Fleshgod Apocalypse - King (2016) Review

Breathing the soul of the slain in battle

In the old forum era and during the time of Fleshgod Apocalypse’s first years of activity, it was a joke how they “put a photo of their drummer on the cover of the Mafia EP”. Word was for the incredible percussion technician Francesco Paoli and how special his contribution was to the band’s debut full length-album Oracles in 2009, as well as the EP that followed - but that wasn’t the only aspect that made them stand out. Mixing the gut-punch immediacy of technical death metal with a classical flavor, the project was an ambitious experiment in synthesis from day one. Following a trajectory defined by increasing integration of these classical textures in Agony (2011), and even more so in Labyrinth (2013), the blood-stained tuxedo gang from Italy were traversing a familiar path when King dropped in 2016. 

Whitechapel - The Valley (2019) Review

 I can't erase these memories, but I will erase humanity

Up to 2019, deathcore veterans Whitechapel from Knoxville perfected but never questioned the vocabulary that helped define the genre’s first major wave from the mid ‘00s and onward. While the band’s earlier work leaned on archetypal lyrical violence and sharpened musical blunt force, The Valley seriously shook the waters as a fundamental reorientation of their career. Explicitly autobiographical, it’s a deeply personal concept album built around the real-life childhood of vocalist Phil Bozeman, and chronicles his upbringing in Hardin Valley (Tennessee), a landscape marked by loss, mental illness and instability. Embedded in the textual architecture of the record are his father’s death when he was ten, as well as his mother’s struggle with alcoholism and schizophrenia before her overdose several years later, often drawing directly from her journals and charging the album a documentary gravity that’s a rare bird in extreme metal. The “valley” itself functions both as the literal setting of where he grew up, but also as a metaphor for the burden of emotional desolation.

Nemorous - What Remains When Hope Has Failed (2025) Review

Above average atmospheric black metal has the capacity to pull you into its world like gravitation, and What Remains When Hope Has Failed is one of those cases. From what was once Wodensthrone, a seminal force in the English underground,  arises Nemorous with their debut album as a meticulous resurrection of a long missed force in the scene. Four years in the making, the album is the product of reinvigoration, a cohesive melodic ambition that projects emotion and often outpaces the sum of its parts.

Right from the moment when opener "The Wyrm at World's End" unfurls its tendrils of tremolo and synth, its sense of longing embedded in the cold establishes itself. Nemorous' world draws from the unbearable grey, the lingering half-life of autumn's last leaves, and expresses itself through the exquisite musicianship of individuals who have already proven themselves within atmospheric black metal circles. Coiling with a fluidity that evokes both melancholy and beauty, the album's textural intelligence with subtle synth touches and gentle guitar tempo shifts, ensure that the listener never settles into complacency. 

There's a natural affinity to legendary atmospheric acts like Agalloch or Fen, but Nemorous does not sound derivative. Tracks like "This Rotten Bough" and "Sky Avalanche" display a real command of dynamics, with the guitars (newly expanded as Rob Hindmarsh has been added to the line-up) yielding rich soundscapes that shimmy between earthy swings and higher tension. Frontman Nick Craggs, the masterful vocalist of death metal wagon Vacivus, deserves his own mention. His delivery has range and nuance, whether it's the deeper growls, the painful shrieks of the spoken word segments, and lends the record a surprisingly human presence amid the atmospheric storm.

Revisiting Wodensthrone for a better verdict on where to place this album in the band's universe, might be in vain, because there's a more distinctly separate entity here, even while being strongly anchored in the atmospheric black metal sound. The production frames the music and its contrasts beautifully, as clean moments breathe, and the few more aggressive ones cut without confusion. What Remains When Hope Has Failed is reflective rather than reactionary, and shows how Nemorous now steps boldly into their own terrain, after a quite decent first EP in 2021.

Release: December 19th, 2025 | Bindrune Recordings
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 [Great]

Website: Facebook 

 

Enmity - Illuminations of Vile Engorgement (2005) Review

Whoever sets on a path to discover the sickest kind of extreme music that has ever been recorded, sooner or later will come across Enmity’s debut and only album, Illuminations of Vile Engorgement. Released in 2005 through Permeated Records, the album has accrued a reputation as much for its divisive sound as for the discourse it sparks about the limits of brutal death metal, and how it forcibly melds absurdity with brutality while ignoring all expectations. The band has little interest in conventional structure, butchering the notion of accessibility by plunging headlong into a torrent of blast assaults, guttural chaos and relentless slam death noise. Forget pretty descriptions like memorable riff progressions, discernible melodies, technical prowess, as all that’s musical is sacrificed in the pit of barbarism and repulsion.  

The guitars are tuned so low and mixed so murkily; they basically blur into an amorphous, impenetrable wall of sound. Guitar lines are pounding, abrasive and unrepentant, while drums throb with literally non-stop blast beats, producing an effect so visceral and overwhelming, that you’ll probably have a physical response to it. Track titles are right up there when it comes to the ugliest brutal death metal filth, while the gurgling, intentionally grotesque guttural vocals just double down on the whole element of distortion. I would freely admit it’s impossible to tell one track from the next, yet the total of 33 minutes of this experiment, somehow needs to be listened just to see how a band reaching sounds like. It’s unclear whether Enmity did this deliberately or not, but they orchestrated the conditions for the perfect storm inside extreme metal fandom just with this one album. 

Wildly divergent reactions have been drawn over the years about Illuminations of Vile Engorgement, and the audience will never come to an agreement about it. For some, a misguided experiment that lacks quality and direction, standing as a bizarre outlier in brutal death metal that overstretched itself to complete incoherence. To others, a sonic anti-thesis, dismantling the tolerance of even the most durable listeners with its ceaseless propulsion. To me, just the vastness of different opinions is what stands out here, and how chaotic the record actually is – repetitive and uninviting. Pushing itself to such a ludicrous edge, there’s a performative audacity in Enmity’s approach that’s at least acknowledgeable. It’s not going to be in my death metal favorites any time soon, but I somehow get both why people strongly hate or strongly worship it. 

I’m not going to mention any specific track or moment, except for the outro “Severe Lacerations”, which is fully in acoustic guitars and quite virtuosic to my ears. And the only reason I’m mentioning it is to maybe confuse you even more, in case you read the vivid breakdown of the rest of the record done in the paragraphs above. In the end, Illuminations of Vile Engorgement refuses to moderate itself (except from the end), it’s polarizing and impossible to digest or be processed logically. There’s a series of works of this kind that do take the extra mile, and this clearly is one of them.