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| Album Score: 7.5/10 |
There are bands that try to be heavy, and then there are bands that just are. Svart Crown fall into the second category. The French foursome blend Death and Black metal in a tooth-rattling vortex, their sound falling somewhere between the crushing onslaught of Behemoth and the Sophisticated Black Metal Art of Emperor. Their second effort, Witnessing the Fall is largely driven by rumbling tremolo riffs and thunderous drumming, its ten songs tied together by themes of ancient Rome and “humanity in perdition”. While by no means the first to combine their two principle genres, Svart Crown – whose name translates to “Black Crown” and is pronounced as it looks – manage to create their own voice and vary their songwriting enough to make Witnessing worth hearing out.
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| Album Score: 6.5/10 |
One thing about The Seer is indisputable: this album is massive. Sprawling across 120 minutes and two discs, this behemoth is a radio DJ’s nightmare and a prog junkie’s dream. The songs range from a minute and a half to over half an hour, telling nigh-indecipherable tales of anguish and uprising, foresight and doom. Swans claim that The Seer is the culmination of 30 years of work, and the sheer scale of the album lives up to such a claim. And yet when it’s all said and done, the question remains: how much is too much?
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| Album Score: 8/10 |
Black metal and horror fiction would seem to be an obvious marriage of style and subject matter; on the other hand, concept albums have a propensity to be either exceptionally good or hilariously bad (take Swans and Metallica as recent examples). The Great Old Ones’ choice of H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon as their template is a bold move, but it pays off in spades on Al Azif. Drawing from black metal stylistically and post-metal structurally, the French quintet manage to craft a captivating debut through a chilling atmosphere and unorthodox musicianship.
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| Album Score: 8.5/10 |
Ever since Deathcrush was first swept beyond the Nordic forests on icy winds of hand-traded cassette tapes, black metal has been famous for the bleak, empty feelings that permeate its very being. While the cell-phone recording quality of early black metal was a combination of do-it-yourself philosophy and an anti-industry approach (as well as anti-Christianity, anti-social, and anti-everything, really), these traits have become a hallmark that many modern bands seek to recapture. American act Wolves in the Throne Room have come under some fire for shunning these cult roots of the genre, but really, their brand of American black metal – played by firelight on vintage amps – isn’t so different from Emperor and Ulver’s pagan aesthetics. In fact, Wolves’ 2008 DVD Live at Roadburn is about as black metal as it gets, as they blast and shriek through a selection of ten-minute epics about returning to nature, occult mythos, and stories of post-apocalyptic landscapes.
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| Album Score: 9.5/10 |
Gojira did not take the quick path to stardom. Formed in 1997 around brothers Joe and Mario Duplantier, the quartet spent nine years in relative obscurity until their third album From Mars to Sirius really made a splash in the international metal community. The band’s first live set, The Link Alive, was a solid take on their first two albums, but came too soon to capture Gojira’s creative explosion. 2012’s The Flesh Alive, however, takes full advantage of the strength and diversity of From Mars… and successor The Way of All Flesh.
