Life’s got you down and you need both a refreshing pick-me-up and a quick turnaround on an overdue album review?  There is a way to get both at the same time!  All you gotta do is drink from the cup of heresy.  This week’s offerings: Nargaroth’s Apocalyptic Steel and More Brewing Company’s Take One Down.

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The Tunes: Nargaroth’s Apocalyptic Steel

Speaking of things long overdue, we are finally getting Apocalyptic Steel in our hands, an album that most people who are not former or current members of Nargaroth did not even know they were missing out on, and yet one that showcases the German project at their most urgent and uncompromising.  Nargaroth is, was and always will be the brainchild of one Rene “Ash” Wagner, and for nearly thirty years, he has been churning out no-frills, raw and brutal black metal, drawing from old-school influences across the metal spectrum, from Darkthrone and Mayhem to Deicide and Obituary to Judas Priest, Accept and Motörhead.  Apocalyptic Steel represents a blip, albeit a significant one, in that time: recorded in a single weekend in California back in September of 2014, the album sat long-forgotten on a hard drive in the US for nearly a decade, before resurfacing in 2022 when drummer Phil Cancilla re-recorded the drums.  From there, it would be another three years before vocals were laid down and proper mixing and mastering was done. But now, almost twelve years after it was originally tracked, that wild weekend finally sees the light of day as a proper release.  “Recorded fast, recorded dirty and finished on its own terms” is how Nargaroth describes this album, and you know what?  Fast and dirty are exactly the words I would use to describe Apocalyptic Steel.

Take one look at the cover of this album: do you get the feeling like you already know what this album sounds like?  You’re right, it sounds exactly like that!  This is black metal with no frills, no “post-” anything, no adornments; just furious, pummelling and ripping riff after riff, and barely a break to catch your breath at all.  Cuts like the title track, “Man of Mayhem” and “Twisted Steel” brim with the evil, throat searing rage of the classics of black metal: the guitar work is suitably over the top, and the breakneck speed is both technically impressive from an instrumental standpoint and exactly what fans of old-school black metal will rejoice in.  Still, that’s not to say Apocalyptic Steel is without its surprises: “Shelter the Faithless” reeks of the kind of death metal crawling out of the Florida swamps of the 90’s, and while “I Drink Alone” and “Metalheart” are definitely black metal tracks in their instrumentals, the tongue-in-cheek humor and raucous energy read much closer to Priest and Motörhead.  The only real unpleasant surprise on here might be “Dresden”; it’s a weird choice to include a power ballad right in the middle of an album that is about as cold and brutal as it gets, and it sticks out like a much-too-sore thumb.  Still…not bad for a weekend’s work!

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Apocalyptic Steel is out now on Season of Mist.  For more information on Nargaroth, visit their Facebook page.

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The Booze: More Brewing Company’s Take One Down

As I mentioned in my last edition of this column, our favorite brew place is closing down imminently.  More so than the loss of delicious beer, we are losing a place where we could gather with friends and enjoy a sense of community, a third space and an activity.  That’s a hole that’s hard to fill, but fortunately, we’ve found Beer on the Wall, a combination bar/liquor store/gaming cafe that seems like a good candidate to fill the Illuminated Brewworks shaped hole in our hearts.  Not only do they sell a wide variety of hard-to-find beer, liquor and seltzers, not only do they offer places for people to come together to play Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering and a whole host of board games, but they also have done a collaboration with More Brewing, a name astute readers of this column will surely recognize.  Take One Down is similar to Apocalyptic Steel in the sense that there are no frills about this one: it’s a German pilsner, by and for people who love German pilsners.  Take a look at the label on this can: do you get the feeling like you already know what this beer tastes like?  You’re right, it tastes exactly like that!  It’s bright, citrusy without being tropical or piney, it’s crisp and damn refreshing.  Turns out that, just like black metal, there doesn’t strictly have to be a gimmick to do something classic well; you just have to do it well, and both Nargaroth and More Brewing have achieved that.

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Before too long then, eh soldiers?  Cheers, and be good to each other.

-Ian