Church of the Sea – Eva Review

By Tyme

I’ve often thought Adam’s rib-mate, Eve, got a bad rap. Led astray by the pesky serpent, Eve took that first bite of the fruit from the Forbidden Tree and shared it with her man. This act not only resulted in their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, but in Eve becoming traditionally branded as the original sinner, who eventually suffered the pains of childbirth as part of God’s consequence. Formed in 2017, and after releasing their debut album Odalisque in 2022, Greek doomgaze trio Church of the Sea has partnered with These Hands Melt to drop sophomore effort Eva, which aims to reimagine the story of Eve, celebrating her defiance and casting her in a different light. One not of sinner, but rebel, who willingly embraced what others consider ‘forbidden.’ I wondered what form Church of the Sea‘s doomgaze would manifest on Eva and whether it would have me reveling in Eve’s now reconstructed rebellion.

With zero expectations of what doomgaze should sound like, I was pleasantly surprised by the atmosphere Church of the Sea creates on Eva. Vangelis provides the doom, comprised chiefly of his sparse, spindly, and sometimes spooky guitar lines, while Alex rounds out the gaze of Eva’s instrumentation with subdued, synth-driven darkwave. Melodies undulate like roiling black seas under steel-grey skies, leaving me stranded on Darkher and REZN-filled waters, searching for salvation. Trent Reznor-inspired synth beats greet us on the first proper track, “The Siren’s Choice.” When the spider-like guitar notes and Irene’s sultry, velvety Shirly-Manson-meets-Sara-Bianchin vocals enter the fray, we get a glimpse of how powerful the doom of Church of the Sea‘s sound can be. This power is undeniable when fuzzy guitar chords coalesce with distorted synths to add heavyweight exclamation points throughout Eva‘s thirty-minute runtime, succeeding at creating a hypnotically hazy, drone-like, yet heavily doomy experience.

Each note on Eva means to satisfy the alpha waves of mind and body like a 432 Hz tone. From the Dead Can Dance meets Vermilia tribalism of “Eva,” with Irene’s native Greek vocals establishing a very folk-forward cadence, to the electronica dominant closer “How to Build a Universe, pt. II,” Eva is full of highlights. None more evident than the three-punch combo that starts with the very Darkher-inspired “Widow,” imbued with “Lowly Weep” vibes to the Bloody Hammers-like spookiness of “Garden of Eden,” where you can almost feel the snaky villain slithering toward our defiant and rebellious heroine. It’s not until the fateful lilts of “Churchyard” enter that the triptych at the apex of Church of the Sea‘s Eve story reveals itself, an ebb and flow, tension-packed track full of sanguine beats, ethereal vocals, and hard-hitting doom tones that find Eve defiantly accepting her role as the ‘mother of all living’ and embracing her newfound knowledge.

Church of the Sea creates music for certain moods, and Eva is no exception. More lulling than pulse-pounding, Eva’s hazy drone succeeds mostly by staying true to what it is and never attempting to stray from that mission. Songs plod, crawl, and cautiously sense their way through Church of the Sea‘s garden of Eva with arachnidic stealth. While stellar in its execution, this fact limits accessibility. This music will not energize you as much as it will have you delving into sub-plateaus of self-inquiry, lazing about in effortlessly created atmospheres. In an age where we admonish bloat and overly long opuses, my biggest quibble is that Eva is not long enough. Minus the two-minute intro, Eva clocks in at a scant twenty-eight minutes, and while I am quick to hit replay, I’m left wanting to hear more of what Church of the Sea has to offer.

April has been a month that could very well find me flung back into the n00b pit. I’ve stumbled on a string of releases I’ve really connected with. I chose Church of the Sea to diversify the kinds of albums I was grabbing, and much to my chagrin, I fell in love with it. Though short in stature and length, Eva is chock full of quality. Irene’s vocals mesmerize, and the guitar-synth combo is way heavier than it has any right to be. I know there will be albums in my future that I won’t connect with, and I anxiously await their arrival, but Church of the Sea‘s album Eva is not one of them. I recommend it fully, and I hope you check it out.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320kb/s mp3
Label: These Hands Melt
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: April 11th, 2025

#2025 #35 #Apr25 #ChurchOfTheSea #Darkher #DeadCanDance #DoomMetal #Doomgaze #Eva #GreekMetal #Review #REZN #Shoegaze #TheseHandsMelt #Vermilia

