand is the very antithesis to the artist’s intention). One of my favorite “proggy-techy” DM songs of all time is Alkaloid’s “Rise of the Cephalopods”, which weighs in at an even more heavyset 20 minutes. Now, the idea of directly comparing it to this Felgrave song is absurd for a plethora of very obvious reasons, and I won’t go into too much detail for the sake of not making this any more wall-of-texty than it needs to be, but unlike “Darknesses”, “Cephalopods” often returns to figures previously alluded to, varies and twists them, and ultimately concludes them in a satisfying manner. Like I said, looking for analogies between the two would be a fruitless undertaking: Otherlike Darknesses (both the album and the song) clearly originates from a completely different artistic vision and mindset, and to my understanding overachieves in what Mason set out to do. This album is one of the year’s highlights and will end up on many AOTY lists come December. It’s also a piece of art that asks too much of me personally, and my rating reflects that. I might yet come around on this one and definitely plan on returning to it throughout the year. Dear reader, don’t miss out!
Reign Destroyer — 04.25.2025 — Sentient Ruin Laboratories — Spotify
There’s always something brewing in the dungeons of Sentient Ruin’s headquarters, and 2025 is already a prosperous year for them (think Délirant, Ritual Ascension, and Prophetic Suffering on the horizon). One of their latest additions is Samiarus from California, a war metal band that embraces punk’s roughest edges while relentlessly hammering scathing riffs, infernal yells, and stomping drums on their debut EP, Reign Destroyer. On “New Iron Age,” I came across a brutally beautiful example of how this niche subgenre thrives not only in frenetic speeds, but also in mid-tempo pacing, particularly during the track’s introduction. Of course, some momentum builds later on in the track, with a terrific short solo that collapses into its ominous ending, utterly engaging and effective in all its simplicity. The production and aesthetics are as harsh as the music, which also draws from the barren wastelands of noise / industrial for an even fuller spectrum aural assault, just in case you weren’t uncomfortable enough already. If you like extreme metal of warfare, no light and no hope, this is for you.
Per my earlier offering from Final Dose, I’ve got nothing against meat and potatoes bloodlettings so long as they do what they’re there for and serve up the grit and livewire energy it takes to stick the landing. “New Iron Age” unfortunately played as procedural to my ears: the bulk of the track felt comfortable to the point of complacency in midtempo territory, its high-octane runs were fuelled by blasts and trem riffs that might as well have come from a rote playbook, and none of its sections delivered a memorable overall highlight for me. I’m automatically sympathetic to an emphasis on rougher textures in extreme metal – give me that sloppy sandpapery punkishness all day! – but this didn’t have much bite to back it with for me.
Between this, Martoriator, Profanatica, CogaS and Hexekration Rites (and Felgrave if you want to count that), this week was blackdeath central. “New Iron Age” is a clear-cut offering taken from a satisfactory (read: good) EP by a band that’s not in the risk-taking business. If you’re familiar with this traditional kind of black/death intersection, there’s a good chance you’ve heard countless variations of the riffs Samiarus chose to incorporate on this track and throughout the whole of Reign Destroyer. I’ve never delved too deep into the subgenre myself, yet this sounded fairly unremarkable on the writing front. The build-up/bridge at 2:20 and the pithy riff that kicks in at 2:36 were my favorite parts here, but neither of those elements will make me put this band on my mental wish list. One thing that’s a cut above average is the production; the guitars sound sharp without ever getting screechy and the rhythm section provides a punchy, natural-sounding backdrop, with the drums being a clear standout. There’s really not much to add, but if you’re a fiend for blackened death metal (or vice versa) in the strictest sense of the term, you might get more out of this than I did.
Sentient Ruin has of late pared its focus down from a very diverse and artistically ambitious roster (which in the past accumulated and nurtured some of my favourite bands ever — Sleepwalker, Show of Bedlam, Decoherence, Mind Mold, Chaos Echœs etc. etc.) to a near-monoculture, consisting primarily of a very specific brand of bestial/noisy/blackened death/war metal, and the occasional noise or thrash record popping up in the crevices between. With this in mind from the outset, I am absolutely (and sadly) unsurprised by anything I’m hearing on pressing play. I can’t sugar coat the fact that this formula does very little for me with its basic ingredients, and that’s all I’m getting here for better or worse. I am weary. This song began and ended and I had to play it again to make sure I actually heard it. Harsh words? Maybe, but I simply need even a glimmer of risk taken, some jewel of excitement for this to not simply wash over me. I look to Knelt Rote, for instance. Where is the Knelt Rote of the now? (It’s Knoll, actually…) Or other past SR bands Friendship, Noose Rot and Diabolic Oath. Or the criminally underrated Aberration which somehow never seemed to get the push they deserved. Matter of fact I’m gonna go listen to Aberration S/T again right now… and I would encourage you to do the same. This one didn’t spark any joy, or anything at all, I’m afraid. Not this time, at least.
