Tag Archives: metal

Xasthur and the Circle of Metal

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This ran on Metropulse, way, way back.
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For centuries, scholars believed that metalness was a straight continuum, with bands like Slayer at the top end and performers like, oh, say…Debussy at the bottom. In recent years, though, researchers have discovered that the truth is somewhat different. Beyond St. Vitus, beyond Celtic Frost, out where the black dooms drone, we now know metal curves, and Stephen O’Mally, like a wily ourobourous, takes his tail in his teeth only to discover he’s chomping on the smiling visage of Danny Elfman.

Xasthur’s new album doesn’t sound like Danny Elfman at all, really. But on it, one-man-band Malefic maybe takes a step or two around the circle in that direction that I wish he hadn’t. At his spiky, buzzing best — as on 2002’s Nocturnal Poisoning — Malefic was right in the soul of black, with static and keyboards and shrieking vocals and drums all fusing in a single hissing howl of knives and hate. Xasthur was fierce, brutal, and unrelenting.

And then, on All Reflections Drained, Malefic relents. Oh sure, he breathes out something approaching his trademark evil at the beginning of “Inner Sanctum Surveillance,” or in the middle of “Masquerade of Incisions.” But for the most part, the album just backs off everything a bit — the buzz, the static the shrieks — and all of a sudden we’re listening to a soundtrack for the apocalypse rather than experiencing the apocalypse itself.

What’s even worse is that slowly, horribly, as you listen it becomes clear that Xasthur was always just an inch away from …restful. And…pleasant. Like Jesu, or…Sigur Ros. And, don’t get me wrong, I like Jesu and Sigur Ros. But I liked the old Xasthur more.

Slow, Cheerful Doom

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This first ran on Madeloud, way back when.
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Bunkur
Nullify
Three Stars

One single seventy-eight minute ultra-slow doom metal track from Holland. It starts off with some clanging which resolves itself into the sound of a train starting up. You’re not on the engine though, nor even on the caboose. Instead you’re sitting on the track in the middle of a barren plane, listlessly whacking at one of the rails with a two by four. Occasionally, a massive, drooling derelict leans towards you from the platform above and spits out phlegm-pocked gibbets of indecipherable apocalyptic imagery. The PA system crackles with more and more insistent feedback, inspiring you to hit that rail harder and harder, and the derelict to try more insistently to cough up a lung.

This all goes on for some time.

Still going.

Stilllllll gooooinnnnggggg.

Stillllllllll gooooiinnnnnnngggggg.

The loudness of the feedback changes some; the shrieking varies a bit; and every so often there’s a sound like a rusty gate being dragged across a chalkboard. But basically, nothing happens until past the 45 minute mark. At that point, the percussion shifts from single thwacks to a series of leaden drum rolls, the feedback resolves itself into a recognizable tolling, and suddenly we’ve got something that almost seems like a groove.

That lasts for about ten minutes before the momentum frays and cracks into more insistent feedback drifting above lumbering percussion and the same hideous screaming. And then it goes on like that for a surprisingly long time again, till eventually the screaming and the bashing drop out, and you’re left with just the feedback chords, which phase in and out, finally suggesting a train again laboring off into the distance.

Nullify is one of the more extreme examples of doom, and as such it encapsulates the genre’s paradox. In some ways, doom, is absolutely the quintessence of metal — metal stripped down to its bleak, black, featureless soul. It almost isn’t even music anymore; just a giant, repetitive pummeling; a noise stripped of all meaning except pure, blind force. It’s the overwhelming soundtrack that lets you, the tiny hobbit, know that the great Sauron is upon you, moments before he crushes you beneath his heel.

And that’s why, at the same time, it ceases to be metal at all. Doom really does function almost as a soundtrack; background shoegazy ambience for a pleasantly Tolkienesque apocalypse. Being pummeled very, very slowly is, as it turns out, kind of restful. Almost despite itself, the nihilistic Nullify, promotes a spirit of peace and goodwill, as extreme metal fans and non-metal fans join together for 78 minutes, of slow nodding to the same non-beat.
nullify

To God With Hell

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Some years back I got the chance to interview Daniel Smith of the Danielson Famile. The band is known about equally for its extremely idiosyncratic songwriting and its Christianity. When I talked to Smith, he explicitly linked the two. To create, Smith said, was to imitate God. God was infinitely creative and original; to honor him, therefore, you should be creative and original. When I asked him what he thought of most so-called contemporary Christian music, he looked pained.

