#trve cvlt

[wolven-maw]

I'm really high and about to start this black metal choose your own adventure novel

[blackmetalinferno]

Brynjard Tristan from Dimmu Borgir.

He was the bassist of the band between 1993-1996. He left after the album “Stormblåst.” He also used to be a writer for the Norwegian music magazine Mute.

[gaileyfrey]

When people who exploit laborers in order to amass wealth are allowed to define the future of humanity, they'll do what they do best: prioritize their private interests at everyone else's expense. That's why the wealthiest people on earth look to space as an escape from this changing planet. Of course their support staff will need to come with them. Of course there are no labor protections.

What they forget is that in space, no one can hear you peel your exploitative boss like a banana and let him bleed into the void.

Know Your Station #1 is available tomorrow 12/07 wherever you get comics. Pick up your copy to learn what horrors await the 1%!

[wobbly-headed-girl]

A tribute to one of my most beloved metal vocalist, Dead

[heavymetalivneedle]

[vinylspinning]

Agalloch: The White EP (2008)

For a variety of reasons (including some unacceptable anti-Semitic comments from former band leader John Haughm), Agalloch’s stellar discography hasn’t been readily available in recent years, and The White EP, in particular, became something of a white whale (no pun intended) amongst their followers.

So I literally pounced on this long-awaited and beautifully packaged reissue when I saw it listed in a temporarily shuttered record store’s “purchase by phone and pick up in the parking lot” list, midway through the past year’s Covid-19 pandemic.

The things we do for certain records ... and this was a special one, as I explained in my original All-Music Guide review from 2008 ...

Though Agalloch’s first album, Pale Folklore, was essentially a fusion of black metal and folk music inspired by Ulver’s ‘Three Journeyes Through the Norwegian Netherworlde,’ the Oregonians pursued a heavier direction (black and death metal, darkwave, etc.) on their sophomore masterpiece, The Mantle, and fantastic third long-player, Ashes Against the Grain. 

So The White EP seemed to have been fashioned specifically to redress this sonic balance, by jettisoning most every heavy metal ingredient so the band could revisit (and expand upon) the haunting acoustic guitar and piano frameworks, atmospheric backdrops, and pagan themes of their early days.

Electric guitars do overwhelm the tremolo-picked “Birch Black,” but they are otherwise used merely as accents, shades and shimmering backdrops for the dominant acoustic strumming and picking heard on sublime offerings like “The Isle of Summer” and the epic “Pantheist.”

Vocals, too, are only used sparingly: as chorused “Aaaaahhhs” in the last-mentioned track, as conspiratorial whispers on the unusually lush, drop-dead gorgeous “Sowilo Rune,” and as somber murmuring on the accordion-backed “Birch White.” 

Of the remaining two cuts, “Hollow Stone” is a synthesizer-woven beehive of sound and the stark, piano-led coda “Summerisle Reprise” joins “The Isle of Summer” and “Sowilo Rune” in featuring dialog from the 1973 cult horror pagan film, The Wicker Man.

That movie had no official soundtrack until one was assembled in the 1990s, so it’s fitting that The White EP plays like an unsettling, romantic, and evocative half-hour score for a movie that will never be made -- and it’s just as essential as Agalloch’s full albums.

More Agalloch: Pale Folklore, The Mantle, Ashes Against the Grain, The Serpent & The Sphere; plus Pillorian's Obsidian Arc.

[leatherfacevlade]

"I lie awake in the freezing moon.."

[inatimeofbloodandfire]