#TuneTuesday bringing rage with #RipandTear and crush and smash

#LLNN #Obsidian
https://llnn.bandcamp.com/track/obsidian

#Abraham: Suurwäut

https://song.link/0vg5td3fhn9x9

#PostHardcore #PostMetal

FFO #Adzes #LLNN #YearOfNoLight

"Mein Freund hat so laut gelacht, dass die Nachbarn gekommen sind, um zu sehen, was passiert ist. Jetzt sehen sie sich das Video auch an"

#OwlClub

I can’t express how much I love the crushing cosmic sound of #LLNN #Interloper #SaturDoom

https://llnn.bandcamp.com/track/interloper

K L P S – K L P S Review

By Maddog

Determined to explode my word count while safeguarding my character count, K L P S is a familiar band with an unfamiliar name. The band’s 2023 debut Phantom Centre, released under the name Kollaps\e, got stuck in our filter before I yanked it out. Phantom Centre’s sludgy mix of atmosphere and eighteen-wheeler riffs made it concise and compelling, albeit one-track. Two years on, K L P S sees Sweden’s sludgers drop a backslash and four letters while adding even chunkier riffs, more atmosphere, and three non-breaking spaces.1 After an already-promising start, K L P S has taken one leap closer to being a titan of their genre.

K L P S takes Phantom Centre’s measurements and doubles each one. The riffs are bigger, with distorted rhythmic explosions that recall LLNN. Conversely, even these heavier sections come drenched in post-hardcore sorrow. Adding to the soup, K L P S’ use of chunky riffwork to build meditative atmospheres resembles stoner sludge acts like Dvne. While K L P S has amped up their extremity, K L P S’ softer pieces step up as well. The album’s sparser passages, often featuring just simple guitar melodies and ritualistic drum beats, add stark contrast to its heavyweights. Although K L P S is less rhythmic and bass-focused than Phantom Centre, it magnifies nearly every other dimension of its predecessor. The resulting record bears the familiar markers of sludge, but accentuates them all to avoid fading into irrelevance.

K L P S’ blend of heft and emotion makes every track a highlight. The album’s hulking riffs harness sludge’s power while eschewing its typical laziness, tethering themselves to ominous, infectious melodies (“Undertow”). Aided by blackened motifs, even these heavy segments ooze pathos (“Subverse”). K L P S’ descents into minimalism stand in stark musical contrast but embody the same strengths, using subtle melodic tweaks to both hypnotize and grip the listener (“Katarsis”). The record’s greatest triumph is that it never treats these diverse elements as mutually exclusive. The sections that blur the line between heart and muscle show off the best that K L P S has to offer, like the interplay of meditative guitars, post-rock ambience, and climactic riffcraft on “Tribulation.” Like Amenra before them, K L P S wields beauty and brawn in ways that are at once worlds apart and inextricable.

Although K L P S remains interesting throughout, its tracks bleed together over several listens. The album’s six songs have similar lengths and lean into similar styles, without a clear sense of evolution or climax in the tracklist. While each song navigates deftly between serene minimalism and sludgy cacophony, this style grows stale by the end. K L P S’ production choices magnify this feeling; although each instrumental line shines through, the loud master and the muddled sludge riffs make K L P S seem more repetitive than it really is. Still, these are faint splotches on an otherwise impressive record. Given its tempered 43-minute runtime, K L P S never threatens to lose my interest altogether. And when the album does prioritize buildup and climax, the results are spectacular. The closer “Aureola” takes the cake, using powerful melodies to anchor the listener before building up into oblivion and then back down into cathartic quiet. K L P S would benefit from more of this continuity overall.

K L P S has improved upon their debut on nearly every axis. While Phantom Centre was already a breath of fresh air in a moldy genre, K L P S steps up its riffs, its ambience, and its emotional weight. Displaying an uncanny level of maturity, K L P S’ sophomore release shines by blending these elements into a heady brand of sludge where the riffs have soul and the atmosphere has grit. While I wish K L P S had more ebb and flow as an album, its masterful songs keep me coming back for more. Even skeptics of sludge and post-metal owe this hidden gem a listen.

Rating: Very Good!
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: These Hands Melt
Websites: kollapsemusic.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/kollapsemusik
Releases Worldwide: March 7th, 2025

#2025 #35 #Amenra #Dvne #KLPS #Kollapse #LLNN #Mar25 #PostHardcore #PostMetal #Review #Reviews #Sludge #SwedishMetal #TheseHandsMelt

Panzerfaust – The Suns of Perdition – Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion Review

By Carcharodon

The Panzerfaust tetralogy, The Suns of Perdition series, began all the way back in 2019 with Chapter I: War, Horrid War. Despite being a great record, delivered by a band showing huge promise, this massive saga wasn’t one that I really expected to ever see finished. Bands break up, get dragged into controversies1 or whatever. But, five years later, here we are, at the conclusion of The Suns of Perdition series and the end of the world. For that is what Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion explores: the world slowly falling apart, as human society and civilization approach inevitable collapse, and descends into chaos. At my hands, the series to date has gone 4.02-4.5-3.5. Does the final entry represent a triumphant conclusion to an epic saga or Panzerfaust’s unavoidable descent into the reality of the cold light of day?

