I find that as a connoisseur of metal music I don't listen to a whole lot of stuff that has a feel-good tone to it, and I find that I'd much rather music that conveys the exact opposite feeling. Now I don't mean depressive music per se (not all the time anyway) but rather music that is just downright unnerving. Music that makes me feel like there's something extremely wrong in this plane of existence, that something bad is going to happen to everything on an unfathomable scale, and that there's nothing anybody can do to stop it. Such is the experience with Antediluvian's sophomore release λόγος.

Antediluvian follow a death metal formula similar to that of Mitochondrion, Portal, and Impetuous Ritual. They make this chaotic and dissonant sound that also sounds ancient and esoteric due to the primitive sounding production on this album, and really that's what λόγος is all about. This whole album sounds like the destruction of the universe as inscribed on ancient stone tablets many eons ago, and the uneasiness that accompanies that idea is constant throughout the album.

As such, λόγος is one of those albums that's best listened to from beginning to end. However, each of the songs on here have their own discordant melody to make them memorable even if it's not particularly easy to pick them up on the first listen. Establishing them though gives some well needed landmarks throughout the album to give the listener a sense of progress such as the steady kick drum passages on "Towers of Silence", the crushing opening riff on "Nuclear Crucifixion (Turning the Spear Inwards)", or the pitch bending on "On the Tree of LIfe and Death". The guitars, besides laying down the relentless riffs, also provide some tormented sounding solos on each of the songs to compound the unease. Even the ambiance in between the songs is welcome; I'd almost call them a necessity because they actually provide a lot as the album passes through.

The vocals though are an absolute treat. They're this layered sounding low growl that sounds like the voice of a daemon lord whispering apocalyptic prophecies. That's what they'll sound like as you progress through this 34 minute path towards eschaton. They're dark, unsettling, and sound like they're reciting the lyrics in some D&D styled abyssal language. Even when they're relegated to quieter mumbling during the ambiance between the songs they sound excellent.

I have to give props to one track on this album more than the others though. As this album goes on through the chaos, eventually it reaches the final track "Death Meta" which is easily the cornerstone of the album due to how beautifully it brings the whole experience to a close. It's noticeably slower than the rest of the tracks, but this only makes the experience even more unnerving as the final push towards the end of time is made. It's apparent from the slow to start riff progression coming off of the interlude ambiance at the start to the distorted freestyle ending alongside the prophetic sounding spoken word passage that this track is the best way to end the album as the universe finally collapses.

Listening to λόγος feels like a bit of a trial, but it's an extremely fun trial once you get used to it and it's easily one of the better products of this niche of death metal. Antediluvian definitely have a good thing going for them right now, and after listening to this I just wonder what alternate tale of Armageddon they will tell in the future.

(89/100)

Mechina, while not entirely blowing me away, have produced material good enough for me to keep an eye on them. Having already checked out their latest two albums, Conqueror gave me another extension of their musical evolution to explore. Indeed, it does have all the things that make Mechina what they are in Empyrean and Xenon, but it seems more simplified here while also making it more streamlined. So while it's again not perfect, there's a few things the band could learn from themselves on this album.

The theatrical heavy metal space opera that this band is known for at this point still runs strong here. The intro track "Incipient Tragoedia" has a nice melody with the female singing, and that melody is revisited in the outro to the album "Ad Astra". Once the first song with guitars, "Pray to the Winds", comes around, it doesn't waste any time getting right into riffs though. Somehow, this album doesn't feature the awkward production that Empyrean features with burying the guitar in orchestral programming despite Conqueror being released before. The orchestral programming sounds more well balanced here and the guitars stick out more as a result which is actually a mixed blessing.

Mechina's Sybreed-Meshuggah inspired guitar work on this album is effective at adding to the sci-fi sound scape that they make but do end up being kinda boring by themselves, but they're improved when they go with the right mixture of the orchestra programming. "Pray to the Winds" and "The Iron Law" are the perfect examples of this and are the two best tracks on this album with the former's heroic overtones and the latter sounding like the score for a final boss battle in a sci-fi RPG video game. The other tracks however seem to have a more unbalanced mixture and just flat out fail to provide that epic atmosphere that I'm looking for. "Anti-Theist" and "Internecion" are the worst offenders in this case while "Non Serviam" and "Conqueror" do it to an okay degree but not to an outstanding one.

The lyrics have a lot of catchy moments though and I've found myself singing along with them under my breath when I listen to this on my iPod in public, especially "The Iron Law"'s "TOTAL-SYSTEM-FAILURE!" line. David Holch's vocals are mostly on the harsh side on this album with his clean vocals being contained to "Anti-Theist" and "Non Serviam" for better or worse. He doesn't quite pull the clean vox off quite as well as he does in Empyrean.

