Ad Baculum is a band that, in theory, should be pretty good. The sole member, Meugninousouan, was the vocalist for one of Brazil’s earliest Black Metal hordes, Mystifier. He’s been in the scene for ages, and having been in and around extreme music for most of his life, he should know a thing or two about creating evil Black Metal, right? Sadly, this isn’t the case. This is his second Ad Baculum LP, and though I haven’t heard the band’s 2011 debut, Blackness Doctrine, if what’s on Abstract Abysmal Domain is any guide, I didn’t really miss much. Though the music on this album is somewhat reminiscent of Mystifier, the main problem with it is that it’s pretty boring. It’s severely lacking in heaviness, brutality and menace. Basically, it sounds neutered. The guitars are sterile, and the best way to describe them would be to say that they’re like someone revving a chainsaw but with most of the bass sucked out of the recording. The drum sound is likewise lifeless, with a trashcan lid snare and light switch bass drums. There’s no energy in the playing at all, even when the speed kicks up to “blast” levels. The drumming is fast, but mechanical, and could very well be a simply programmed drum machine. And then there are the vocals… Meugninousouan has a very monotone style, and his delivery is one of the problems that fucks up everything. He doesn’t know how to mesh his singing with the rest of the music, the result being that there’s no “flow” to it. The vocals ramble away, absolutely oblivious to all else that’s going on, sounding like Meugninousouan reading us a dissertation on Satanism in a growly monotone while a band is rehearsing in the room next door. It’s that disconnected. Unfortunately, the only things going for this LP are the Mystifier connection and a cool band logo. Other than that, it’s essentially a waste of time and money.

Though Cult of Fire hails from the Czech Republic, their influences are not what you would expect. This isn’t your typical Black Metal LP by a long shot. The band’s basic Bathory-esque assault has been copiously augmented by inspirations culled from Hindu mystical traditions, literature and music. There’s lots of chanting, Indian musical instruments, and song structures that are not normally found in European Black Metal all over this album, and those are the things that give Cult of Fire a sound that’s pretty unique. I like how the band was able to incorporate outside ideas into Black Metal in a way that’s still dark and evil sounding, but at the same time has a different atmosphere from the others in the genre. What makes this so good is the fact that Cult of Fire has melded Indian/Hindu mystical imagery and sound into their music in a way that sounds natural. None of the additions to the basic Bathory-influenced Black Metal style sound tacked on or out of place. As an added bonus, it also kicks all kinds of ass. For a band that uses Hindu mystical influences, this is remarkably aggressive, which is something that I didn’t expect. When I see anyone involved in the Hindu religion, they’re usually the most passive, mellow people imaginable. Cult of Fire, though, rages like a psychotic wolverine hell-bent on shredding you into little pieces. I’m definitely looking forward to hearing more from this group because their music is an interesting twist on the Black Metal style that’s both distinctly different from other bands in the genre and induces extensive amounts of neck damage at the same time.

Canto III, the latest LP by England’s Eye of Solitude takes a bit of getting used to. Unlike their previous output, the band goes for a more varied approach this time around. While everything is still mostly in the realm of Atmospheric Doom/Death Metal, there are times that a faster and aggressive Death Metal style is used, which never seems to work as well. Eye of Solitude excels at slower, more melodic and atmospheric stuff. The speedier bits of this album are more of a hindrance than a help for a band like this. There is a segment in “Act I: Between Two Worlds (Occularis Infernum),” and also one in “Act II: Where the Descent Began,” where the drumming goes into blast mode. The drums are a bit too loud and artificial sounding, especially the bass drums, which have an unnatural tone and seem to be triggered. When Adriano Ferraro starts blasting away, he literally drowns out the two guitarists completely, reducing that part of the song to a blast beat drum solo. Obviously, this ruins the carefully crafted atmosphere, and when the large part of your appeal is the atmospheric element, that’s always bad. Thankfully, Eye of Solitude doesn’t do that kind of thing very often. Most of the time, the music is oppressively dark and depressing; feelings that the band is able to conjure up quickly and effectively. They’re so good at what they do that even with missteps like the blasting drums in the early part of the album, they’re able to recover almost immediately and hit back just as hard, if not harder. If you’re looking for dark and brutal Death Metal with tons of atmosphere, Eye of Solitude is a band that reliably delivers the goods. If you’re into bands like old My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost or Atmospheric Doom/Death in general, this LP should definitely be on your short list of releases to pick up.

