Lmst

By Alekhines Gun

Alongside money, sex, and the number 42, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women” remains the peak answer to the meaning of life. Such melodic woe, such malodorous despair is the anthem to many a succulent succumbing of the Other, the Lesser Than, and the Detested. Conan traffic in an unusually encouraging slab of doom; namely, rather than horror descending upon the listener, you are that horror, and woe betide all who come to oppose you and your curiously hawk-shaped weapons. Here to be the accompaniment to your next assault on all those whose name you scorn and singing the songs of your own personal terrorization of those beneath your notice, sixth LP Violence Dimension has arrived. Does it name a frame of mind? A place you exile your conquests? The wing of the dungeon the n00bs are kept in? Grab your noblest of steeds and polish your battle axe, we have a pillaging to get to.

While most subgenres survive based on the might of the RHIFF, doom survives as much on its tone as its composition. Violence Dimension offers that tone in spades, with a plod like the flinging of pure tar splatter into your eardrums and a woofer rattle thicker than a wooly mammoths mating thrusts. From the kickoff rumblings of “Frozen Edges of the Wound” to the opening quake of terror lifting the curtain on “Foeman’s Flesh”, Conan offer up a sound which sidesteps fuzzed out stoner tropes into something much more akin to banging impossibly large rocks together. The grindy, sub-one-minute “Warpsword” blasts with a sandpaper buzz to reduce your saber teeth to stumps in seconds. The vocals of Jon Davis echo across the neighboring mountain, bringing tidings of destruction meshed with rarely seen motivational lyrical refrains (“Total Bicep”) while riding grooves stacked atop grooves across the whole package.

Subjugating the Tyrannosaurus tone is one spear-chucking assault after another. “Desolation Hexx” comes out swinging an Ankylosaurus tail straight for the feeble brain cavity, only to keep wailing on you with extreme prejudice as drummer Johnny King switches his flows to take the repetition from merely brutal to prehistoric savagery. “Total Hex” rides riffs with balls bigger than Messa’s Belfry and closes out on a better Electric Wizard riff-and-fuzz-solo than that outfit has penned in several albums. Even the mostly instrumental title track manages to channel the sinister atmospheres of modern Bongripper into Conan’s own sense of identity and flow, with bass solos, ever-shifting drum fills, and one relentless chug after another violating the listener.

So with so much weighty blood and Brontosaurus poo being flung about, what’s the catch? Violence Dimension suffers excessively from “The Windhand paradox”. Every single song here features top-shelf, grade A, Triceratops steak medium rare riffage ready to create new caves to dwell in with their own might; these riffs are promptly run right past the stone age and well into the modern age, into regrettable monotony. Other than the possible exception of the title track (which itself starts to run out of steam the last couple of minutes), many of the songs don’t deserve the length they’re given. The shorter songs are absolute volcano cratering ragers, and every long song has many a melody of menace to welcome your enemies’ wives into your harem. But those moments don’t deserve to be repeated as often as they do, and what would make for a delightful 4 minute song gets pushed into a nine-to-ten-minute song with gleeful abandon. Closer “Ocean of Boiling Skin” is the worst offender, ending on a glorious clubbing of a groove and then ooga-booga’ing for a solid five extra minutes, until all the initial impact is long forgotten.

This is maddening because when Violence Dimension is on, it is on. Make no mistake, this is still a quality album and doom aficionados will find much to love here, but I’m rooting for more. Conan write unique, relatively uplifting, energetic doom, and I want more of it. I also want them to write riffs worthy of the song lengths they dole out, or commit to an album of shorter songs just to see what happens. For the moment, make sure your axes are sharpened and find your favorite loincloth, for Violence Dimension is here to ensure you have a fitting soundtrack to send your enemies to the great beyond in style.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 303 kbps mp3
Label: Heavy Psych Sounds Records
Websites: Album Bandcamp | Official Facebook Page
Releases Worldwide: April 25th, 2025

#2025 #30 #Apr25 #Bongripper #Conan #DoomMetal #ElectricWizard #HeavyPsychSoundsRecords #Messa #Review #Reviews #UKMetal #violenceDimension #Windhand

BONGRIPPER (Estats Units) presenta nou àlbum en directe: "Live at Soulcrusher" #Bongripper #Stoner #Sludge #DoomMetal #Febrer2025 #EstatsUnits #NouÀlbumEnDirecte #Metall #Metal #MúsicaMetal #MetalMusic

