The Six Stacker: Second Strike, Strike Deadly

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The Six Stacker: First Edition

Ugh, what an ugly piece of industrial design.

I still buy CDs. Compact Discs. Redbook format. 44.1kHz sample rate with 16 bits of resolution. Designed by Sony and Phillips in the 70s to later shape the 80s. Obsolete in almost every way imaginable.

CDs used to be the chariot that delivered music to the people - now CDs are bits of after-market merchandise. In a grand twist of fate, the music industry bait-and-switched us all into following the rent-a-play, dime in the jukebox model of music ownership again, thanks to Spotify, Apple Music, and so on. If you buy a CD over streaming, most people can and will chide you: “why don’t you just get Spotify?” Because it sucks, Karen.

I think my six-CD stacker in my trusty Nissan Tiida has seen more play than the Globe at this point. I also use it as a barometer of how good a set of albums are - the longer they stay in, the more I tend to like them. They’re only forced out through sheer force of boredom and a craving for novelty. To document my own musical journey, I’m going to blog about the new “batch” of six discs (or vinyl downloads) in my car.

Are they all great purchases or am I wasting my money?

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DIALITH - EXTINCTION SIX

These guys may be the most European Philadelphians you will ever meet - all pomp, pageantry, and symphonic power metal. Dialith have taken it upon themselves to combine Wishmaster by Nightwish and V: The New Mythology Suite by Symphony X in a Cronenberg The Fly chamber and create the second part to both in one freakish yet awesome chimera. Krista Sion is a mezzo-soprano superstar, flying over tracks as light as air or diving into a cavernous brutality made in Hades: whatever the tone demands. No, she isn’t Tarja Turunen. Stop asking. Power metal fan, or even tolerant? Buy it.

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IN FLAMES - FOREGONE

I know - the cover artwork kind of looks like The Number of the Beast, Iron Maiden’s breakout and most successful album to date. A reminiscence, of sorts? That’s kind of what this album represents: rebirth in the flames of nostalgia. Now that The Halo Effect is a thing and does In Flames better than In Flames does In Flames, the “real” In Flames have stepped up their game a notch. They’ve reintroduced themselves to solid twin-leads and snarling, beastly growls by mainstay vocalist Anders Fridèn, hearkening all the way back to their 2000s era heyday. When that doubled-up lead break half-way through A State of Slow Decay rams through a signature Göteberg double-kick, double-time maelstrom, it feels like home. A home with dial-up internet, cargo pants, and angst, but home all the same. You can teach old Jesters new tricks.

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WOODS OF DESOLATION - THE FALLING TIDE

Creaking open like an oaken chest of treasures, The Fallen Tide and its expansive take on “blackgaze” - a wanker portmanteau of black metal and shoegaze - doesn’t come across as pedal-pushing carpet-staring, not even in the slightest. Though this one-man band D. loves his Agalloch as much as his Killing Joke (that pun only makes sense if you say it out loud) streaks of post-punk make for some happy accidents in his misty forest scenes, ripe for coffee and contemplation.

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DARKEST ERA - WITHER ON THE VINE

I don’t know where the Irish stereotype of lovable laughing drunk came from, because there’s a lot of depressing shit coming out of Ireland. Frank McCourt novels, Martin McDonagh films, and The Cranberries, I guess. Oh, and Primordial - depressing as all fuck. Darkest Era is doom metal but not cloaked in all that violin and Victorian-era lace and wilted roses patter; it’s more a whimper that heralds the end of the world. Krum (yep, that’s his name) and his delivery is plaintive and defeated - he does edge close to growlier moments but Darkest Era don’t stray too far from slow and funereal; I suppose they leave the embers of Celtic anger to the experts. It’s one long exasperated sigh; a mood so compelling I often take it with me hopping out of the car. “What’s wrong, dude?” Everything. Absolutely everything. Excellent, excellent LP.

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SINERGY - TO HELL AND BACK

I guess the alternate title of Little Adobe Photoshop of Horrors wouldn’t have stuck. The cover and liner was designed by someone who just learned ALL the PS blending tools such as “outer glow” and “linear burn” and didn’t care if sticking them all in on PSD file looked awful (or awesome?) Sinergy is Alexi Laiho’s (RIP, ex-Children of Bodom) punk-baroque-n’-roll project with wife Kimberly Goss on vocals. (They never ever divorced. I looked it up.) Goss is essentially Debbie Harry pre-Heart of Glass, before producers told her she could, in fact, sing (cue the hidden track Hanging on the Telephone.) It’s that, with an awesome-in-retrospect line-up backing her - Roope Latvala (ex-COB), Marco Hietala (ex-Nightwish, Tarot) and Tonmi Lillman (RIP, ex-Lordi.) It’s a fun disc that ripsnorts through midpaced headbangers about video games (Gallowmere), semi-mystical quasi-power metal (Return to the Fourth World) and dive bar punk rock numbers prefaced by obscure horror movie samples (The Bitch Is Back.) I wanted this since it came out in 2000, and now I have it. I rule!

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GOATWHORE - ANGELS HUNG FROM THE ARCHES OF HEAVEN

Metalheads are supposed to be chaos merchants but cannot get enough of classification. Set metalheads loose in a earthquake ravaged library and you’ll return to neat piles in Dewey-decimal perfection. Add the word “reminiscent” in there somewhere, because BAH GAWD someone is going to fucking use it. Goatwhore is your typical N’Awlins band - they couldn’t give one po’boy n’ Southern Comfort fuck about labels, and it shows. I mean it resembles black metal without glasses on, but you’ll be damned getting frostbitten Norwegians calling it that. There is that sludgy swamp-beating thump throughout, jazzed up by 80s lead breaks at times and unbridled death-to-innocents nihilism at others. Goatwhore don’t make shit albums. Gawd almighty.

Knotfest: Melbourne’s World Expo of The Weird and Heavy (Hysteria)

Courtney LaPlante of Spiritbox. Photo: Jordan Tan

When the righteous shout, “death to the freaks,” the freaks gather at Knotfest. They gather and have a bloody great time revelling in their derangement.

Drifting through Knotfest as every black-shirted shouty music enthusiast in Melbourne did, we’re greeted with every pillar of our culture. Knotfest is the World Expo of everything dangerous, scary, and downright exhilarating. Some of us expected a lanky top-hatted twirly moustache guy to announce every weird and wonderful thing that was happening like we were in an open-air psycho circus.

“Roll up, roll up! See the incredible chainsaw-wielding juggler! Will they be carving up incredible feats, or their actual feet? In the squared circle, we have Burlysaurus taking on the squirrelly Mouth from the South – his Lariat-Jurassic Punch combo sends his opponents into the stone age!” Nope, no such luck. If that guy was indeed real, he should have been shrieking “Two stages only! No clashes!” at the top of his nicotine-scarred lungs. If those masks on Slipknot were actually washed once in a while, I’d kiss all their faces. Bless you, Slipknot. Er, by Satan of course.

Read the review at Hysteriamag.com