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Four years and one pandemic on from Orificial Purge, Vastum, the longest running band on the 20 Buck Spin roster, offers up its fifth bludgeoning document of psychic malaise and lost faith with ‘Inward To Gethsemane’. As before, the abject disgust unsparingly captured in Vastum’s unique approach continues to drape the music with an aura of discomfiting unease. The cavernous density Vastum has made a core element of its discography remains as inhuman as ever, continuing to delve into darker atmospheres, yet never devolving into ambient murk; on the contrary it’s always punishing and with a fearsome momentum. The distinctively harrowing dual vocal attack of Daniel Butler and Leila Abdul-Rauf appears throughout ‘Inward…’; the possessed narrators of Vastum’s hellish underworld. Eight minute album closer ‘Corpus Fractum’ manifests a transformative and even experimental side of Vastum musically and vocally, while sustaining the characteristic merciless power the band is revered for across its five albums. Between the sporadic but legendary live performances and a worshipped discography of modern era true Death Metal, Vastum has become a torchbearer of the grisly and grotesque underground, both within its native Bay Area and well beyond. ‘Inward to Gethsemane’ carves another notch in Vastum’s totem of deviance.

• One of two simultaneously released new albums by Bay Area surreal blackened technical death metal band
• Each album cover is half of a larger original piece created for the band by Ian Miller (Stormkeep, Bolt Thrower, Games Workshop)
• 2020 album Providence was widely hailed for its unique style of death metal
• For fans of Atrocity, Enslaved, Gorguts, Demilich, Krallice, Voidceremony, Tomb Mold, Suffering Hour

• One of two simultaneously released new albums by Bay Area surreal blackened technical death metal band
• Each album cover is half of a larger original piece created for the band by Ian Miller (Stormkeep, Bolt Thrower, Games Workshop)
• 2020 album Providence was widely hailed for its unique style of death metal
• For fans of Atrocity, Enslaved, Gorguts, Demilich, Krallice, Voidceremony, Tomb Mold, Suffering Hour

With first album Tlazcaltiliztli, Tzompantli called forth a penetrating strike of death and doom Metal like a poisoned arrow through the heart. The band’s foundation in Indigenous / Native rituals, history and lore, and merging of traditional instruments into their sound made for one of 2022’s most uniquely voiced metal records.

Now Tzompantli have again been summoned from the smoke of the ancient fires with a new offering at the altar of human sacrifice, Beating The Drums Of Ancestral Force. Fearsomely brutal marches of war-like, percussive death metal are contrasted with melancholy passages of longing spirit and entrancing ceremonial invocations to the ancestors. The Tzompantli tribe has greatly expanded on this second album with 10+ musicians enlisted in the conjuring of wrathful deities and collection of invader skulls.

There has been no shortage of fantastic death / doom records in recent years and Tzompantli’s latest entry in the genre’s pantheon demonstrates its continued expansion into wider musical and thematic arenas. The anguished fortitude at the heart of Beating The Drums Of Ancestral Force exalts in the blood and ash of empire and would-be conquerors, a fiery lamentation to centuries of erasure.

After releasing three albums in three years and then spending the next four in the wilderness, Tomb Mold has been reborn on fourth album The Enduring Spirit, a thoroughly unabashed step into vast new territories. Yet for all its frenetic daring and audacious exploration, it is never anything other than unmistakably Tomb Mold.

While the expanding Tomb Mold architecture could be heard on last year’s self-released Aperture Of Body tape, it comes into clear focus throughout The Enduring Spirit. Certainly Derrick Vella’s time creating within and expanding the doom genre in Dream Unending has seeped into the flesh of Tomb Mold, not to mention Payson Power and Max Klebanoff’s explorations in their own Daydream Plus project.

