Norwegian top-act Throne Of Katarsis sort of is a constant element within my end year lists. Their Candlelight-efforts Helvete … (2009) or Ved Graven (2011), for example, did end up with a very high personal score (both reviews I did on these full albums are still available within the Archives-tab). So I was very pleased to receive the promotional edition of this band’s fourth studio album.
Vegard Sverre Tveitan, aka Ihsahn, is probably mostly known from legendary act Emperor. He is / was also active in splendid projects like Thou Shalt Suffer (damn, I do miss them in every aspect), God Of Atheists, Zyklon-B (another excellent combo, even though… Never mind…), Hardingrock or Xeresia (almost all of them bands or projects I am just crazy about); with his wife Heidi S.
I was very pleased with what Italian band Stigma (the one from Piedemonte, of course) did in the past. Albums like When Midnight Strikes! and Concerto For The Undead (both of them released via Pivotal Recordings, in respectively 2008 and 2010; reviews updated on respectively 18/04/10 and 21/12/10 in this site’s Archives-section) were honoured by positive reviewing taken care of by undersigned ;-).
Bordeaux… I do appreciate some of the wines coming from that era, even though not every sub-region out there can completely please me (I am a connoisseur-amateur, with a profound passion for wines and distillates, but that’s another story). However, there’s another Bordeaux-based existence I do appreciate enormously: Year Of No Light. This band was formed at the beginning of this century and they did record a handful of highly acceptable releases with a mostly breath-taking atmosphere.
After a decade of solo work under the monicker Onethirtyeight (a wacky piano 'n' keyboards based soundtrackish kinda thing with some very weird topics, either in lyrical or visualized context – check out some of those videos at (www.) onethirtyeight.co.uk – with four releases to its name : 2002's Case #6 EP, 2003's Bring Out Your Living EP, the 2006 The Sister EP-CD, and the 2009 full-length CD (+ DVD) London Transmissions), London-based Dan Hardingham suddenly felt the need to start something in a band configuration agai
Doom Metal has many faces; that’s something we all know, that isn’t but a cheap side-line. Making abstraction of the Black-, Funeral-, Sludge- and Death-oriented sub-genres (amongst others), and concentrating on the more traditionally inspired bands, there are some huge different interpretations as well. There’s the so-called Epic-scene (with sword and shield), the Sixties-oriented one (with joint and mushroom), the sabbathesque clones (also with joint and mushroom), and so on, and so on.
Monolithe are one of Sylvain Bégot’s outfits (one might know him from Anthemon as well; this act originally started as a side-project, but since Anthemon was put to rest…). Besides the main instruments (bass, guitars and keyboards), Sylvain took care of this fourth album’s production too.
Hybris is a London based technical thrash metal band witch concept started originally in distant 2002, when Federica (Centurions Ghost) made camp in London and started writing riffs for what would have been an all-female metal band. However, finding the right people seemed to be a big issue.
Hum...not a lot of info on this band to be found on the Internet, and it's therefore a blessing that we still have the info sheet we got along with the promo copy of the album! So, with further ado, let's just “copy-paste” (huh...like as if!) the info found there, with the sparse additions we díd find!
To say it took a few listens before False Prism opened up would be the understatement of the year. I still have to be in a particular mood to really enjoy the music fully. This is Sadgiqacea (pronounced sad-juh-kay-sha?) latest and they have created an album of the type that doesn't come along very often.
