After over two decades reliance on public transport, cars are absolutely worth the cost. I can jump in at a moments’ notice and get somewhere in comfort. No more braving the cold and wet, the late and farty, the cancelled and never rescheduled. Fuck PT, fuck it to the moon. Anyway, here’s where my tunes come in:
ENCHANTMENT - COLD SOUL EMBRACE
Cosmic Key Creations/Transcending Records (2022)
If someone told you that just after Yorkie down-in-the-dumps Paradise Lost released Gothic and before the lads in Anathema wrote Eternity they both did a collab with My Dying Bride during the Turn Loose The Swans sessions, you’d call them a god damn liar, and rightly so. Enter Enchantment, which is such a pitch perfect blend of the OG Peaceville Three circa 1992-93 it has you believing that it really is a long-lost supergroup cut. Death/doom still lives on in smouldering pockets of depressed resistance, about that blighted Norf. If things went only shades different, we’d have an honourary Peaceville Fourth. You’d even swear that the singer was the bastard child of PD’s Nick Holmes and MDB’s Aaron Stainthorpe. Did I end up buying more MDB records to fill out my collection after this? I’ll never tell.
Cryptic Shift - Visitations from Enceladus
Blood Harvest (2020)
A pickup from the recent Into The Fall death metal festival, Cryptic Shift are either on heavy drugs or heavy doses of Robert Heinlein. Either way, their tripped out, spacefaring technical death metal cribs from all over the weird and wonderful musical spectrum. Funky lines aren’t shy, nor are Atheist or Gorguts style jazz fusion passages. It’s all wrapped up in a bleeding crimson guttural growling bow. Cryptic Shift, if they were Canadian and chill, would probably be akin to Rush. They are not akin to Rush.
This also came with a second disc of offcuts and snippets, which was really weird, therefore taking up two slots in the stacker.
Carnosus - Visions of infinihility
Independent (2022)
The Black Dahlia Murder lives! Wow, what a contradiction in terms. Swedish slightly melo, highly death peddlers Carnosus, if you didn’t know any better sound like that Phoenix arising out of the ashes of the dearly departed TBDM (RIP Trevor Strnad), wound tight around all the good bits of metal - headbang-worthy riffage, noodly weedlies at the top end of frets, and guttural grumbles heralding the end of all creation. If TBDM never come back (and really, let’s leave the legacy of Strnad to the Gods) Carnosus are inheritors of their own infinihility. I don’t know how to pronounce that either.
Be’lakor - Stone’s Reach
Riot! Entertainment/Prime Cuts Music (2009)
I’d be one to venture that the Scandinavian sadboi melodic death movement’s heyday started with Insomnium releasing Above the Weeping World and ended after Omnium Gatherum’s New World Shadows, with these Aussie parallel imports releasing a very, very good - but not quite great - entry into the pantheon in 2009. Pensive, longing acoustics are plucked throughout alongside frosty piano lines. Plunging riffs dive right into the heart of snow-capped darkness. It isn’t boilerplate Scandi-sadboi, but it doesn’t stray too much from the formula that’s served so many of their contemporaries (the forementioned, Kalmah, Mors Principium Est, In Mourning) so well. The twists come thick and the turns are tricky enough to discover new ones on repeat listens. If this is one surefire route to drinking out of a shoe in downtown Gothenburg in front of black clad Swedes, I really can’t judge.
Obscura - Diluvium
Relapse Records (2018)
Another pickup from Into the Fall festival, Deutschland’s Obscura are one of those technical death metal bands that are too fast for rational thought to parse - you definitely heard it but your brain didn’t. It isn’t all just fast shouties and 22/7 time signatures, though. Rattling off robotic laments (Emergent Evolution), travelling to the epic side of death metal town (Ethereal Skies) and even trying their hand at resurrecting the good ship Opeth (The Seventh Aeon, one track before punisher The Conjuration. Cheeky!) Though all the band except leader Steffen Kummerer would leave to form ahem, Obsidious, who released the biggest fuck you to Steffen last year with Iconic, because it was.