Best of 2007 - #9

9. pig destroyer - 'phantom limb'
[review published on issue #78 of LOUD! magazine, translated and slightly adapted for too.many.records.]
The incessant racket that was Pig Destroyer's previous album 'Terrifyer', had a accompanying counterpoint to it, the mysterious DVD-audio that contained one single sinister, slow and oppressive 37-minute song called 'Natasha', for which you needed even more stomach to listen to in its entirety than for the album itself. Aware of the effect that these contrasts provoked in their listeners (or victims?), Pig Destroyer have on 'Phantom Limb' a sort of mix of both. Of course, the minute-and-a-half insane discharges are present and accounted for, but roughly half the songs here are over three minutes long, showing a complexity and different arrangements that make the record a much more intimidating whole than the constant grind of yore. Expect no mercy, however. Everything hits you, and it hits you hard. Harder than before, even - as the dynamics improved, the fast parts are much faster and project an even greater image of uncontrolled insanity, and their effect is much more pronounced because of the contrast with those bits when everything becomes sicker, slower and you go back to that dark room that was 'Natasha'. It's not pretty at all, and with a new fourth member hired just to wreak havoc on samples and electronics, it gets even uglier, which is obviously the point. Vocalist J.R. Hayes is a liberated monster, belting out his penetrating lyrics mixing esoteric lyricism with visceral gore like few have done this side of Dax Riggs and sharpening these songs beyond what's reasonable. Pig Destroyer were already at the top of the grindcore 'hierarchy', but judging by all the territories this album visits, soon you'll have to mention them on the death metal hierarchy, as well as doom's, and devil knows what else. No need to go into petty discussions about best songs and whatnot. It's all a merciless beating from beginning to end, and you'd have to be crazy to endure it all. Fortunately, we all are, a bit.

Pig Destroyer - 'Thought Crime Spree'

Best of 2007 - #10

10. high on fire - 'death is this communion'
Matt Pike, High On Fire's legendary frontman (he was in Sleep with Al Cisneros) said in an interview shortly after the release of 'Death Is This Communion' that he doesn't need to dress up in a warrior's costume covered with blood and guts to prove that this band is for real, and that is the perfect way to start to understand High On Fire. Crystallizing like few others the true spirit of what rock and metal really are, High On Fire are just a kickass power trio like they used to make 'em, belting out fist-to-the-face tune after fist-to-the-face tune, grooving wildly as if the devil himself was whistling a tune. It all sounds loose and devil-may-care, but underneath it all there is a rock-solid structure that makes this album one of the strongest of the year on a musical level as well, besides the unbeatable feeling. The balance of songs is spot-on, and you'll be sorely missing out if you just hear an isolated song from this. It's an album and meant to be enjoyed at one, from the roaring-out-of-the-gates enthusiasm of opener 'Fury Whip', reminiscent of stuff from 'The Art Of Self Defense', you're totally hooked, and from there the record see-saws between wildly different moods. Perfectly captured by yet another legend that is producer Jack Endino, you get Eastern-tinged exoticism ('Waste Of Tiamat' and 'Khanrad's Wall'), blitzkrieg go-ahead brutality that will make you smash any furniture unfortunate enough to cross your path if you listen to it at home ('Turk') and tribalist intensity that Sepultura would kill for ('Headhunter'). The ending is the final climax to this mind-twisting collection of songs, as the strangely moving 'Return To NOD', where Matt's lingering solo work is more epic than any band, well, dressed up in warrior's costumes covered with blood and guts. A blindingly intense album, supremely mature but that will nevertheless make you feel like a teenager all over again.

