"Oh.. isn't this the singer from #Finntroll?" #andOceans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LsvP354rbA

#BlackMetalMonday #NowPlaying

The Regeneration Itinerary by ...and Oceans

bandcamp link:
https://andoceans.bandcamp.com/album/the-regeneration-itinerary

album.link:
https://album.link/t/414113697

#Music #Metal #IndustrialBlackMetal #SymphonicBlackMetal #AndOceans

In Mourning – The Immortal Review

By Kenstrosity

Swedish sadboi staples In Mourning have had quite the journey over the 25 years since their founding. From the early days of doom-laden, gothic-tinged pall to the current era of dramatic, crooning melodic death, In Mourning’s trajectory arcs over one of the more unsung careers in a world filled with Insomniums, Be’lakors, and Omnium Gatherums. Yet, theirs is the one that stuck with me. I witnessed the majesty of Monolith as a breakout high-water mark, the uncertainty of transitional records like Afterglow, and the resurgence of Garden of Storms followed by an absolute triumph in The Bleeding Veil. And through it all, In Mourning always delivered material of rich depth, considerable nuance, and highly developed songwriting. Their seventh, The Immortal, is no exception.

Immediately identifiable as an In Mourning special, The Immortal sees these Swedes expanding and elevating their repertoire of sound and style further than ever, but still grounding themselves in the chunky riffs, multifaceted vocals, and soaring melodies I’ve come to expect. Integrating a mild proggy slant that reminds of The Meaning of I-era Voyager (“Song of the Cranes,” “The Sojourner”); scorching the flesh with second-wave black metal melodies that recall …and Oceans and Mare Cognitum (“Staghorn” and “The Hounding,” respectively); and utilizing a wide gamut of rhythms and percussive patterns pulling from all over the metallic spectrum1 mark a few key ways In Mourning play with this more varied palette, and to great effect. Pulling it all together, The Immortal’s crisp and clear mix showcases every performance, spotlights each vibrant tone and stimulating texture, and deftly balances soft ruminations against ferocious outbursts.

To my great delight, In Mourning’s best compositions here are those which challenge what I expect to experience. In particular, “As Long as the Twilight Stays” and “Staghorn” elicit intense frisson in my system as I cycle through each spin. In the former’s case, it is the chorus’ tremolo melody tumbling to the foreground from a wonderfully smooth percussive fill that lights up my skin. In the latter, the shock of an aggressive old-school black metal riff surprises me with a most enticing burst of velocity. Yet, each song offers much more than just a single moment of radiating pleasure. Smartly written, honed compositions like those aforementioned highlights writhe between shapes and styles in such a way as to create excitement and intrigue at every turn. Other contenders like “Silver Crescent,” “The Sojourner,” and “North Star” offer reminders of what In Mourning always excelled at, balancing syncopated riffs with weeping guitar melodies and clean vocals that evoke a synesthetic vision of sepia-toned fields of wheat brushing against a gentle breeze. More importantly, though, the effectiveness of these cuts illuminates how successfully closer “The Hounding” compiles all of In Mourning’s strengths, both proven and newfound, into a shimmering tearjerker that demands my rapt attention.

At a tight 47 minutes, The Immortal flies by with an effortless grace, leaving very little opportunity for me to capture and identify negatives. With persistence, however, I started noticing that gentle quasi-ballad quasi-interlude “Moonless Sky” is the only number that leaves my memory all too quickly. It’s gorgeous, just like everything The Immortal exhibits, but simply lacks staying power. In a similar vein, I call into question the function of opening intro “The Immortal.” It’s so short and blends so seamlessly into first track proper, “Silver Crescent,” that I wonder why the two aren’t merged into one. To reach for another nit to pick, “Song of the Cranes,” while a rock-solid song on its own, does feel less inspired and more in line with the majority of In Mourning’s existing catalog than its neighbors. It’s not so stark an outlier that it feels out of place in the tracklist. Rather, it simply feels a touch weaker by comparison.

With The Immortal, In Mourning further solidify their status as an elite act in the melodeath pantheon. It is well known to the readers and writers here that they have become my personal favorite in this particular subset, but I was still pleasantly surprised. A modest, but notable departure from their usual approach, and still unquestionably rooted in their established identity, The Immortal is on par with In Mourning’s best work. You owe it to yourselves to hear it.

