Outside of the novelty factor of hearing a Black Metal band from Mumbai, India, Solar Deity doesn’t offer a whole lot that hasn’t been done before. The music is essentially built upon the foundation laid by bands like Burzum, Darkthrone, Judas Iscariot and other raw, simplistic, Black Metal bands from the early Second Wave. The riffing is fairly basic. Each song is composed of one or two riffs that are repeated over and over again throughout the duration. There is a bit of Indian influence here and there in the riffing style, but on the whole, they stick to the conventions. The standout track on this EP has to be the final song (before the outro), “Ceremonial Feast at the Black Temple.” The music on that track is definitely a cut above the rest. The lack of originality is easily apparent, but then most bands bypass the demo stage and go straight to their first album. With that in mind, I’m essentially treating this as a demo recording. These guys have some potential, but by sticking to convention, they’re really not doing anything to differentiate themselves from the massive horde of faceless Black Metal bands out there doing the same thing. At this point, the novelty factor is their main selling point. If they don’t deliver the goods on their next album, Solar Deity will be just another band lost in a sea of others just like them.

Funeral Doom, when done right, can be the most powerful style of music on the planet. Seemingly heavy-hearted since birth, it’s difficult for me to think of a band that has occupied my stereo more often than Shape of Despair over the last decade. However, when done incorrectly, Funeral Doom can also be the most boring thing imaginable. Finnish quartet Profetus have not yet discovered the secret to creating meaningful Funeral Doom, as …to Open the Passages in Dusk fails to captivate on any level. If all it took was to play at an inhumanly slow pace, they’d be in business, as play inhumanly slow they do. But that isn’t all it takes. To play at this (complete lack of) speed presents an enormous canvas. An enormous canvas that must be filled delicately and creatively with all of life’s pain and then some. The crushing weight of sorrow, loss and dejection must carry the art, with the denial of all hope as borders. Only then can the beauty of human suffering emanate from the density. Profetus’ indiscernibly uneventful compositions go nowhere slow. Waves of tediously uninteresting chord progressions rise and fall with no life, never reaching apex, never even gathering momentum, all the while guided by an equally painless organ. Anssi Mäkinen has an adequate dull roar —effective, if only by comparison to his tepid spoken bits— but, just like the music, it’s all too content to trudge anticlimactically through cyclical monotony. The clean singing on “Burn, Lanterns of Eve” isn’t very good, but at least it woke me up. Truth is, there isn’t a Doom growl bestial enough, nor a singing voice with enough passion and grace to save this hour-long descent into insubstantiality. Profetus do have some of the tools and could improve, but no Funeral Doom band can come to my pity party unless they remember to bring the pain.

With a name like Black Messiah, you would think that they were some Necro Black Metal band if you’ve never heard their music before. At the very least, you would think that they were Satanic. They’re neither of these. Black Messiah is a Folk Metal band and this is their fifth album. The Final Journey is a hit-or-miss affair that seems to follow a pattern. When they stick to playing Metal and leave the Folk stuff as a garnish, their songs kick ass. When they start playing Folk stuff and have the Metal part as a garnish, things tend to get hokey. The Final Journey is split into two halves. The first of which is a hodge-podge of songs that range from well executed Metal to “Renaissance Faire with electric guitars” music. The second half of the album is a concept piece called “The Naglfar Saga,” which is about what happens to dishonorable warriors after their death. This part of the LP is more consistent and the songs are also more focused on being Metal than Folk (though their fiddle player still gets a fair amount of time). That being said, the second half of the album is definitely better than the first half. I would have preferred to have everything more like the “The Naglfar Saga” than how The Final Journey ultimately came out. Some of the songs on the first half of this album are good, but the “Renaissance Faire” hokeyness drags this one down. The final 23 minutes of The Final Journey is where the best material is. If you can get through the Ren Faire shit, it’s fairly rewarding.