Best of 2007 - #11

11. orthodox - 'amanecer en puerta oscura'
[review published on issue #8 of Rock-A-Rolla magazine]
Sevilla’s Orthodox are everything but – already on their first album, ‘Gran Poder’, a relatively hidden gem, it could be perceived that these Spaniards were on to something special. Although the album got lost in its own meanderings a bit too often for its own good, that unmistakable feeling of a band on to something unusual was there. ‘Amanecer En Puerta Oscura’ confirms that, and a lot more besides. Still a remarkably difficult album, even more so than its predecessor, as sombre, unsettling passages alternate with urgent jazzy labyrinths to create an unpredictable tapestry that will require a lot of dedication for it to make any sense. Structures seem loose and vague, which helps the eerie, trance-like quality of most of the music, but once you get used to it the underlying thread becomes apparent, a moving force similar to later Neurosis. Most of the record is instrumental, and when voices do appear, it still feels instrumental, as they are used for texture and richness of atmosphere primarily. ‘Amanecer En Puerta Oscura’ is a great evolutionary leap for the band, as the focus is much greater than on their debut. The several elements are given less space to get lost in themselves and the dynamics are helped a great deal by this mutating approach to songwriting. Exotic in a dark and frequently disturbing way, experimental but controlled, strangely uplifting but nevertheless oppressive in its stronger moments, this is an album of contrasts and touching extremities, on which the patient listener will be immensely rewarded.

Orthodox - 'Con Sangre De Quien Te Ofenda'

Best of 2007 - #12

12. cephalic carnage - 'xenosapien'
[review published on issue #9 of Rock-A-Rolla magazine]
‘Xenosapien’ is a rare beast – a bomb of a record that manages to grab you by the neck instantly, such is its catchiness and extra sense of groove (in comparison with their previous albums, which weren’t exactly groove-less monoliths), but which is not an immediate record at all, as it also keeps revealing itself in hundreds of brilliant little details as you listen to it more and more. And listen to it you will. Previous Cephalic Carnage albums, ‘Lucid Interval’ especially, but also 2005’s ‘Anomalies’, have been extremely impressive but have also left the impression that they were trying to do too much. Not that they’re not capable of it, given the stratospheric technical level of these musicians, but as bassist Nick Schendzielos proclaims in this issue’s feature, sometimes less is more. ‘Xenosapien’ is a perfect example. Encapsulating all the moods found in CC’s music before, be it the grind, the doom, the crazy jazz, you name it, into a simpler-sounding but harder-hitting package, this record shines through where it’s most important to – songs. Remember those? Properly formed, individual songs that burst with vitality and imagination, from the surprisingly spooky mid-pace of ‘G.lobal O.verhaul D.evice’ and its saxophone, to the whirlwind that is ‘Divination & Volition’, to the quasi-black metal intensity of ‘Touched By An Angel’. The highly entertaining conspiracy theory lyrics and unusual artwork are the icing on a cake that has been baked to near perfection. As a triumph of creativity and genre-bending, you’d be hard pressed to find anything better this year so far.

Cephalic Carnage - 'G.lobal O.verhaul D.evice'

Best of 2007 - #13

13. lake of tears - 'moons & mushrooms'

One of the most unfairly underrated bands of the last decade, Lake Of Tears nevertheless soldier on, with each album always a surprise in terms of musical direction taken. ‘Moons And Mushrooms’ is a sort of combination of all that was good about the past six records but much more guitar-focused, with melancholy, catchy choruses and their indefinable fantasy quirkiness greatly enriched by the wonderfully strong guitar sound. Much darker and heavier than before, it’ll appeal to anyone into any kind of melodic metal., read my review on issue #159 of Terrorizer magazine. Unfortunately, that was all the space I got to write about 'Moons And Mushrooms', but there would be much more to say, as there would about most Lake Of Tears albums, a band that has been consistently underrated throughout their career. On 'Moons And Mushrooms', if you still don't know Lake Of Tears, you have the perfect entry point, because the album is a sort of summing up of all the best things they've done before. The infectious melodies of 'Children Of The Grey', the sad melancholy of 'Like A Leaf' or the razor-sharp intensity of the guitar sound in opener 'Last Purple Sky' (and throughout the whole record, really - this is the best guitar sound the band has ever had) are just some of the highlights of a consistently brilliant album that will once again be rather overlooked, but will satisfy that happy bunch that is the Lake Of Tears fanbase. It's like we're all in to a little secret, and it actually feels great. And if you still doubt their rock credentials, check out the Status Quo cover 'Is There A Better Way'.