Rating: Great!
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Supreme Chaos Records
Websites: inmourning.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/inmourningband
Releases Worldwide: August 29th, 2025

#AndOceans #2025 #40 #Aug25 #BeLakor #InMourning #Insomnium #MareCognitum #MelodicBlackMetal #MelodicDeathMetal #OmniumGatherum #ProgressiveDeathMetal #Review #Reviews #SupremeChaosRecords #SwedishMetal #TheImmortal #Voyager

Record(s) o’ the Month – May 2025

By Angry Metal Guy

There are months when the Record(s) o’ the Month feels like a sacred duty. It is the noble, worthwhile culmination of rigorous listening and passionate discourse.1 And then there’s May. May, a month in which Dr. A.N. Grier tried to vote for a band called… SEXCAVE or some shit four or five different times using different pseudonyms (but the same IP address), and where Dolphin Whisperer almost made me rage quit by making a single comment about “sky-tearing tonalities,” which, like… what kind of pretentious fucking bullshit is that? Do you people even listen to music, or do you just sit around all day making up stupid poetic ways of saying absolutely nothing?2 But if we’re fair, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Sometimes a record arrives that doesn’t just demand attention, it seizes it like an Aztec death deity grabbing the sun.3 So for the first time in a while, the best album in May came from an unsigned band. And not just any unsigned band. It came from a band proficient in bull riding!

The beauty of the Unsigned Band Rodeö lies in its chaos. No expectations. No promo sheets. No preconceived narratives. Just music dropped into our laps like cursed artifacts.4 On Nikan Axkan, which was self-released on May 2nd, 2025 [Bandcamp], Kalaveraztekah weaponizes its vision of death metal through the lens of pre-Hispanic culture and indigenous cosmology. There’s no sense that these Hidrocálidos are some kind of novelty act. They aren’t a Mexican Eluveitie, just playing Dark Tranquillity riffs while putting a Ritual Death Flute over it for 40 seconds in every song.5 Rather, Nikan Axkan is a muscular, seething, and deeply rooted record that radiates conviction from every grinding riff. The percussion rumbles like a procession of drums echoing through stone temples, fusing to a brutal core of death metal that just fucks. There’s a Blood Incantation-like spaciness that offers a counterbalance to all this brutality and adds unexpected depth. After spending the better part of a week in what my physician has called a “ritualistic fugue state,” I managed to pull myself out of the netherworld to write that when Kalaveraztekah’s two pillars—the atmospheric otherworldly and the brutal death metal—meet, “they crash into each other like storm fronts, creating something beautiful and terrible to behold. Nikan Axkan is simultaneously brutal and thoughtful, grindy and melodic, atmospheric and immediate,” and it’s the Record o’ the Month.

Runner(s) Up:

…and Oceans // The Regeneration Itinerary [May 23rd, 2025 | Season of Mist | Bandcamp] — …and Oceans is having an Amorphisesque second act and I am here for it. They’ve always walked the line between symphonic grandiosity and black metal chaos, and with The Regeneration Itinerary, they’ve engineered their third very good platter in 5 years. The record combines sharp, Emperor-style riffing with theatrical synths, industrial flourishes, and ruthlessly precise pacing. “Demonstrating a degree of evolution in their craft” and with “exceptional [performances] across the board,” …and Oceans have once again hit that sweet balance—and ever-more unique sound in this current black metal soundscape—that makes their revitalization so welcome. But it’s not just that it’s a good continuation, I feel like they are continuing to refine and revitalize the launch with each new album they release. It’s always fun to watch bands defy Angry Metal Guy’s Law of Diminishing Recordings™, and while The Regeneration Itinerary isn’t their best record yet, 30 years after their debut, …and Oceans is still releasing vital music that’s impossible to overlook.

Jade // Mysteries of a Flowery Dream [May 9th, 2025 | Pulverised Records | Bandcamp] — Mysteries of a Flowery Dream is an atmospheric death metal record that unfolds like a guided hallucination. It’s melodic. It’s moody. It’s weirdly elegant. And it doesn’t care about my riffs-per-minute quota. It takes things slow and keeps them dreamy. Jade trades bludgeoning immediacy for textured dream-logic, and while it takes a few listens to understand what’s happening, once it clicks, it’s hard for listeners to shake. And yet, it balances out the problem that atmospheric records rarely feel heavy, because they’re too busy padding the sharp edges with “atmosphere.” But Mysteries of a Flowery Dream accomplishes its heaviness by feeling oppressive, dense, claustrophobic, and crushing—leaving the listener feeling like they’re in an experimental submarine on their way to see the Titanic.6 And while it’s not the easiest record to penetrate, Owlswald wants you to know that “those who actively immerse themselves in Jade’s expansive world will be handsomely rewarded. The excellent songwriting, replete with its cohesion, balance, and dynamism, is impressive, steadily shifting my initial apathetic impressions to genuine appreciation. So don your finest headphones, sit back, and let Jade immerse you in their dreamlike world.”

#AndOceans #2025 #AMGSUnsignedBandRodeo #Amorphis #DarkTranquillity #Eluveitie #Emperor #Independent #Jade #Kalaveraztekah #May25 #MysteriesOfAFloweryDream #NikanAxkan #RecordSOTheMonth #RecordsOfTheMonth #SelfReleases #TheRegenerationItinerary

🇬🇧 Finally giving the new ...and Oceans record, 'The Regeneration Itinerary', a listen.