Like Danielsson Famile, Stryper is a Christian band that’s positioned itself (more or less) in the mainstream rock world. They’ve essentially spent their career demonstrating that a Christian band can be as boring as a secular one, and vice versa. In that sense, their new album, The Covering, seems to be an inevitable culmination. Like the idiotic title says, this is (mostly) covers of FM staples.

Nobody says that covers have to be unoriginal. The Danielson Famile’s version of the Shagg’s “Who Are Parents?”, for example, is both reverently faithful and mind-blowing. Smith and his cohorts reproduce, note-for-note, the insane, dysfunctional, metrically-crippled Shagg original. It’s like watching someone drop a glass bottle on the floor and then perfectly reconstruct it from a million scattered bits so that you can’t even see the cracks. It’s miraculous in a way I think God would appreciate.

The Covering is not miraculous. And though I don’t want to presume about God’s aesthetic impulses, it’s hard to imagine how any being, finite or otherwise, could find much to like in this rote slog. It comes across as a kind of anti-creativity; everything is taken and borified by, say, 70%. The harmonies and cheesy proggy changes of Kansas’ “Carry on My Wayward Son,” are dumbed down with clunky drumming and pro-forma hard rock trundling. On Van Halen’s “On Fire”, Michael Sweet proves himself utterly unable to channel the bloated Vegas charisma of David Lee Roth, while some hapless guitarist demonstrates to a world that knew it already that he’s no Eddie Van Halen. And then there’s Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” Why, Lord, why? Best, perhaps, not to speak of it.

Stryper found someone else’s rut to wallow in; Deicide, at least, built their own. One of the classic eighties death-metal bands, Deicide has experienced numerous personnel changes, but little alteration to its winning formula — fast, hard, brutal death metal with blasphemous lyrics.

In fact, where the recently released To Hell With God gets into trouble isn’t where it’s true to form, but where it innovates. Early Deicide albums sounded like they were recorded somewhere south of your basement; the latest effort is more polished and crisper. And where, say, “Blaspherion” managed to be both propulsive and evilly slogging, the title track on the latest effort drifts perilously close to actually having a rawk-anthem melody. You could see people raising their lighters and shouting “To hell with God! You don’t want to be forgiven!” like they were at a High on Fire concert or something.

Not that Deicide’s totally lost their way. They certainly haven’t embraced the post-grunge emoting behemoth metal zeitgeist the way Metallica has, for example. The riffs still come at you like you’ve stuck your face in a ceiling fan, just the way they should. It’s only when you listen closer that there’s a little disappointment; the rhythmic, stuttering maelstrom of old tracks like “In Hell I Burn” are gone. “Into the Darkness” is fierce, but it’s a more predictable fierceness, like Pantera. And I like Pantera fine. But they’re not classic Deicide.

So would it be better if Deicide were doing now exactly what they were doing twenty years ago? Obviously that seems kind of pointless. Maybe frontman Glenn Benton should just have retired. He could have called it quits a couple of years ago when he had the crucifix brand in his forehead surgically removed, for example. But then there’s always the great beast Mammon to consider. The irony is that by sticking around past their sell-by date, Deicide may actually have finally attained the blasphemy they claimed to be going for all along. To Hell With God doesn’t spit on the deity the way Stryper does, but it does have about it the whiff of defilement. Those old Deicide albums though; I have to think they’re on Jehovah’s iPod.

Dimmur Paganini

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Metal and classical sound like one another to me. Ok, that’s stretching the truth, but there’s a fundamental something that makes those two seemingly polar genres ring the same to my ear.

Metal’s got highly distorted and compressed music. Classical doesn’t. But for the life of me, I can’t think of a piece of music more metal than Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Throw in Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos,” too. Fast forward to the present and living composers, and it’s no coincidence that the work of Arvo Pärt is a favorite amongst many metal musicians. Likewise, classical’s timeless feel of grandeur gets channeled within me just as strongly with the compositions of In the Woods… or via the ubiquitous black metal minor scale harmony.