Lake Of Tears - 'Last Purple Sky'

Best of 2007 - #14

14. mayhem - 'ordo ad chao'
Actually, if you don't mind me lapsing out of my Mr. Reviewer tone for a while, I've got the perfect real life episode to explain exactly what it feels like to listen to 'Ordo Ad Chao'. It was a night of intense, erm, alcohol sampling, and my friends who participated in the event stayed at my place, after locomotion slowly stopped being an option. One of them stayed on the sofa on the living room, where we had been listening to some music on an mp3 player, which was left on by forgetfulness. After a while, and we are talking about someone who's into the most fucked-up music you can think of, he woke up, uncomfortable and confused, from an unpleasant sleep, wondering what it was that was giving him such a nasty feeling. It turned out that the mp3 player that had been left on had reached 'Ordo Ad Chao'. Asleep or awake, this is exactly what this album will do to you. The way I see it, Mayhem have been searching for their direction ever since the black metal cornerstone that is 'De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas'. 'Wolf's Lair Abyss' was a blast, but a mini-album and one that they apparently didn't build on musically, 'Grand Declaration Of War' was ambitious but ultimately clumsy (and it hasn't aged at all well) and 'Chimaira' was just a forgettable, straightforward attempt at brutality. On 'Ordo Ad Chao', which, significantly, witnesses the return of 'De Mysteriis...''s vocalist Attila Csihar, is where Mayhem manage to combine all their previous misguided ambitions of necro ('Wolf's Lair'), weird avant-creepiness ('Grand Declaration') and boot-in-the-face ('Chimaira') into one fucking disturbing whole that is much more than the sum of those parts. This is above all an album of violent contrasts - for all the dissonant, angular and not obvious at all guitarwork (there are no riffs, as such, to speak of in the entire album), the sound is still horribly old-school necro-sounding, not quite on Darkthrone levels but close, which will alienate any post-something fan that might be attracted by the drone-like texture of the sound. Conversely, the structures are so atypical, combining silences, skewed drum patterns and Attila's inhuman throat sounds into a whole that will go far beyond the usual expectations of the regular black metal fan. It's useless to give you .mp3 sample songs, because this isn't an album that you can get by one song. Either you get the whole thing after living with it (and terrified by it, probably) for weeks, or you don't.

Best of 2007 - #15

15. caïna - 'mourner'
[review published on issue #80 of LOUD! magazine, translated and slightly adapted for too.many.records.]
Shortly after Alcest blew me away, the perfect companion for 'Souvenirs D’un Autre Monde' came out, and companion can even be interpreted in several ways. Alcest's album is a soft, pastoral affair, essentially feminine in its aesthetics and sensitivity, while 'Mourner' is a sort of masculine counterweight to the environments lived in Neige's work. Equally born from a solitary musician's work, young Andrew Curtis-Brignell, who doesn't feel at all the need to hide behind a demoniac alter-name (despite being a LaVey follower), 'Mourner' is the dark and disturbed face of the ambient genre. Something so scarily enveloping as 'Hideous Gnosis' is an eloquent demonstration of what you can expect of a record of this magnitude - a spartan beginning, threateningly minimalist, in which Curtis-Brignell softly sings Who’s on the side of the angels and who’s on the side of Satan?, the song transforms further and further, until we're thrown to the flames on the latter stages of the metamorphosis, as if it's suddenly a Xasthur song. The tortured voice is worthy of Varg Vikernes in 'Dunkelheit', as it proclaims No one is there anymore over guitarwork so abrasive that it sounds like a swarm of wasps. Throughout the nine songs, musical landscapes as esoteric as they are uncomfortable remind us of Swans (mainly), My Bloody Valentine, Burzum, Jesu, Lustmord and even Alcest, and from them the essential is retained. The red thread used to piece everything together is unmistakably Caïna. In an era where 500 teenage bands a day show up on MySpace, and half of them manage a recording contract after a week, it's amazing how one musician all by himself, and of this age, can have such maturity and self-confidence to create a visionary work, with its own separate identity. Hats off, dear Andrew.