#andOceans #BlackMetal #Finland

Walg – V Review

By GardensTale

As I have mentioned before, I’m focusing primarily on contact form promos this year. But every now and then, I will make exceptions, mostly to cover bands I have seniority over. Fortuitous, then, that twice-listing meloblack mavericks Walg sent their fifth opus V in through our back door, allowing me to keep my streak and eat it too! I admit, I did grovel for the promo because I finally wanted to give the Dutch duo their dues with a real review, rather than relegating it to yet another TYMHM article. But my point stands, and so does my hype. Will Walg keep up its insane release-rate-to-quality ratio?

That’s largely a yes, and I’ll get to the caveat later. If you’re new to the band, Walg is melodic black metal distilled to its purest form. Equally catchy and vicious, the studio-only pair has settled handily into a niche somewhere between modern …And Oceans, early Dimmu Borgir, and Old Man’s Child. They don’t break new ground, but are absolute experts at treading the old. Yorick Keijzer is a beast on vocals, his primary weapon a slavering snarl still chewing the meat from its last kill. But he flips just as easily to a hoarse howl straight from the DSBM handbook. Robert Koning adds the occasional ICS Vortex adjacent cleans, and also all of the instrumentation, which spans a fairly broad range of high-speed assaults, atmospheric folk intros and interludes, and intricate multi-part melodic movements.

50-odd quality tracks in 5 years is hard to do without some sort of formula, and it has become easier to recognize the handful of structural stencils Walg employs. Usually, the band can dazzle hard enough to distract from that sense of familiarity, but the back half of V consistently fails to draw my attention away entirely from the man behind the curtain. “Zielsalleen”1 leans a little too much on the same hook and the decrease in pace of “Pijnlichaam”2 is not accompanied by as gripping a riff as it needs. These tracks are not even a little bit bad, by the way; most bands would kill to write something as powerful as the final minute of “Ego-Dood.”3 They are just a smidge harder to love without reservation when I’ve heard the same band do better with the same tools.

But 4 tracks that are merely very good still leaves 5 that are every bit as strong as Walg has ever written. Opener “De Vlinder en de Dromer”4 takes all of 0.5 seconds to launch into an intense onslaught of ariose tremolos that reminds favorably of …And Oceans’ “Cosmic World Mother.” Follow-through uppercut “De Adem van het Einde”5 employs a riffing style that borrows from NWOBHM and speed metal for an exhilarating turn. And centerpiece “Daar Waar Stilte Spreekt”6 is downright addictive with its jaunty swinging rhythm that conjures imagery of ghost ships and haunted cliffs. There’s no fat on the compositions either. Walg may have a formula, but one of its most potent ingredients is a strict lack of bloat. Koning and Keijzer would rather end a track early than overstay its welcome, and the entirety of V runs a svelte 40 minutes. Combine that with the excellent, rich production and finely tuned mix, and you get some of the most replayable black metal in the scene.

Infinite growth is impossible, and Walg’s meteoric rise had to slow down somewhere. But in this case, it means nothing more than a small step below the pinnacle that was IV. The front-loading of the album makes the flaws of V a tad more noticeable and makes me less hungry to spin it again the moment it’s over. But every time I do, I still get my head caved in and my neck snapped in twain, and with Walg’s production speed, that remains a colossal achievement. If you like melodic black, you owe it to yourself to give V a few spins, and I would hardly be surprised to see this wind up on a few Top 10 lists anyway.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Self-released
Websites: walg.bandcamp.com | walgmetal.com | facebook.com/Walgmetal
Releases Worldwide: May 25th, 2025

#AndOceans #2025 #35 #DimmuBorgir #DutchMetal #May25 #MelodicBlackMetal #OldManSChild #Review #Reviews #SelfReleased #V #Walg

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#MetalInjection

The Weekly Injection: New Releases From MIDNIGHT, WITCHCRAFT & More Out This Week 5/23

https://metalinjection.net/upcoming-releases/heavy-new-releases/the-weekly-injection-new-releases-from-midnight-witchcraft-more-out-this-week-5-23

#WeeklyInjection #MIDNIGHT #WITCHCRAFT #YearOfNoLight #AndOceans #HouseOfProtection #MSPAINT #SkunkAnansie

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#BLABBERMOUTHT

The Regeneration Itinerary

https://blabbermouth.net/reviews/the-regeneration-itinerary

#ANDOCEANS #RegenerationItinerary #BlackMetal #TimoKontio #CosmicWorldMother #AsInGardensSoInTombs #Behemoth #DeathMetal #IronMaiden #Sinsaenum

