June Metal Gleanings

A quick rundown of what I've been churning through recently during my prime listening hours:

• Keep of Kalessin - Reptilian. This album has completely lived up to its promise, becoming the disc with the sounds so infectious I have to limit myself to listening once a day. "The Awakening," with its bridge hook that begs to be shouted through one of those Swiss Alpine horns into a gale (seriously, go to 3:03 in this clip and check it out) has replaced early favorite "The Dragontower" as the song of choice, but the whole thing is an easy sell because it's brutal and catchy all at the same time.
  
  
• Nachtmystium - Addicts: Black Meddle Pt II. Between this album and the Twilight disc I had a whole Blake Judd bloc yesterday afternoon, which was pretty fantastic. My first feelings after hearing the sequel to Assassins were of awe at Nachtmystium's ability to switch gears so easily from track to track. The overall aesthetic is still that fuzzy Nachtmystium we know and love, but an album that includes everything from a very poppy chorus in "Then Fires" to old school industrial touches in "Blood Trance Fusion" to a heavy dose of EBM in "Every Last Drop" offers a lot to explore. I'm psyched to be seeing these guys again tomorrow.
  
  
• Odem Arcarum - Outrageous Reverie Above the Erosion of Barren Earth. As I've mentioned in the past, this album owes a great deal to Emperor's later work; there's a good bit of 1349, too, especially in the vocals. A bit derivative, perhaps, but these guys offer up so many textures in their 10 minute epics that there's still plenty to enjoy. Definitely take the whole album as one dose, though.
  
  
• Nevermore - The Obsidian Conspiracy. Just got this one a few days ago, so I'm still forming impressions, but thus far the band's seventh album is in keeping with expectations: impressive musicianship, ear-bending vocal lines, and a broad mix of lyrical topics. "Your Poison Throne" seems like the most traditionally Nevermore track thus far, while "And the Maiden Spoke" stands out with a particularly challenging chorus.
  

Into the Depths of Twilight

I've been rocking out to a lot of black metal recently - the Odem Arcarum album I mentioned a few weeks ago, the Ludicra album everyone but me discovered three months ago, the new Keep of Kalessin - but the one that's been the biggest surprise success for me is Monuments to Time's End by the unfortunately-named Twilight. A black metal supergroup of sorts and fronted by Nachtmystium's Blake Judd, Twilight's been a surprise stalwart for me because it's so much of a throwback to the halcyon days of low-fi second wave black metal, a genre that I find more academically interesting than praiseworthy, in part because I am not a low-fi sort of guy. There's something different about Twilight, however and it's taken me a few listens to figure out why that difference appeals to me. After my first listen of Monument..., I felt like I had just been through an Experience (definitely with a capital E) that did not generate any specific positive or negative emotions, but was enough for me to give the album another try. On each additional listen something new has jumped out at me: a guitar line floating here, a dissonant chorus rising like a monolith in the background there, but the whole album remains a stormy sea of sounds that keeps calling me back to explore its depths. I embedded a track below for you to check out, but unlike the majority of my selections it's a random sample rather than a representative one. I'm going back in to see what else I can find.