Dark Music Awards 2017 - Results!

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Written by Tomaz

Terra Relicta Dark Music Awards 2017 - The Final Round!

The Terra Relicta' annual competition for best dark music album of the year is over! This was already our sixth edition of TERRA RELICTA DARK MUSIC AWARDS!!! A big Thank You to all who voted for your favorite bands/albums and made this competition so popular! Also a big thank you to all bands who promoted the Awards in many possible ways! As you know we started everything with the Preliminary Round. There were 9 groups with 7 albums in each, plus the "write in vote" group, so in the end we had 63 + 38 nominees, in total 101 albums. From each group two albums with biggest amount of votes made it into the big finals. In the final round all of you had a chance to vote for two different albums out of 20 finalists, and the result is:

The title of Dark Album Of The Year 2017 goes to:
THE BIRTHDAY MASSACRE - Under Your Spell

Congratulations also to British cult metallers PARADISE LOST and their amazing album Medusa for second place and Portuguese dark metallers MOONSPELL who with their album 1755 reached the third position!!! Congratulations to all other bands who made it into the finals and fought really well. The results are listed below.

Check out also the results from each preliminary group over HERE.

jVoteSystem developed and designed by www.joomess.de.

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Au Champ Des Morts - Dans La Joie

Au Champ Des Morts make music that is in no way just another typical post-black metal thing, there are many elements hidden and nicely blended inside their compositions. Just to see which bands are cited as their main influences tells a lot; Bathory, The Sisters Of Mercy, And Also The Trees, Celtic Frost, Alcest, The Devil's Blood, pretty varied list of artists... Dans La Joie has it all, it's dark, deeply personal but very vital record, is an interweaving of many dualities.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

Bitterfeldt - Götzen.Dämmerung

Bitterfeldt's debut is vital food for those who want to embrace the darkness in its most primal form, it's full of agony and passion, but in a strange way it's beautiful and addictive. Götzen.Dämmerung is an ode to end-time, a true artistic escapade of soul consuming darkness. This is in its essence dark metal, with a strong emphasis on the word "dark". Bitterfeldt is eternal night, an apocalyptic atmosphere in word, vision and sound of end-time.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

Black Needle Noise - Lost In Reflections

One of the most innovative sonic architects in our age, John Fryer, a masterminds behind legendary This Mortal Coil, and having shaped the sound of bands like Nine Inch Nails, Cocteau Twins to HIM and Depeche Mode, has released a new album with his new act Black Needle Noise. It's like day dreaming, you sit there and get lost in thought, lost in the music, it takes you away to another dimension. On Lost In Reflections John collaborated with numerous artists resulting in a stunning output.
LINK / LISTEN

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

Following her acclaimed 2015 album Abyss, Hiss Spun is at once dynamic, heavy, and raw. The album was conceived as an emotional purge, a means of coming to terms with the tumult of the outside world by exploring the complexities of one’s inner unrest. Every Chelsea Wolfe album is cathartic, but never before has both the artist and her audience so desperately needed this kind of emotional purging. She's digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath.
LINK / LISTEN

God Body Disconnect - Sleeper's Fate

Post-rock influences, large cinematic atmospheres, surreal field recordings and bass driven melodies that slowly build, make this album truly special and quite the journey. Ethereal guitar, carefully mixed field recordings and subtle undertones really put you into a story worth experiencing. This album has it all. Sleeper's Fate is a sonic explosion of the senses and a deeply moving and personal experience brought to the microphone.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

Last Leaf Down - Bright Wide Colder

The swiss “shoegazers” Last Leaf Down return with their second album and are delivering an overwhelming soundscape of dark and atmospheric melodies. The production on Bright Wide Colder is gorgeous, the sound quality is amazing and the musical richness is incomparable. The more you listen to this album, the more you discover new details. Last Leaf Down offer us one of the best guitar driven experiences we can find out there.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

Moonspell - 1755

This is Moonspell in their most extreme, intense and most earthshaking form until now. The songs are complex, atmospheric, with lots of symphonic elements and female choirs, it's a pretty lush thing, but in the background we can notice some gothic elements that enrich many of the tracks. 1755 is absolutely not a typical Moonspell album, and while listening to it you must forget about their past records and concentrate on what everything 1755 has to offer.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

Myrkur - Mareridt

Mareridt is a work of atavistic mystery, unflinching honesty, and balance. It embraces everything from horror and beauty to the sacred and profane. A perfect blend of folk, black metal, and ambient music becomes in Mykur's music a portal into a world torn apart by light and darkness. The sound is mostly based on great atmospheric soundscapes made by using so many different instruments and siren like vocals which often converge into sheer aggression.
LINK / LISTEN

Near Earth Orbit - A.T.O.M.

