Void Eater - IIII (2019)

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There's absolutely no surprise that Void Eater's EP IIII is right up my alley, as it's putrid to the bone black/death metal to the point of mummifying in it's own reverb and calcifying under the weight of itself. Too often adjectives are haphazardly thrown around and I am certainly not above it myself, but one would be out of their fucking skull if they were to try and describe Void Eater without using words like; Primeval war-stomp, barbaric body-slam, bestial blood-doner, antediluvian head-kick, troglodytic beat-down, etc, etc.

Everything about this downward spiral of black/death is impressive and far more oppressive than lesser forms mascaraing under the banner of bestial death metal.

Void Eater - IIII (bandcamp)

Bestia Arcana - Holókauston (2017)

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Holókauston is an album I have been chewing through since it came out; Slowly wading through its musical fat and gristle, letting the innocuous flavours and the potent decadent flourishes rest on my pallet before swallowing. You would be remiss (and wrong) to chalk this album up as black/death metal and just walk away as if this simple categorical summation is adequate. It's not.

It's a raging torrent of death metal at its foundation. A deluge of war-like drums poke and pound nefariously while the whirr of guitars waft around a cavernous atmosphere in a dizzying haze, gaining in traction, increasing in heft, bubbling, frothing, foaming over, spilling over its iron cusp and pouring out onto the earth. Its core tethered to the lilt of black metal, cold and unrelenting. It sounds like communicating beasts, invoking spells and inciting incantations; summoning tremors, hale, lighting, fire and the 17 plagues of babel. Your hope and whimsy left in desiccated heaps of dust and your wellbeing not so well. Malign in your bones and total ennui in your veins.

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The paragraph above is seemingly hyperbolic and self-masturbatory. A lot of words, with little meaning… Yeah maybe, but one thing is certain, Bestia Arcana released one of the better metal albums last year and it went way under everyones radar. Everyone fucked up.

One of the best albums released in 2017, period.

Bestia Arcana - Holókauston (bandcamp)