Tempus Edax Rerum — 04.21.2025 — Memento Mori / Obscure Disharmony — BC
The last release week of April was stacked to the brim with death metal bangers. When I learned that Supreme Void’s guitarist/vocalist used to be in a band called Nex, going with something off of Towards Oblivion seemed to be a foregone conclusion (and if you’re into the dissonant side of things, definitely check that one out). However, I have a soft spot for bands hailing from underrepresented countries, and Argentinian doomy black deathers Ataudes fit that bill to a T. As far as I’m aware, their homeland has never produced an act of Sepultura’s or Sarcófago’s caliber, and even a band like Horcas is largely ignored around these parts, as evidenced by their all-blank artist page on Sput. However, at least as far as DM is concerned, there seems to be some movement in Argentina’s scene of late. Following last month’s respectable OSDM outing by Horrendum Vermis, Tempus Edax Rerum represents yet another substantial specimen of the only relevant genre of music. While naysayers might decry the album’s uniformity and conjectural lack of ambition, both as a self-contained entity and in the grand scheme of the band’s past and present peers, it radiates enough mystique and esprit to make for a mesmeric excursion to the depths of the phenomenal world. The Spanish lyrics, which tackle a wide array of topics ranging from generalized sociocritical observations to self-reflection to tales of conjuration and witch-hunts, add to the air of otherness, as do the songs’ slower, atmosphere-focussed segments. I recommend listening to the album in one go, but if you need a taste, check the closer embedded above. It may offer little in the way of surprising chord progressions, but does a good job of combining the band’s trademark facets (now with 93% less synths): Gritty if familiar riffing with the occasional discordant set piece, accompanied by plenty of blasts and some melody-affording, catchy leads and solos. If I were to carp at anything just for the sake of it, it would be the uneven prod job, which while pleasantly paludian in nature, displays some puzzling mixing choices at specific points. Fortunately, they never get so irritating as to detract from the overall greatness here. Ataudes put out one of this month’s highlights for fans of all things murk with this album and prove that sometimes it’s wise to stick to what works without major revisions.
I know the young (lol he’s nearly 30 now, it’s been 10 years, christ…) guitarist here — Ivo Bisceglia — from Online Metal Shit, and I’ve been greatly anticipating his contributions to this fresh Ataudes full length after really getting behind his work on the Tumba de Carne full length from a few years back. Unsurprisingly, I love this. On Tempus Edax… Ataudes stamp themselves directly onto the spongy part of my brain I normally reserve exclusively for Vastum, Necrot, Mortiferum — the “serious” death metal of upper-mid-tempo bludgeoning designed by Bolt Thrower and perfected gradually over the years by them and a small handful of others. We can now put Ataudes among them. Never racing too far beyond 150 or so (to put a number to it), the tempo is fast enough to make you feel like something is happening when the blasts come out, but it’s slow enough that when you cut down to triplet feel (see 3 mins or so in “Maleficos”) or slower still, it can really pound. A fertile ground for the diversity of ideas this trio are playing with. Ivo and Jon have really pushed the boat out here, particularly in the quality of the melodic work. Focusing on the guitars for a bit, Ivo spends a lot of time doing what I can only describe as “overplaying”. Believe it or not this is a compliment — I’m talking about performance flourishes here. The album is littered with shit he didn’t need to be doing — cheeky mutes and stops, quarter tone bends, slides and slurs down the neck, ghost notes, specific pick chirping by playing in a precise part of the string over the pickups, a couple of great pinch harmonic motifs, all manner of ear candy treats from the subtle to the severe. All of which greatly smart-up riffs which might otherwise be identikit 16th note wiggling that we’ve long come to expect from this style, and only embiggen the other more creative rhythmic or harmonic swerves. Growing and shrinking bars, interesting triad movement, pretty wide harmony in layered chord stacks, 2nd wave black metal non-diatonic minor stuff… I’ll cool it with the music nerd shit, but it’s captivatingly composed when given the focus to parse out the detail. Maybe I had this experience because I know what to expect from Ivo and went into it with this attitude, I dunno… but it’s all in there. A thing I noticed only on my studio speakers (where the stereo image was a bit wider) is how up front and busy the bass guitar is. Pretty clean, dull and ‘mwa’, but sitting nicely between Double and sometimes Triple Ivo and following him creatively at every turn. On headphones it’s quite a lopsided, narrow soundstage except for the hard panned guitars, and the bass playing is rendered fairly indistinct. Vocally there are few exceptional moments to be found, and I am not a fan of the weak and breathy timbre here, but it does the job. If you aren’t booming from your huge guts like Tucker over this sort of stuff it’s not going to hit me, and I was aching to be bellowed at. In spite of this, there’s more than enough going on instrumentally to cover the shortfall of a lacklustre vocal and the sometimes weird mix choices, particularly when it comes to the drum tone and bus compression. After a track or two I forgot what my immediate problems were and sunk into the murk a bit, so I won’t prosecute that any harder, but I wonder what a more expensive sounding mix would do. When albums that sound like this cross my path I generally predict no new ideas after the 3rd song, but not here. The back half of the record just keeps twisting into new clever shapes. It’s clear that Ivo and Jon have listened to enough of The Chasm to also farsee the paranormal abysm, honing their compositions well enough to pull such an enjoyable record out of the sidereal haze. I’m gonna need an LP and a sand-coloured shirt of the artwork STAT.