I’ve listened to Candlemass since their 1986 debut LP (Epicus Doomicus Metallicus) and while I would never consider myself a rabid fan of the band, I’ve always found something worthwhile in each of their releases. When I heard that bassist Leif Edling had a new project that was in the Doom vein, I had to check it out. While Avatarium isn’t exactly Candlemass, they do have some strong similarities. The main differences between the two bands are that Avatarium has a female vocalist, Jennie-Ann Smith, and the music is decidedly more Hard Rock-inspired, where Candlemass was, of course, more Metal. This doesn’t stop Avatarium from being heavy, though. Much of this album sounds like a cross between Trouble and Candlemass, but with strong doses of Stoner and Psychedelic Doom thrown in to make things interesting. Jennie-Ann Smith doesn’t have the lungs of Messiah Marcolin or Robert Lowe, but her voice fits the music far better than a more operatic singer or a banshee-wailer would have. She has something of a Bluesy style that has the versatility to work with both the Hard Rock/Psychedelic stuff and the harder-hitting Metal parts, giving the band a wider range of music to explore. For a debut release, Avatarium is very interesting. While listening to this, I wanted the band to go further into the Psychedelic Doom direction, mostly because the lyrics are pretty “out there.” There are times when that element does come in, but it’s never as pervasive as I thought it should be. Still, the music is potent enough to satisfy most fans of straight-out Doom Metal in the vein of Trouble or Cathedral. It’s an impressive effort and hopefully Avatarium will continue on as a full band. With Leif also in Candlemass, I would hate to see this be a one-off project.

Sometimes all the pieces come together exactly the right way and the whole is inexplicably greater than the sum of its parts. This happens when Ghosts at Sea slows down and gets gloomy, as in the flawlessly ominous dirge “The End of Days.” I always listen to whatever I’m reviewing several times, in an attempt to understand it as well as I am able. Hymns of Our Demise was not at all difficult to decipher. It’s 21st century Black Metal with the appropriate and expected speed and atmosphere, plus more than a little Doom injected into its veins, very well done and certainly interesting enough, but not exactly astonishing. Except for the aforementioned stunner “The End of Days,” which I could not help but continually repeat 18 times. There are other moments of such excellence throughout the album, especially in “The Weight of 1000 Suns” and sparsely scattered within the fourteen-minute closer, “Through the Shadow That Bind Us,” but only once does this Indiana/Kentucky team achieve full-song perfection. The United States isn’t exactly a hotbed of quality Black Metal (with a few notable exceptions, of course!), and I think that I can count the number of premium USBM bands from right here in Indiana on one cloven hoof, so obviously I’ll be keeping an ear on Ghosts at Sea. Will this despondent duo find a way to more seamlessly integrate different tempos? Or perhaps drop the faster stuff altogether and fully embrace the crushing despair of a glacial pace, which works so well for them whenever they do it? Hymns of Our Demise feels a bit disjointed, but the potential is clearly here for its follow-up to be a true masterpiece.

Ekove Efrits hails from Tehran, Iran, and is the primary band of Count De Efrit, who is also the sole member of Silent Path. The difference between the two is that Silent Path is more depressive and droning, where Ekove Efrits is far more experimental. I’m tempted to call the band’s style Post-Black Metal, but I don’t know if that would fit, either. This is some weird shit. You can tell the influence of bands like Burzum and even the likes of Moonspell and Katatonia in here, but the music takes that foundation and goes wild with it. There are elements of Ambient, Goth/Industrial, Techno and Trip-Hop all over the place, making this a very interesting listen. You never know quite what you’re going to get from one song to the next. It isn’t weird for the sake of being weird, though. There seems to be a method to all of the madness, so to speak. Even though there are disparate musical influences going into this, it somehow makes sense in an atmospheric/emotional way. The music is dark and melancholic, diving into Goth territory most of the time, but never quite going over the edge into Suicidal/Depressive realms. I think fans of Gothic Metal will get the most out of Nowhere, mainly because the music is more in line with what fans of that genre are looking for. People requiring something more straight-forward or aggressive will find this too strange and too passive. I enjoyed this LP because it was so unpredictable on one hand, yet fairly predictable on the other. You know what you’re going to get, but you don’t know how Count De Efrits is going to give it to you.