Bongripper – Nothing

https://bongripper.bandcamp.com/track/nothing

#FediRadio #DoomMetal #Bongripper

Sanctuarium – Melted and Decomposed Review

By Angry Metal Guy

By: Nameless_n00b_85

Sanctuarium is a young band with an old, rotted soul. Beginning life as a one-man old-school death project, the outfit quickly expanded after its first demo into a two-man unit for its debut full-length, Into the Mephitic Abyss. This change shifted the band’s approach from straightforward OSDM into a more synth-drenched death/doom hybrid, heavy on atmosphere blending their doomy dirges in with mid-paced death. On their sophomore outing, Melted and Decomposed, the band has upped to a full five-piece and further evolved sound. With this stylistic shift and three new members, it remains to be seen if Melted and Decomposed innovates or not.

Good death/doom needs to have the sound to back up the music, and here Melted and Decomposed excels at its soundscape. This album sounds monstrous, with a thick, buzzsaw guitar tone that serves the death and doom elements equally well. Drummer Agus alternates between fills and flourishes, as the death riffs allow him to show his chops in snare abuse and creative fills, while the doom passages shift him into the background. Vocalist Carlos adds heaps of atmosphere with his performance, alternating between gutturals and prolonged, vaguely blackened screeches that are drowned in reverb and always seem to be cutting through from the back of the mix. The whole package sounds foul and is a real treat for lovers of that vintage OSDM sound. This time, however, Sanctuarium has opted to separate the ingredients of death and doom and offer them up in alternating layers instead of a proper blending of sounds. As a result, this is a mixed bag of an album, with its core approach to songwriting proving to be its biggest stumbling block.

When Sanctuarium focuses on playing proper death metal, they sound properly infected. Their approach is at times beatdown heavy, such as the ending of “Exultant Dredges of Nameless Tombs,” which features some of the album’s most creative drumming over a riff that Bongripper would be proud of. Elsewhere, “Phlegmatic Convulsions” sports stank-face-inducing riffs that glide forward like tanks and sports a midsection that sounds pulled straight from the Coffins playbook of grooves. It is in such moments that Sanctuarium is at its most lethal. While never approaching anything that could be considered “technical,” the death portions of every cut never lack energy and zeal.

Where the album struggles is when the band brings the music to a screeching halt. With every song clearing a minimum mark of eight minutes, each contains multiple doom passages that teeter on funeral doom pacing–single-note, single-snare-hit dirges that derail the momentum of any song. This approach is pervasive throughout the album—groovy, catchy, wonderful death riffs suddenly interrupted without warning by brake-slamming, overly sustained chords (for especially egregious examples, check out “Abhorrent Excruciation in Reprisal” and “Sadistic Cremation of Emaciated Offal”) There is no build up to such moments—nor a cathartic explosion after them—instead, they are treated like an afterthought, as if the band remembered they needed to put doom into the album to adhere to their sound, before moving right along to the next death riff. Frustratingly, the final minutes of the closing track “The Disembodied Grip of Putrescence” even show the band suddenly grasping at the last moment how to make doom work to serve the song structure rather than the other way around. All too late, the writing proves capable, vindicating their sandwiching approach. Unfortunately, no other song manages this balance, and the doom elements commit the greatest crime in metal music: being boring.

Ultimately, Melted and Decomposed is a curious listen. I’ve never heard an album at once hit such delightful highs and experience such abysmal failings, and within the same song.1 The sound is excellent, the death metal elements strong, the atmosphere pervasive, and the doom doesn’t have to suck as hard as it does. Resuming the blended approach of their first album or improving the transitions and bridges between their divided song structures will let them unleash something truly putrid to the world on their next outing. Nevertheless, the death portions present an EP’s worth of genuine goodness, and lovers of all things audibly foul should investigate for themselves.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s CBR MP3
Label: Me Saco un Ojo Records
Websites: sanctuarium.bandcamp.com (old) | mesacounojo.bandcamp.com (current album)
Releases Worldwide: September 3rd, 2024

#20 #2024 #Bongripper #Coffins #DeathMetal #DoomMetal #MeltedAndDecomposed #OSDM #Review #Reviews #Sanctuarium #Sep24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI8cNsz8Ytk

Neues Bongripper-Album, kam im Frühjahr. Stonergaze. Weniger Doom, mehr Drone, Mut zum Ausformulieren musikalischer Ideen. Empty hat 3 Tracks von je über 20 Minuten. Und immer noch keinen nervigen Gesang dabei, sondern pure, tiefergestimmte, von sparsamem Schlagzeug begleitete Distortion. Ja, kann man anhören.

