From The Metal Archives Vol. 9 - Transcending Obscurity Records

[Welcome to this special edition of From The Metal Archives, meant to showcase two things that happened on the Transcending Obscurity Records Bandcamp page. One, in January ALL albums are available as name-you-price downloads!

By the reviewers from The Metal Archives.

[Welcome to this special edition of From The Metal Archives, meant to showcase two things that happened on the Transcending Obscurity Records Bandcamp page. One, in January ALL albums on the page are available as name-your-price downloads! Two, the label released a massive sampler with 52 tracks meant as a "contemporary annual preview of the new music that we're working with and what you can expect in the times to come".

I also found two earlier death metal releases that were well received by The Metal Archives reviewers. One is better known and more progressive than the other, both are great examples of the breath of death metal found on the Transcending Obscurity roster.]

Artwork by Alex Tartsus.

[The Metal Archives reviewer Chris Jennings said]

One of the UK’s leading death metal acts return with album number 5, and De Profundis haven’t sounded this focused and this ferocious in years. Perpetually progressive, subtly melodic and yet as savage as they come, De Profundis sound rejuvenated here and The Blinding Light Of Faith is an eye-opening blast of technical death metal brutality.

[read Chris Jennings's full review here]

[The Metal Archives reviewer TheStormIRide said]

While band’s lyrical themes may be rooted in the realms of human thought and emotional experience, their music is a real it gets. The band describes themselves as old school death metal, but a more apt description would be the steamrolling, oft-militant school of Bolt Thrower or Hail of Bullets. Despite ascribing to that style, the band brings an extremely varied songwriting style to the table. The seventeen minute album spends most its time hammering your skull with a mix of fast paced, chunky riffing and angular chord progressions, but the band slows things up with a few crawling tempos that could sink ships.

[read TheStormIRide's full review here]

Artwork by Turkka Rantanen.

[Taken from the Transcending Obscurity Bandcamp page:] This is our most ambitious and diverse label sampler yet. The bands have been carefully handpicked to represent what we feel is the best expression for that particular genre and as such this sampler is segregated as per the different styles we're specializing in. There's death metal, grind/crust, technical death metal, black metal, sludge metal, doom metal and of course the avant-garde bands. Here's a rough demarcation of the genres where possible:

Tracks 1-23 - death metal/grind/crust
Tracks 24-26 - technical death metal
Tracks 27-31 - sludge/doom metal
Tracks 32-41 - black metal
Tracks 42-48 - doom/death metal
Tracks 49-52 - avant-garde metal

Svrm - Занепад

By Justin C. I got hooked on Svrm’s new album, Занепад, from the first song alone, so I had to go and bug the Vigor Deconstruct folks until they gave me the rest of it. The album is actually pretty short by recent black metal standards

By Justin C.


I got hooked on Svrm’s new album, Занепад, from the first song alone, so I had to go and bug the Vigor Deconstruct folks until they gave me the rest of it. The album is actually pretty short by recent black metal standards--just 5 songs coming in at 21 minutes--but it feels much more expansive than the running time suggests.

Other than a second member providing some brief acoustic passages, Svrm is one-man Ukranian black metal. Google translate tells me the title means “Decline,” and the other song titles (at least the ones that Google didn’t hilariously butcher) are things like “In Hell” and “The Road to Death.” So yes, definitely bleak, but Svrm falls into an area of black metal that I’ve been calling, at least in my head, triumphant black metal. A good comparison would be Vanum’s Ageless Fire from earlier this year. That one is one of my personal AOTY, and Svrm pulses with the same kind of energy. Yes, Svrm’s vocal content is probably pretty bleak--it’s described as “rooted in Ukrainian lore,” and that’s a country that’s had a rough time since World War II.

But in spite of the pain and melancholy, there’s a feeling of restless, indomitable energy that comes through. If the last track is “The Road to Death,” then the music fights every step of the way. That track has drawn me in for repeated, end-on-end listens. The distorted, choral-like electronic effects that open the song give way to full-throttle second-wave BM, with that extra kick of defiance underneath, especially in the raspy shrieks right in the front of the mix. Another quieter interlude breaks in later, turning the song into a five-minute mini-epic that I get a little bit more from every time I listen.

I know it’s too early to start my best of album list for 2020, but I don’t care. I just found the first contender.