In late 2009, a friend made me a copy of Drudkh’s Microcosmos LP and told me, “Dude, you’ll love this shit.” In retrospect, I did not, in fact, love that shit, although it wasn’t bad at the time. It was a melodic Black Metal album with a strong melodic Black Metal focus mixed with hints of melodic Black Metal and occasional melodic Black Metal flourishes. A decent assembly of pretty, 10-minute numbers that was ultimately forgotten three years later. Having not thought much about these mystery men from the Ukraine during that span, it seems I missed out on their Handful of Stars LP which was rumored to be a drastic Art Rock style change. A shame, because good or bad I might’ve actually remembered that one. Back to doing what got them there, Eternal Turn of the Wheel is basically Microcosmos 2, which means… you guessed it… more melodic Black Metal. I will say, the production is slightly better, the playing a little sharper, and I love that flanged hook on “Breath of Cold Black Soil.” Thurios’ raspy bark is a bit more grating this time around. It doesn’t lend itself well to the band’s serene vibe, and the lyrics not being in English doesn’t help. Like Wolves in the Throne Room with significantly less head-up-ass, these guys are maestros at weaving fragile melancholy with blasting frostbitten grim, but the bottom line is that all these melodies just don’t hurt enough. Go suicidal or go home. People already want to die, so the hard part’s done for you. Drudkh are convincingly adept at creating atmosphere —nature-inspired, calm yet volatile, morose— but in the end it’s just another decent assembly of pretty, 10-minute numbers that will ultimately be forgotten three years later.

This is the first full-length Demoncy album since 2003’s Empire of the Fallen Angel, which is quite a hiatus. Ixithra, the sole member of Demoncy, has always had a knack for creating dark and evil music, and Enthroned Is the Night is definitely a dark and evil album. Though considered Black Metal, Demoncy has always had more in common with Death Metal in terms of style. When you consider that Ixithra was part of Profanatica during the early days of the USBM scene, that isn’t a surprise. Back when Death Metal was all the rage and bands like Morbid Angel, Deicide, Death and Cannibal Corpse were getting huge, there were only three US Black Metal bands that anyone was really aware of (Profanatica, Necrovore and, after Ixithra left Profanatica, Demoncy). All of them had a more brutal, Death Metal oriented sound. This is one aspect of Demoncy that hasn’t changed. This is heavy and brutal. One of the things Ixithra has been doing over time is combining his Dark Ambient project, Profane Grace, with Demoncy. There are a number of “interlude” tracks on Enthroned Is the Night that could be Profane Grace songs (or parts of them). Those are the eeriest and also the strongest tracks on this album. The Metal parts are dark and brutal, but the atmosphere on the interlude tracks stands out the most. The only weakness that I found on this album is one that plagues every band that ever wrote a song in the key of “brutal.” The tonal range that Demoncy operates in is very tight, resulting in songs that are brutal but similar sounding. If it wasn’t for the atmospheric stuff breaking things up, I could see how most would view Enthroned Is the Night as a compilation of ten different versions of the same track. Even with that, this is an album that is getting a lot of play on my stereo.

Arise from the ’80s and attack with the gay
The killing won’t stop until first wipe
We’ll bring you to Canada because we want to enslave
Hole will be frozen with fright
We’ll break through the crust, leave from our trailers
Protected by eternal Pabst
Lay down the laws from our moronic scripts
Bringing you nothing but Ass

Ass…. Metal
Ass…. Metal

Ruling your strip malls, controlling your towns
Entrapped in your worst nightmare
Piercing my ears with this horrible sound
Casting my elusive care
Jarome Iginla laughs, his needs are fulfilled
The Flames are now burning hot
Ass riffs are churning, the people are bored
Audio torture the reason we fought

Ass…. Metal
Ass…. Metal

Kill them fags

Now they take over and rule by Ass Metal
Enjoy their much hated stain
Halford’s cock’s what they want and they won’t settle
Until they drive you insane
Attacking the young by killing the old
Bleeding with every lame beat
Darkness has fallen when this record is sold
Claws will dig into your man meat
When the crowd doesn’t come and the hipsters don’t bite
Know that your career is at its end
Rendered fanless so scream out fright
Ass Metal gone with the wind

