Metal 467 Items

etched 4th side

The first Mizmor full-length, originally released in 2012, has now been remastered and pressed on vinyl for the first time. The release of this self-titled album gave the world its first glimpse of Mizmor, and while many of the elements that we recognize on Yodh and Cairn are present here it's fascinating to hear the foundation for those sounds in a very raw fashion. The Mizmor debut is a document of change. A person losing their faith and finding the trailhead of a new path.

If you ever thought a slower and more atmospheric and cerebral “sludge version” of infamously fringe and violent extreme metal bands like early Carcass or Pissgrave was just a silly pipe dream, think again... Like an acid trip that goes totally wrong just as you enter a torture dungeon of unnameable horrors and begin to hallucinate before the most harrowing cruelty and inhumanity, MISCARRIAGE's new album and Sentient Ruin debut Imminent Horror is a work which defies logic and sanity in its insurmountable display of misery, cruelty, and barely comprehensible chaos. Set to become one of the most shockingly violent, depraved, unsettling, and horrific albums of 2019, Imminent Horror seems to have crossed a new and never before seen threshold in extreme metal, taking the genre to a sickening new extreme never before explored, and never before fathomed, not even by the sickest and most fucked up minds. Structured around a churning morass of hallucinatory atmospheres, derailing, discordant, and appallingly dense and downtrend guitar crush-depth, an unpredictable and utterly oppressive rhythm section, and a swarming haze of distorted screams, the songs on this abomination incarnated seem to want to reach out into a realm of the absurd to harness a level of deviancy and inhumanity of unseen magnitude and plausibility. With their post-Carcass gorenoise/goregrind roots firmly anchored at the base, Miscarriage have augmented the foundations of this abhorrent sound and built an entire new world above it by bringing in elements of slower and more experimental and atmospheric extreme music coming from a sickening cesspool of influences as diverse as early Swans, Primitive Man, Corrupted, Ride for Revenge, Godflesh and the most fucked extreme black metal, to materialize an aural abomination of near-incomprehensible horror. Classic homemade gore-drenched artwork and lyrics that can not and should not be ever unearthed for one's mental sanity and safe sleep round out a release of absolutely incinerating cruelty and insanity whose sole existence is already an inexplainable mystery.

Approaching a full forty years on from 1980 - arguably the greatest year in its history - it can be vanishingly difficult in there here and now to find bands who can summon up the true elixir of traditional heavy metal in all its gory glory. Certainly, there have been manifold variants of this supernatural force in the last four decades, yet for all the power-metal diversions and Pro-Tooled machinations that have crossed our transum, the blood-simple formula of steel-plated grandeur and street-level grit remains mystifyingly elusive for even its most long-standing proponents. Lucky for everyone therefore, that the Cypriot denizens of darkness Mirror have returned. The brainchild of former Electric Wizard and Satan’s Wrath bassist Tas Danazoglou, Mirror’s second album sees them building on the heroic vibrations of their self-titled 2015 debut, summoning forth nine triumphant anthems that are equal parts lethal and life-affirming. Deftly avoiding the lure of pastiche and parody, ‘Pyramid Of Terror’ arrives once again at the cusp of an audial era in which the widescreen sweep of late-‘70s rock, a la the cinematic splendour of Dio-era Rainbow, crosses swords with the stripped-down panache of the NWOBHM - somewhere akin to a danger zone between first-two-albums Iron Maiden and the occultist allure of debut Angel Witch - to set passions dramatically ablaze.