The Asteroid Bullet Belt

Ignorance reigns when reason ends.  (Originally submitted to the Metal Archives on January 24th 2022)  Earlier this month, I covered Mizmor’s This Unabating Wakefulness , in my review of which I mentioned how excited I was to see what A.L.N. had in store for us in his upcoming release, Wit’s End . A week later, the EP released, and making heads or tails of how I feel about it has proven to be quite the challenge. So let’s take a look at what makes this such an intriguing release in Mizmor’s catalogue, shall we? Wit’s End is split in two different tracks, the title track, and “Pareidolia”. Both of these tracks are quite interesting, each for different reasons. The former sees A.L.N. strip back almost all of the black metal from Mizmor’s sound, resulting in a crawling 15 minute long funeral doom song. While it’s an admittedly interesting direction for the band to take, the absence of the black metal elements hurts the music more than it helps it. Barring a few t...

Albums I like a lot: Part III (Originally submitted to the Metal Archives on August 21st 2021) Metal music has always been about speed and extremity. From its humble beginnings in Black Sabbath one can trace a line of bands where the goal was “we need to play faster, heavier and louder than the rest”. But there turned out to be an outlier in that evolutionary chain, and that is funeral doom. It eschewed the speed and anger of most extreme metal at the time and went on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, opting instead to be as solemn and slow as possible. In essence, its extremity came from going the other way that most bands did at the time. One such band is Bell Witch, whom I was introduced to through the subject of this review, 2017’s Mirror Reaper . Originally what caught my attention was its length. It’s not often that you see albums composed of a single 83 minute song. So I went in with an open mind and full of curiosity, and what I heard was one of the mos...