Incidentally, Caïna will have available in the spring a limited split release with Portuguese doom kings Process Of Guilt, through Major Label Industries, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that one too.

Caïna - 'Hideous Gnosis'

Best of 2007 - #16

16. stinking lizaveta - 'scream of the iron iconoclast'
[review published on issue #9 of Rock-A-Rolla magazine]
With instrumental rock and metal on the rise like it would have been crazy to think about a decade or so ago, and bands popping out everywhere, each of them trying to out-warp the previous one, it’s very refreshing that there are three guys from Philadelphia keeping it pretty simple, with mammoth riffs shot out one after another, super tight, pounding rhythm section and squealing fuzzy solos are the norm here. Within this apparently limited framework, Stinking Lizaveta carve out sixteen dirty, rocking hymns. With lots of variety – take for example the opposition between the charging 2-minute ‘Gravitas’ and the slower, sunnier 6-minute ‘Unreal’ - throughout which your interest won’t dwindle one iota. On the contrary. Risking a big claim here, this is the most addictive and replayable instrumental rock album of the past few years. Fortunately for the band, everything seems to be in place for them now. Although they have been around since 1994, ‘Scream Of The Iron Iconoclast’ catches them in the best form of their career, at the best possible time for this kind of music, and with the best possible name to drop – it’s Steve Albini doing the recording here, and what a rock-out that must have been. Don’t miss it.

Stinking Lizaveta - 'To The Sun'

Best of 2007 - #17

17. minotauri - 'ii'
At some point, you just want to rock. For all the wonderful creativity, emotion, brutality, innovation or just plain weirdness that we music geeks like to look for endlessly in our piles and piles of precious records, sometimes we all just feel like putting something on that will rock. No frills, no complicated atmosphers, no heavily layered vocals, no journeys into an inner world of splendid depth - just the comfort that there are still people who can call a song 'Doom On Ice' and get away with it, tongue-in-cheek, just because they can. That's when we put on Minotauri. A cool way to look at this Finnish band is to imagine they're a sort of even more stripped down version of fellow Finns Reverend Bizarre. There's the same sort of back to the basics, old heavy stuff worship approach, but without the mysticism and cult leanings of the Reverend. 'II', tragically Minotauri's final album (even on that announcement they're simple - 'now we're dead! fuck off!' at the end of the booklet), sounds dusty but inviting, heavy but never entirely serious, and the balance they achieve with this is brilliant. It's all about the music, really - the one advantage that Minotauri have over, oh, any retro-rock (I do hate the term 'retro', but you understand) band is the songs. Faultless songwriting, perfectly placed instruments and vocals with just the right amount of grittiness, melody and power that will burrow into your brain and stay there, like the best Candlemass or Pentagram tracks. Great music. Sometimes we should remember that that's what it's all about.

Minotauri - 'Hammer Of Doom'

Best of 2007 - #18

18. portal - 'outre''
[review published on issue #82 of LOUD! magazine, translated and slightly adapted for too.many.records.]
Profound Lore's releases have been consistently brilliant so far, especially in 2007, and Portal is no exception. These mysterious, hooded Aussies, with their second album, take the rotten carcass of death metal, decomposed and eaten by whatever creatures that come out of this portal, to levels of unimaginable degradation. At the core of their line-up, a couple of members from Star Gazer (if you don't know them, go get 'The Scream That Tore The Sky'. Like, now.), a band that does their own sort of sinister, cosmic death metal - Portal is just the opposite. Organic, mouldy, subterraneously monstrous. This music is abject, ugly and at first glance not subtle at all, but at the same time it exhales a ritualistic feeling that provides some haunting to the cavern where it takes place. Gone are the days when extreme music used to really scare us, but hideous pourings such as 'Black Houses' or 'Omnipotent Crawling Chaos' are probably the closest we can get to that. In a moment of rare inspiration, the record label describes this record as the soundtrack to Dali's disturbing horror short movie 'Un Chien Andalou', and that's in fact the best way to approach this. It also gives an idea of the graphically evocative potential of 'Outre´'. Rarely has a recent record given way to such brain activity, desperately trying to picture the abominations suggested by it. Apparent frivolities like a fantastically designed digipak take a particular place of relevance here, and contribute to an indissociable whole, despite the exclusivity of this sort of thing - just like other prophets of esoteric terror like Khanate, The Axis Of Perdition or even 80s Swans, 'Outre’' is not for the ones who want it, it's for the ones who can take it.