Where Argentina’s Ataudes showed promise through decorous blackened death metal with their debut Merecemos la Extinción, their second full length album Tempus Edax Rerum displays a notable leap in songwriting as well as atmosphere. “Maleficios, conjuros & lamentaciones” is the last and longest piece here, but it’s really worth it to start from the beginning and see how the band gets there. A few instances in the first part of this track reminded me of the latest Vacivus record, and when the band contemplates longer with mid-paced structures towards the end, similarities can be drawn with recent Krypts material. These two parts are linked with a more unhinged passage (from roughly 3:40 to about the fifth minute) where Ataudes suddenly kind of shapeshift to Portal, which I found to be a really interesting moment that also underlined a certain compositional evolution. The band’s dive into doom-infused, rhythmically hypnotic death metal with a fair amount of mayhemic bursts, lacks nothing in vision or memorability compared to similar releases that often get way more coverage in physical or digital media. Makes you wonder.
Maybe the incremental trials and assaults of this list have done their foul work on my nervous system (and maybe this was the desired effect thanks Nex), but this ended up horrifyingly close to that much-maligned, forever-misunderstood premise of a Background Listen, bane of peons whose impoverished attention spans and heartbreaking dependencies on gratification require their music to be constantly doing something. Now, I’m frazzled enough right now that I’m 99% sure this is a reflection of me rather than the track, but as someone who values listening to minutes-of-sound just as much as seconds-of-action, I’m going to indulge this impression regardless and say that y’know what, this pairing of hazy tremolo-blackage and chunky-deathage feels remarkably well-balanced and that I’m a big fan of how comfortable these guys are coasting on their atmospherics! Awesome. I am ascended and we are become riff — the song does, however, end a little abruptl
Other noteworthy releases from week 17:
Insineratehymn – Irreverence of the Divine (S)
Supreme Void – Towards Oblivion (S)
Ceremonial Flesh – Advent of Putridity (S)
Corrupter – Gloria in Profundis (S)
Gorekaust – Fleshcross (S)
Morefected – Demo 2025 (B)
Cadaver – Hymns of Misanthropy (S)
Percipient – Apparitions (S)
Changeling – Changeling (S)
Profanatica – Wreathed in Dead Angels (S)
Scoured Crypt – Demo 2025 (B)
Carnelian Idol – Spiritual Revanchism (B)
Banished Realm – Utterances of an Ennead (S)
Feral Howl – Den Blodstenkede Jord og Vederstyggelighetens… (B)
Hexekration Rites – Misanthropic Path of Carnal Deliverance (B)
Martoriator – Bloodpainted Visions of Perpetual Conflict (B)
Aaand that’s a wrap! Truly some of the words of all time. Just look at all those glorious walls! Give it up for Night, who squeezed these writing sessions in despite his busy schedule, Johnny, who let all these infra-dig riffs wash over him with the patience of a dog pretending not to see the dropped steak, and Brendan, who went so above and beyond with his analyses, he made Demon of the Fall’s comments look like one-liners! Having reached the finish in record time, there’s only one thing left to do:
Brendan, you are a madman in the best sense. Thanks again for doing this — it’s been a joy to read your thoughts and insights. Any last words before we let you off the hook?
Yeah nah fucken oath. A pleasure as always to get to think/talk/write about and, above all, listen to music. Thanks to the other heads for asking me to do this, and for supplying some interesting and new things for me to explore. There were several that didn’t make it to final selection but it was very helpful to have a list of stuff to paw through. I rely heavily on word of mouth/insistence to find new stuff these days due to a chronic lack of time for sifting. If anyone ever wants to do a deep dive on ‘85 – ‘95 cold war technothrash/silky shirt progressive music from the golden era, you know who to call. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank anyone who gave a shit about Perdurance and wrote about it on Sput — I tried to log back into my account to have a yarn about it and respond to some queries but none of the recovery systems work, and I haven’t used my account for approximately one thousand years. If anyone wants to fix that for me, I’d appreciate it. If anyone reading this wants to get in touch with me for anything, especially if you want to make music together, I’m pretty easy to find. See youse ‘round like a rissole.
Ever wondered how they’d make Convulsing work live? Here’s your chance to find out:
Previously on Extreme Measures:
