Altarage - The Approaching Roar

By Bryan Camphire. The Approaching Roar is the third record for Bilbao's blackened death metal act Altarage, released on Season of Mist. The set consists of nine songs and clocks in at 43 minutes. In this span, the group reveals an agenda

By Bryan Camphire.


The Approaching Roar is the third record for Bilbao's blackened death metal act Altarage, released on Season of Mist. The set consists of nine songs and clocks in at 43 minutes. In this span, the group reveals an agenda that takes the listener through a broad spectrum ranging from bizarre twisted outer-limits to raw adrenaline fueled fist-pumping anthems. All the while, the sound palate is focused and distilled down to maximum potency. The resulting din is indeed a bestial and ferocious roar.

What makes their music so thrilling is that they take the oppressive sounds of their influences and polish them. The effect on their music is that of increasing the contrast in a photograph. In the hands of Altarage, blacks get deeper, brights more blinding, angles get sharper, textures more abrasive.

"Sighting", the opening track, is both hypnotic and startling. It starts with down-tuned acoustic guitar tremolo picked in a minor key almost flamenco style. This lulls the listener into a whirling trance for a spell. Then the full band crashes in like a violent tidal wave, upending everything in its wake. Altarage really have a masterful control of pacing, in one minute they can drone you a dream-like state, in the next they'll pummel you mercilessly, and eventually they'll lock into an irresistible rhythm and defy you not to bang your head.

"Inhabitant", the sixth track, is another highlight. The guitars seem to mimic a cigarette being snuffed out on your skin. The band kicks in and amplifies this and suddenly you feel like your whole body is being somehow drilled into the Earth while you're helpless to resist the music's momentum. Two minutes in there’s a breakdown—the album is full of these dramatic moments that make you sit up and pay attention—war drums fall into a mid-tempo lock-step. Suddenly this music that up to this point had sounded so alien and strange cracks its whip and you find the need to bang your head under the strange spell of the song.

Altarage have created a set that is measured and rarified. The black and white visual aesthetic of the album art is a compelling visual cue for the ideas that make The Approaching Roar so arresting. It's a record of high contrast, displaying a clear sound saturated with strangeness and emotion for their most powerful LP yet.

New Light Choir - Torchlight

By Karen A. Mann. It’s difficult to know just where to begin in reviewing New Light Choir. With black metal, doom, death metal, prog rock and even a little NWOBHM in their musical arsenal, the Raleigh duo isn’t so much genre-defying as genre-transcending.

By Karen A. Mann

Cover art by Thomas Moran.

It’s difficult to know just where to begin in reviewing New Light Choir. With black metal, doom, death metal, prog rock and even a little NWOBHM in their musical arsenal, the Raleigh duo isn’t so much genre-defying as genre-transcending. Band members John Niffenegger (vocals, guitars, bass, keys, synthesizer, Swiss bell) and Chris Dalton (drums, synthesizer, wizard) display an intellectual musical curiosity that’s both innocent and wide-ranging. Their previous full-length release, 2014’s Volume II, hinted at their vision, while remaining true to their stated love of Tribulation-style blackened death metal. On their most recent release, Torchlight, that vision is fully realized, with the drama of Kate Bush calling over the moors to Heathcliff, the pain of Dawnbringer’s dying Sun God, the fist-pumping insistence of Thin Lizzy and Scorpions and the questioning morose of doom. Throughout, there’s a gnarled, blackened thread that sometimes hides and sometimes makes its presence well-known, stitching the band’s disparate elements together to make a musical canvas that’s theirs alone.

The album’s opener, “Grand Architect,” starts off in a singular direction, with a loping riff that would be right at home on a Trouble album. Shortly thereafter, it speeds up into the song’s main melody, which sounds like a blackened version of High on Fire. Niffenegger’s voice is clean, high and insistent as he sings of a “stargazing seer,” and “Grand architect of dreams.” This transcendent theme plays throughout, including the exotic “Omens,” which tells of “the way revealed: An opening into forever,” the Scorpions-worshiping “Psalm 6” and the album’s majestic showpiece, “Stardust and Torchlight,” which includes the lyrics:

As silver beams of starlight stream on lovers lost in dream.
And in the space between our worlds, where day and night collide.

Even the artwork, a painting of a gauzy sunrise over a roiling sea by 19th Century American Romantic landscape painter Thomas Moran, hints at the emotional turmoil brought forth on the album. The Romantics were intrigued by the violence of nature, and considered humankind’s attempts to subjugate it futile. Ultimately, they believed in the supremacy of the individual over the collective and emotion over reason. New Light Choir’s lyrics (mostly written by Niffenegger) concern themselves with the same heady, mythical themes, and feature protagonists who are searching for some sort of cosmic or spiritual transcendence.

There are times when New Light Choir throws all expectations out the window, and the most obvious of them is on the second song, the vintage-worshiping occult-rocker “Queen of Winter.” With organ and Mellotron accompaniment by Scott Phillips (Dalton’s bandmate in indie-rock band Goner and its electronic offshoot Gnoer), “Queen of Winter” easily sound like a lost song from a Blood Ceremony album. This is further proof that even a band as unexpected and beholden to genre as New Light Choir can find a way to surprise their listeners.

Death Fortress - Reign of the Unending

By Bryan Camphire. Reign of the Unending. It's a fitting title for a record released just before the fall of Fallen Empire Records, as the label prepares to lock up its gates. The venerable label's influence is indeed unending, and Death Fortress is a band best equipped to exhibit this fact

By Bryan Camphire.

Artwork by Raul Gonzalez.

Reign of the Unending. It's a fitting title for a record released just before the fall of Fallen Empire Records, as the label prepares to lock up its gates. The venerable label's influence is indeed unending, and Death Fortress is a band best equipped to exhibit this fact, as they have been releasing uncompromising music via Fallen Empire throughout the label's seven year history.

Death Fortress make records that sound like the band is playing live in your living room. It's a ferocious sound they've cultivated with heaping measures of muscle and teeth. In an era rampant with over-produced recordings, it's refreshing to hear a set as raw and powerful as this. To my ears, Death Fortress blends the bombast of Bleach-era Nirvana with the blasphemous bent of Belketre.

The human touch to this performance imbues the music with grit and gristle. The drumming is jaw dropping. This has been the case on all of the band's records and the clip is maintained throughout on this release. The vocals are another source of intrigue. Guttural howls are interspersed with hellish cries. These elements combined with gain-heavy guitars and low slung bass lines produce a high voltage of intensity to leave a lasting impression on the listener.

"Nearer to Purity" is a highlight. The momentum this track kicks up and the tension it creates is like experiencing a helicopter crash in a blizzard and living to tell the tale. Half of the tunes on this release have mid-tempo breakdowns. It's these moments that all at once provide reprieve and serve to strengthen the songs' potency. The music gets ratcheted up in these slow sections like a measured ascent that precedes a free fall. It's a sensation you can feel in your chest, and Death Fortress orchestrates the experience with mastery.

On Reign of the Unending, each song title on is concerned with power, and this theme is reflected in the energy of the playing. There isn't an ambient interlude to be found throughout the thirty-eight minute run time of this set. It's all blood and guts. The ferocity on display here lends the music its escalated heartbeat, which cuts a stark path through unforgiving landscapes. Death Fortress brings feverish heat to desolate atmospheres, which are richly realized on this release.