Portal - 'Omnipotent Crawling Chaos'

Best of 2007 - #19

19. evoken - 'a caress of the void'
As the more extreme forms of doom, and funeral doom in particular, become a more broadly accepted proposition, more and more bands of the sort begin to show up, either newly formed, or being picked up more easily by record labels. It's also a time, however, to remember the ones who have been here before, and who still are the natural leaders of the genre. Direct spiritual descendents of the two entities that basically formed the entire blueprint for the genre, Disembowelment and Thergothon, they have been spreading their miserable, crawl-paced terror since the frightening 1996 EP 'Shades Of Night Descending'. Always at the forefront with such monuments of heavy slow doom such as 1998's 'Embrace The Emptiness' or the recent 2005's 'Antithesis Of Light', Evoken have now delivered an album of a magnitude that can rival with anything they've done before. 'A Caress Of The Void' is a bottomless pit of despair, and a much more dangerous one than before. This time, there's camouflaged quicksand covering the pit, so you'll think you'll be okay at first and then you'll start to sink in, slowly, until you realize the creeping horror that's still down there. There is a newfound sense of melody (within this context, let's not get carried away with the word 'melody' here) in Evoken's music, with a song like 'Mare Erythraeum', for example, providing an almost singable line, or at least hummable. These bits, and the slightly more digestible song sizes, that now hover around the eight minute mark, make 'A Caress Of The Void' an album that's strangely easier to get into, but that on the other hand proves impossible to get out of. The small specks of light make the darkness all the more impenetrable, a feeling that's very helped both by the band's amazing performance and by the perfect production - the sound can get literally suffocating in behemoths like 'Astray In Eternal Night'. At one point, you'll need to come out for air, but you'll just want to hold your breath and go back in again.

Evoken - 'Astray In Eternal Night'

Best of 2007 - #20

20. whiskey priest - 'hungry'
And then, sometimes, you need to rest. You need to sit down, dim the lights and be quiet, let your troubles and your tiredness sink in. That's when you put 'Hungry' on. Whiskey Priest is Noah Hall and his guitar, together with a few friends, and it's the acoustic album of the year. The first line of the band's description on their MySpace reads I like quiet songs. I like honest songs., and that's precisely what 'Hungry' delivers. Songs that whisper and gently strum their words and chords to you, but also songs that resonate deeply very long after you've heard them because of the brutal honesty with which they are delivered. Noah also says love makes me want to sing songs about love, but don't think by that quote that you're getting into some sappy pink album. At its core, 'Hungry' is wounded and heartbroken. It's not completely hopeless and bleak, but hope is a distant concept, one that is there merely as a little beacon of light (should the years choose to be kind and after all you're still inclined, if some day I come across your mind and we're not completely out of time, I will be with you - 'Waiting Game'). Throughout these thirty-five minutes, Noah exposes his bare feelings, through outrageously beautiful and varied compositions, despite never leaving the simple guitar/voice/piano set-up. The guitar and voice were recorded live, for honesty's sake, so every song sounds warm, personal and like Noah is singing to you while sitting across your chair in your room. The lyrics don't offer too many unsolvable riddles, but they manage to speak of things in a very evocative way, bringing up very powerful images that complement the melodic richness of the songs perfectly. Highlights are everything, with every song glowing in its own very individual aura - there's the surprisingly gorgeous minimalist version of 'Sweet Child O' Mine', appropriately shortened to 'Sweet Child' as the second verse isn't sung, there's the biting sarcasm of 'Love & A Gun' (all you need is love, love is all you need, yeah, love and a gun I mean), there's the desperate wishing of 'Superman' (wanna be someone's hero someday if I can, don't wanna end up one more broken superman) and there's 'Souvenir', an exceptionally dangerous song if you're on heartbroken street yourself, so desolate and melancholic an ending it provides to the album, a bit like David Poe's 'Love Won't Last The Afternoon' on his remarkable 'Love Is Red' album. Yeah, I do run-on sentences when something touches me deeply, and that's precisly what 'Hungry' has done. Goddamn it, even the packaging itself is amazing, with a strangely moving little tale by Gina Ochsner that explains the meaning of the album title. If there's still some heart left in you after the world beats you down, you need this.

Whiskey Priest - 'Souvenir'

Go buy it here.

Best of 2007 - from #25 to #21

25. watain - 'sworn to the dark' / ixxi - 'assorted armament' (watain) (ixxi)
A double-header! I could go into all kinds of wonderful justifications to have two records sharing one spot, and they'd actually be valid, like both Watain and IXXI embodying what's still relevant about black metal these days, kind of torchbearers for the genuine core of a genre, how both albums are similar beasts of misanthropic aggression, all that. All true, but this is actually a bit of a cop-out to hide the fact that I discovered IXXI, shamefully, when this list was already well underway, and 'Assorted Armament' is way too good to leave out. While we were furiously headbanging in the car to it, noticing that it wasn't a million miles away from 'Sworn To The Dark', my bestest friend JMR suggested that I slip them both in the list side by side, so here it is. Watain is Watain, if you're not into them, you're not into black metal, period. 'Sworn To The Dark' might not be as essential as 'Casus Luciferi', for example, but it's still a trve-as-fvkk satan-worshipping black'n'rolling middle-finger to music in general, and stuff like 'Storm Of The Antichrist' makes it all worthwhile anyway. Catch them live and feel the smell of death as the blood of a hundred shows rots on their clothes. And fuck off. Preferably, while listening to 'Assorted Armament' - just the beginning of the record is enough for you to understand what you're getting into. After the intro, where you can hear a whole bunch of mouse squeaks, a voice spits out 'Earth, man. What a shithole!". After that, the let's-hit-other-people-NOW! rifff of 'Armageddon Nobility' kicks in, dirty, filthy, groovy and GRAAARGH and you're hooked. And it goes on for nine more songs, so go get it. Now. You wimp.

Watain - 'Storm Of The Antichrist'

IXXI - 'Armageddon Nobility'



24. david galas - 'the cataclysm'
David Galas is mostly known for his involvement with Lycia, and there are a few traces of that sort of goth-y darkwave in 'The Cataclysm', but you'd be well advised to approach this album as a self-contained piece of work. And such a stark and sombre work that it is - Galas has worked on it for six years ever since Lycia disbanded in 1999 up to 2005, and it shows. The scope of the record is massive, with nineteen tracks spanning over seventy minutes of music, a remarkably well-worked concept that ties in with the booklet photos, taken by the well known Elena, the "kid of speed" that has done shocking work among the ruins of Chernobyl. It's precisely the air of desolation and abandonment transmitted by that region and by those photos that David can transmit perfectly with his music, with his deep croon very reminiscent of Michael Gira and the lushly but sombre and soberly arranged instrumentation. A song like 'September' perfectly illustrates the depth of dark beauty and of heightened melancholy that permeates this entire masterpiece. All of 'The Cataclysm' has been written, performed, recorded and produced by David himself, which shows the level of musician that we're dealing with here. Superb.

