Drouth – The Teeth of Time Review

By Dear Hollow

There are bands that check all the boxes from a quick gander at the promo. Yeah, sure it’s black metal, but the name Drouth is just fun to say.1 The title The Teeth of Time is just tantalizingly terrific. That cover is appropriately terrifying and unique. Don’t expect me to listen to the advance track – I’m on it, hoss. The problem is that such behavior led me to an average score of 2.3 in 2022, when I dedicated myself entirely to the blackened arts. What can I say? The dark blacky whacky looks cool as hell so much of the time. That being said, will Drouth be a bounty of rewards beneath its shimmer or is it just a whitewashed tomb?

Drouth is a black metal band from Portland, formed in 2014. Born from the ashes of Contempt and featuring caliber from acts like Vermin Womb, Ursa, Cormorant, and Black Queen, they have released a plethora of blackened breeds, impressing with their range but lacking identity: debut Knives, Labyrinths, Mirrors fully immersed itself into the mellow meloblack pond while follow-up Excerpts from a Dread Liturgy laid an icy finger upon death-doom’s more weighty moods. In this way, while firmly entrenched in the former, Drouth engages in a more feral and unhinged approach reminiscent of other American black metal acts like Mo’ynoq or Anicon, shredding tremolo and layered melodic overlays colliding in an overwhelming and tastefully concocted experience.

Drouth manages to strike a fine balance: layers of melody and a pristine production. The Teeth of Time’s foundation of rabid tremolo, bouncing around with an energy and fire, is complemented by an unhinged percussion performance that utterly rips into the next dimension. The sound drips with iciness that recalls Immortal but without the bogged-down drama. The diminished chord progression that everyone and his kvlt dog uses appears only sporadically (“Through a Glass, Darkly,” “Exult, Ye Flagellant”), replaced by a yearning melody that feels desperate and vicious in equal measure. Muscular riffage bolsters this approach with a death metal-inspired weight that kicks things into high gear while emerging from the fray in moments of clarity (“False Grail,” “Through a Glass…”), while melodies are unique in their sounding both haunting and heart-wrenching (“Hurl Your Thunderbolt Even Unto Death,” title track, “Through a Glass…”). The production and mixing are clear and clean, offering a rawness drenched in reverb without losing the individual elements – the drum production in particular is organic and relentless in equal measure.

While the majority of the album focuses on unhinged melodic second-wave shenanigans, there are moments of experimentation that are scattered into the latter half. Closer “Exult, Ye Flagellants” is perhaps the best example. While generally aligning with the American black metal template, the doom flavors of Excerpts from a Dread Liturgy appear most prominently in a dreary and mysterious dirge, only hinted at in earlier tracks (“False Grail”). The passage of flaying dissonance halfway through (vaguely hinted at in “Through a Glass…”), a layered haunted plucking that recalls microtonal acts like Victory Over the Sun, is a tad out of place but nonetheless impressive. Guest vocals provided by Ails and former Ludicra alum Laurie Sue Shanaman and Christy Cather in the title track, “Hurl Your Thunderbolt…,” and “False Grail” inject a dose of fiery energy, while Dead to a Dying World and Isenordal violist Eva Aldridge adds a somber dimension to “False Grail” and “Through a Glass, Darkly.”

One thing that Drouth does very well is make black metal sound pretty decent – good, even. Even though it takes repeated spins to unearth its treasures beneath the feral attack of layered melodies and muscular riffs, and the bass sometimes gets lost in the buzz of second-wave, The Teeth of Time is solid as fuck. Offering five tracks in a reasonable forty-one minutes, you have time to ponder but plenty of time to be thrashed about. While Drouth has experimented in prior releases, I hope the sound on The Teeth of Time is here to stay. Drouth offers bounty aplenty beneath its appealing exterior: get bitten or bite me.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Eternal Warfare Records
Websites: drouth.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/drouthpdx
Releases Worldwide: May 16th, 2025

#2025 #35 #Ails #AmericanMetal #Anicon #BlackMetal #BlackQueen #Contempt #Cormorant #DeadToADyingWorld #Drouth #EternalWarfareRecords #Immortal #Isenordal #Ludicra #May25 #MelodicBlackMetal #MoYnoq #Review #Reviews #TheTeethOfTime #URSA #VerminWomb #VictoryOverTheSun

Kólga – Black Tides Review

By Iceberg

Texas-based Kólga bill themselves as a “blackened surf rock collective.” With a descriptor like that, and an album cover like THAT, there’s no way I could pass up on seeing what lurked beneath the Lizard People pool. Boasting members from a boatload of bands from across the spectrum (Dead to a Dying World, Cleric, Tyrannosorceress, Sabbath Assembly, to name a few) this is Kólga’s first stab at a full-length: and barely at that, running at a lithe 27 minutes. But if the band calls it an LP, then an LP it is, and a review it receives. Unsure if I’ll get Dick Dale in corpsepaint or Euronymous in board shorts, I let the churning waves of the opening seconds of Black Tides wash over my frozen skin.

