Pit Lord - Gallery of Skewered Swine (2022) Review

Man, this blows hard. The colossal amount of sub-par extreme metal bands coming and going the last two decades is difficult to avoid, yet most of the times it is wiser to ignore than to indulge. For once, and with such a grand cover art, I slightly had some hope for the second Pit Lord album, a parody death metal band focusing on the subject of grilling meat and barbeques, and as much as I appreciate this craft, the band is ridiculous at best. While not being a person pre-determined against groups with humorous lyrics (even if there is good ground to be), I always take the musical content into account above all, and Gallery of Skewered Swine is one of the most poorly made, generic and weakest death metal albums I have heard this year. Its production is a complete failure, as the guitars completely lack any kind of impact in their sound, something that could have saved them from the fact that they haven't written not even one riff worth listening to in the whole album. The vocals feel forced and frail too, and the drum machine sounds as good as the sound of typing on a keyboard. Pit Lord go for slam / brutal death metal grooves really often but the structure of the tracks is so flat and so predictable, in a completely unoriginal and deficient record that has only two nice points: the cover and some funny samples about grilling. An attempt of the classic word altering joke title of "Sons of a Northern Breakfast" just makes the whole situation more embarrassing, because at least when e.g. Cannabis Corpse do it, they are also capable of writing some actual music to support it. There's nothing worth it in this album and most of death metal you will hear is better than it, so don't even consider investing the time. This genre has much better artists with substantial vision and considerable musicianship for you to enjoy, instead of toying with material way below mediocrity. [1/5 - Really poor]

Spiral Staircase - Visions Shifting Form (2022) Review

At last, after a series of mini releases and demos, Spiral Staircase channel their focus into creating a full length album. This debut sums up the band’s path until now quite well and with slightly clearer sound, but don’t be scared that it goes too far. Visions Shifting Form has an abundance of great riffs, slight punk-ish elements, a distant epicness with frequent ominous passages and plenty of melody for a raw black metal album. It flows nicely, and while listening, it is easy to notice that it’s a hardly repetitive record, as numerous different parts of changing tempos co-exist in the same tracks, yet the feeling of the whole outcome is kept the same. The band released the excellent EP Cellar Dream last year, and continues with an even more convincing statement in Visions Shifting Form, but I couldn’t help but notice the relatively short duration of most of the project’s material. Excluding the eight minute cover of cult band Asakku “Endless Woods”, the album would clock at 22 minutes but in all honesty, you’d rather have short but competent material than never ending mediocrity. Visions Shifting Form has a lot of great moments and really enjoyable tracks, and Spiral Staircase strike well this time with a release that deserves all the attention of folks wandering in the dungeons of underground black metal. Classic second wave guitar lines in “Returning”, “Empyrean Wolven Gate” and the self-titled track, the opening “Infinite Shadow” is clearly energized through some d-beat punk aggression, “The Hallucination” has even more atmospheric riffs that a different band would stretch to 10 minutes, and there’s an one minute shot “In the Scrying House” with just a couple of sections. The cover on Asakku is wonderful, it brings back the ghosts of the mid and late 90’s and makes it easy for you to label Spiral Staircase, not only musically but also chronologically. If you’re gonna look backwards, at least do it with decency. [3.5/5 - Great]

Gaerea - Mirage (2022) Review

This name will appear in many outlets and probably many lists this year. Gaerea have all it needs to be a part of the widely discussed leading names of the modern black metal scene, right along the biggest names of the scene. They have been on an upward spiral since their debut, they are as photogenic as needed and now come around with an extremely attractive record to prove themselves. But do they? Mirage is by all means grandiose, really expressive and acutely crafted. The sound is powerful and the tracks compelling, cracking the formula of how to make properly heavy material with loads of melodies, borrowing some elements from post-black metal, evocative clean guitar passages and an intense live presence to go along with it. You can feel the vocalist’s agony through these painful screams, and the album explosively starts with highlights “Memoir” and “Salve”.  “Deluge” is also entertaining, “Arson” somehow manages (even though I hear some melodies that are the same as in Mgła), and that reveals a negative aspect of Mirage, its slightly underwhelming evolution until the end. There’s serious blasting in the beginning but it feels to me as ideas become more and more sparse as it progresses. “Ebb” has pretty standard, one-dimensional riffing, the filler clean guitar part of the self-titled track removes a lot of the album’s potential up to that point, and both “Mantle” and the closing “Laude” contain nothing more than average atmospheric / post-black metal lines. Thankfully, the delivery on the vocals often saves the day in the record, which is as a whole a quite satisfactory listening experience, despite the compositional weaknesses in some points. Despite that, this point will not alienate the fans who will worship this, or it will go unnoticed as Mirage is a generally powerful release. Therefore, the enormous praising that Gaerea receive, is not completely unjustified, yet I wouldn’t completely agree on how groundbreaking or genre pushing this work actually is. [3.25/5 - Good]