…and Oceans – The Regeneration Itinerary

By Owlswald

My history with Finland’s …and Oceans runs as deep as the Mariana Trench. As a burgeoning metalhead, the eclectic symphonic black metal of 1998’s The Dynamic Gallery of Thoughts immediately sank its hooks into me. Its successor, The Symmetry of I – The Circle of O, solidified their place with its atmospherically intense and innovative brutality. The two albums remain all-time favorites of mine to this day. Conversely, the group’s industrial era of A.M.G.O.D. (2001) and Cypher (2002)—preceding the group’s hiatus—split my interest until 2020’s Cosmic World Mother and the subsequent As in Gardens, So in Tombs marked …and Oceans’ triumphant return to form. So, upon learning that …and Oceans’ seventh full-length, The Regeneration Itinerary, aimed to fuse the Finnish collective’s thirty-year history with their most experimental material since their resurgence, I eagerly dove in, hoping …and Oceans’ stylistic evolution would culminate with an album rivaling their early years.

The Regeneration Itinerary finds …and Oceans venturing into bolder and more daring territory while remaining anchored in the Emperor-esque incisiveness of Cosmic and As in Gardens. Echoing the sweeping grandeur of their earlier works, …and Oceans quickly re-establishes their familiar blend of flamboyance and experimentalism. Launching with a celestial shimmer, opener “Inertiae” detonates into a furious Dimmu Borgir-like energy before unexpectedly morphing into an industrial atmospheric bridge with electronic dance elements. This same confidence fuels potential Song o’ the Year contender “Prophetical Mercury Implement”—recalling Symmetry of I through swirling guitars, powerful drums, and dramatic synths—as well as the machine-like “Chromium Lungs, Bronze Optics.” For forty-six minutes, …and Oceans’ signature combination of symphonic grandiosity, industrial texturing, and black metal aggression ebbs and flows like a rising and retreating tide, firmly leaning into their outlandish spirit.

Demonstrating a degree of evolution in their craft, the performances on The Regeneration Itinerary are exceptional across the board. As Antti Simonen’s orchestrations navigate the majestic backdrop where Dynamic Gallery’s operatic symphonies (“Terminal Filter,” “The Form and the Formless”), Symmetry of I’s serene synths (“Towards the Absence of Light”) and the stark, mechanical pulse of A.M.G.O.D. and Cypher-era automations (“I am Coin, I am Two”) unite, they trade command with Tio Kontio and Teemu Saari’s blistering tremolos and razor-sharp guitars to produce …and Oceans’ grand melodicism. Lillmåns’ vocals are a highlight, shapeshifting from blood-curdling screams to manic shrieks to subterranean growls in tracks like “Prophetical Mercury Implement,” “The Form and the Formless,” and “Förnyelse i tre akter,” wholly embracing the raw and unhinged persona of former vocalist Kena Strömsholm. Beneath these shifting tides, Kauko Kuusisalo’s technical and colorful drumming pulls like an intense undertow, showcasing its evolution by moving beyond characteristic rapid-fire blasts and violent double bass in favor of artful rhythms and precise patterns. Furthermore, …and Oceans’ best production to date cleanly articulates The Regeneration Itinerary’s crushing brutality and subtle nuances, particularly for Simonen’s synths and Kontio and Saari’s guitars.

While the performances on The Regeneration Itinerary are stellar, certain songs across the album’s ten tracks don’t quite measure up to the record’s stronger compositions.1 Despite the strength of the core songwriting, the quirky industrial track “The Ways of Sulphur” seems forced and out of place, while “I am Coin, I am Two” feels underdeveloped and rushed, its abrupt end hindering its otherwise strong first half. Likewise, “The Form and the Formless” and “The Fire in Which We Burn” seem too brief. Thankfully, the strong performances carry the album forward but in a more hardened form, The Regeneration Itinerary would have crushed the Score Safety Counter into mere rubble.

Rating The Regeneration Itinerary demands that I separate my head from my heart. Nevertheless, my overall reaction is one of excitement. In many ways, this album embodies the …and Oceans of old and is what I’ve longed for since their 2017 reformation. With The Regeneration Itinerary, …and Oceans comes full circle, integrating their past into material that should ignite a sense of homecoming for longtime fans. Known for their constant evolution, The Regeneration Itinerary feels like the arrival of a new tide for …and Oceans. One that I’ll be impatiently waiting for again.

Rating: Very Good!
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Season of Mist
Websites: andoceans.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/andoceans
Releases Worldwide: May 23, 2025

#AndOceans #2025 #35 #BlackMetal #DimmuBorgir #Emperor #FinnishMetal #May25 #MelodicBlackMetal #Review #Reviews #SeasonOfMist #SymphonicBlackMetal #TheRegenerationItinerary