It seems a lot of metal bands these days enjoy playing with subgenres and creating hybrid sounds. I love the creativity of these groups and their courage to explore the space and make something unique. Australia’s Empress is one of those experimental bands and their latest release, Wait ‘Til Night, is an alluring combination of shoegaze, doom, indie, post-metal, and black metal. This album is dark yet delicate, haunting, and dreamy. The band’s signature sound is fine tuned in this, their sophomore album.
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Profile: Post-Metallers Fall of Messiah
Post-metal, post-rock, hardcore, and screamo are all tags befitting of Fall of Messiah and just as you’ll read below, the band prefers listeners and fans to form their own experiences and opinions of their music so, for us, it’s post-metal. With that said, the emotional mixture on display with their newly minted fourth album Senicarne is out of this world. Sure, elements of all the aforementioned tags can be heard throughout and influences from some of post-metal’s heaviest hitters can also be heard but the way Fall of Messiah put this album together is like your favorite roller coaster of highs, lows, and everything in between with moments of crushing heaviness earmarked with lush beauty around every turn. We asked the band our set of Profile questions to get under the hood a little so read on below to see what they had to say and be sure to hit those links to show them some support. Continue reading
Nine Circles ov…2020: A Mid-Year Report
I don’t think anyone expected the world to be where it was when 2020 kicked off. To even attempt to put into words the surge of feelings around a global pandemic that refuses to go away, a wretched history of systemic racism, brutality, and ignorance being exposed and reckoned with in the streets all over the world, and everything else the first six months has brought to light is reckless and futile for me right now. I continue to watch, listen, and learn as much as I can: to actively be part of a solution instead of passively being part of the problem.
In the moments between there is music, and if there’s even a glimmer of light right now, it’s in how good 2020 has been with regards to metal. So let’s see where my penchant lies as we cross the halfway mark of year that feels like forever. Continue reading
Album Review: Adzes — “No One Wants To Speak About It”
If the opening thirty seconds of No One Wants To Speak About It by Adzes doesn’t immediately hook you, I don’t think we can be friends. Nothing hits the spot like heavy Isis-inspired riffs brutally nailed to a cross of harmonization and beauty. Sludgy and dark, angry and unforgiving, and bearing the unrelenting anti-capitalist and anti-fascist message, it is everything I want in my home-grown one man metal projects.
Album Review: Arbrynth — “A Place of Buried Light”
It took a while for it to happen, but the weather here in Chicago finally reached the “endless gray and gloom” stage of winter, where every day feels exactly the same and there hasn’t been sunlight in what feels like months. During these periods, I like to lean into the kind of music that embraces that chilly, desolate mood the snow and slush bring, and, just in time, Melbourne’s Arbrynth have released their sophomore album A Place of Buried Light. The album perfectly encapsulates what a Chicago winter feels like: cold, dark but with a subtle hope for what’s next. Continue reading