Fearing - Black Sand EP (2018)

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I'm easily swayed into these dark ethereal soundscapes; it's a warm place to rest my weary head and mope around feeling optimistically nihilistic and existential and Faustian and drenched in ennui and all that drab bullshit. But really, Black Sand is calm and forlorn guitar driven melodies, The simplistic bombast of drums ala Sonic Youth, thee sexual tension between each bass-line and the downright lackadaisical vocal delivery do it for me sometimes. And I'm hoping the lyrical content reads like an overly pedantic Sartre. Get into it, or don't, life is meaningless anyways.

Fearing - Black Sand (bandcamp)

Erdve - Vaitojimas (2018)

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Lithuania's main export definitely isn't metal - It's probably something more ambiguous and niche, like silk worm tea - nor is it hardcore for that matter, or sludge, crust, and anything else tonally devastating. Erdve are the exception to my wholly ignorant musing; Vaitojimas isn't something that is reinventing the wheel, but it sure as shit doesn't sound like a copycat to anything else, and that counts for something in a era of; heard that before, sounds good, let's replicate that. This album weaves and gestates elements from many pots; Crust, sludge, punk, hardcore, doom, post-metal, etc, etc.

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I'm in the arduous, mind-numbing process of distilling my favourite albums from 2018 right now, and the list will be something around 30 albums, and I've listened to a disgusting amount of metal (among everything else) this year, so I'm revisiting and sifting through a lot right now. And so far, Erdve are definitely somewhere up there.

Erdve - Vaitojimas (bandcamp)