To say that Panzerfaust’s music is misanthropic would be an understatement. The entire thesis of The Suns of Perdition is that to put it bluntly, humanity is a collection of twats doing awful things, which will eventually lead to the apocalypse. Even measured against that yardstick, Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion is bleak. And unrelenting. Unrelentingly bleak, one could say. Gone are the shimmering adornments and twisted, yet familiar, touchpoints scattered across War, Horrid War. Gone are the dancing melodies that occasionally lifted the gloom brooding over of Chapter II: Render unto Eden. Gone (thankfully!) are the interludes that disrupted the threat of Chapter III: The Astral Drain. Panzerfaust is unleashed on To Shadow Zion, with nothing held back. From start to finish, this is the sound of The End. However, where a band like LLNN rendered the apocalypse real on Unmaker through sheer heaviness measured in metric tonnage, Panzerfaust achieves the same by tone alone. Don’t get me wrong, To Shadow Zion is crushing, with savage carnage on the likes of “When Even the Ground is Hostile,” as Goliath’s sulphuric, rasping roar rips out over the backing vocals and cascading tremolos of Brock van Dijk. But from the doom-laden overtones that open “Occam’s Fucking Razor,” with its half-heard, half-chanted backing vocals to the brutal but stripped-back closing third of “The Hesychasm Unchained,” Panzerfaust achieve a cohesive tone of desolation through a variety of means.

As on previous outings in The Suns of Perdition saga, so on To Shadow Zion, Panzerfaust’s true MVP is drummer Alexander Kartashov. His ability, and crucially willingness, to shift between metronomic, artillery-like blasts, doom-laden rhythmic patterns, and something altogether more progressive is what both holds Panzerfaust’s compositions together and drives them forward. Most evident on album highlight, “The Damascene Conversions,” Kartashov modulates his patterns to perfectly accentuate and highlight the bağlama3 (contributed by guest Ahmet lhvani). Far from introducing a lift in mood, the bağlama’s discordant, twanging harmonies bring a sense of mournful hopelessness. The epic closer, “To Shadow Zion (No Sanctuary),” is massive, its rolling guitar lines and thick, meaty bass steamrollering forward, as Goliath switches up his delivery in places, leaning into a snarling, half-spoken rasp that conveys nothing but contempt for his subject: us.

“Fuck hope” intones Goliath (or possibly van Dijk) toward the back end of “When Even the Ground is Hostile,” capturing the entire feel of To Shadow Zion. Panzerfaust has created a dark portrait of a world in flames and done so in five, tightly written tracks, spanning just 45 minutes. The Astral Drain devoted ten full minutes of its run to meandering interludes. These are abandoned entirely here, which means that despite being two minutes shorter than its predecessor, To Shadow Zion delivers more actual music and does so cohesively, without sacrificing its flow or tracks transitions. The production is good, without being stellar. A lot of emphasis is placed on the (excellent) drums and (trademark) vocals, but I do wish Van Dijk’s guitars were pushed just a little more into the foreground in the heavier passages. That said, the guitar tone in melodic places, like the melancholic opening to “The Damascene Conversions,” is perfect and the overall soundstage is dynamic.

The slight (and relative) drop in quality on last installment, Chapter III: The Astral Drain, notwithstanding, delivering a worthy conclusion to The Suns of Perdition saga was always going to be a huge challenge for Panzerfaust. On To Shadow Zion, they have risen to the occasion. “The Damascene Conversions” is likely to follow “The Far Bank at the River Styx” in finding a high place on my SOTY list, while the album as a whole delivers on everything that Panzerfaust set out to achieve. Whilst not quite reaching the stellar heights of series-highlight Chapter II: Render unto Eden, Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion has a devastating flow to it and it’s more than worthy of closing this epic saga.

Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Eisenwald Records
Websites: panzerfaust.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/PANZERFAUST.BM.OFFICIAL
Releases Worldwide: November 22nd, 2024

#2024 #40 #AtmosphericBlackMetal #BlackMetal #CanadianMetal #EisenwaldRecords #LLNN #Nov24 #Panzerfaust #Review #Reviews #TheSunsOfPerditionChapterIVToShadowZion

Evening sunlight under the Yohkai tent.

