The EP boasts an even thicker, more robust sound, whilst retaining that musty homemade feel that made the demo so engaging. There’s still plenty of straight-up old-school death metal goodness on here too, however, with tracks like ‘Calamity From The Sky’ sounding like a more strung out, hallucinogenic Obituary.īristol based solo death/doom outfit Visions From Beyond are back too when I covered his Eternally Bound, Whipped By Time demo back in January, I’d hoped this lockdown project would be more than a one-off, and thankfully Drawing Down The Darkness is a fantastic follow-up. Their second album, 2017’s Remnants… took the band’s old-school Florida worshipping sound into headier, spacier territory, and this EP does the same with dissonant, Voivod-esque instrumentals like ‘Adrift’ and the title track.
US death metallers Rude continue to push themselves on the appropriately titled Outer Reaches EP too. Their latest is a collaboration with former Protest The Hero bassist Arif Mirabdolbaghi on the tanbur, an instrument that adds a remarkable amount of texture and atmosphere to the band’s most meditative and folky set of songs to date. The Canadian trio blend folk, black metal and doom in a particularly earthy and engaging way, like Agalloch and Wolvserpent going ‘shroom picking on a crisp Autumn morning. If that’s your thing, then don’t miss the new Völur EP either. ‘The Dwell’ proves they can still unleash scathingly cold black metal when they want to, but for the most part The Humming Mountain is a much more subdued and solemn listen. Gaahl’s time in Wardruna has evidently informed the sombre, subtle epic ‘The Seed’, whilst the title track takes the band’s atmospheric mid-paced black metal sound to even more hypnotic and mysterious heights. Former Gorgoroth frontman’s new project Gaahls WYRD delve into even more cinematic, folky places on their new EP The Humming Mountain. Still, we’re spoilt for choice for new metal releases this month anyway as well as all the albums below, we’ve got some pretty great EPs too. For a 90 minute album from a band I once considered to be at the very forefront of metal’s cutting edge, that’s really not good enough. It’s not terrible but it’s arguably their blandest offering yet there’s nothing here as egregious as some of the more baffling missteps on Once More ‘Round The Sun and Emperor Of Sand, but the only thing that really sticks in my mind here are the handful of gentle but expressive Dire Straits-ish lead sections that occasionally pop up. I’m not averse to lengthy double albums at all, but coming from a band that haven’t had enough ideas to sustain a single LP in well over a decade, this one feels particularly ill-advised. That said, however, I still struggled to get through the new Mastodon record Hushed And Grim this month.
The rabid response to these sets is an affirming reminder that taking the time to listen to an album in full is still something that huge numbers of us cherish greatly.
In spite of lesser publications trotting out the same increasingly tired, “Is the album dead?” think-piece like clockwork every other month, it was a blast to see so many bands delivering full album sets at Damnation this year, with Paradise Lost, Akercocke and Svalbard all performing classic records front to back.
The latter’s set was one of the most powerful musical experiences I’ve had in a long-time – opening with the rarely (if ever) played ‘Jesu’ from their 2001 opus Hymns, the duo really proved just how timeless and futuristic their unique brand of industrial metal still sounds. Against all odds, the festival’s Leeds swansong was a fantastic send off, boasting a host of young UK acts alongside heavy-hitters like Carcass, Paradise Lost and Godflesh. After months of isolation, it feels good to be writing this column whilst battling through a comfortingly familiar post-Damnation hangover.