This third full-length from dark ambient quartet Agalloch embarks on a meandering journey layered with crystalline guitars, rolling crescendos, serene and entrancing melodies, raspy black metal vocals and understated, clean singing. More focused on electric instruments than previous acoustic-based recordings, Ashes Against the Grain is in no way lacking atmospherics, as tracks like "Falling Snow" and "Fire Above, Ice Below" feature moody, neo-folk doom alongside majestic imagery. It's a mix only a post-metal coven at one with nature could achieve.
Three long songs, stretched to edges of dolor, hope and/or relaxation by low-tempo keyboards, low-crawling guitar buzzes, low-flying bird chirps and intermittently emitted low-pitch, low-resolution sighs about travelling long distances. The effect hints at instrumental shoegaze metal, but when organs turn processional -- briefly in the seven-minute-each title cut and "Dust," then rather majestically in the increasingly hefty 14-minute "Epilogue" -- you can detect traces of bygone Procol Harum or Iron Butterfly, or maybe some obscure band on SST in the mid-'80s or Man's Ruin in the early '00s.
Probably the least aggressive, most atmospheric music these Japanese iconoclasts have coughed up, Attention Please is mainly a vehicle for the sleepy, breathy, Bjork-y murmuring of guitarist Wata. She's always in the forefront, variously mixed atop billowing trance-tronics (title cut), flushed-toilet machine swirls ("See You Next Week") and reverberating lounge pulsations ("You"). Even the guitars tend toward shoegaze metal, though "Tokyo Wonder Land" punctuates its relaxation session with buzzsaw noise spurts and "Les Paul Custom '86" gets some blurry glam-punk gurgle going
From the hopefully reformed murderer and church-burner Varg Vikernes, here's another sickly slab of one-jerk-band elevator metal. After a brief, gurgling winter-forest intro, six subsequent extended tracks key around simple mulched-and-ringing guitar figures, submerged but repeated ad nauseam amid exasperated Norwegian whispering and retching. In the ten-minute "Budstikken," an almost lovely pagan chant section gives way to rock riffs. Then the set closes with an apparent drum circle, coming off what sounds like Indonesian mallet instruments recorded four islands away.
Try hard enough and the lumbering nine-minute opener, "Omens and Portents 1: The Driver," might resemble a Canned Heat tune on Quaaludes, based on an aptly encumbered riff that clears a path for the spacious, spacey instrumentals that follow. Washed in guitar distortion and propped up with piano, "Rise to Glory" and "Hung from the Moon" move with the grinding gait of tectonic plates. Heavy.
Call it a single, call it an EP, call it an album, call it whatever you want. This one-track, 40-minute art-metal curiosity buries medieval classical lute somewhere amidst its sludge -- and then, at the 23-minute mark, old-school-industrial Test Dept. quasi-tribal 20-drummers-beating-on-oil-barrel imitations of Brazilian rain-forest rhythms, which then wind down to some halfway decent whoosh. This is music for the post-death metal-concert chill-out room; it's rather lovely in the background at home as well, while you're reading or doing your taxes perhaps.
With slowly developing riffs and the sporadic growls and shrieked vocals, this critically acclaimed, avant-garde metal band combines elements of hardcore, ambient and doom metal to create atmospheric, punishingly heavy music. Oceanic, their second full-length release, lives up to its title, sketching the vast power and isolation of the furthest reaches of the sea.
After the ambient detour of Pale Sketches Demixed, Justin Broadrick returns Jesu to its pummeling essence, reissuing 2004's Heart Ache EP with four extra tracks. The older tracks, 20 minutes apiece, are monolithic dirge metal laced with synths and drum machines, rich and menacing, reminiscent of early Swans' atonal clang and Big Black's controlled bite. The additions, begun in 2004 and completed in 2010, pair chugging riffs from Earth or the Melvins with synths and atmospheric vocals; the overall effect feels almost like Nirvana chopped 'n' screwed.
Having studied guitar-massing minimalist composers and metalgaze bands alike, Brooklyn's former one-man black-metal art project composes an album deemed one of 2011's best by critics everywhere from Spin to Pitchfork to the New York Times. Quite an accomplishment, given that its gradually evolving repetitive clangor isn't all that far from the backing tracks on Lou Reed and Metallica's Lulu. Except here you've got intermittent yaaaargh-ing on top, plus chiming tintinnabulation, swirling light, token doom ("Veins of God") and neo-primitive chanting that almost does sound liturgical.
