With 2018 beginning to wind down, I’ve started to reflect upon all the great releases I’ve enjoyed throughout the year. This in turn lead me to compiling a massive playlist on Spotify; it’s about 99% metal, but there are also a few non-metal surprises lurking around in there.
Where has this album been all my life? It isn’t every day that you find a record that seems to have been tailor made to satisfy your personal listening palette, but on Future Cult, St. Louis-based trio The Lion’s Daughter have managed to successfully combine a few of my most favorite things, namely pulverizing extreme metal and creepy, John Carpenter-esque synthesizers. I’m not quite sure yet if it’s as delightful a combination as chocolate and peanut butter, but they’re definitely two great tastes that taste great together.
It’s hard to believe that Marduk have been at it for close to thirty years now, harder still to believe that the Swedish black metal stalwarts have maintained such a consistent level of quality over the years with regard to their recorded output. Case in point, Viktoria is the band’s fourteenth album and it picks up right where 2015’s excellent Frontschwein left off, pulverizing listeners with yet another blasphemous blitzkrieg of World War II-themed black metal.
2018 has already been a pretty stellar year for doom. So far we’ve been smacked upside the head with killer releases from the old masters Sleep, as well as a host of young whippersnappers such as Green Druid and Chrch , making it a damn fine time to be a fan of all things sluggish and Sabbathy.
As I was preparing to review this album, something occurred to me; In nearly ten years of THKD I’ve never once written about Amorphis (I have no idea why). It also occurred to me that many readers will probably be surprised to find out that I unabashedly love this band, given that their music is pretty much the antithesis of so much of the other metal I love; it’s proggy, folky, pristinely produced and at times poppy as all hell, yet somehow Amorphis makes all these elements that I’m not always such a big fan of (at least not when it comes to metal) palatable, nay downright tasty.
It seems that not enough people are talking about Green Druid, but they damn well oughta be, because the quartet has released what should rightfully be considered as one of the stickiest of the icky doom metal releases of 2018 in the form of Ashen Blood, out now on Earache Records.
Bloody hell, has it really been over a year since the last installment of OOB? Seems a little crazy since brutal death metal in all its wondrous guises has long been a major part of THKD’s bread and butter. But rather than lament the fact that these features are few and far between due to the laziness of yours truly over the past few years, let’s delve into what’s new and bludgeoning in the world of brutal death metal, slam, etc…
