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
That’s right, folks…in a few short hours I will be on a plane and getting out of this god forsaken hell hole where it’s already stating to snow AGAIN and heading South for warmer climes, cooler waters, and copious amounts of alcohol – copious in this instance meaning maybe 1-2 drinks since I’m old and sleepy and my liver won’t stand for much more than that at this point.
But fear not! Our lovely editor has made sure I am not forgoing my Nine Circles duties, and has loaded me up with a ton of music to start digesting so when I get back I can get back to sharing what’s hot, what’s not, and what’ll curl your toes with glee or disgust (who am I to judge?). So for this edition of Nine Circles ov… I give you a purview of a few things on my radar over the next few weeks. Does this seem like a quick ploy to bang a column out before I leave for vacation? Sure! Does it matter? You be the judge! Continue reading
Man cannot live on metal alone.
“Blasphemy!” you may cry, but true…at least in this dude’s case. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of stress and activity as I turned another year older, paid another bill, worked another late night, blah blah blah. It gets to a point sometimes when you just need to clear your head and take a little time for yourself. Not to mention that after a while when you’re digesting promo after promo you run the danger of not giving the music the attention it warrants. And you start to look for shortcuts. “Well,” you tell yourself, “I heard the first four songs, I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to really change my mind about this thing.” Or worse, you start just leaning more and more on the materials in the press release: “Oh! A cross of Joan Baez and Incantation? But with drone elements? I’ll say a mix of Joni Mitchell and Malevolent Creation with, uh….fuck it, drone elements.”
You know what I’m taking about. For me, it’s a matter of disconnecting in order to reconnect. And there’s been plenty of music I’ve been discovering over the past few months that have helped me to reconnect with what it is I love about loud noises. So for this edition of Nine Circles ov… I want to share a few of the records that have been recharging the batteries and re-calibrating the heavy sensors. Let’s dig in. Continue reading
Deafheaven has become one of my favorite live bands for many reasons. I’ve seen them numerous times over the past few years and they have always delivered great performances. Hell, I saw them twice in one day during Chicago Open Air last year. But what I’ve respected as much as anything else is the diversity of the lineups they perform with. Tribulation, Envy, Carcass, Between the Buried and Me… the list goes on and on. Varying bands from varying forms of metal, one tour to the next. This lineup at the Paradise Rock club a couple weeks back, featuring the likes of Emma Ruth Rundle and This Will Destroy You, might have been the most intriguing (or curious) yet. Continue reading
It’s nearly a given at this point in heavy music that genre lines are far more blurred than they were even ten years ago. As the tendrils of post-metal, ambient music, and shoegaze crept into black metal, death metal, and doom metal (and vice versa), it suddenly became much harder to classify bands with a rigid genre tag. The same has happened with a good amount of music tangential to metal: Post-punk has always been viewed as the big brother (or father, even) of goth rock, new wave, and industrial, but the beginning of each sound was fairly self-contained in its origins until artists started integrating more textures. It’s interesting, then, when all these worlds collide at once; Atlanta-based trio Dead Register have crafted an absolutely stunning debut with Fiber, which seamlessly coalesces influences from gothic rock, shoegaze, doom metal, and some “post” tendencies, both rock and metal. Continue reading