Artaud Seth (Garden Of Delight, Merciful Nuns) and Ashley Dayour (Whispers In The Shadow, The Devil & The Universe) return with the fourth album under the monicker Near Earth Orbit. This is the most ambiental and maybe the most experimental album of Near Earth Orbit so far. This album takes us in the space between chaos and shape. A.T.O.M. is one of the most unique post-apocalyptic-ambient-rock releases ever!
LINK / LISTEN

Paradise Lost - Medusa

Paradise Lost on Medusa offer crushing, tumultuous and quite dynamic doom metal sound. It's murky and atmospheric, sometimes also catchy, bringing forth a strong devastating melancholy implemented in peculiar organic yet cold sound. It's a sound of metallic darkness that explores some of the most sombre themes that this band ever put on the table. Paradise Lost shows to all those thousands of new bands playing doom metal, how masters do it.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

Përl - Luminance

Luminance depicts a initiatory journey through the world in five intense and hypnotic tracks. Mixing the minimalism of post rock music and the elephantine sound of the post metal genre, Përl uses every possibilities of its own to deliver an evocative, rich and violent album. The band sends the listener from the abysses of the Himalaya to the mysteries of the human soul... Përl offers the right alternation between minimalism, sensitivity, power and intensity.
LINK / LISTEN

Soror Dolorosa - Apollo

Apollo is a sonic adventure made up of 14 quite diverse compositions and while you embark on this journey with Soror Dolorosa you'll traverse many different emotional states, but one thing is common in all of the songs, that's a delicate sweet melancholy and bittersweet nostalgia that breaths from every single note. Apollo is Soror Dolorosa's crowning achievement, it offers more multidimensional and atmospheric sound than anything they did before.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

Subterfuge - Blind To Reason

One of the most surprising gothic rock releases of 2017 must be Blind To Reason. An album that is mainly inspired by 80s/90s traditional darkwave, gothic rock and alternative rock. Musically and lyrically Subterfuge offer quite a sophisticated sound saturated in utter melancholy, especially when they go into really obscure territories. Every fan of more traditional gothic rock will play and replay this album many times, because it has its value and it can nicely grow on you after some spins.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

Svartsinn - Mørkets Variabler

We all know Svartsinn like one of those acts that created some of the most dark soundscapes ever heard and Mørkets Variabler not that just follows this path, it's even making everything more audacious. With this album we get immersed into so very dense and haunting atmosphere that rare other artists can compose. It's a memorable atmospheric work with long darkened drones, subtle droneing cello, well inserted field recordings and yet much more.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

The Birthday Massacre - Under Your Spell

Under Your Spell is the seventh full-length studio album by Canadian dark/electronic rock band The Birthday Massacre. This is the most intimate and emotive record to date made by The Birthday Massacre. This album is a captivating hybrid of 80s, electronica, and aggressive guitars, fused with dark, cinematic melodic progressions. Under Your Spell blends the expansive breadth of The Birthday Massacre's signature sound and creates a deeply personal, immersive collection of songs.
LINK / LISTEN

The Crawling - Anatomy Of Loss

One of the most interesting newcomers to the doom/death metal scene must be the Northern Ireland based trio The Crawling. The Crawling strive to spread their brand of misery ever further with their own brand of old school doom metal darkness. The Crawling use a guttural vocal to combine melancholy with weight, churning out a heavy, doom/death ensemble, offering a collection of stories about loss, regret and despondency.
LINK / LISTEN

The Devil & The Universe - Folk Horror

The horror element has its subtle nuances. It lies in fields and meadows, hides in birdhouses and haystacks. This is a soundtrack to that moment when your cell phone battery runs out while you’re walking in a lonely meadow and that scarecrow in the distance suddenly appears to be moving closer with a scythe in his hand. The Devil & The Universe with Folk Horror made an album that is a perfect example how mysticsm should go along with music.
LINK / LISTEN

The Eden House - Songs For The Broken Ones

Built around the core duo of guitarist Stephen Carey and bassist Tony Pettitt of Fields Of The Nephilim together with drummer Simon Rippin of The Nephilim and many other notable guest musicians, The Eden House makes timeless music. with lush layers of violin and diverse female vocals, leading them to be described as ethereal wave. Without betraying their goth-rock roots, The Eden House expand their horizons working with top musicians to create their unique fusion sound.
LINK / LISTEN

W.E.B. - Tartarus

W.E.B.'s fourth album is an expression both straight but at the same time theatrical. W.E.B. is here to move you, provoke you, and invite you to the journey through ravendark starless nights with a fire made of metal music. This is a special blend of extreme, symphonic, gothic, dark and black metal. It's a musical challenge expressing darkness and death through adrenaline and poetry. Tartarus focuses on a deep orchestrations, making it sound epic as hell.
LINK / LISTEN

Zornheym - Where Hatred Dwells And Darkness Reigns

A genius, a brilliant mind that must be preserved for posterity, icon of perception, intelligence, dedication and artistic overcoming. Zornheym's absolute creator, Zorn (Tomas Nilsson), former Dark Funeral member, summoned up a symphonic extreme black metal album that blends a refined dark melody with crushing riffs, amazing acoustic guitars and percussion, stunningly orchestrated for a poetic psychological story.
LINK / REVIEW / LISTEN

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