Stretching three tracks over 35 minutes (the shortest, "Transylvanian Incantations," is only 3:40, which leaves an awful lot of room for the other two), this female-fronted French experimental doom-drone band unites several strains of late 20th century downtown Manhattan avant-garde (Swans, Meredith Monk, assorted minimalist composers) into a kind of dolmen-metal that takes turns working as new age relaxation music and a demon-screaming, window-crashing horror soundscape. They are fond of monastery chanting and white noise and extreme slow motion. You either get sucked in, or you don't.
Fundamentally rooted in metal, Mouth of the Architect's moody atmospherics are heavy in a different sense. The pensive bleakness of their introspections (averaging about seven minutes apiece) is loaded with weighty, melancholic subjectivity, ranging from 2008's economic crises ("Hate and Heartache") to coming-of-age emotions ("Guilt and the Like"). But the starkly beautiful passages underlying the pained vocals somehow create hopefulness in their cohesion; check out a poignant appearance by Julie Christmas on the tender "Generation of Ghosts" for further reading.
Blake Judd and Co. return on their fourth full length, and first for Century Media, to bring their blackened psychedelia to new frontiers. Experimenting, or "meddling," with sounds such as saxophones and ambient textures produced by keyboards, Nachtmystium's ever-changing black metal-ish sound destroys all boundaries, becoming harder to pinpoint stylistically. With so many different moods and departures, the pleading pain of "Your True Enemy" and stark tranquility of "Seasick (Part 1: Drowned at Dusk)" offer glimpses of the brutal but poetic enigma that is Assassins.
The experimental prognosticators' 1992 release is one distressing journey. Listening to Souls is kind of like feeling lost in the dark, when the possibility of ghosts becomes eerily real. Neurosis blast through mind-blowing orchestrations and long instrumental passages that build slowly and take unexpected turns through goth-inspired soundscapes before erupting into layered yells, tribal beats and fuzzy distortion. The urgency of "Flight" will make your heart pump with adrenaline, while the ominous calm of "Sterile Vision" will have you dreading an impending doom.
Pelican's first full-length for Southern Lord furthers their reputation for complex instrumentals. Combining the trudge of doom and stoner metal with the open structures of prog rock, they create deliberately-paced, super-heavy extendo-jams. While the songs on What We All Come To Need are decidedly more subdued than on previous efforts from the L.A.-based (via Chicago) quintet, both the title "The Creeper" and the way it meanders its way into the listener's subconscious, evince the way the entire album works -- gently. This may be the first ever "subtle" metal record.
On their fourth album, you can totally tell this instrumental trio comes from Chicago, home to Tortoise and Sea and Cake. Russian Circles' metal machine Muzak basically rushes in circles like a louder, distorted version of the new agey so-called "post-rock" that those bands concocted back in the '90s. There's plenty of bloodily valentined oceanic shoegaze, too, which aligns them with combos like Isis, Pelican, Cult Of Luna and Red Sparowes. In "Atackla," they even manage some bombastic Glen Branca overtones. And in closer "Praise Be Man," they finally murmur a few words.
Jerusalem was a bootleg release of the legendary Sleep cut that got them kicked off London Records back in 1993, when the label asked them for a single and they produced this 68-minute dirge epic. Broken up into six tracks, nerve-rackingly repetitive (in the best way) and, of course, mind-squashingly heavy, Jerusalem is simply one of the most important records in all heavydom. Sleep bassist and singer Al Cisneros has said in interviews that he still prefers this version to the "sanctioned" one that came out on Tee Pee in 2003, titled Dopesmoker.
While Sunn O)))'s brilliance can really only be understood when the mountainous waves of guitar drone that make up their turgid pieces are permanently damaging your hearing in a live setting, Flight of the Behemoth marks the highly influential band's taffy-pulling finest moment on wax. Collaborating with Japanese electronic noise overlord Merzbow on tracks 3 and 4 here and reconfiguring Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (the scarifying closer "FWTBT"), the glacial moan of feedback, while heavy and loud as all hell, serves to transfix the listener far more than it disturbs.
This third full-length from ambient black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room is epic and devastatingly gorgeous. With Black Cascade, WITTR recorded on two-inch black tape through a 1973 console, building upon their penchant for purism. The resulting four tracks are dark, urgent and heart-wrenching.
