Masters of riffs and doomy goodness, Monolord have emerged from the smoke after two years with their latest full-length release Your Time to Shine. This is most certainly a Monolord album, however, there is some fine-tuning and added finesse making it a unique addition to the band’s discography. It may even be the best album by the Swedish trio to date. This dynamic album has everything fans love about Monolord—amazing riffs, sludge distortion, hypnotic doom metal vocals—with added dramatics and wrapped in a crisp production. Your Time to Shine was created with “liters of coffee, cinnamon buns, and good bad jokes” which can be felt in these five tracks. Who knew that was the perfect formula for creating stellar doom metal?
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Album Review: Elder — “Omens”
Do you like riffs? Do you like riffs so much that you feel like what you should do is interrupt riffs to add more riffs? Have you ever said to yourself “this riff needs more riffage”? Well, if that’s the case, I assume you are already familiar with Elder, but if not, Omens continues their riffy trend with cleaner vocals, more synths, and their signature articulate fuzzy guitar tone. They’ve come a long way from their early stoner doom roots with an album that is refined and masterfully produced.
The Nine Circles Audio Thing: Baroness was June 2019’s Album of the Month!
Episode 25! How the hell did we make 25 of these?! It boggles the mind, but not as much as the production choices on Gold & Grey, the latest from Savannah’s rocking sludge merchants Baroness and not coincidentally our Album of the Month selection for June 2019! Continue reading
Album Review: The Dark Red Seed – “Becomes Awake”
Occupying a space somewhere in the dark corners of psychedelia and the snake charming swagger of dark folk lay the heart and bones of The Dark Red Seed, the duo comprised of King Dude guitarist Tosten Larson and engineer Shawn Flemming. Where King Dude travels the sonic highways of neon bars and the squalor of dim hallways, Tosten and Flemming migrate to more exotic climates, and their debut full length Becomes Awake is an ambitious if slightly mixed offering that works the weirder and spacier it gets. Continue reading
Album Review: Black Salvation – “Uncertainty is Bliss”
It’s easy to mimic the surface level vibe of what heavy rock music was in the 70s: there’s a couple dozen bands trying to bring back flared jeans and boogie as we speak. It’s another thing to get under the skin of the period, to take the freak and experimentation and truly inhabit it as more than just a fashion to be hung around the neck. Black Salvation inhabit this dark crevice of creativity on sophomore album Uncertainty is Bliss, reveling in a dark and twisted psychedelic rock that’s not afraid to meander and slither even as it engages in deep hooks and a solid song structure that other bands try in vain to capture. Continue reading