The Asteroid Bullet Belt

Breaking free from the depths of Tartarus.  Whenever I cover Greek bands, I tend to discuss how I’m surprised to see artists who exist beyond the confines of what one might expect of the country’s usual scenes, be they black or thrash metal. As I’ve taken it upon myself to focus primarily on releases from my home country over the past year or so, I’ve had the pleasure of stumbling upon some outliers that I don’t think I’d have found had it not been for this self-imposed limitation. DSKRTN (if anyone knows how to pronounce this, hit me up) is one such find, and arguably one of the most surprising ones thus far, as war metal hasn’t ever been a sound Greece was known for, given the country’s predilection to melancholy and arcane splendour. As you can imagine, a record as barbarous as  Cyber-Cataclysm of Nuclear Typhoeus and Entropy Beyond the Flesh Codex  wasn’t something I thought I’d find in the process of writing these reviews, but here we are. I must confess that in my f...

Digging your own grave XIX: Oops, all noise!  Truth be told, part of me dreaded reaching 2023 in the course of this series. Something about having to come off a year filled with landmark releases for Μνήμα’s career made it feel redundant, even if greener pastures lie further ahead. Industrious as our mastermind might be, it’s not hard to imagine that life, and the music that springs from the experiences therein, took its toll on the man behind the mask, and led to 2023 being a year where something, anything, had to be put out in order to keep the lights on, show that the project is still alive and kicking. Furthermore, it’s a year comprised exclusively of splits, which by and large I don’t find to be particularly impactful in the wider canon. But hey, a man’s gotta keep his word, and at least this here split with Ahulabrum makes for a neat novelty. Now, Μνήμα’s always tended towards noise, but more often than not it served an auxiliary role in their sound, and even the band’s past ...

Digging your own grave XVIII: Do not go gentle into that good night.  There often comes a point in an artist’s career where they release something that could very well be considered a pinnacle of theirs, be it on an artistic or personal level. With it, comes the question of “What now?”. Artist and audience are forced to reckon with the fact that a work of art has been so profoundly affecting for either or both parties, the former also having to ask themselves the daunting question of what is to follow. Does one try to outdo their masterwork, and risk turning into an Icarus, falling victim to their own ambition? Are they to look backwards and attempt to go back to basics, at the potential cost of sounding redundant to the outside world? Or should altogether ignore it, and move past it in an effort to explore different territory, in turn subverting whatever expectations might’ve been foisted upon them? In Μνήμα’s case, they’ve always opted for the third option, regardless of what one...

Digging your own grave XVI: A spiritual laxative.  It took me 15 reviews, and perhaps way too much time, but at long last we’ve reached the catalyst for this entire series. It took Μνήμα 4 years of screaming out into the void, but they did kick 2022 off with their very first full-length, Disciples of Excremental Liturgies , and it’s the platonic ideal of what one would expect from someone who spent so much time and effort exploring and expanding their sound. Before I get into the review proper, I’d like to take a moment to discuss my connection to Μνήμα prior to this series. I actually originally stumbled upon the group back in November 2024, naturally in the context of Nothing But Black Metal November, a most fitting time to listen to this sort of music, the weather getting colder and grimmer as sunlight becomes more scarce. Though I did find myself enjoying the band’s 2 records, as well as some of their early work, I found myself gravitating towards other bands, mostly classics I...

Digging your own grave VIII: Going lunatic mode.  Although the Gathering Sorcery…  EPs (we’ll get to those soon enough) are used to delineate each of Μνήμα’s eras, I’ve taken to a different system for segmenting the band’s catalogue, and with Tombs of Necromantic Lunacy  we’re reaching the end of the second era. Whereas the first one was defined by our unnamed instrumentalist’s collaboration with X., and all the experimentation that came with it, 2020 was dedicated to reconfiguring the band’s core sound and seeing where things could go. Though each release has had its own unique character, the throughline of uncompromising raw black metal has remained consistent across all of them, and it's the glue that binds them all together. The two eras in question also have some commonalities in a macro scale, namely the fact that their last releases managed to blow my socks off for some reason. Tombs…  is arguably the best snapshot of Μνήμα one could possibly ask for. It’s bri...