You can trace this convergence of the genres back to Yngwie Malmsteen, the famously obnoxious guitarist extraordinaire who partially modeled his egregious personality after that of Niccolo Paganini, the 19th Century Italian violinist whose extreme ability, flamboyance and eccentricities raised him to mythical status. Before Malmsteen’s incorporations of classical scales opened up massive new directions for the genres in the early ‘80s, metal was the doom and gloom pioneered by Black Sabbath, a band whose roots were in blues and who adapted that style into something heavier.

Since then, if you choose your genres right, you can hear the ghosts of Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Albinoni (not always too subtly, either) in many of metal’s subcategories, but you’re most likely to find them in power metal bands, and in black metal bands, too, with names like Emperor, Symphony X, Stratovarius, Angra, and Dimmu Borgir being the most famous.

But this article is about the most underrated bands. Here are two that are criminally underrated and uphold the theme of the interchangeability of metal and classical.

Windham Hell.

Windham Hell is as indispensable a cult pick as it is a nerd’s dream. The band’s sound is something along the lines of if Yngwie Malmsteen recorded black metal albums with limited, semi-improvised means in the bedroom of a log cabin in the same woods where the owls-who-are-not-as-they-seem from “Twin Peaks” flew ominously overhead.

Windham Hell’s compositions often have a stark, menacing tone to them — the sometimes present, incoherent grave-moan vocals, the dissonant application of classical scales underpinned by aggressive, driving metal riffing and beats, and the often off-kilter song structures that brings all these jagged elements together, sometimes into a miasmal hell that would befit a Paganini-inspired legend, and sometimes into a calm, lovely musical respite… but Windham Hell was always something uniquely alien and utterly delightful in its genius — perhaps a genius that was as idiot savant as it was technically gifted — but like a cult show or movie like “Twin Peaks,” the cult appeal is owed as much to all the things that are wrong, goofy, or off-kilter about it as it does what isn’t.
 

 
The band’s ultimate and definitive formation was Leland Windham and Eric Friesen, two guitar genius recluses who lived in Snoqualmie, a rural, forested part of Washington state. Windham was as dedicated to mountain climbing as he was to shredding maniacal classical leads, and the theme of the cold, unforgiving, beautiful granite faces he loved so much were a major theme in his band’s music. The CDs would come with photos of Windham hanging upside down on a horizontally jutting rock face, or photos of mountain goats he would find on his excursions. Friesen was obsessed with playing guitar, and was also an accomplished drummer (while many think the drums on Windham Hell’s albums are a drum machine, they are in fact an e-kit played by Friesen) who released a couple solo albums under the name of Friesen Hell. One of these albums, Friesenburg Concertos, is Friesen’s “hail to the gods” of classical music, in which he plays various classical pieces that he learned entirely by ear, as he did not read music.
 

 
It was possibly Friesen who pushed the “Twin Peaks” worship angle in Windham Hell’s mystique. Whoever it was, the duo had a lot of parallels to play up. Snoqualmie is the real name of the place where the legendary show takes place. The third and final Windham Hell album, “Reflective Depths Imbibe,” was recorded behind Mo’s Motor, which is where Leland and Laura Palmer drive off from in the “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” movie. Leland Windham shares two names with major “Twin Peaks” characters, Leland Palmer and Windom Earle. Indeed, any and all similarities Friesen could find to “Twin Peaks,” he worked, like how the violin in “Alpinia” was played by a Bob (parallel to Killer Bob), and a keyboard bit was courtesy of a Mike (yet another “Twin Peaks” character.)

The “Twin Peaks” worship was so deeply entrenched in Windham Hell’s inspiration (with songs like “Glacier Walk in Me” and “Clear Blue Plastique,” and liberal usage of sound clips from the show amassed in hidden sections at the end of the albums), that Windham Hell’s music has come to be like the alternate soundtrack to the Black Lodge for me: a creepy, gorgeous, passionate body of work that is equally menacing as it is goofy; emotional, beautiful, evocative as it is dissonant; and metal as it is classical.

PS: In case you were wondering, the name Windham Hell is a spoof of the music made under the Windham Hill Records label, who specialized in folk and new age music. The band’s last album was released in 1999, and will likely stand as its last work, as Eric Friesen passed away in 2006.

Virgin Black.