With album opener “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)” the band’s angular dimension shifting riffing appears right out of the gate as the track travels through varying degrees of progressive death metal and some of the band’s most extreme material yet. “Will Of Whispers” enters with a jazz-like fantasy sequence before careening into a blinding white light barrage, tasteful guitar leads and back to a dreamy serpentine pattern, encompassing whole universes in its nearly seven minute run-time.

(..)" ma è l’intera tracklist a rivelare il rinnovato spessore artistico dei canadesi; la conferma inesorabile della loro maturazione arriva proprio ascoltando il disco nel suo insieme, nel cui sviluppo il gruppo riesce nell’impresa di catalizzare mood fondamentalmente classici senza mai cadere nella trappola della prevedibile derivazione, sfoderando riff esaltanti e pillole di vero ingegno a cadenza regolare. Smisurata passione e un indubbio background da veri death metal fan completano il quadro. I Tomb Mold sono diventati grandi.(..)

taken from Metal Italia

After six years in deathlike repose, Predatory Light returns. From beneath churchyard stones, the bare, ruined choir sets forth to drape the world in its nocturnal lightings. Once again established in the spiritual desert of the southwest, the devil’s quartet has been reanimated by the same infernal regents that compose the deadly Superstition. As a result, the four musicians that conceived ‘The Anatomy of Unholy Transformation’, in Predatory Light, delve into far bleaker corners of their dark twisting subconscious. “Death And The Twilight Hours”, the second album from Predatory Light is comprised of four towering mazes of infernal technicality, ancient evil, and eerie church nightmare Black Metal of the South European and South American style. These four hymns conceptually meditate on the triumph of death during times of plague, focusing on the psychological terror and rapture of humanity’s impending doom. Borrowing imagery from Boccaccio’s account of the plague in his native Florence and inspired by Lucretius’ record of the Athenian Plague, Predatory Light explores the historical mindset of human sin and torment- evoking the archetypal personification of death as it tethers human consciousness to the realm of earthly suffering. The sinister, spectral guitars that drift like cemetery mist over everything and beckon for release tell the story on “Death And The Twilight Hours” as much as the scathing diseased vocals guiding the path. Now resolutely ascendent, Predatory Light’s return heralds the second coming of one of US black metal’s immense outliers.


 

Digipak CD
First Oranssi Pazuzu album reissued at last.
“During the last few years we have had many people asking from us about the availability of our earlier albums, the vinyl versions of both and also the debut cd being sold out for some time now. We have been promising a repress basically since 2011, when the vinyls first came out, and we are very happy to say this is finally being realized.
To us both Muukalainen puhuu and Kosmonument nowadays sound something like a different band, but they still embody many of our principal musical ideas in songs like Korppi or Kaaos hallitsee
 

MYLINGAR Döda Själar LP, is the third chapter in the Döden trilogy

With their anticipated debut full length Seraphic Punishment in 2022, Fargo’s Maul dropped one of the most memorable death metal earworms of the year. Coupled with the band’s relentless drive for bringing their music to the people live throughout the country, Maul’s reputation rapidly grew and a pact with 20 Buck Spin was scrawled in blood. The initial fruit of that union was delivered late in 2023 with the Desecration And Enchantment promo tape. And now all roads have led to Maul’s second album, In The Jaws Of Bereavement.

While the rotten death metal heart at the core of the band is without question, the band have no shame in their game when it comes to embracing a penchant for the heavier side of hardcore with mosh-ready riffs and crowd-killing breaks. In The Jaws Of Bereavement manages to so skillfully fuse the eerie apparitions and melodic lead work of death metal’s greats with the punishing rhythms of hardcore’s violent power it feels completely organic. It’s all tied together by the unhinged vocal prowess of the human wrecking ball Garrett Alvarado.

At its putrescent core Maul is a live band, and the songs on In The Jaws Of Bereavement are adeptly tailored to the environs of a dank club sweltering from the energy created through this music and a crowd living for nothing but the moment and the swell of bodies on bodies. The production here is clear and in one’s face, and allows the band to expand their unique blend of old and new to become Midwest death incarnate.