CD Reviews

Callisto return with their fifth LP, Secret Youth and while this still has a lot of Callisto's dark, progressive and distinctive sound, it's a little more stripped back. Gone are some of the more sombre jazz like sections found on Noir and Providence.

"Pale Pretender" opens the album with a dark and atmospheric riff. Jani Ala-Hukkala's almost Mike Patton-esque crooning leads the song toward a soaring chorus. While this may not be as heavy as Noir or True Nature Unfolds, this track is brimming with...

Like some gargantuan, mythological beast of melancholy, destined to roam the earth, wailing with grief and convulsing with despair. It destroys habitats and men with nary a thought to it's own powers of destruction, deaf to the screams of those being obliterated, without the knowledge or awareness of it's own capabilities. At The Gates have an awe-inspiring ability to create music with a...

“For fuck’s sake, get over it” the Irish are muttering; much like St. Patrick’s Day and Guinness, the English are enthralled by the murky death metal sound of Zom and have been hankering after another release since their demo came out last year. These dudes are very much a staple of the death metal scene in Ireland, heck they’re a part of pretty much every scene in Ireland, being stuck on the line up of just about every respectable gig that...

Sacramento’s four-piece, Bog Oak, are a band that have been slowly building a respectable reputation, within the underground, for about a year. Their DIY efforts caught the attention of the good folks at Svart Records and they now find themselves very much in the public eye, with the impending release of their first EP ‘A Treatise On Resurrection And The Afterlife’.

The current metal scene needs another doom band like a fish needs a bicycle and, while that is the sole focus of Bog Oak’s music, they should not be dismissed as what they have to offer is strangely unique to an incredibly oversaturated sub-genre. Bog Oak weave together fuzzed-out sludge atmospherics...

In my imagination, Revocation are a huge, gleaming, chrome sponge. More than any band I listen to, they seem to have chewed up the last 30 years of the harder, heavier end of Metal and, like the pellet of an owl, you can pore over and dissect the ejaculate to easily identify every morsel they've ingested. Their trick, and the reason they've been so relatively successful, is that they...

Voices are formed from the ashes of Akercocke by certified badmen David Gray (drummer extraordinaire), Peter Benjamin (Guitar & Vocals) and Sam Loynes (Guitar), the line up being completed by Daniel Abela (Bass).

Considering that ¾ of the band are from Akercocke voices managed to take most people I know by surprise with their debut...

Surely this is the sound of the wind and the rain on a filthy November afternoon, soaking you as you walk the coastal path, the sound of burning leaves and deadwood in Autumn, the smoke flavouring the air, the sound of sunlight piercing the heavy and swollen clouds, the sunlight and shadows racing and tumbling across the slopes and fields of the moors, the lakes blazing in...

So this one's all about going insane, going, quite literally, off your noggin, dipping the nosecone of your flying machine and letting the tailspin take you where it will. Spiraling is the key word on this collection - the riffs like a lorryload of spinning tops tipped down a long, sweeping rubber corkscrew of a stairway, the drums frantic to follow every trajectory while an impossibly harsh whip-cracker screams and bellows to impose order on...

We breathe laments for those who destroy without pity or mercy - there is no hope; anguish gnaws on the glistening nerve, the soft pulp of our desperate desire to live - our only understanding is for the bleak acceptance that what fixes its gaze upon us will be our end, our doom - a new life is lived in those few heartbeats left to us, a terrible, swirling journey - but the hammer blow, when it comes, is swift, measured - delivered with...

I think it's the vocals. The vocals and the drums. The vocals, the drums and the guitar tone. But really, it's the vocals. Doom metal, like grindcore, is an inherently restrictive genre and the question is always: what distinguishes this band from another? And, on this album, Conan have found that elusive set of criteria.

The foundation stone, the building block are those astonishing dual vocals (Jon Davis/Phil Coumbe) developed since 'Horseback Battlehammer'- calling out from beyond the mountains, from below the oceans, echoing through the arctic tundra and the searing African...