Decapitated - Cancer Culture (2022) Review

It’s now been 20 years since Nihility, Decapitated’s second and highly influential album in the modern / technical death metal scene. They have gone a long way since then and even after all this time, I can not account the band for any serious misstep in their discography, as they have more or less maintained their posture these two decades. Latest offering Cancer Culture is an alteration of the common term “cancel culture” that has been in the spotlight the last few years, and Decapitated take a stand regarding it with an opinion that is easy to guess from the album’s title already. Compositional prowess has always been there, the band is more than capable in creating continuous streams of intense and heavy guitar riffing, yet Cancer Culture has, in my opinion, the most dreadful and lousiest lyrics they have ever written. Since such a hot topic was picked, it would have been more convincing if it was articulated more consistently and not as if Decapitated are teenagers themselves (just five years ago in Anticult, the band nailed it on the lyrical content). Some tracks are  great musically, like the self-titled, “Locked” (a highlight!) or “Suicide Space Program” and “Last Supper”. And then, on the two tracks where guest musicians are featured, there isn’t a riff that was written that was not generic, especially in “Iconoclast” (with Robb Flynn of Machine Head). “Hello Death”, with Jinjer’s Tatiana, is by far the weakest piece in Cancer Culture for the same reasons, as it barely even has an actual riff. Decapitated is a band I have been following for years now, and for the first time I’d rather not understand what they’re singing about, because while the concept itself could prove interesting, the delivery here is embarrassing. At the same time, it’s not short of musical excellence in some parts of the record, and almost toothless at others (further example, “Hours as Battlegrounds” shouldn’t even be there). Cancer Culture has a great cover, but I wish a lot of its insides would be different. [2.5/5 - Average]

Spider God - Fly in the Trap (2022) Review

My first interaction with Spider God was a split with Μνήμα from 2021, where both bands expressed similar kind of filth in a few tracks and had me excited about another uprising quality raw black metal band. You can imagine my reaction coming across Black Renditions a year later, however I quickly moved on with a big question mark on how it was the same band that produced the two. Spider God proved hard working and release their actual debut full length album Fly in the Trap, which still remains unconventional if not polarizing for a black metal record. With a strangely eerie artwork, the record deals with the famous story of the death of Elisa Lam and includes quite interesting, ghost musicians like Rope Sect, Revenant Marquis and A Forest of Stars. Employing heavy doses of melody, most of the tracks abuse tremolo picking in a meaningful way and often manage guitar lines under a lot of brightness, contradicting the usually soul crushing atmospheres found in black metal. On the contrary, Fly in the Trap is borderline uplifting to listen to (check out the chorus of "Labyrinth of Hallways" for example) and doesn't really have the nuances of the genre Spider God are actually playing, yet the musicianship is skilled enough to construct wonderful compositions with nice riff transitions all throughout the album. I found the vocals a little bit repetitive at times, a few titles questionable (e.g. "Hiroshima Mon Amour" or "A Thousand Lonely Spiders") but tracks like the opening "The Fifty Second Murderer" or "Flies in the Trap" have their moments. The unclear direction of "The Hermit" places is clearly as the album's weakest point, and the closing track "Invisible Light" features an introduction straight out of a Running Wild record, and that's how much far away from black metal Fly in the Trap really is. Spider God have the potential to provoke and impress, yet this doesn't translate to the work's essence actually being groundbreaking. By no means a dull listen though. [3/5 - Good]