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Band: A Forest Of Stars
Album title: Beware The Sword You Cannot See
Release date: 27 February 2015
Label: Prophecy Productions
Beware The Sword You Cannot See is A Forest Of Stars by all means, but beside being just a logical continuation of 2012's A Shadowplay For Yesterdays it offers much more. It's a bolder album judging by compositions, but it's absolutely more adventurous, more accessible, it's much more melodic and I dare to say even catchier. The ambiances they create are at least to say beautifully unendurable, so vivid, dangerously psychotic, but often so picturesque that it's just a matter of minutes or seconds when you'll find yourself with closed eyes absorbing everything A Forest Of Stars has to offer. A very specific structural ability of being able to re-create itself from the ashes of burned down theatre of insane existence and rising up again in full splendour and glory was always one of those surpluses that this band took advantage of while mixing up a vast repertoire of many different genres into one well structured and flowing integrity.
Read a full review HERE
Band: Abbath
Album title: Abbath
Release date: 22 January 2016
Label: Season Of Mist
Immortal is back, in a new shape and with a new name, hailing under the name of the previous frontman of Immortal, Abbath Doom Occulta. The album feels like a journey back to the old glory days of Immortal, it reminds to classic albums like At The Heart Of Winter and Sons Of Northern Darkness. Melodic and fast tunes go perfect along with the bombastic music. The famous Immortal sound is certainly there in the fingers of Abbath's guitar playing. The guitar sound is warm and fuzzy, the songs feel alive and very powerful. They are like a journey into the mountains.
Read a full review HERE
Band: Ahab
Album title: The Boats Of The Glen Carrig
Release date: 28 August 2015
Label: Napalm Records
With The Boats Of The Glen Carrig, the band seems to leave their typical funeral doom metal style behind them. There's much more emphasis on the atmosphere, driving metal lines and let's say the band discovered its progressive side, which nicely complements with heavy slow crushing riffs, punishing drums, wretched bass and guttural death vocals, maybe one of the best in this genre. There's often present a certain dose of humour in Ahab's output, even though being well hidden behind the explicit use of psychedelic, sludge and horror elements, but yet you can sense it anyway. Ahab this time composed their boldest album to date, it's not the darkest one they ever made but still there are almost no light moments. The Boats Of The Glen Carrig is not an easy album to consume, it's a complex work, more than anything else these Germans ever did. They used a much larger palette of different elements and they put those together with perfection. Ahab's obsession with depths of the ocean and sea, with epic adventures, with anything drenched and salty, this time got a truly monolithic form and is the pitch perfect mood setting.
Read a full review HERE
Band: Aeon Sable
Album title: Hypaerion
Release date: 11 March 2016
Label: Solar Lodge
Aeon Sable are since their beginning in 2010 on a mission to explore new limits of melancholic and dark atmospheric post-goth rock, it's a rarity to find such a band on this planet right now that could be able to provoke so highly luminous and mind seducing soundscapes, they go beyond the borders of what was once known as gothic rock, even though in its essence they remain loyal to the legacy of goth and some of the things have its origin in the sound long ago created by The Sisters Of Mercy and Fields Of The Nephilim. They are bringers of a new era, this isn't anymore the third wave of gothic rock, this is something completely new, this is Hypaerion, this is Aeon Sable.
Read a full review HERE
Band: Alcest
Album title: Kodama
Release date: 30 September 2016
Label: Prophecy Productions
If the band exlored almost every possible element of atmospheric metal and rock, going deep into dreamy pop gaze and before that seeking the evil essence in the most ambiental side of black metal, now everything is staggering, perfectly put together into this musical amalgam of stylistic maximalism that finds its drawing substantial inspiration from Japanese art and culture, more precisely in Hayao Miyazaki's anime film Princess Mononoke. Kodama is just another step in Alcest's never ceasing creative force, it's an album that needs a lot of consequent listens before being completely discovered in all its corners; it boasts with many dramatic subtleties, hidden layers, and to reach that state of mind, when this albums grabs you with its flow, you must be in certain mood, ready to enter this cultural, stylistic and compositional narrative thing that not only upholds the band's trailblazing legacy but actually makes you want to see where they go next.
Read a full review HERE
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