https://11k2.wordpress.com/2024/08/28/bongripper-empty/

#Bongripper #doom #drone #Empty #musik #Sludge #Stoner

Thousand Limbs – The Aurochs Review

By Dear Hollow

If any metal style has the right to be instrumental, it’s a three-way tie between djent, drone, and post-metal – and I’m guessing you’re cringing right now. While the former two are dragged across oft-unwilling ears in masturbatory guitar wizardry and booty-thick minimalist sprawls, respectively, post-metal has always felt a bit more exploratory and dynamic. Acts like Tempel and Russian Circles have crafted landscapes out of massive riffs and complex compositions, and New Zealand’s Thousand Limbs takes a similar approach with debut full-length The Aurochs. Big riffs and visceral chord progressions guide, and we are on this journey with them.

The Aurochs takes influence from the enigmatic Chinese Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, illustrations and parables from twelfth-century Zen master Kakuan Shion. Thousand Limbs’ individual ten tracks reflect each of the illustrations and their attached poetic verses respectively, through a sonic exploration of the achievement of awakening. While post-metal is clear in Isis-esque off-kilter rhythms, curious melodicisms, and lurching patterns alongside Russian Circles awe-inducing hugeness, other influences of YOB, Bongripper, and Earth also pervade. Orange haze, vintage distortion, and driving baritone riffs add a certain aggression and twist.

Beginning with “A Blessed Life to Suffer,” you’re graced with post-metal and doom’s most endearing quality: patience. Thousand Limbs is content letting its riffs grow and sprawl across its mammoth nearly hour-long runtime. Tracks like “Form,” “Fall of Body and Mind,” and closer “A Boundless Heart” exchange big sprawls, haunting leads, and fuzzy noodles seamlessly in painting enlightened pictures with broad yet gentle strokes, while the interludes “Only His Shadow,” “Evening Haze,” and “Beneath Soil and Stone” embrace the darker melodies that momentarily cut through the murk. Centerpieces “The Aurochs” and “The Aurochs – Aligned” are the best tracks here, exemplifying a two-part exploration of “Seizing the Ox” and “Taming the Ox.” First half “The Aurochs” is vicious and driving, complete with dissonant dueling arpeggios, while the second’s “Aligned” interpretation is more sunny and optimistic stoner-heavy bass-forward intertwined rhythms feel like some achievement of peace. Thousand Limbs’ careful control of its songwriting and motifs is consistently illustrated throughout, transitions between dissonance, darker minor moods, sunny melody, and brighter major chords remarkably smooth.

The fusion of post-metal and vintage doom is an intriguing premise, but Thousand Limbs suffers from its murk. Stoner doom in particular is aligned in minimalist compositions, and while guitars attempt to intertwine and compensate for The Aurochs’ voiceless trudge, it takes multiple listens to discern between the layers – especially when they exist in the same register. All the layered riffs and leads that guide “A Dim Light to Guide,” “Form,” and “A Boundless Heart” all swirl with no particular conclusion, only letting random bouts of squealing feedback cut through the bog. In this way, the careful and precise nature of post-metal is incompatible with the fuzzy wrecking ball of stoner doom, and Thousand Limbs shoots itself in the foot with its stoner doom swampy mix. Even beyond it, while the album structure favors their placement as album climax, “The Aurochs” and “The Aurochs – Aligned” are the undisputed best tracks here, putting all others in their shadow.

To their credit, Thousand Limbs has created a post-metal album that is evocative, smartly composed, and achieving a clear purpose. The problem is that The Aurochs makes no case convincing stoner doom and post-metal naysayers that it’s the best thing since Isis or Bongripper. Unless you’re prepared to analyze the hell out of it for damn near an hour, fighting uphill against a production value of dominating fuzz and denied vocals, The Aurochs is a chore. Thousand Limbs carries on the tried-and-true tradition of instrumental post-metal in a unique fusion that embraces the hallmarks of classic doom and stoner sensibilities in a tangible and realized theme. But like the walk towards enlightenment, you’ve got to struggle for it.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Released
Websites: thousandlimbs.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/thousandlimbsnz
Releases Worldwide: July 19th, 2024

#25 #2024 #Bongripper #DoomMetal #Earth #Jul24 #NewZealandMetal #PostMetal #Review #Reviews #RussianCircles #SelfRelease #StonerDoomMetal #Tempel #TheAurochs #ThousandLimbs #YOB