Hierophant Nox

LVCVS : SEMEN RORIS Ars Aeterna Italy’s LVCVS certainly aren’t your average neo-folk act, so it’s a good thing that we don’t deal in averages here. “Semen Roris” is something unique, challenging and altogether otherworldly. It’s the collective’s second release, a dreamy, moody composition summoned to life via the medium of various traditional stringed instruments [...]

AMORPHIS : SKYFORGER Nuclear Blast On the one hand it’s hard to believe that “Skyforger” is the ninth Amorphis full-length – on the other, it seems obvious that this band should be claiming veteran status, since at some difficult-to-pinpoint moment over the past nineteen years they have, without enormous amounts of fuss, slipped into the [...]

CODE : RESPLENDENT GROTESQUE Tabu Recordings “Resplendent Grotesque” is the kind of album that seems a hundred times longer than its paltry 35-minute running time, and certainly not in that eye-gouging “oh hell, when will this end” sort of a way. This magical Anglo-Norse amalgamation of talent weaves a web of cresting, fidgety, deep, progressive [...]

ARCHIMAGE Archimage is an underground Finnish black metal act which is just beginning to nose its way out into the (s)limelight. Possessed of an enviable creativity where frosty leads and hypnotic structures are concerned, they have an authentic and a pleasingly classic approach that will engage purists whilst still bringing fresh compositional flair to keep [...]

AHAB : THE DIVINITY OF OCEANS Napalm Records Germany’s greatest purveyors of “funeral nautic doom metal” are back once more, with a dazzling second full-length in the form of “The Divinity of Oceans”. Ahab were a surprising discovery for most after 2006 debut “The Call of the Wretched Sea”; immensely heavy, their wretchedly sad doom [...]

INFERNAL STRONGHOLD : GODLESS NOISE Forcefield Records Dirty, dirty, DIRTY and cool. That’s how I’d describe “Godless Noise” in four words. Of course, it’s never been Infernal Stronghold’s ambition to be ‘cool’, and I wouldn’t like to tar them with that brush – regular readers should know that cool in my books is a perverse, [...]

ORCRIST : WE COME IN WAR Painkiller Records Some crazy fool once told me that Italy doesn’t do black metal. I never heard such bullshit. Unsurprisingly, folks within spitting distance of the ‘Holy’ See have a fundamental affinity with the most blackened and hateful of musical expressions. Like any nation, the Italians do it every [...]

FENRIZ’ RED PLANET/NATTEFROST: ENGANGSGRILL Indie Recordings For all the media exhaustion and general scepticism surrounding this release, it actually makes quite a lot of sense (apart from the choice of title, obviously. I guess you had to be there). The tracks contributed by Fenriz under the banner of his Red Planet project are a potent [...]

BEHERIT : ENGRAM Spinefarm The announcement of Beherit’s reformation in 2007 was difficult for the mind to process. A mysterious, cultish and primitively forceful part of black metal’s early days – whether or not the scene agreed at the time: it’s tough being Finnish – Beherit almost did themselves a favour when they meandered away [...]

DE MAGIA VETERUM : MIGDAL BAVEL Transcendental Creations “The Confusion of Tongues” must be a strong competitor for the title of ‘most hostile and sense-assaulting opener ever’. Indeed, every moment of De Magia Veterum’s second full-length album, “Migdal Bavel”, seems calculated to terrorize the human soul, like a psychic labyrinth from which there is no [...]