Dawn Ray'd - Behold Sedition Plainsong

By Kim Kelly. “It’s time for new tales of resistance!” is a hell of a way to open an album, but in Dawn Ray’d’s case the bravado is warranted. “Raise the Sails,” the string-speckled opening salvo on the Northern UK trio’s sophomore album, Behold Sedition Plainsong, is more of a warning than anything.

By Kim Kelly.


“It’s time for new tales of resistance!” is a hell of a way to open an album, but in Dawn Ray’d’s case the bravado is warranted. “Raise the Flails,” the string-speckled opening salvo on the Northern UK trio’s sophomore album, Behold Sedition Plainsong, is more of a warning than anything. When vocalist and violinist Simor Barr lets loose his mighty roar and lays out the bones of this latest manifesto, it’s hard not to feel a shiver of excitement (or dread) run up one’s spine.

This is a wild, powerful modern black metal record steeped in the language of revolution, and executed with the deadly precision of a battle-hardened firing squad. Melodic, aggressive, and heavy in all the right places (“Until the Forge Goes Cold” provides a masterclass in dynamic tension), Behold Sedition Plainsong is a brilliant piece of militant propaganda, designed to delight and inflame in equal measure. Its canny blend of epic black metal, winding folk melodies, and even funereal doom (as on “Soon Will Be the Age of Lessons Learnt,” which at certain moments sounds all the world like a cleaned-up Thou) is as refreshing as it is compelling, offering a thoroughly modern take on the genre while at times harkening back to the great old 90s folk black metal bands (but mercifully devoid of any cryptofascist heathen underpinnings).

Dawn Ray’d is a unique property in a genre flush with tired dogma, hokey theatrical bluster, and sly cryptofascist signaling, and the attention they’ve raked in as modern black metal’s premier anarchist standard-bearers is a breath of fresh air amidst cloying clouds of rot. It’s in that way they channel their venerable UK predecessors by exemplifying the Bolt Thrower creed: in a world of compromise, some don’t. This violin-powered, often grandiose black metal trio, with its roots in the industrial North of a politically-fractured island and its black flag flying high, have been on the vanguard of a new kind of metal resistance—and that influence is spreading.

Over the past several years, as the rise of global fascism has emboldened dotted cesspools of fascist scum and energized a new generation of radicals, the world of heavy metal has reacted in two ways—first, in the new wave of antifascist extreme metal has increasingly made its presence known, and secondly, in an upswing in reactionary or outright fascist elements rearing their ugly heads and caterwauling in defense of “keeping metal dangerous” (Never mind that most of the revered Second Wave black metal bands were founded in liberal social democratic Nordic countries and made up of spotty proto-edgelord teenagers practicing in government-subsidized studios).

Dawn Ray’d's contributions here cannot be understated. The very fact that a vocally, proudly antifascist band—let alone with one with an explicitly working class anarchist politic— has been invited to spread their message on some of metal’s biggest stages and been covered positively in all manner of publications (metal-focused and otherwise) continues to be a source of amazement. And, for those of us who came of age during a time when getting many metal fans to care even a little bit about injustice seemed like an insurmountable feat, it feels downright miraculous. It is even more satisfying to note that, politics aside, the quality of their compositions, musicianship, and songwriting have remained utterly top-tier; I cannot fathom why one would want to ignore a message like theirs, but if needs must, there is plenty for the alleged “apolitical” metalhead to appreciate here. One of Dawn Ray’d's greatest strengths has been their ability to write undeniably excellent black metal songs, and this sophomore effort is no exception; I’d challenge any black metal aficionado to stick on “To All, To All, To All!”— a blistering screed against wage slavery—and find fault with its icy melodic core, merciless blasts, or medieval-sounding folk passages torn straight from the Windir playbook, or for that matter, with the feral, melancholic roar of “Salvation Rite.”

Lest one assume that the album is a joyless manifesto punctuated by blastbeats, rest assured that there is still hope to be found among the ashes. Extreme metal has a long history of building power from below, and it’s that exact political strategy that will lead us out of perdition. As Dawn Ray’d ask plainly on “A Time for Courage at the Borderlands,” a smoldering folk-inflected elegiac for the refugees left to die at arbitrary settler-colonial borders,

What if all it took
To help get people through
Was someone else who could resist
What if that was you?

What if it was all of us? Imagine what a better world we could build.