CD

Xtreem Music

Double CD in Jewel case with 12-page booklet.

SÓLSTAFIR have come a long way from an obscure Black Metal band out of Reykjavik, Iceland to a musically mindboggling and unique mixture of dark Metal, psychedelic passions and an eerily rocking groove – beloved and praised by critics and fans alike.
This band’s journey started in the year 1994 and continuously meandered into something that their many die hard adherents describe as ‘extremely cool’ and ‘different’, now the quartet’s burgeoning creativity has been bubbling up like a hot geyser unleashing their breathtaking double album “Svartir Sandar”, which takes the metamorphosis of these individualists close to perfection.
This eagerly awaited masterpiece comes with a red hot passion like glowing magma and emotionality as stormy as the Northern Atlantic. Ride this volcano with Iceland’s gnarled and twisted cowboys of Rock and Metal!

For fans of ENSLAVED, AMON AMARTH, ELUVEITIE.

Season of Mist

Riding entirely along the melodic wave, Goatmoon have released something so impressive that I had to break my silence of words. Having been on a hiatus for more than two weeks now, something told me it would be a black metal release that’d force me to pick up my pen once again.

For starters Goatmoon hail from Finland and have been belting out black metal since the winter of 2002. Much against those who hate the thought of hatred itself, this band has kept it alive and a little more than that. Two full-lengths, several splits and demos later they have decided to take over your thoughts and make it swing their way which happens to be a route of satanism and chilling breezes.

Goatmoon is a one-man band and all the songs are hatched by BlackGoat Gravedesecrator. Probably his name would be one of the very few things not working for the band. Well, that’s none of my business anyways. Varjot, as the album is named, seeks to flood you with loads of black metal with sheets of folk placed very carefully amongst the tracks. There is not much difficulty in finding rawness on the album as Gravedesecrator knows what is the ‘in thing’. Cold riffs with enough reasons to foster melody makes Varjot a must have.

An otherwise uninteresting 2011 has been perked up by these powerful metal releases and life doesn’t seem to run out of reasons. Although the album could have showcased a lot more variety and taken hatred to an all new level, Goatmoon have rejuvenated black metal in their own way and my speakers cannot stop blaring the tracks from Varjot.

Werewolf

Lifelover's fourth and last album "Sjukdom" (English: disease) is a dark and challenging record. Following their critical acclaim-afforded and cathartic "Konkurs" in 2008, these elusive and mysterious misanthropes venture down an even more daring path with "Sjukdom" where the extremes of the characteristically idiosyncratic Lifelover sound are pushed to their utmost limit: the bittersweet melodies become more beautiful whilst the pulsing, coal-black heaviness becomes uglier. After the tragic death of B in September 2011, this is Lifelover's final studio album.

Prophecy

Atzinski

Elitist is a four-piece band from Portland, Oregon, but for all intents and purposes, you may as well just think of the band members as four spiky signposts pointing the quickest road to Hell. This is nasty, incendiary stuff, a rotten brew of sludge, doom, black metal, crust, d-beat, and whatever the fuck else kind of distressing noise these crabby SOBs can find to throw in the pot. Truth be told, there is something of a glut of bands taking a similar mix-and-match approach to extreme metal in recent years, but Elitist’s debut full-length is one of the most convincingly ugly and consistently compelling albums among an increasingly crowded field. To put it bluntly, Fear in a Handful of Dust hates you and wants to taste your tears.

The band appropriately cites Eyehategod as an influence, which shines through less in the band’s sound than in the drug-spent nihilism of its aesthetic. Opener “Burning the Unspoken Gospel” takes its time working up to a full band crush, making excellent use of waves of thick guitar carrying the vocal savagery up until they can take no more, and the full band must man the ramparts and scale the walls. Still, sometimes it’s nice to just let a guitar hang around and be nasty for a while, like for the first few seconds of “Black Wool,” before a fat, stumbling bass serves as midwife to horrific vocal expulsions. Elitist calls to mind fellow luminaries of fuck-your-labels-this-is-METAL metal such as Coffinworm or a much less grindy (and much better) Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire, but fans of Withered, Black Breath, Gaza, or basically anyone else who is taking a fistful of recognizable genre signifiers and lining them up against a wall to face a firing squad of angry bees and mistreated tigers should quake in all the right ways from these bad vibrations.

Many of the shorter songs run through a sort of diseased, ultra-thick d-beat tar pit (“Cult Malevolence,” “A Howling Wind”), while the longer tracks make a greater use of dynamics and stylistic switch-ups, like the stuttering drums that lead a clattering blast into “Human all too Human,” which has been transformed by song’s end into an elastic Sleep-y dirge. With vocals ranging from guttural death/grind to higher-pitched rasping that doesn’t quite approach black metal shrieking, Josh Greene is a suitably feral frontman, while the remaining members of Elitist play this gritty, woozy, and ill-tempered racket like their instruments have been soldered to their hands, with a “the world’s shit, so let’s keep playing” attitude that really elevates their brand of style-fuckery to grimly satisfying heights.

The album’s true masterstroke comes early in the form of “Ivory Shavings of the Tools Unknown.” A nasty Pantera-meets-Celtic Frost beatdown eventually transitions to a lovely, black-metal-influenced midsection that strongly evokes the latest Tombs album, then finally into a feedback-drenched outro that is the closest approximation of a star imploding this side of Skullflower’s Tribulation. Fear in a Handful of Dust covers an awful lot of ground in just under 35 minutes, but never feels like the amateurish exercise in cut-and-paste that often afflicts bands trying to chew up and spit out as many extreme metal styles as possible. The wonderfully-named “Tower Of Meth” closes things out on a slightly downbeat note where I wish it would have stormed out in a, well, towering rage of shrieking and stomping, but this is a relatively minor complaint. The numerous styles that get thrown together throughout the record are balanced and well integrated, and any misgivings about the slight lack of memorable songwriting chops are quickly erased when one remembers that this is the band’s first album. If subsequent efforts see them maintaining the red-line intensity while cramming this maniacally-unhinged blend of styles into tighter songcraft, we had all better watch the hell out. This is filth-caked noise for a filth-caked world: just what the doctor ordered.
(www.metalreview.com)


Season of Mist

 

Hammer of Hate

Peaceville

The official Beherit debut album, recorded back in 1990 in Ala Ky Studio, Rovaniemi. Because of the problems with Turbo Music the album was never released until Sodomatic Slaughter found the master tape in his personal collection in 2010.

Recorded live in the studio by Nuclear Holocausto Vengeance and Sodomatic Slaughter.

Contains two previously unreleased tracks and the other tracks are different to what has been available before.

Kvlt Records

AFM

New outstanding album from this French Death-Black Metal Militia.
6 scenes & one outroduction of satanic violence and spiritual emptiness

Agonia

Inter Arma