Mastodawn

By Samguineous Maximus

Sometimes, you catch a glint from deep within the festering promo heap and you know exactly what kind of beast you’re about to prod. Strigiform’s debut, Aconite, radiates the unmistakable stench of “I, Voidhanger-core”—that wonderfully cursed strain of aural decimation that critics slobber over while normal metalheads back away slowly, usually on smaller wierdo labels like I, Voidhanger or Transcending Obscurity. Think along the lines of AMG darlings from this year like Hexrot, Patristic and Ritual Ascension. Let’s check the boxes, just for safe measure. Genre tag reads “avant-garde black/death” (Check). Hails from Italy, where pretension and brilliance are often bedfellows (Check). Cover art looks like a philosophy major’s panic attack rendered in oil paint (Check). Pretentious song titles? “Knell of Nethermost Withdrawal” (Triple Check). This is the kind of swirling, self-immolating chaos that promises either transcendence or a migraine.

Luckily for Strigiform, their songcraft does anything but check boxes, and the compositions on Aconite are nuanced and powered by a crack team of impeccable musicians. This is a quartet of underground metal veterans, from bands such as Vertebra Atlantis, Afraid of Destiny and Thirst Prayer, showing every bit of their pedigree across a lean 34-minute runtime. They merge the reality-altering riffcraft of mid-period Blut Aus Nord, the crystalline cleans of Haunter’s lighter moments and the sly virtuosity of Serpent Column into something entirely their own. Guitarist Saprovore careens between satisfying second-wave tremolos, uncomfortable suspended arpeggios, and spacey, phaser-coated clean sections dripping with a subtle menace. This delectable guitar work is backed by a tasty, jazz-fueled bass performance by Aiokos, who anchors the 6-string haze with a warm, meaty backbone, guiding the ear through these twisted compositions with melodic fills and supporting the eldritch riffery when necessary. The instrumental trio is rounded out by Morte Rossa on drums, who blasts and gallops as expected during the more anarchic moments, but also brings a gentle rhythmic touch to the record’s softer motifs. Each performance is impressive in its own right, but it’s the synthesis of these talented players working together to create considered compositions that elevate Aconite to a higher plane of perverse consciousness.

On Aconite, songs unfold naturally, brimming with skronktastic chaos and understated melodies. Strigiform understands the necessary push and pull to accent a work’s heavier moments, spending almost as much time lulling you into a sense of hypnotic false security as they do pummeling your eardrums with unholy blackened fury. The more aggressive cuts (“Adamant,” “Obsecration”) are led by omnidimensional death-tinged riffs and octopus-armed drum grooves while vocalist N shrieks abstract void poetry atop it all, but the rest of the album leaves plenty of room for brooding atmosphere. “Scorched and Hostile” emerges from its aural onslaught and ends on a sickening off-time chordal refrain, while album highlight “Hypnagogic Allure” weaves around a gorgeously haunting, Imperial Triumphant-esque clean arpeggio, building towards a dissonant freak-out as its poignant conclusion. Aconite demonstrates a pointed and deliberate pacing that often eludes bands of this ilk. Whenever a section might overstay its welcome, Strigiform interject with a novel, mind-bending part which furthers the song, easing up on the gas when necessary, but always deepening the band’s twisted vision.

Musically, Aconite is superb, but the work as a whole is elevated by Strigiform’s keen sense of thematics. The six songs on Aconite are ordered from shortest to longest, with each piece becoming more and more expansive until the 8-minute finale “Knell of Nethermost Withdrawal,” a tune that begins with nearly two minutes of abstract noise before the band’s familiar groaning lurch explodes into action. A full album listen gives the sense of descending into the Conradian darkness of some sinister subterranea. This is aided by some truly standout lyrics which evoke a poetic nihilism with the flourish of French symbolists like Baudelaire or Rimbaud. Such evocative lines as “Encapsulation of screaming cells / Inebriated by rotten velvet / Heal me with your aconite hands / Soak me in crimson flames / Turn my wrath to limestone / Drown in smoke” or “Molten into iridescent hallucinations / of devoured perception / yet again, another moment of consciousness / coerced into contemplation.” set my inner English major’s heart ablaze and are clear evidence that Aconite has the narrative weight to match its outstanding musicianship.

With Aconite, Strigiform have crafted a fully realized artistic statement that pushes the boundaries of esoteric underground metal. It’s the kind of album that makes all the trials and tribulations of music reviewing worthwhile—a debut from an unknown band on a modest label that completely floors you. Aconite is dynamic, intricate, and richly layered, a record every fan of avant-garde metal should hear. I can’t wait to see what Strigiform do next

Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: I, Voidhanger Records
Websites: i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/aconite
Releases Worldwide: November 14th, 2025

#2025 #40 #aconite #afraidOfDestiny #avantGarde #blackMetal #blackenedDeathMetal #blutAusNord #deathMetal #experimentalMetal #haunter #i #iVoidhanger #imperialTriumphant #italianMetal #nov25 #review #reviews #serpentColumn #strigiform #thirstPrayer #vertebraAtlantis

Alex Jun 23, 2025

In the absence of weekly tags for synthwave and something new to me called witch house, I'm giving this a run out on #BlackMetalMonday since it's plenty blackened enough.