On the other end of the spectrum from Windham Hell’s cult bedroom insanity is the music of the Australian entity Virgin Black, whose career pinnacle came in 2007 with the release of the 2nd part of the band’s “Requiem” trilogy, “Requiem Mezzo Forte,” and the subsequent release of the 3rd part, “Requiem Fortissimo,” in 2008. (The first part of the trilogy, purportedly recorded with the rest of the albums, has yet to be released. The trilogy is meant to be listened to in succession, with melodic themes that run through the albums.)

Virgin Black’s sound is like Gothic doom-influenced classical music. The classical aspect here is largely tied in to singer Rowan London’s operatic singing style, and how all their records have featured classical elements, like cello and piano, given a heavy treatment, but it wasn’t until that landmark 2007 album that Virgin Black’s sound moved out of the backroom studio and the digital box, and into recording an entire record with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, making a full record that didn’t just have orchestral segues, but was mostly orchestral, punctuated by passages of heavy guitar and bass and tastefully simple, pounding drums and martial snare rolls.
 

However, some of what or what is not going on in Virgin Black’s records is a bit of a mystery, and what I think is the truth is so awesome it gives me minor chills. I know what I witnessed. I saw Virgin Black on tour at Slim’s in San Francisco in 2008. I saw a small, muscular man in a see-through black mesh shirt take the stage as Virgin Black’s frontman and keyboardist. He seemed to be wearing mascara, and he had an odd, out of place, kind of alien demeanor about him, like he was physically there but his spirit was in different places at once. I saw this man deliver the male operatic vocals from the records, and then, I saw him deliver the female operatic vocals as well. He would seamlessly switch back and forth between the two, as well as the deathgrowl parts from the material of “Requiem Fortissimo,” and the realization that when I was blown away at the sweeping, crushing beauty of the compositions and vocals of “Requiem Mezzo Forte” and its seeming choir of singers, it seemed I had in fact been hearing the work of a man who was somehow a soprano and a tenor. Like a castrato who was allowed through puberty but never lost his choir boy voice. Maybe there’s some kind of pitch shifter voice box that allows one to do something like that. Whatever it was, I was blown away.

Subsequently, I swear I’ve looked up Virgin Black on line and found a wikipedia page in which Rowan London was dubbed something not terribly flattering like “androgena.” I swear I saw this page, and I remember it having information that supported my perception that indeed, Rowan London was *every* voice on the Virgin Black records. This elevated already superb albums into the godlike in my view: that someone could possibly have that much musical ability to physically pull something like that off, and do it in the context of such beautiful music. However, any trace of those words are no longer there. Maybe they were changed. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing. I probably did, as the soprano voice on “Requiem Mezzo Forte” is credited to Susan Johnson, but my appreciation of this band’s work was forever raised even farther when I saw them that day in San Francisco.

There’s not much information or interviews with Virgin Black out there, and the band has been on a long hiatus. Even if the final, purportedly completely choral and orchestral work is never released, “Requiem Mezzo Forte” stands as perhaps the finest example of the seamless marriage of classical and metal, featuring massive, timeless melodic themes as tremendous as the performances… whoever those performances were done by.

Maranatha, Funeral Mist

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This first appeared way back when on Madeloud.
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The maybe not-so-secret truth about a lot of evil black metal is that it’s not really all that evil. Genuinely disaffected Scandinavian losers burning churches and shooting each other have more or less given way to multi-national art school kids happily orchestrating noisy ambience on their hard drives.

Don’t get me wrong; I generally like the hipster music better, and not just because, atheist though I am I don’t really approve of burning churches. And, you know, some of my best friends went to art school. Perhaps Typhos and Necromorbus of Funeral Mist also attended, for all I know. On the one hand, I could absolutely believe that they did…and yet, even when it seems most like they must have ponied up some tuition at some point, they still sound completely feral.. “White Stone” encapsulates the dichotomy; built around a scraping guitar noise like granite being dragged across granite, it’s heavy in a Melvins-heavy way that really takes some thought and arrangement. And yet, there’s none of the Melvins’ brutal, indie wit here; on the contrary, if there’s a brain in this track, it seems entirely focused on dragging the leaden blasphemies from the singer’s bleeding throat.