Ass…. Metal
Ass…. Metal

One of the more hidden treasures of the NWOOSSDM movement can be found in Spain where Barcelona’s Graveyard rest in festering slime. With only a demo, one proper full-length release, and a few splits under their belt, I hope to be forgiven for not being too familiar with the quartet. But if this 6-song EP —originally pressed on 12-inch vinyl from Doomentia last year, released on CD in 2012 by the fine folks at Pulverised— is any indicator, these Swedeath merchants are definitely capable of high quality, and I should get busy tracking down their back catalog (especially 2009’s split with the mighty Deathevokation). The Altar of Sculpted Skulls is not by any means a flawless recording, but they certainly know how to kick down a door. The opening title track is vicious and massive, boasting a fantastic replica of the vintage Sunlight sound. Dirty and rotten, like Saltrubbed Eyes cooked with Like an Ever Flowing Stream and baking soda, this song explodes with “Soon to Be Dead”-like urgency and a truly monstrous, sick-ass bass tone. Unfortunately the two songs that follow aren’t in the same league. These guys fall in love with a riff and then play it to death —an affliction I know all too well— which isn’t the best idea even if it’s a great riff… let alone mediocre ones that go nowhere. Still, even when the material leaves something to be desired, the vibe is always right. That early ’90s feeling is always undead and ever present. Instrumental “Cult of the Shadows” could serve as the outro to any classic, Autopsy-stained Swedeath masterpiece of your choice, yet it’s not an outro here. We also get the two tracks from the split with Terrorist as a bonus. Decent songs both, but nothing really comes close to topping the opener. The kind of track that mixtapes exist for. These guys may not have the chops to pull every song off, but they do play Death Metal the right way. File under “keep your eye on.”

My first reaction to this was “Wow, I didn’t know Dismember put out a new album!” When I checked my player again, I found that I was wrong and that this was Acephalix. Odder still, this band apparently comes from San Francisco and I’ve never fucking heard of them. I know most of the bands from around here and that struck me as strange. According to what I was able to find out about the band, they started out as a Crust band but morphed into a Death Metal band over time. Regardless of how they got there, they sound very much like old Swedish Death Metal. They have that Sunlight Entombed/Dismember sound down pat. The pacing is slower, though they never slow down to the point where they become Doom/Death like Asunder. The only real flaw that this band really has is that they sound a bit too much like old Dismember. You keep checking your player to see if you aren’t really listening to Like an Ever Flowing Stream. Still, this is some seriously brutal and heavy Death Metal. I like the fact that it gets your head banging almost right away and by the time you hit the album-closer, “The Hunger,” your neck is completely fucked up. Deathless Master should come with a neck brace.

It’s good to know that Kevin Heybourne, the founder and sole remaining original member of Angel Witch, still has it. While they were never as popular with the masses as Iron Maiden or Judas Priest during the heyday of classic Heavy Metal, they always had a special place in the blackened hearts of Bay Area thrashers. In a way, they were Heathen before there was a Heathen. They were a bit too heavy to be in with the more Rock inspired NWOBHM bands (Def Leppard, for example, was one of these bands) and they were too melodic to be in with the harder-edged bands (like the UK Warfare or Venom). They kind of existed in their own territory, which made it hard for folks to lump them in with other bands. As Above, So Below is more inspired by British Doom Metal (as opposed to the more Thrash oriented stuff from the more recent albums) but still with the melodic guitar-work that made Angel Witch famous. The pacing is slower than previous albums and it is definitely the heaviest stuff they’ve done in a long time. I would have liked a thicker, heavier, guitar tone to go along with this, though. The Black Sabbath influences are more prominent in the Doom-inspired tracks and I think a bass-heavy sound would have lent some additional weight to the songs. I’ve heard people say that this album is comparable to their 1980 self-titled debut, but I’m not sure that I agree with that sentiment. As Above, So Below doesn’t have the same feel as Angel Witch. With thirty plus years between them, As Above, So Below is a far more mature album. It’s much more controlled and effective. There’s less “flash” and more of an emphasis on hard-hitting Rock & Roll. The hints of occultism are still there, which is something that I also liked. While they were never known explicitly as an occult Metal band, Angel Witch had far more songs about occult topics than Iron Maiden or Judas Priest ever did. Between Angel Witch and the resurrected Hell, the darker side of NWOBHM is making a comeback and personally, I welcome it.