It's Sex and Repression in High Society, Stupid, by Saint Vengeur (2025): https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sex-and-repression-in-higher-society

#synthwave #IVoidHanger #industrial #witchhouse

Sex and Repression in Higher Society, by SAINT VENGEUR

8 track album

I, Voidhanger Records

Angry Metal Guy Jul 19, 2024

Occulta Veritas – Irreducible Fear of the Sublime Review

By Thus Spoke

From the seemingly boundless nightmare realm that is the melting pot of extreme, dissonant black and blackened death metal, Occulta Veritas arises. The creation of Daniele Vergine, guitarist of Noise Trail Immersion, it veers off on its own experimental path with that project as a starting point. Blending post, atmospheric, and the most chaotically inaccessible black metal into an unusual, confrontational whole, Irreducible Fear of the Sublime presents its own challenge. The world the album takes its listener into is one that—perhaps typically, but very appropriately—purports to delve deep into the mind, mired in particular, in the theories of Lacan.1 It could be another befuddling, indistinguishable assault, forgotten as soon as it’s gone, or it could be a frightening dream you don’t forget.

You don’t need a psychology degree to analyze Irreducible Fear of the Sublime; nor would it help you. Here, vocals—and the meaning carried by the words they communicate—are rather a distillation of pinpointed emotion than they are a narration. Buried under the layers of tumbling chords, and choked in a muffled veil of distortion, they form yet another dissonant element to ring against the others, and the audience is encouraged to experience the music as a collective rise and fall of noise. It is better appreciated in this manner, for when the focus moves from these violent, incomprehensible screams, clambering, lurching riffs, and apparently fickle tempo fluctuations—the individual parts that relentlessly jostle for presence—to the piece they collectively create, much of what seems baffling and unnatural simply becomes a necessary part of the whole. On the macro level, the solemn, post-metal bridge “S(Ⱥ)” is a chapter of obvious beauty amidst its tortured peers with eerie, yet delicate atmosphere and haunting female singing. But on the micro, from the twisted, backwards scales (“The Mirror Stage”), impossibly clustered progressions (“Metonimia”), and lurching assaults of the blackened avantgarde (“The Sacred Horizons of Totality,” “Bound to Incompleteness”), comes a strange coherence, and suddenly, genuine harmoniousness.

What’s hardest to pin down about the album is its soul. This has nothing to do with its chaos, nor its heaviness. Rather, it is a function of its disparity. Part of me feels that such a refusal to be, or to mean, any one thing, is perfectly intentional; hence the extreme discomfort that tracks such as “The Mirror Stage,” “Bound to Incompleteness,” and the title track generate, with their stubborn flaunting of any boundary in key, rhythm, or force when crafting their nonetheless elegantly composed whole. Sometimes so purely intense, that it’s practically peaceful (“The Mirror Stage,” title track), and sometimes almost upsettingly jarring and borderline irritating in predictable unpredictability (“The Sacred Horizons…” “Metonimia”), just because it succeeds—and it does definitely succeed—in crafting something paradoxically coherent, doesn’t mean that what it crafts has any more substance than the dense smog you the music fills your lungs with as you experience it. Yet on the other hand, it’s difficult not to get lost in that smog, particularly when these perplexing passages of turmoil give way to melancholic lament (“The Sacred Horizons”) and plunge into liquid atmospheres (“The Mirror Stage,” “Bound to Incompleteness”).

For what could have simply been a wall of sound, Irreducible Fear of the Sublime is notably distinct. Peaking unsurprisingly over the limbo of “S(Ⱥ),” the remaining brutal companions are rendered yet more cutting and confrontational through relative clarity of every jangling, jarring element. Though the vocals are the obvious exception to this dynamic contrast, the music fares all the better for their repression. Like the conflicting sentiments and struggles manifesting in the melodic discordance, one’s straining to hear the exact facts they state is in vain, and is felt rather than consciously understood. Working in the opposite direction, nonetheless, is the listener’s inevitable desire to hear with better certainty, the voice that fills the void, and combined with the tendency to violate conventions in song structure, it can be a distractingly overwhelming listen, to the point of putting many off, I would imagine.

Where Irreducible Fear of the Sublime takes you is indeterminable. It is no soul-shattering anagnorisis, though there are moments when it almost could be, but nor is it a symptom of a crowded and indistinct subgenre of extremity. By listening, you may at least make your mind that much richer than it was before. We’ll just have to wait and see whether Occulta Veritas has further, more immediate truths to expound in future.

Rating: Good
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: I, Voidhanger
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: July 19th, 2024

#2024 #30 #BlackMetal #DeathMetal #DissonantBlackMetal #DissonantDeathMetal #ExperimentalMetal #IVoidhanger #IrreducibleFearOfTheSublime #ItalianMetal #Jul24 #OccultaVeritas #PostBlackMetal #PostMetal #Review #Reviews