Best of 2018: Chris’s List

EOY 2018 Header 9C

What does music do for you?

In the end, it’s the only question that matters.  An admittedly hard question to hear, what with the screaming of every opinion in every corner of the internet, but in the end when you step away from the noise and muck of screen shouting and scene guarding it’s your opinion in the end.  Every year that I’ve written an end of year list for Nine Circles it’s been a variation of the same theme: when we write about music, we’re writing about ourselves.  What matters is what the music does to you, and only for you.

But what’s the point, if you’re really only writing for yourself? Continue reading

Album Review: Megaton Leviathan – “Mage”

Megaton Leviathan - Mage

Megaton Leviathan felt like a secret, something I discovered browsing through Bandcamp late one evening that none of my friends knew about.  Funeral cosmic doom that embraced so many disparate elements to craft a forlorn style of music that spoke directly to the frightened receptors in my brain.  After a sizable gap in time Mage has fallen to the cold, hard ground to remind me that buried in the dark is a lush sense of melody and decay.   Continue reading

Initial Descent: October 21 – 27, 2018

Hate Eternal
Hate Eternal

My weekend festivities consisted of healthy doses of horror and metal, as it should. How many of you caught the new Halloween? I thought they did a great job with it and the fact that they packed it with stuff for fans of the original was a definite plus. And I’ll leave it at that in case you haven’t seen it yet. As for the metal, read on to see what’s in store this week…

Hate Eternal are back with their seventh full length of wildly technical but oh so good death metal on Upon Desolate Sands – I’m not calling it a triumph over Infernus yet but Rutan and co. kill it as usual. No matter what camp of Bloodbath you frequent the most, their fifth full length The Arrow of Satan Is Drawn offers enough horror fueled Swedeath for any and all parties, I dig it. Norway’s Sjukdom keep it frosty with 90s style black metal but offer just enough melodicism to trip my trigger on Stridshymmer Og Dodssalmer and Oregon’s Megaton Leviathan turn the psychedelic drone of Mage into an entrancing ritual which makes it a worthy successor to their stunning Past 21: Beyond the Arctic Cell.

AND there is much, much more to sink your teeth into so get in there… Continue reading