willowtip records

Album Review: Contrarian — “Sage of Shekhinah”

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Contrarian - Sage of Shekhinah

Where does an album get their genre descriptor from? And who has the authority to give an album, and the band who created the album in the first place, said genre descriptor? If anyone has listened to both prog death and tech death long enough, you’ll notice there is a fine line between both genres, especially when their descriptions become subjective to the listener. Casting the finer points of metal music vernacular aside, the reason for this thought was that Contrarian’s fifth album, Sage of Shekhinah, straddles the line between the experimental nature of prog death and the technical instrumentation of tech death. Let’s discuss.

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Album Review: Ominous Scriptures — “Rituals of Mass Self-Ignition”

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The early 2000’s was a special time for me.  It was the beginning of my transition into the world of extreme metal.  At the time, I was into classic metal, your Metallicas, your Black Sabbaths and AC/DCs and what have you, but it was around 2003 or 2004 that my mom accidentally got me MTV2’s Headbanger’s Ball, Vol. 2, which was my first taste of the extreme side of heavy metal.  Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I started seeking out even more extreme and brutal metal, and the rest is history.  Ominous Scriptures’ Rituals of Mass Self-Ignition immediately takes me back to that point in my life.

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Receiving the Evcharist: Lamentations and Other Half Brewing’s DDH Small Cashmere Everything

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Receiving the Evcharist 2018

I am back in the saddle after a long while. Miss me? Of course you did. Anyway, let’s drink from the cup of heresy with Lamentations‘ Passion of Depression and Other Half Brewing‘s DDH Small Cashmere Everything.

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Second Circle: Hath and Egregore

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Second Circle

In Dante’s Inferno, the second circle begins the proper punishment of Hell, a place where “no thing gleams.” It is reserved for those overcome with Lust, where carnal appetites hold sway over reason. In Nine Circles, it’s where we do shorter reviews of new (ish) albums that share a common theme.

Within the last two years or so, I’ve come to enjoy taking a long, hard look at my own biases when it comes to music I like and don’t like. I have a long-form rambling manifesto on the topic of progressive metal from a while back to that effect, but that is not where this self-interrogation begins or ends. I have been finding a lot of albums lately that I love despite their being played in a style of metal that I don’t generally gravitate towards, and this brings me another chance to shine a light into the cobweb-strewn corners of what’s left of my brain and grill myself about two albums that could each conceivably be called ‘blackened death metal’, although both choose to do something wildly different with that prompt. With that, I bring you something old, and something new…

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Hath’s Frank Albanese on new album “All That Was Promised,” working with Willowtip, Bandcamp, and much more!

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Hath

On their debut Of Rot and Ruin, Hath stunned a crowded death metal landscape with their brutal Opethesque take on it. Now, three years and a pandemic later, All That Was Promised is even better with tighter songwriting, even more razor sharp riffs than before, and an incredibly apocalyptic atmosphere. In two albums, Hath has reached a level that most bands take years to develop. Just on the heels of the new album’s release, Buke had the chance to chat with vocalist and guitarist Frank Albanese about the new album and how the band dealt with the extremely high bar they set three years ago, how it’s been working with Willowtip Records and how that union came to be, Bandcamp and the Epic Games recent purchase of same, how Frank learned to play guitar, and some of Frank’s and the band’s history in the Jersey scene. They also cover one of Frank’s favorite albums of 2021, video games, album art, giving black metal artists free ideas, and a ton more. 

This is an epic length conversation, so grab your beverage of choice and settle in for another edition of the Nine Circles Audio Thing.

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