Author Andrew Doherty
I have heard so many good things about Swallow the Sun over the years but somehow always managed to miss them when they played live. It’s redemption time now as “Songs from the North” is a triple album, each transmitting… Continue Reading →
I don’t normally comment on band names as bands have to have some sort of tag, but Octanic suggests something energetic and high octane. That is what we get here from the Australian band. Listening to “Aeternus Imperium”, which opens… Continue Reading →
Not long before receiving this 2015 re-issue of these stylistically divergent albums which came out close to each other in 2003, I read a media post in which the commentator remarked on a recent Opeth live show. The post was… Continue Reading →
I confess this is a band I didn’t know anything about before picking up this album but it seems that they’ve done the rounds in their six years of existence. “Disharmony” is the LA band’s third full album release. Reading… Continue Reading →
GOLD’s mission statement is to “play a distinct form of heavy rock as a monument to civilisation’s decline”. This follow-up to their first album “Interbellum” is much more than heavy rock. “No Image” should really be called “A Multitude of… Continue Reading →
Until this album came along, “New World Order” for me was always a track by Pagan’s Mind. Now here’s another angle on it by Italy’s Void of Sleep. “Occult rhythms in a whirlwind of Psychedelic Madness” is how this is… Continue Reading →
Gonius Rex, The Heretic and Soul Reaper a.k.a Onirik return for their fourth album of black metal “wandering textures”. If you’re looking for life this isn’t the best place to come. Grey and drawn out structures seem to represent Onirik’s… Continue Reading →
Sunday 4th October What I heard was a mess. What I saw was a six piece band including a bemused-looking woman in a pure white robe who stuck out like a sore thumb from the others. The band in question… Continue Reading →
“The UK plays no part in Europe”. There’s nothing newsworthy about that. There may have been no UK bands this time among the fourteen playing at the seventeenth edition of this annual festival, but Rene and his organising crew have… Continue Reading →
One no doubt unintended outcome of this work is that if you show photos of people in corpse-paint over a ten year period, there’s no ageing process. So before I started to listen to this French band’s historical collection, I… Continue Reading →
This is an interesting project from Bauda, a progressive rocker from Chile. In it he collaborates with Rene Rutten of The Gathering. After a dramatic opening, “Vigil” is one of the most transfixing progressive tracks I’ve heard. It has that… Continue Reading →
This album is “a lyrical concept called ‘Mörkrets Kärna’: an album-trilogy about falling down a pit of your darkest being, losing yourself completely and desperately trying to make sense of it”. Moloken come from the same place geographically, and in… Continue Reading →