It's all happening downtown...

Anniversary of the greatest newspaper headline ever.

April 15… forget the IRS and taxes. Forget my mom’s birthday. What this date is really about is a classic NY Post headline.

New Zealand’s grinding death metal war machine Heresiarch stoke the bellows after four years with a new full length entitled Edifice. As uncompromising as ever with a borderline war metal assault somewhere between AngelCorpse and Krisiun speed with Hate Eternal and Dim Mak heft and tech given occasional forays into doomed out passages serving as brief surveys of no man’s land before launching another volley of riffs, blower bass and pounding drums. More refined than Diocletian yet retaining a chaotic edge.

Speaking of which, isn’t a new Diocletian in the wings?

While on this war metal aside… Similar uncontrolled chaos of Adversarial will be unleashed at the end of May. All aboard the Erich Kennedy lightning train. Dude has been on hyperblast since 07 and, fatigue be damned, displays no sign of slowing…even on the fade out he’s accelerating.

Do you think Ulcerate, like Queensryche, don’t believe in love? Somewhere those classic riffs lodged in their brains and regurgitated in mutated forms throughout “To Flow Through Ashen Hearts.” Love the bass runs meandering about this tangle of Dehn Sora footage. The mix is dynamic adding to the push and pull, placing emphasis on different musical elements over the duration of the track and never concealing the mangled DeGarmo riffs.

Not to be confused with Mære, but, Marea are an Italian melodic black metal band with post leanings that bridge a gap somewhere between early Novembre and Dissection while using off color chords. Not gonna lie, I only discovered this after a recent No Clean Singing piece where labelmates Boleskin House were featured.

Typically I hate when labels do this: preview almost the entire album one song at a time before the street date. Transcending Obscurity has 4 of 5 Mære tracks streaming on bandcamp and YouTube. Hopefully there’s a surprise in store with the remaining one; but, I’m pretty sure the whole thing will be previewed before April 19. Anyhow… off the soap box old man and enjoy this German conduit to Steeve Hurdle and Denis Piggy D’Amour riff worship. Enjoy the twisted, angular dissonant metal.

While Voivod build the war chest for the documentary film by Felipe Belalcázar why not take a listen to an hour and a half of Piggy demos recorded while on the road during Outer Limits. All of it infinitely (infini?) better than what would surface further down the road on the hard drive albums. Almost all of it is still better than what 99% of any band would and will write. Check the comments for Deceased’s King Fowley’s recollection of obtaining the holy grail for which you are to allow your ears to drink.

Also, speaking of Voivod… the set list we saw at Stroudsburg, PA not too long ago was all killer. Zero fat. Could’ve asked for a better Eric Forrest track, but, “Rise” is a nice ode to that brief era. Forgotten in Space, Holographic Thinking, Tribal Convictions, Rise, Pre-Ignition, Nuclear War, Fall, Condemned to the Gallows, The End of Dormancy, Fix My Heart and Voivod. Fucking tremendous.

Meanwhile, Deceased ran a gauntlet of shows with Vio-Lence and Exhorder over the past couple of weeks. Look for the long lived fearless undead machine to unleash a new album on Hell’s Headbangers later in the year. Desmond Root Ambrose with the cover artwork.

“God Damn the Sun,” don’t Devenial Verdict know Michael Gira has proclaimed “I Am the Sun?” These Finns may claim, “I Have Become the Sun,” but, have no doubt, Michael Gira has noted not only that “I Am the Sun” but “I Am a Tower.” What Devenial Verdict have that Gira and Swans do not is unrelenting, blasting speed. Yet another future winner from the Transcending Obscurity stable.

Speaking of Transcending Obscurity winners… Replicant coming off a triumphant European tour and seeing the release of Infinite Mortality to glowing reviews. Brute, thug rhythms meet thinking man’s angular tech. Sort of what would happen if Steeve Hurdle re-engineered Burn My Eyes and The More Things Change and told Flynn to shut his sasshole, let an adult write and scream the lyrics. I know, I know. A lot of you Stateside refuse to acknowledge NJ being the cradle of winners. The State offer up evidence in the 95/00/03 NJ Devils, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, dälek, Human Remains, Discordance Axis, and other bands without Dave Witte including Replicant currently at the fore.

If you follow Omination you know who Fedor Kovalevsky is. He may be getting busy with a new project. Or he’s only experimenting with techniques. Whatever the case, it sounds promising.

Two from from Purgatorial. Manchester, UK. Sorrowful, doom death that treads similar sonic space as Altars, Convulsing and Portal. Insectoid gibbering speedy moments, gurgling magma slow passages and hellmouth vocals. Love the description of this project being “detuned hymns straight from the abyss.”

You know what else has ties to Manchester and is a top 10 album for me from 2023? If you read older posts you’d know… She The Throne.

Speaking of magma and volcanic bursts… this cavernous deathly entity Fastidium discovered beneath the Honolulu Volcanics of Hawai'i was detected by and is currently channeled through a member of YUH. Gnarled, twisted forms of what is almost free form, free wheeling death metal that sonically aligns with Replicant and Worn Mantle in that it is culling from both atavistic recesses of the mind as well as forward thinking alien intelligence.

Whew… well, that has been two posts too close together. Don’t get used to it.

Please visit Everything Went Black, The Metal Dad and his fiendish five podcast, No Clean Singing, Stereogum: The Black Market, The Devil’s Mouth, Aversionline, Invisible Oranges, Horror Wolf 666, Into the Necrosphere, Sol Nox Podcast, The Book of Very Very Bad Things, Plague Rages, Thrown to the Abyss Podcast, Freedom Has No Bounds, Machine Music, Dreams of Consciousness, Doktor Dismemberment’s Midnight Murderplex and Crucial Blast’s Warhead…. most of these sites update more frequently than I do here at this platform.