post metal

Record #828: Bossk – Migration (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As much as I love post metal, I won’t deny that the genre has no shortage of color-by-numbers acts that regurgitate the same few influences. I’ll admit, this isn’t always a dealbreaker for me. I’ve heard and enjoyed a number of albums that might as well have been subtitled “A Study in Russian Circles,” and even purchased a number of them—such is my hunger for heavy guitars and dark atmospheres.

With that in mind, when a post metal act releases something that looks beyond the scope of the overworked soil tilled up by Isis, Cult of Luna, and Russian Circles and replanted by just about every other band in the genre since, the results are truly fresh.

Take for instance Migration, the second full length from Kent, England’s Bossk. It draws enough from the conventions of post metal to pass the smell test, but it infuses those flavors with generous bits of seasoning from trip hop, industrial, and hardcore.

The results is one of the most inventive and rewarding post metal albums of the last few years.

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Record #824: Coastlands – Death (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Discovering music used to be so hard.

Usually, you were entirely reliant on the help of a tastemaker friend or a record store employee who had the time to sort through the silt to find the gold they’d pass on to you. Besides that, you could scour the websites of record labels you liked or study the liner notes of your favorite CDs to find what bands the bands you liked would work with. Then you’d take all of that to the P2P network that hadn’t been shut down or overrun with viruses yet and hope that the file you downloaded was properly labeled (it usually wasn’t).

These days, great music just falls in your lap, via the recommendation algorithms of your streaming service of choice and the endless stream of posts from likeminded music fans online. Or, in the case of Coastlands, the band might just start following you on TikTok and end up being super good.

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Record #791: Amenra – De Doorn (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Media is an interesting thing.

Take for instance De Doorn (Flemish for “The Thorn”) the seventh album from Belgian sludge metallurgists Amenra. It is by all respects a grave and serious album: these songs were written as part of a project commissioned by local government officials as a commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the First World War, a presence still uniquely felt in their region, dotted with bunkers, trenches, and the lingering loss of ancestors. It is a poignant look at grief, mourning, and the scars of war.

And yet, I discovered this album when professional wrestler Malakai Black used a track as his entrance music.

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Record #772: Kowloon Walled City – Grievances (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

There is a misconception I see sometimes that the better a song is, the more difficult it is to play. After all, anybody can write a simple song, but it takes someone with real talent to write something complicated. It takes real talent to play an intricate solo. It takes real talent to write a song with lots of different chords and multiple time changes.

However, there are numerous examples across the world of recorded music that disprove that theory. Bands like The Ramones or The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Add to that list Kowloon Walled City, a Oakland CA outfit that creates huge monoliths of sludge metal without much complication. While other bands might be tempted to speed these songs up or fill them with gratuitous guitar solos.

Kowloon Walled City resists these urges, trusting the strength of the crawling riffs and passionate songwriting to make Grievances a chilling statement—and rightly so.

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Record #767: BIG|BRAVE – Vital (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

For someone who is as heavily into glacial, sludgy, female-fronted metal as I am, it might come as a shock to hear that I never heard about Big Brave until a couple months ago when I found myself with an advanced copy of their newest album to review. But within seconds of the opening track “Abating the Incarnation of Matter,” I was already on their site ordering this record. Immediately after I finished the review, I tracked down a copy of their earlier album A Gaze Among Them.

All that to say. This record is great.

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Record #755: BIG|BRAVE – A Gaze Among Them (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Anybody who has even the most passing familiarity with this blog can tell that there are a few musical tropes that I cannot resist. Among them are crushing walls of sound, ominous, glacial tempos, lush atmospheres, and emotional female voices.

And Big Brave from Montreal delivers all these in spades, combining each of my favorite colors into a stunning landscape that is at once sonically crushing and achingly gorgeous.

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Record #747: Jesu – Terminus (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few members of the music scene are as prolific as Justin Broadrick. Since the first Jesu release in 2004, he has had more than twenty releases through that project, including a number of studio albums, EPs, splits, and collaborative albums.

Of those albums, I fell deeply in love with 2007’s Conqueror several years ago, but haven’t found anything else in his extensive catalogue that has captured me quite as tightly.

That is, until last year’s Terminus, which showcases his brand of sparkling bedroom doomgaze in an understated yet compelling way.

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Record #737: Emma Ruth Rundle – Marked For Death (2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In the last few months, my awareness of Emma Ruth Rundle has absolutely exploded. I was introduced to her most recent solo record On Dark Horses when I was assigned it while writing for a Belgium-based review site, and even then she was only introduced to me as the guitarist from Red Sparowes.

After almost a year and a half of knowing and loving just that album, I started to dig deeper, falling in love with her alternative/post-rock/psychedelic outfit Marriages, psych-folk outfit Nocturnes (someone sell me their vinyl copy plz), and her recent collaboration with doom metallurgists Thou.

But it’s taken me until a few weeks ago to listen to any of her other solo work, and once I did, the obsession continued. Marked For Death, her second song-based solo album—and regarded by many to be her best—is a crushing work of dark, brooding Southern gothic that showcases her stunning talent as both a songwriter and an ambient architect.

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Record #729: Baroness – Yellow & Green (2012)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Image may contain: 1 personI started 2020 with the realization that Baroness could do no wrong, and that I might as well just buy their entire catalog. Red was the first record I purchased in 2020, and so there’s a certain poetry to the fact that Yellow & Green—the final missing piece in my collection—was the last I purchased.

It’s admittedly an odd choice to purchase this record last—by most accounts, Yellow & Green is their masterpiece: a massive, sprawling double album that finalizes their transformation from sludge metal heroes to genre-defying Metal Gods. It was perhaps that monstrous reputation that me tentative to approach it, but every second of this album lives up to its legacy.

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