K L P S – K L P S Review

By Maddog

Determined to explode my word count while safeguarding my character count, K L P S is a familiar band with an unfamiliar name. The band’s 2023 debut Phantom Centre, released under the name Kollaps\e, got stuck in our filter before I yanked it out. Phantom Centre’s sludgy mix of atmosphere and eighteen-wheeler riffs made it concise and compelling, albeit one-track. Two years on, K L P S sees Sweden’s sludgers drop a backslash and four letters while adding even chunkier riffs, more atmosphere, and three non-breaking spaces.1 After an already-promising start, K L P S has taken one leap closer to being a titan of their genre.

K L P S takes Phantom Centre’s measurements and doubles each one. The riffs are bigger, with distorted rhythmic explosions that recall LLNN. Conversely, even these heavier sections come drenched in post-hardcore sorrow. Adding to the soup, K L P S’ use of chunky riffwork to build meditative atmospheres resembles stoner sludge acts like Dvne. While K L P S has amped up their extremity, K L P S’ softer pieces step up as well. The album’s sparser passages, often featuring just simple guitar melodies and ritualistic drum beats, add stark contrast to its heavyweights. Although K L P S is less rhythmic and bass-focused than Phantom Centre, it magnifies nearly every other dimension of its predecessor. The resulting record bears the familiar markers of sludge, but accentuates them all to avoid fading into irrelevance.

K L P S’ blend of heft and emotion makes every track a highlight. The album’s hulking riffs harness sludge’s power while eschewing its typical laziness, tethering themselves to ominous, infectious melodies (“Undertow”). Aided by blackened motifs, even these heavy segments ooze pathos (“Subverse”). K L P S’ descents into minimalism stand in stark musical contrast but embody the same strengths, using subtle melodic tweaks to both hypnotize and grip the listener (“Katarsis”). The record’s greatest triumph is that it never treats these diverse elements as mutually exclusive. The sections that blur the line between heart and muscle show off the best that K L P S has to offer, like the interplay of meditative guitars, post-rock ambience, and climactic riffcraft on “Tribulation.” Like Amenra before them, K L P S wields beauty and brawn in ways that are at once worlds apart and inextricable.

Although K L P S remains interesting throughout, its tracks bleed together over several listens. The album’s six songs have similar lengths and lean into similar styles, without a clear sense of evolution or climax in the tracklist. While each song navigates deftly between serene minimalism and sludgy cacophony, this style grows stale by the end. K L P S’ production choices magnify this feeling; although each instrumental line shines through, the loud master and the muddled sludge riffs make K L P S seem more repetitive than it really is. Still, these are faint splotches on an otherwise impressive record. Given its tempered 43-minute runtime, K L P S never threatens to lose my interest altogether. And when the album does prioritize buildup and climax, the results are spectacular. The closer “Aureola” takes the cake, using powerful melodies to anchor the listener before building up into oblivion and then back down into cathartic quiet. K L P S would benefit from more of this continuity overall.

K L P S has improved upon their debut on nearly every axis. While Phantom Centre was already a breath of fresh air in a moldy genre, K L P S steps up its riffs, its ambience, and its emotional weight. Displaying an uncanny level of maturity, K L P S’ sophomore release shines by blending these elements into a heady brand of sludge where the riffs have soul and the atmosphere has grit. While I wish K L P S had more ebb and flow as an album, its masterful songs keep me coming back for more. Even skeptics of sludge and post-metal owe this hidden gem a listen.

Rating: Very Good!
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: These Hands Melt
Websites: kollapsemusic.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/kollapsemusik
Releases Worldwide: March 7th, 2025

#2025 #35 #Amenra #Dvne #KLPS #Kollapse #LLNN #Mar25 #PostHardcore #PostMetal #Review #Reviews #Sludge #SwedishMetal #TheseHandsMelt

The Legendary Tor-Helge Skei’s The Holos Collective Inks a Deal with Italy’s These Hands Melt:

#HolosCollective #TheseHandsMelt #TorHelgeSkei #Signing #Deal

Link: https://metalinsider.net/news/the-legendary-tor-helge-skeis-the-holos-collective-inks-a-deal-with-italys-these-hands-melt