Digging your own grave VII: It’s a procession, not a sequence.  Given the relative conservatism displayed by Μνήμα as they greeted the 2020s, it felt like they could’ve gone in whichever direction they wanted with whatever came after  Possessed Templars . They could either dig their heels in and iterate on previously established ideas, or veer off into completely unknown territory once again. The only consistent trend we have seen from them thus far is that we can’t quite know what to expect from them sonically. As it turns out,  Νεκρώσιμος Ακολουθία  posits a different answer to this conundrum: “Why not both”? I’m not particularly fond of cross-referencing an artist’s work with previous releases, but the nature of “Chalice of Spirits” makes it impossible to not draw some parallels to 2019’s  Forbidden Creatures of Time  EP. For one, it’s a 10-minute behemoth that plays around with soft-loud dynamics, but this time instead of ambient influences we are met...

Digging your own grave IV: The [adjective + noun] of Time, part 2.   Well, I gotta admit. I didn’t expect to be filtered by a Μνήμα release this early into this series. Given how harsh their music is, I expected there to be at least one of their works I’d struggle to digest at some point in their discography, especially when the “Noise” tag looms large alongside “Raw black metal”. It was a matter of time until I stumbled upon something that truly put the noisier aspects of their music to the forefront, and The Superior Poisoner of Time does precisely that. That being said, the black metal is still there, albeit in a heavily obscured capacity, overlaid with some of the rawest sounds Μνήμα has ever committed to tape. Whereas the riffs and song structures on previous releases were easy to pry apart if you were already predisposed towards lo-fi black metal, here it’s all turned into a massive wave of hissing static that wants to push your limits. It all sounds so fucking busted t...

Digging through the sky, hoping to find God. 2023 was an exceptionally industrious year for Full of Hell, one that saw them collaborate with bands across a variety of genres, some closer to their own than others. From the (unfortunately middling) split with powerviolence chameleons Gasp, to the harrowing shoegaze-cum-sludge collaboration When No Birds Sang with Nothing,the Maryland quintet never kept their love of non-metallic music a secret, but that year saw them put their hands in more pies than they usually do, in lieu of there not being a proper full-length to dig into. Among that year’s partnerships was also the one with the black-hole-dense trio that is Primitive Man, who also happen to draw from a similarly noisy well, although their guitar riffs lay on the opposite side of the tempo spectrum, instead opting for crushingly misanthropic trudges through sludge. In short, although there are common points between the two, they never struck me as the types of bands that would cross...

Crumbling into infinity. (Originally submitted to the Metal Archives on December 8th 2021)  There’s nothing quite like being fashionably late, and what’s a better example of that other than covering an album 2 months after its release? Like I said earlier this year in my review of Weeping Choir , I had been looking forward to Full of Hell’s fifth full-length release ever since they had teased it on social media. 8 months after that, Garden of Burning Apparitions released, and I obviously went and listened to it as soon as I could. Did I get what I expected? Well, yes and no. Every Full of Hell album thus far has had its own distinct identity so far, and this one is no different. Following the deathgrind madness of their previous 2 works, Garden… sees the band inject a healthy dose of mathcore influence to the mix. Tracks like “Guided Blight”, “Burning Apparition”, and “Reeking Tunnels” mix grinding death metal with spastic riffs and rhythm changes in a very fresh ...

Weeping tears of joy. (Originally submitted to the Metal Archives on February 21st 2021)  Over the past few months, Full of Hell has been teasing the fact that a new album is on the way, and what better way to celebrate it than by reviewing the album that got me into them? Weeping Choir , the band's 2019 release was my introduction to their chaotic brand of deathgrind, and what made me fall in love with their sound as a whole. The sheer savagery on display left me in a daze the first time I experienced it. It also proved to be quite intoxicating, leading to me to giving the album multiple listens ever since. Things start off on a blistering note with "Burning Myrrh", which, even after multiple listens, never fails to blow me away with its sheer intensity. It really helps set the tone for the aural violence that the band engages in on a regular basis. That being said, they do sprinkle in some tempo changes, like the section at 0:33. The final leg of the track...