When you get right down to it, Conqueror basically does the same thing Empyrean and Xenon do. It's still worth listening to and it does run smoothly from start to finish. It's also only 37 minutes long as opposed to 50 on the succeeding two outings, so props to Mechina for not making an overlong album. When this band does stuff right though, they successfully land among the stars so I hope they continue what they're doing.

(75/100)

Have you ever glanced over the black metal genre and looked at how it has evolved throughout the years and decided "Hey, I want to listen to a newer album that's devoid of any creativity, originality, and soul. The most boring black metal ever made."? Of course not, I haven't either. Regardless, one KFD Vordak decided that this was his artistic vision and brought Antropophobe to the world; and though he himself has insisted that this music is some sort of higher art like most wannabe black metal musicians do, make no mistake. Le Royaume des Morts somehow succeeds in being more lifeless as the pile of dead fish on the album cover.

It's pretty easy to tell that he wants to be the next Belkètre or the next Mütiilation because the music here imitates all the worst aspects of the Les Légions Noires acts. The production job sounds like ass water. Now that isn't really out of the ordinary on a lot of black metal, particularly demos, but Le Royaume des Morts isn't' supposed to be a demo. It's supposed to be a full-length album. But worse still is that the actual music on this album is so vapid that I can see it boring a school of sharks to death. It's albums like this that give black metal a bad name.

This unfortunate creation starts off with some weird droning on "Introspection" that sounds like it was taken from a Bull of Heaven piece that was shortened by about three months. About a minute and three quarters in, it cuts finally to guitar but the riff that goes on is just this block of noise with no harmony whatsoever. And it's not dissonant in a chaotic Deathspell Omega way, nor is it an eerie and unnerving Xasthur or Striborg esque passage. It's just...there to make noise. And the tone just sounds so pathetic. It's so quiet and weak sounding that when the faster "Images Drawn" comes around, the guitar just ends up getting drowned by the drums. Hell, no production job could save these pathetic riffs. They never go anywhere interesting, don't evoke any atmosphere at all, and are often times just irritating. I mean, fuck. There's these parts that are basically just droning played along to blast beats. Past the 0:52 mark of "Invasion de cafards", there's a prime example of that. Slower moments, like the huge drag that is "Cry of the Lonewolf", aren't any more inspring; hell, this same track just sounds like Burzum's "Behold the Daughters of the Firmament" in a different tuning and no keyboards.

This whole album is a collossal bore in just about every aspect. Besides the guitars, the other instruments aren't played in any inspiring pattern either. Most of the time, the drums are stuck in a basic sounding blast beat on the songs that are supposed to be more lively sounding, but "Tu parles comme une arme" does feature this really obnoxious sounding polka beat alongside guitars that for some reason sound more hushed here than the rest of the album. I've heard more epic drums in Paysage d'Hiver's programmed drums, and I have to struggle sometimes to even pick up the drum beat in some of that band's songs. KFD's black metal shrieks are weak as fuck too. Most of the album he sounds like a more constipated version of post-prison Varg Vikernes but on "Cry of the Lonewolf" he tries out constipated Sin Nanna as well. His attempts at sounding eerie on the title track by throwing in these stupid sounding distorted spoken word passages also fall way short.

Somehow, he also succeeded in making the worst black metal interlude in recent history. "(Ils arrivent)" is an obnoxious minute and a half worth of programmed percussion noise. It's very existence just confounds me. Why the fuck is this here? How the hell does this go along with the rest of the album?

Unoriginality is one thing, but taking all the worst aspects of black metal and shoving it all together into 39 minutes of fuck is another. This whole album is essentially Les Légions Noires worship for people with bad taste. Nothing creative about it at all. Now, KFD himself has expressed heavily that creating art isn't supposed to be fun and that he does in fact take his music seriously, but bad music is bad music and the only demographic that could ever appreciate this album are those pinheaded motherfuckers who go around asking for underground/unknown black metal recommendations with no other standards whatsoever. So yeah, if in his words "art = transcend suffering", go ahead and suffer through this boring fucking terribad turd of an album.

So to sum this up by asking questions and immediately answering them: is this black metal? Sure. Is this good quality black metal? No, not in a million years. And finally, is this art? I could go into MS Paint and draw two stick figures jerking each other off, and that would be more artistic than this piece of shit.

(2/100)

Despite my initial indifference towards Mechina and their 2013 album Empyrean, I have revisited the album quite a number of times and my interest in their music has grown to the point that when they released Xenon early this year I was intrigued. I was in the mood for another sci-fi epic in musical form since these guys definitely had something interesting going on in that last album. What I discovered was a definite improvement over Empyrean in many ways. The epic theatrical setting I was looking for in Empyrean is much more apparent here and I definitely had way more fun with this album.

