Atmosphere, this album has plenty of it. Synths pave the way, first as an intro and then as the beginning of the first song, so when the guitars hit, there’s a feeling of dichotomy between the synths and the treebly strings with the former feeling quite spacious and the latter flat. So when the keyboards […]
The Swiss three piece MATTERHORN (named after the country’s most famous mountain) is a band that seems to make it easy to the listener at first glance. Hailing from Switzerland, being a three piece with a singing guitar player, a voice that sounds pretty much like Tom Warrior and riffs and beats that remind of […]
HALLIG are hailing from Germany and have just released their second output entitled "A Distant Reflection Of The Void". The opening track ‘A Dawn Beneath Titanium Clouds’ starts with some keyboard notes and could be an intro of a Gothic band before the guys start to unleash their Black Metal inferno. Somewhere between ISTAPP and […]
The French label Les Acteurs De L’Ombre Productions is the go to place to get a glimpse of the who’s who in the current French Black Metal scene, and a bit beyond. The label has in my eyes done some really great releases during the last ten years, where they have been around, always on […]
PESTIFER from Portugal, active for two decades already, finally present their first full-length entitled "Execration Diatrobes“. After hearing the first tunes of this nice output early MORBID ANGEL immediately came into my mind but also mixed with some slight notes of early CANNIBAL CORPSE in a quicker version. The album starts with an intro before […]
EPITAPHE is a new Doom / Death act coming from France. This is their debut demo entitled just as “Demo MMXVII” and it was released earlier this year by Mexico’s Chaos Records. Recorded in the “French Alpes”, what we have here is three long tracks of some kind of raw stuff. ‘The Downard Stream’, the […]
DENIAL definitely is one of my favorite bands from Mexico, if not the favorite band. The debut album "Catacombs Of The Grotesque " from 2009 is truly a masterpiece and still spinning frequently in my CD player. Chaos Records now puts out an awesome compilation of all the band’s work so far, except for the […]
ESKHATON is a trio from Australia that plays a kind of extremely fast and extremely brutal Death Metal that reminds me of ORDER FROM CHAOS and BLASPHEMY speeded up with a bit of the insanity of SADISTIK EXEKUTION, and with some early MORBID ANGEL also coming to mind. This is their third album and it […]
Album number three by ARCHEMORON from Greece. At first I was irritated about the name, the term "arche" and its meaning of beginning or source / root is quite known, but "moron"? Do not be fooled, the word is inspired by the ancient Hellenic mythology and "Moros" was the child of Nychta (night), having two […]
I got introduced to this great zine directly through editor Dima Andreyuk, who contacted me a while ago, asking about the possibility to re-use some of my interviews in TOUGH RIFFS MAGAZINE. Since a lot of those interviews are only available online so far, I accepted his offer right away. Surprisingly it didn’t take very […]