I consider myself to be a big Kataklysm fan, and despite not being completely blown away by the band’s previous album, 2010’s Heaven’s Venom, I was still very anxiously awaiting this new release. A few seconds into the first play-through and my mind wandered, without anything drawing my focus again until the digipak-only bonus track, a cover of “The American Way,” which seems just as timely now as when Sacred Reich wrote it nearly a quarter century ago, although stylistically entirely out of place here. Another dozen spins and the regular-edition closer, “Elevate,” worked its way into my brain as well, and now after weeks of countless additional tries to cram the rest of this into my hippocampus, it’s kind of happening, despite the occasional imperfect riff (I’m looking at you, “Under Lawless Skies”). The impeccable recording/production helps, I think, and Maurizio Iacono’s growls, shrieks, and roars are as amazing as ever. Waiting for the End to Come combines all the necessary high-quality ingredients the right way, and is a tremendous accomplishment, but as with the aforementioned Heaven’s Venom, something’s absent… an element that I can’t describe. From an unknown Death Metal band, this album would be close to a ten, but Kataklysm have set the bar, and my expectations, so high that perhaps it’s impossible for even the godz of Northern Hyperblast to reach them anymore. I suppose that’s not fair. Reality seldom is.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Satan’s Wrath, mostly from folks who missed the campiness of old Heavy Metal. Perhaps he best way to describe this band is to say that this is what Grim Reaper would sound like if Cronos from Venom took over vocal duties and wrote all of the lyrics. It’s musically far more in line with traditional Heavy Metal in the NWOBHM style, though not in the same quality as bands like Iron Maiden, Angel Witch or Hell. It’s melodic and the sound is very much old-school Heavy Fucking Metal the way I remember it from back in the early ’80s. Vocally and lyrically, though, this is pure Venom worship. It’s over the top Satanic, but in a campy way that makes this hard to take seriously. I don’t normally go for bands like this, mostly because they tend to be one-trick ponies. I’ve listened to dozens of groups in a similar vein, and once you’ve heard one album by a band like this, you generally don’t need to buy any more because they all sound the same. I went back and checked out Galloping Blasphemy, the debut album by Satan’s Wrath, and sure enough, the two are very similar in style and substance. Listening to them back to back, it sounds as if Aeons of Satan’s Reign took a step down in the production department. Galloping Blasphemy is sonically a lot more powerful, sporting heavier guitars and a fuller production than its successor. If you’re curious about Satan’s Wrath and don’t already have the debut, I would recommend Galloping Blasphemy over this one for the simple reason that it sounds better. The two records are very similar in terms of the music, but the tie breaker is the production. If you already own Galloping Blasphemy, you can safely pass on this one because you’re really not getting much that you haven’t already heard.

When I heard the self-titled demo from Finland’s Shadecrown, I was seriously impressed. It isn’t often you find a band that takes the time and the effort to create a demo recording that has both well-crafted songs and excellent sound. While I enjoyed the music immensely, I was disappointed that it was so short. At three songs and under fifteen minutes, it was over far sooner than I wanted it to be. I needed to hear more, and to my surprise, my wish has been granted far sooner than I expected! Shadecrown has unleashed a new four-song EP with more of what I was craving. Like their self-titled demo, Chained is dark, heavy and melodic. The sound is, once again, excellent, with a production that rivals releases by the top bands in any genre of Metal. I seriously wish more bands had sound this good, because being an old and admittedly jaded Metal fan, I want to hear the music presented in the best possible light. What good is having a guitarist or a bassist if you never hear him? Every instrument on Chained is clearly audible and properly balanced so that no one dominates the recording. The songs, likewise, are well written and have both power and melody. The music is slightly more Death Metal oriented this time around, giving the songs a bit more punch in the brutality department, but the melodic guitar-work and the atmosphere still infuse everything with a dark and somber feeling that reminds me at times of old My Dying Bride. One of the reasons I loved early My Dying Bride was because they were punishingly heavy and brutal, but there was an underlying beauty amidst the carnage that you can appreciate as the disks in your neck make more snap, crackle and pop noises than a bowl of Rice Krispies. Shadecrown has that quality as well (my chiropractor sincerely appreciates this, as you can imagine) and it’s why I was so excited to hear this. If there’s one flaw with Chained, it’s that there still isn’t enough here to satisfy my craving. Like their debut release, this is over far too soon. Twenty minutes of Shadecrown isn’t enough for me. I’ll definitely be waiting to hear more from this band, and if they can maintain this level of quality, they’ll be a top player in this genre.