Take any twelve black metal albums, put them together, and “White Stone” would be the weirdest track on any of them. On Maranatha, though, its not even the oddest song. That would probably be “Blessed Curse”. For twelve minutes, a dark-robed preacher intermittently declaims ominous verses; the Funeral Mist duo intermittently howl; the music surges and squawls…and the drums lock into a march that keeps threatening to shift just a hair into something syncopated and danceable, presuming you could dance while being crushed beneath a gutted Leviathan. Not much less bizarre is “Jesus Saves!”, which starts out in more traditional full ranting blackened death mode, all racing drum machines and raw voiced shrieks set against a pummeling cathedral of grandiose bleakness. And then, you get five and a half minutes in….and suddenly you’re listening to a repetitive, space grunge guitar figure. It’s as if Darkthrone suddenly got mugged by Sonic Youth…or maybe drank some foul brew and transformed itself into Sonic Youth in order to lull you into a false sense of security. Thurston Moore might create a performance piece about burning a church, but he wouldn’t actually do it, right?

The remaining tracks are all less startling, entrails-on-the-sleeve deathy blackness, though the band’s sense of structure and invention ( the bizarre asthmatic inhalation which opens “Living Temples”; the classical processional which closes “Anti-flesh Nimbus”) never deserts them completely. In a way, the fact that some of the tracks seem closer to the earnest mettalisms of Watain than to the borderline-rock of Nachtmystium only makes Funeral Mist more mysterious. Usually you can tell instantly whether a band is insane or evil, but Funeral Mist seems to be both by turns — either too canny or too fiendish to admit that there’s a difference.
 

Tsushima

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Even if rock’s triumphal-film-score concept-album crescendos are generally dedicated to narrating combat of the mythic mock medieval variety, rather than documented events, heroic ballads set against sweeping historical vistas have made a few appearances in rock-opera prog, such as Triumvirat’s Spartacus, and in the occasional power metal suite, like Iced Earth’s The Glorious Burden. But despite not knowing more than a few erratically memorable examples, I doubt that any prog or power “history album” quite compares to Arriver’s long-awaited epic, Tsushima.

Primarily from the viewpoint of the defeated Russian Admiral Rozhestvensky, the album tells the story of the Battle of Tsushima, a landmark 1905 naval encounter in the Russo-Japanese War. Wikipedia describes it as a turning point in modern warfare, as it was the first battle in which wireless electronic communication played a central role and the last in which one fleet surrendered to another. The album opens with “Winter Palace War Council,” a mournful accordion overture interrupted by a vicious staccato assault, in which, although “The Dowager Empress warned us/ Eastern entanglements shall fail,” the vocals growl defiantly states, “We will all die, but we will never surrender!” After balefully adopting the voice of Japan’s victorious Admiral Togo, in the menacing trudge “Togo, Son of a Samurai,” the story resumes in the Russian perspective with “Dogger Bank,” a high-speed stuttering Deicide-esque dirge conjuring the shadow of defeat to the distant conflict in the North Sea. “Our anchorage will be refused in every neutral port of call/ You may turn your backs on us,” the guttural snarl testifies, “but we alone are standing tall!”

In the album’s centerpiece, “Around the Cape,” a fierce, lumbering riff accompanies the background of total collapse, the defeated Russian fleet at Port Arthur and peasant revolts at the Tsar’s palace: “Crocodile hunting and French whores,” shouts the disembodied chorus in the face of their annihilation, “they only serve to slowly weaken our resolve.” A brief, precisely shifting thrash piece, “Dark Clouds Above the Fleet,” evokes mechanized perfection while prophesying the inevitable end: “Misery is all we know/ No solace found in place of sorrow/ Ignore your orders, lashing follows.’ In reverberating harmonic chords, and some actual Russian-language re-enactment, “Singapore” describes Rozhestvensky’s Ahab-like hubris in the face of the looming conflict. A massive swaggering rocker chopped into odd sections by tempo shifts, percussive artillery, bewildering time switches, and ornate finger-picking figures, “Tsushima Trilogy” churns like huge icy waves; in the suite’s last section “The Boiling Sea,” the Admiral exhorts his men to “never lower the flag,” until the battle ends in a whiteout of seasick feedback and the gasping sputter of a dying engine. The devastation is summarized in bleak harmonies over a rumbling funeral march in “Quadrology:” “21 vessels sunk by dawn/ 4000 Russian sailors drowned/ The Tsar’s last armada is lost and with it the war.”