Blackened surf-rock is certainly a facet of Black Tides, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. The idiosyncrasies of surf-rock do indeed form the floor of the album: lightly distorted tremolo melodies, and that classic double-tap snare drum pattern. The blackened portion of the album is confined mainly to lo-fi cavernous vocals (“Space Beach Massacre,” “Squall of Cthulu”) and some heavier, more distorted passages that feel a little more Black Sabbath than black metal (“Tethis,” “The Kraken”). Much of this album would be better described as bad-trip surf rock, with shades of the psych-revivalist The Black Angels or even the theatrics of Alice Cooper. It’s also important to point out that this is predominately an instrumental album, though the band has a formidable treasure chest of timbres and textures on hand to keep the sound from stagnating (plenty of synth pads, auxiliary percussion like guiro and tambourine, a theremin, and even a waterphone, an instrument I’ve certainly heard before but never seen in action).

It’s this diverse palette of sound, along with a slavish adherence to their tongue-in-cheek concept, that gives Black Tides it’s je ne sais quois. Black metal and surf rock share more DNA than you may think, thanks to the prevalence of tremolo melodic guitar lines and fast single-stroke fills down the drumkit. Guitarists Jason Mullins and James Magruder do an admirable job of making me believe I’m in Surfin’-USA-gone-wrong with creepy laid-back numbers (“Squall of Cthulu,” “Endless Bummer”) and more maniacally driven ones reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack (“Riptide,” “The Kraken”). The vocals—by Mullins as well—revel in their role as a caricature of second-wave black metal (“Space Beach Massacre,” “The Kraken”), or a de-tuned acid trip narrative (“Squall of Cthulu,” “Tethis”). The band feels at ease in their performance, playing it a bit fast and loose with the timing, but not so much that it sounds like a jam session. And with the aforementioned lean run time, Black Tides manages to leave an impression without wearing out that inherent weirdness.

While Kólga aim to revel in their monster mash-up of a style, not everything on Black Tides has me buying what they’re selling. While bookends “Space Beach Massacre” and “The Kraken” make me believe the band is serious about Scandinavian Surf, the interior of the record strays from the thesis. Other tracks feel pulled from 70’s doom (“Tethis”) psychedelic rock (“Squall of Cthulu”) or straight surf rock (a sagging three-song run of “Riptide”-“Is This Real?”). These pieces are by no means poorly executed, but the divergence from the original genre pitch feels like the band threw everything at a wall to see what would stick, making for a listening that feels more unfocused than confident. The mix also feels a hair thrown together, with the drums—cymbals especially—feeling less crisp and seated than the rest of the instruments. I commend Mullins for committing to the bit with his vocal performance, and while I enjoy his Davy-Jones-on-LSD voiceover in “Squall of Cthulu,” the clean singing at the end of “Is This Real?” is strained and beginning to replace parody with cringe.

Gripes aside, Black Tides manages to provide a wacky, whimsical, yet under-baked detour from the more self-serious sides of metal. While I’d like to see the collective create a more cohesive and focused sound for future records, I can envision myself using a few of these tracks as background for Halloween or other mind-enhancing get-togethers. The band seems to have had fun making this record, and I hope they return to the project to make it bigger, bolder, and weirder. Now to find out the going rate for used waterphones on Ebay…

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Ottis Media Records | Bandcamp
Websites: facebook.com | Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: March 29, 2024

#25 #2024 #AliceCooper #AmericanMetal #BlackMetal #BlackSabbath #BlackTides #Cleric #DeadToADyingWorld #DickDaleAndTheDelTones #Kólga #Mar24 #OttisMediaRecords #PsychedlicRock #Review #Reviews #SabbathAssembly #SurfRock #TheBlackAngels #Tyrannosorceress

#TuneTueday ok, I may have spoken too hastly; I have found a less obvious but (maybe) grandiose alternative with a song from the first #DeadToADyingWorld record (who doesn't like #blackenedcrust with #cello?). Dead to a Dying World, We Enter the Circle at Night and are Consumed by Fire:

https://tofucarnagerecords.bandcamp.com/track/we-enter-the-circle-at-night-and-are-consumed-by-fire