Right from the start of the guitar playing, I could tell two very important flaws have been fixed since the last album. First, the mix isn't ass. I know Empyrean was re-mixed but I listened to that and the re-mix didn't help; but here on Xenon, everything is so crisp and clear with the instruments but especially the guitars. Speaking of which, the second major improvement is the added variety in the guitar work. Most of Empyrean's guitars were spent chugging or djenting and for the most part weren't very interesting to follow, but now they've got a more straightforward industrial feel to them with sounding like they landed somewhere between Sybreed and Strapping Young Lad. In other words, this album's guitars are what Empyrean's guitar tracks should have sounded like. All in all, Xenon is much more well executed than Empyrean so much that even though it's actually a few seconds longer than that album, it feels shorter because it's much more enjoyable to go through.

The symphonic programming is still omnipresent, but this time it melds better with the rest of the music since it's not the sole thing pushing the music forward anymore. The minute spanning piano/choir build up is a lot quieter than "Aporia" on the previous album but nonetheless provides some ambient prelude to the interstellar warfare that begins almost abruptly at the first minute mark. Imagine the opening theme for Halo starting off an album; that's what the type of mood being set here. Then throughout the rest of the album, it's this sort of Two Steps From Hell symphony thrown alongside the metal music. It certainly makes the title track much more epic sounding especially on the awesome chorus in that song. There's a couple of times that where the band opted for some more electronic elements too, most notably on "Zoticus" which ended up being one of the highlights of this album.

One thing I did notice about the overall atmosphere in the tracks is that the heroic tone present on tracks like "Interregnum", "Imperialus", "Anathema", "Empyrean" and "Infineon" on the last album is largely absent here. The overall tone on this album seems a lot more foreboding with the noteworthy exception being the more upbeat "Zoticus".

There are a few more pressing downsides. David Holch's vocals sound pretty good, particularly his harsh vox, but this time around there's more apparent use of auto-tune and other modulative fuckery done with his clean verses. There's quite a few instances of his voice being intentionally chopped up by the mixing and it does get a little grating, especially since this was less obvious in Mechina's past work. Furthermore, while I did find Xenon easier to go through than Empyrean, it does seem to lose energy towards the end. "Erebus" and "Amytas" are weak tracks to end the album on especially since they sort of blend together. It certainly doesn't help that the album starts with its best track either, the title track. Setting the high water mark early tends to have an effect on the rest of the album. This whole album's span can be compared to that of a dying star, first expanding into a red giant before collapsing into a white dwarf. Though there still is some shining light at the end of the white dwarf stage which here is in the form of the album's true closer the tranquil "Actaeon" which revisits the piano piece from the beginning of the album.

So there's a few things Mechina still need to tighten up, but they've definitely have improved. Xenon, while far from perfect, is the band's most rewarding listening experience to date. Definitely worth checking out for those interested in symphonic metal with an industrial twist. I myself am still intrigued by what this band can offer and await more of their material.

(77/100)

It's always a good sign for me when a black metal album begins with a beautiful, spacey ambient piece before it actually dives into the riffs. Evilfeast's Lost Horizons of Wisdom falls into this niche of spacey atmospheric black metal that I enjoy and is easily one of the best albums in that niche that I've found in a long time. The band has released other albums, but even they don't strike me as strongly as Lost Horizons of Wisdom, mainly because I prefer this album's structure: 5 ten+ minute long tracks rather than 8 or 9 shorter ones including interludes.

The riffs themselves sound like a mix of Darkspace and Lunar Aurora during the faster parts, but it's not them alone that make the album. There's ambient bits thrown in throughout the album, not constantly, but just in the right places. The guitars may sound a little dry, but the ambiance in the right places gives them a booster shot to help them forward through each of these long songs.

When the ambiance plays by itself though it sounds the most mystical. The beginning of "Algol's Northern Lights and the break in "Grimspirit the Forest Wanderer" are the best examples of this especially the former as it's the intro to the album. The only time the ambiance gets carried away is in "My Tower Among the Timeless Mountains" because it goes on for way too long. It's a twenty minute long song, but it could have been cut a good five and a half minutes shorter because that's how long this intro is.

The best parts of the album though are when the metal instruments and the ambiance play together. And while there's plenty of that going on here, some of them are extremely memorable; in particular, the starry sounding part starting at the 6:10 mark of "Grimspirit...", the slower Elffor-esque parts after the intro on "Cold Chains of Despondency", and the outro of the same song which reuses the ambiance used in the intro. Hell even the intro to "Algol's Northern Lights" sounds great when it turns up again near the end of the title track when it's played with the rest of the instruments.

Lost Horizons of Wisdom is a great album for fans of spacey sounding black metal. It's great for fans of Kataxu, Lunar Aurora, Vinterriket and the like. Despite it being longer than Evilfeast's other three full-lengths and therefore may be a tougher nut to crack, when you do crack it it's well worth it.

(91/100)