norway

What happened??? Revelations of the Black Flame (Candlelight, 2009) has nine tracks. Four are ambient interludes. One is a six-minute intro. One is a Pink Floyd cover. (Evidently Americans aren’t the only black metallers indulging their “psychedelic influences.”) The three remaining tracks are metal, but two mine a sort of blackened doom. (“Serpentine Sibilance” is […]

Yesterday, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas turned 15. Much has been made of its urtext status in black metal, as well as its violent circumstances. (Wikipedia notes, “It may also be the only heavy metal album, and possibly the only album in any genre, on which both a murderer and his victim perform.”) However, its musicality […]

Above: metalheads in Mexico City last week. Note the Tsjuder shirt. My mother is telling me not to go outside. This is New York Fucking City. If everyone followed her advice, nothing would get done. Or perhaps everyone would be alive. WHO knows. Supposedly an industrial pig farm started all this. One level below pandemic, […]

I’ve had Burzum’s “Tomhet” stuck in my head after I saw Severed Ways (reviewed here), in which the song figured prominently. Astral and peaceful, it’s an odd bird in Burzum’s ambient works, which tend to be brooding (early period) or martial (late period). The first time I heard “Tomhet”, I thought, “Atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass”. […]

by Cosmo Lee Record release dates differ worldwide for various reasons – business concerns, store stocking practices, manufacturing processes. Although varying release dates are typical in metal, those of The Age of Nero stand out. Roadrunner released it in Europe on November 3, 2008. The next day brought news of a deal with Koch for […]

by Cosmo Lee My mother, who lives in North Dakota, emailed me recently: …there is a winter storm and we have been under Arctic spell for several days now and will continue to X’mas day (windchill -30 F and + everyday)… -30 F converts to -34 C, for you Europeans. Gothenburg, SE, and Bergen, NO […]

by Cosmo Lee By now, the images are iconic. Frost breathes fire in a cave; King ov Hell glowers next to a blood-red building; Nattefrost wields an inverted cross (see above). Peter Beste‘s black metal photography has penetrated popular culture enough so that it’s lost some of its shock value. It’s still striking, though. Those […]

by Cosmo Lee Khold‘s schtick is cool, so to speak – black metal that trades not in blastbeats and anguished rasps but midpaced, head-nodding grooves and commanding growls by a cross between Galder and the Phantom of the Opera. Until now, though, the band has been utterly mediocre. Previous albums were slow seemingly because the […]

by Cosmo Lee Trinacria is a collaboration between 3/5 of Enslaved – everyone but the rhythm section – and Fe-Mail, a noise duo comprised of Maja Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tafjord. (The former is a prolific composer and performer whose 2002 album Voice was co-produced by noise terrorists Jazzkammer.) The project began as a concert […]

by Jess Blumensheid Runhild Gammelsaeter is a beast. She contorts her vocals to sound unreal, more ill-tempered than any horror film villain. Her intuitive sense of experimentation is profound, surpassing any female vocalist in metal. With her first solo album, Amplicon (Utech, 2008), Gammelsaeter exceeds expectations based on her work in Thorr’s Hammer and Khlyst. […]