Niederwelt are an entity hailing from Saxony, Germany and this is their second full length opus. This one contains kind of intro plus six songs. The music is raw black metal but with lots of atmospheric parts, slower doomy rolling parts and tortured screams mixing with angry screaming, whispering, even coughing in awesome and desperate Cult Of The Rising Moon. This may be called depressive black metal, but it is in fact atmospheric black with doom elements. Lyrics are in English and deal with apocalypse, surviving after the destruction, personal fighting with inner demons through prism of entity who questions its own humanity. Songs are rather long but they do not get boring in any case. One of my personal favorite is aggressive and blasting From The Ashes, which reminded me a lot of old school nineties Norse black metal influences, especially old Mayhem, circa Deathcrush era. But, for me the most epic on this opus is Reincarnation, long epic song with ritualistic guitar melody, thundering drums, chanting monk like clean vocals and that old school production and vibe that many black metal bands lack these days. Repetition Of Sins slows down things a bit into more doomy regions but it is such a powerful guitar riff coupled with vocal growls. Great stuff. Not to discover just all, check this one out!
You may say what you want but Darkthrone are explorers. Besides being black metal legends who released couple of milestone albums in black metal genre they decided to explore metal and musical boundaries and not giving a fuck what anybody thinks about that. Main occupation of Darkthrone’s music last couple of years is 80ies metal with Fenriz being an absolute encyclopedia of metal and underground. For me personally, the best phase in last couple of years of so, was more melodic punky crust phase with Circle The Wagons coming to mind immediately. On to this opus. This one contains seven songs, with one called Koboltn, West Of The Wast Forests being eerie piano synth instrumental. On this opus Darkthrone mix eighties metal with doom metal slower side of things but retaining enough melody in guitar riffs to keep songs interesting and good listening. My personal favorites are Eon 2 having such nice main guitar melody, also Kevorkian Times. There are no blast beats on this album, but there are synth parts smartly thrown in some songs, also acoustic atmospheric parts and varied yet hypnotic riffing topped with Nocturno Culto’s trade mark voice. Maybe it takes couple of listenings to get to love this album, but once you do it, it is superb like all Darkthrone releases.
Germany has been always great black metal scene and Wolfmond Production brings us some really awesome releases. This time it is a new opus by Lost Shade. This is their fourth full length opus being in the scene since 1999. This opus contains ten songs. Music of Lost Shade is fast and kind of raw black metal, but also song structures have some epic warrior battle melodies, with lyrics more oriented towards pagan side of things. Vocals are black metal screaming, not too extreme but I can also hear some chanting and some spoken word in some songs depending on the atmosphere. As I said, this is black battle pagan metal par excellence. Lyrics are in German, but I understand the language so my personal favorites on this one are Ewige Vergeltung, great epic song with such eerie piano song ending, also Hexentanz and Leichenmarsch. It kind of reminds me of old school Mystic Circle in its epicness, but without synth and symphonic passages. Good epic pagan battle black metal.
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