Rebel Extravaganza

Heavy Metal And Other Occasional Musics And Cultures

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Album Reviews

Album Review: Atronos – Erwachen

Enter in ATRONOS of Germany for its second full length, despite being together less than three years. Chalk at least some of that up to lyricist/vocalist Baptist and (now) skinbasher Valfor doing double duty in underrated EISENKULT. Still, ATRONOS be helmed by Henker, who is responsible for music, guitars and bass, so no laurels to rest upon here. ‘Was uns so schrecklich hasst’ begins, fully formed and hoisting the banner of pagan black metal proudly. Baptist’s delivery here is markedly different from his style with EISENKULT, more mid-late ‘90s, reminiscences of when the genre was stepping out of the shadow […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Engulf – The Dying Planet Weeps

While the solitary black metal entity has become a known genre trope – almost to laughably sad proportions – over decades, often losing part of what made it special in the first place in the sheer glut of what should never have been a “scene”, death metal has yet to trip over that stumbling block. Hence, when a death metal project arises where one person is responsible, win or lose, I’ll at least approach with an open mind. After three EPs, New Jersey’s ENGULF (in the form of Hal Microutscicos) marks its first full-length with The Dying Planet Weeps. ‘Withered […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: ÚLFARR – Orlegsceaft

Ever get tired of the lyrics of your favorite black metal bands being written in some obscure “eldritch” dialect that with a short visit to Google Translate becomes known as modern Norse or High German? Do you see Chaucer as a false for using Middle English in Canterbury Tales? Feel like Cascadian black metal’s “alright if you like that sort of thing”, but long for something evoking your eldritch and Cumbrian ancestral home? Behealdan ÚLFARR! Birthed and guided by founder Dominus (aka Hfran), in 2011, ÚLFARR has unchained new material regularly since, yet Orlegsceaft be its first march into the […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Vemod – The Deepening

Time. It does what it does. It marches, onward and steady, each of us warring against or accepting, but still at its grim behest and beneath its law. Art – for those who create such – is a means to capture a moment or period from Time and leave a mark. “I was here.” “This is how I saw the world or myself.” When we rush to make that statement, that claim, it can be done poorly, or not fully thought through, yet it remains in the universe, the half-work of a creator who couldn’t comprehend what they were experiencing. […]

Short Sharp Shocks

Swim Or Drown – Trapped [7″]

There’s just something special about hardcore/punk from Scandinavia and the surrounding area, from the legendary kangpunk/d-beat sound of Sweden to the somewhat more technical yet still as powerful Swiss and Dutch scenes, the latter of which SWIM OR DROWN is a part. The title track of this 7” barnburner slams back and forth between ALL OUT WAR hardcore and FREYA metallic bursts, each style coming across as legitimate, no shred of gimmickry to be found. The gem for me here is ‘Human Scum’, a raging early INTEGRITY-styled diatribe with razor-sharp guitars and a boiling bottom end, scarred vocals spewing justice […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Iron Front – Hooked

It’s easy to judge someone’s skill, technical ability and “deservedness” to be on a label putting out music in their teens. And quite honestly the judgement is often on point. Shit, think of the first garage band you were in. Could 30 or even 40-year-old you play those “songs” with a smile on your face not born completely of nostalgia or should you just tank them, never to be spoken of or heard again. None of us are the same people we were in our teens, and if we are, we have some growing to fuckin’ do. Oakland, California’s IRON […]

Short Sharp Shocks

Blind Chaos – Very Metal Christmas [EP]

What do you do when you’ve got some downtime during the Christmas season? If you’re BLIND CHAOS of Oslo, Norway, you find a historic church, light your torches and…record a Christmas EP! ‘Last Christmas’ is infectious, probably more faithful to the original than lead throat Chris Wiborg probably wants to admit, making for an engaging jam. ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ punches, ending in a holiday wish for something warmer than cider, if you get my drift, and ‘Santa Baby’ is sure to get portly, bearded men in red lining up to hurry down chimneys of good (and […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Megaton Leviathan – Magick Helmet

When a band (or solo act, in this case) bio begins with “creating a sound that would stump critics and come to be known as Doomgaze”, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel that familiar sick-to-the-back-teeth taste that comes when a single entity claims to have “created” a new sub-subgenre. Wait, isn’t “Doomgaze” a sub-sub-subgenre, then? All I know that sole member Reuscher – doing business as MEGATON LEVIATHAN – has his work cut out for him on Magick Helmet. So, let’s put this right out front; it seems the paramount reason for the existence of MEGATON LEVIATHAN’s 4th […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Bull Elephant – The Long War

Alright, kids, let’s open our history books to the section on WWII, remembering when a giant pachyderm went berserker mode on the Nazis after starting out defending the weary Berliners from the incoming onslaught? You don’t? Well, BULL ELEPHANT sure do, as they’ve spent two albums before now telling the tales of our hero’s majestic and elephantine glory. Having dropped its self-titled debut a scant few months before the world went to dung – or at least more noticeably -, the Londoners unleashed Created From Death less than a year later, and then…silence from the studio. Yet, at long last, […]

Short Sharp Shocks

Maul – Desecration And Enchantment [EP]

After a shit-ton of demos/splits/singles/EPs, North Dakota’s MAUL dropped the wing-rending Seraphic Punishment on 2022, the debut’s ice-encrusted grime palpable in its blend of Scandinavian and, strangely, Floridian death to create something invigorating in a genre that’s often too set in its ways to be aware of its own dying from glut and trend. ‘The Sacred And The Profane/Hovering,Sinking’ is destructive from :01, rotting riffs slung over the back of stench-ridden rhythms and carried forth in a voice puked from Satan’s anus itself. Guitar patterns weave meathooks upon which to hang our cadavers as we await the ‘Disintegration Of The […]

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