David Galas - 'September'



23. dirge - 'wings of lead over dormant seas'
[review published on issue #165 of Terrorizer magazine]
Much like the unfurling of their long songs, Dirge’s evolution as a band has also taken its time and matured, and now it seems the ideal time for everyone to realize their worth, as they are currently an all-encompassing behemoth truly worthy of being up there with Neurosis or Isis. themselves. ‘Wings…’ is composed of two discs, with five songs on the first one and the title track as the single one-hour track of the second one. On that first disc, opener ‘Méridian’ is a perfect blueprint example of what you can expect from the other songs. A 19-minute slab of creeping atmosphere that grows patiently but also stealthily, so when you least expect it you find yourself in the middle of a thunderously heavy whirlwind of sludge doom, capable nevertheless of switching back to quiet, minimalist ambient again. All these transitions take their time, seamlessly, so it never feels like the album is pulling you along. If anything, it walks side by side with you. ‘Wings…’ would be essential for this disc alone, but that second disc elevates it to classic status. Profoundly deep, it’s a journey of rising and falling, of light and dark, of silence and abrasive noise, which sums up everything the band has done so far. For once, the word genius is entirely appropriate.

Dirge - 'Epicentre'



22. alcest - 'souvenirs d'un autre monde'
[review published on issue #160 of Terrorizer magazine]
Neige’s (he of Peste Noire) solo project has one of those press sheets that seem to try way too hard, as it describes Alcest like “Yann Tiersen applied to Burzum”, but bugger me with Varg’s spiky mace if that bit of surrealism doesn’t feel 100% accurate after listening to ‘Souvenirs…’ in its entirety. And listen to it you will, often, such is the addictive nature of these soundscapes. You’ll even start to throw crazier names onto that description pile, like Sigur Rós or Jesu, which are probably the most important comparison point here. The enveloping, feverish melancholy that drips from this album feels a lot like the hypnotic shoegaze of Jesu’s self-titled debut, with the important difference that the guitars are still used as black metal guitars, obviously without the same harshness as Neige’s pure BM work, but with similar texture and coldness. This juxtaposition of feelings helps make ‘Souvenirs…’ a towering monument of fragile, desperate beauty that you’d be foolish to miss, regardless of your usual genre of choice.

Alcest - 'Printemps Emeraude'



21. naglfar - 'harvest'
[review published on issue #157 of Terrorizer magazine]
With an evolution somewhat opposite to many other bands, Naglfar’s constantly ascending path has seen them rise from their obscure and rather indifferently generic beginnings to the potent beast they now are. Not even the loss of lead vocalist Jens Rydén after 2003’s ‘Sheol’, an album which was the first real sign that Naglfar might be reaching for something bigger, dampened their conviction, as bassist Kristoffer Olivius put on a hell of a performance on 2005’s ‘Pariah’. Olivius has now dropped his old bass altogether to focus only on his piercing screams, and his improvement is remarkable, no mean feat considering what he has already done before. His powerful and versatile shrieks are the first noticeable result of an overall step up in intensity. If ‘Pariah’ was angry, ‘Harvest’ is furious. Even though still predominantly mid-tempo, the dynamics are much improved, with the slower parts feeling oppressive and the faster parts feeling rabid. One of the great things about ‘Pariah’ was the way that it managed to transmit real hatred in its best songs, and ‘Harvest’ also reinforces that quality. The twisted riffing ‘Odium Generis Humani’ or the sick melodies of ‘Feeding Moloch’ feel full of bile, worthy successors to ‘Spoken Words Of Venom’, however they maintain a distinctive, memorable melodic feel to them. A new factor introduced here is the immense scope of some of these songs - epic in the sense of their vastness, a bit like Rotting Christ’s new album. Opener ‘Into The Black’ is a great example of this, but the pièce de résistance is the surprisingly devastating title track which closes the album. Not only the best thing on offer here, it indicates a possible future that could be very bright for the band. It would be not only lazy, but unfair to label Naglfar mere Dissection successors, as there is much more to them, but the fact remains that these Swedes balance their genres to a similar effect, blending the best of black, death and thrash in a way that has been done precious few times, if any, since ‘Storm Of The Light’s Bane’. Modern extreme metal at its best.

Naglfar - 'Way Of The Rope'