While many loud rock bands deliver arrangements founded on the alternation of chugging riffs and blasts of fury, with Arriver the shifts are more elegant than startling, with dramatic grandeur favored over shock and awe. More classical than fanatical, their chords never simply evoke Satanic massacre or chivalric soundtrack. The uncomfortable relationship between punk and metal is foregrounded with a band such as Arriver– their sophisticated long-form arrangements don’t fail to sound like the French black metal band Deathspell Omega, but without any hint of histrionic horror or the perversion of nature. Or I might think of the melodic arpeggios, whiplash tempo changes, and layered chords of Between the Buried and Me, or the furious mathiness of Converge or Dillinger Escape Plan, but not of those bands’ crisply gated production values, which seem to only make use of death metal tropes in the service of reinventing angsty Gothy industrial music. Arriver’s old-school chops may even occasionally be reminiscent of Vader, but the former’s symphonic nuance is incompatible with the latter’s straight-ahead brutality. Arriver’s warm, tactile sound, both in performance and production, is most comparable with more melancholy exponents of the ‘90s post-hardcore indie-rock spectrum, like Bitch Magnet, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, or Unwound. But, putting the sound aside, the music is convincingly metal.

Merely an agglomeration of tropes, there is no nugget that makes metal metal. But metal fans might concur that, as stridently humorless as metal may be, its lack of irony keeps it blissfully free of sincerity. Metal is not personal but completely internal, not interpersonal but utterly public, magical rather than political, and thus always, in its way, religious. The nature of history as a diverse collectivity of experiences may seem more suited to punk. Still, Tsushima rides the fence admirably, in its unselfconscious apprehension of a totality whose only unifying element is anguish, becoming perhaps less of a “history album” and more of a “war album.”

Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad presents war not as a transcendent individual experience, but an unstoppable gluttonous inertia of force before which conquerors and victims are equally powerless. Weil defines “force” as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “A man stands disarmed and naked with a spear pointing at him;” she says, “this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him.” As in Weil’s description of the Homeric epic, the chief tone of Tsushima is bitterness. “The dissonance introduced in the overture, “The Winter Palace,”introduces a dread that lingers throughout the action of the musical narrative”, grimly relating episodes in the admiral’s reflections upon the battle, before, during, and after, with the delusional yet fatalistic determination of Custer at Little Big Horn. “The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised;” rhapsodizes Weil, “neither victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated.” On a more modest scale, the same sentiment could be applied to Tsushima.

Glory in struggle, a subtext of all loud white music, is subtly tweaked in the fearful feedback, deformed rhythms, and ominous harmonies that counterpoint Tsushima’s thrashy gallops, surgical barrages, and martial marches, somehow mingling the mournful solemnity of patriotic Russian choral anthems with Fugazi’s insurgent insouciance to create a result that is neither reverent nor skeptical. Almost a straight-faced echo of the miniature Stonehenge proffered by Spinal Tap, the mightiest works and most sublime cataclysms of man are seen in their true ephemeral puniness. Rather than a bestowal of posthumous heroic laurels, the abject defeat of arrogant power seems to be the moral of the story, summed up in the chant that closes the album: “Day by day, like links in a chain, darkness spreads at the edge of the empire.” The torch of triumph and the flame of the fallen warrior must dispel in smoke for any hope to stay kindled.
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Arriver’s website with info about the album is here.

Music For Middle Brow Snobs: Black Dooms Droning

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I was asked to contribute some metal recommendations to the ongoing end of year best of blowout at the Factual Opinion. I thought I’d do a playlist to go along with my choices. So here’s some of my favorite metal from the last year/decade.

1. Rites of Thy Degringolade — Totality’s Reign (An Ode to Sin)
2. Harvey Milk — We Destroy the Family (Fear) (Life…The Best Game in Town)
3. Marduk — To Redirect Perdition (Wormwood)
4. Funeral Mist — Anti-Flesh Nimbus (Maranatha)
5. Gallhammer — Endless Nauseous Days (Gloomy Lights)
6. Drudkh — Decadence (Microcosmos)
7. Xasthur — Soul Abduction Ceremony (Microcosmos)
8. Khanate — In That Corner (Clean Hands Go Foul)
9. Pyha — Song of Oldman (The Haunted House)
10. Lugubrum — Kadurha (Albino De Congo)

Download Black Dooms Droning

If you want to buy extreme metal (or any kind of metal) you can’t do better than shopping at Aquarius Records, about the most amazing online store I’ve ever had the privilege to visit.