📷 Pentax KX
🎞️ Ilford Delta 400
🔭 Pentax M 50mm/1.7
⚗️ Come Through Lab

#BelieveInFilm #FilmPhotography #AnalogPhotography #BlackAndWhitePhotography #BlackAndWhite #MonochromePhotography #35mm #Bristol #ArcTanGent #ATG #LLNN

A well-known scientific fact that listening to one #PostMetal song is equal to drinking 10 shots of espresso.
For @AqiDraco's #TheSundayStarter:

Love Sex Machine: Hollywood Story

https://song.link/7stbtvk7rqnhc

FFO #AdmiralAngry #BlackSheepWall #LLNN

So, you like #Psychonaut? You'll most probably like them as well. For @DXMacGuffin's #ProgTuesday:

Hippotraktor: Stasis

https://song.link/5vb03rgtnqt98

FFO #IrisT #LLNN #TheOcean

Sun of Nothing – Maze Review

By Dear Hollow

Few albums reveled in existential despair like Sun of Nothing’s The Guilt of Feeling Alive. While punishing in ways that recall Neurosis or Blindead, it settled heavily into tension and despondence beneath the devastation. It always hinted at something without fully grasping it, fluid and powerful heft contrasting with an overwhelming bleakness. Despite its black metal influence, Sun of Nothing did not offer a bleakness like DSBM’s passing glance at a winter landscape, but represented the grey of its troubling cover art: the day-in and day-out of a cold, tired, and worn city, shrouded in smog. For its first album in fourteen years, the Greek quartet has offered something that stands shoulder to shoulder.

Maze is stacked with expectation, and it delivers. Sun of Nothing could have stayed in The Guilt’s lane and played it safe, but they amp up the punishment, hone the dichotomy, and paint a bleaker and more desperate picture than its predecessor could have imagined. Thick sludge riffs are the most noticeable, weighty affairs that recall post-metal’s more vicious moments in Cranial or LLNN, with dissonant leads that don’t necessarily dwell in eeriness and darkness as much as gloom and despondence. Contrasting this droning palette is a black metal-inclined vocal attack whose soul in torment feels like a cry to break through tar-thick monotony. A rusty edge of noisy post-punk graces Maze with a palpable clanking and mammoth repetition that drives the nail deeper, while the songwriting of everything “post-” graces the tired proceedings with a repetitive and nihilistic krautrock approach. Sun of Nothing takes their signature sound deeper with an emphasis on mood and atmosphere. It’s a desperate and hopeless wandering through the human maze, a crooked path we all walk.

The foundation upon which Sun of Nothing builds its songcraft is a simple one, rooted in post-metal. Tension is established with slightly disconcerting minor riffs and a smoky, sludgy distortion, with dissonant plucking and melodic counterbalances. Centerpiece “Ghost Maze” and closer “Buried Endeavors” are great examples of this, Isis-esque rhythms and patient growth balanced by these chords and an uncanny valley approach to melodic transitions. Elsewhere, tracks “Liars in Wait” and “Voidhanger” embrace the vicious side with roiling percussion and blackened tremolo that is funneled through this palette and warped into something disconcerting and gloomy. This is guided by vocalist Ilias Apostolakis’ almost disjointed vocal approach, usually relying on a distant shriek or drawling roar.

The fluid and miasmic movement in the thick string attack of Maze sets the swampy setting, and Sun of Nothing’s variations feel like a soul attempting to break free of this labyrinth. Apostolakis’ vocals take center stage in staggering repetition in “Liars in Wait” and “After the Fall,” his sermonic roars reaching their breaking point in brutality and viciousness across the gloomy and droning guitars, feeling nearly uncomfortable in the nihilistic dichotomy. The chuggy riffs of “Voidhanger” and their nihilistic leads feel like a steel-toed boot kicking open a cheap apartment door, while the closing melodies feel like Sun of Nothing’s only moment of crystalline sadness rather than despondence. “Ghost Maze” offers more blackened influence in rattling blastbeats and simmering tension, as its blackened approach seems to simply add to the gloom rather than attempt to punch through it – a gloom that is capitalized upon in closer “Buried Endeavors” for a sound whose droning is emotional as well as instrumental.

Sun of Nothing’s sound may not be the most unique in its blend of sludgy post-metal, black metal, and noise rock, as acts like Hail Spirit Noir and Praise the Plague bend the definition of “post-black” to include more of the post-metal heft in this way. Maze’s breed of intensity is not always easy to cut through, as every movement points to its emphasis is on despondence and atmosphere, and memorable movements can be often an afterthought; simply put, Maze will not be for everyone. However, the Greek quartet’s ability to warp brutality and meditation to uniquely paint a picture of bleakness stands apart from their counterparts. But for those willing to revel in existential gloom, Sun of Nothing will offer a haze like few others.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Venerate Industries
Websites: sunofnothing.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/Sun0fNothing
Releases Worldwide: February 16th, 2024

#2024 #35 #BlackMetal #Blindead #Cranial #Feb24 #GreekMetal #HailSpiritNoir #Industrial #Isis #LLNN #Maze #Neurosis #NoiseRock #PostBlackMetal #PostMetal #postPunk #PraiseThePlague #Review #Reviews #SludgeMetal #SunOfNothing #VenerateIndustries