KrvL – Donkere Paden Review

By Maddog

Written by: Nameless_N00b_89

The nameless souls of the black metal band KrvL (pronounced “Kravaal”) are said to roam Belgium’s Kravaal forest. As a nameless one, too, I felt a peripheral connection to the group, which formed in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. With its 2022 self-released debut Kravaal, KrvL presented its sonic vision to the world. A decent dose of black metal with post and doom leanings, Kravaal caught the attention of start-up Italian label These Hands Melt, who signed the mysterious Belgians in 2024. Steeled now to release its sophomore effort Donkere Paden, KrvL seeks to enter the light from, as the blurb reads, “the darkness they find themselves in.”

KrvL’s black metal takes root mostly in the second-wave tradition, with post-metal and doom both making appearances. Replicating the debut’s blueprint, Donkere Paden leans heaviest on riffs of the tremolodic kind. Layering single-string over double-string tremolos to create melodicism in the faster passages, KrvL harkens back to Transilvanian Hunger-era Darkthrone with less of the catchiness and better production. The slower, doom-like passages have a faster-than-funeral-paced Mizmor quality that serves the album’s atmosphere well, with even the dirge-ier riffs being tremolo-picked. The drums employ straight and d-beat patterns to keep the speedier sections moving, while holding back to give the slower-paced passages more room to breathe, where the bass work often breaks through. The vocals, dispossessed of the variety displayed on the debut, rule the bulk of Donkere Paden with a genre-appropriate scream-shout delivery.

A tale of two tempos, Donkere Paden achieves more with subtlety than aggression. The front half’s speedier movements are dominated in the mix by the drums and vocals, leaving little room for the guitars and bass (“De Koning Van Stilte,” “Cadans Der Drofheid”). Conversely, those same tracks’ doomier passages succeed with a more sonically balanced approach, guitars resonating confidently with enough space to hear the slithering bass lines underneath. Guest appearances serve as a counterpoint to the one-dimensional vocal approach, be it the raspy shouts and spoken words of Oerhek’s H (“Duvielsputten”) or Shazulla’s (of Wolvennest) shouted words on the Filosofem-ic “Zielenrust.” The album’s highlights (“De Verloren Herder” and “Het Onbegrip”) both benefit from speedy tremolos that attain even footing with the drums and vocals. The former song’s midpoint builds back from a single-plucked guitar line to shimmering tremolos that usher the melancholic melody to its end. In contrast, the latter song’s slower second half marches the album to a majestic conclusion with its plodding descent of power chords supporting a single-string melody.

At just over 40 minutes, Donkere Paden’s runtime feels longer due to its formulaic repetition. Instead of using the foundation of Kravaal as a springboard for further artistic exploration, KrvL chose a narrower, more AC/DC-like scope and simply recreated it. Less focused on the doomier, atmospheric song structures that highlight the band’s strengths, Donkere Paden cedes more time to speed, which is where KrvL loses itself. Employing less than a handful of notes to drive melodic variation in both the fast and slow tremolo riffs (“De Koning Van Stilte,” “Avondrood”), this approach further intensifies the album’s feel of similitude. Even the plucked guitar passages that serve as intro (“De Koning Van Stilte”) or interlude (“Cadans Der Drofheid,” “Het Onbegrip”) carry a sense of recycled interchangeability. The overall effect dulls the listener’s senses and significantly impacts memorability.

From production to performance, KrvL’s Donkere Paden is a good album, just not a memorable one. Taken in bite-sized pieces, the constituent parts of the record are all pleasantly digestible, especially when they fire on all cylinders (“De Verloren Herder,” “Het Onbegrip”). However, this success is not par for Donkere Paden’s course, which lacks the structural ideas necessary to support the release as a whole. KrvL does more of its best work on the debut than on this sophomore effort. I enjoyed walking the unpaved paths of KrvL’s Donkere Paden and will be keeping an eye on what these nameless minstrels do next, hoping for something I’ll carry with me for longer.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: These Hands Melt
Websites: krvl.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/KrvL1745
Releases Worldwide: October 11th, 2024

#2024 #30 #BelgianMetal #BlackMetal #Darkthrone #DonkerePaden #Doom #DoomMetal #KrvL #Mizmor #Oct24 #PostBlackMetal #PostMetal #Review #Reviews #TheseHandsMelt