With luck, she’ll get to pick up where she left off soon. She can sound sneering and sarcastic, as she does on album highlight “Wigsplitter,” or downright terrifying, like on “The Ritual.” Pre-pandemic, Mungo’s unhinged live performances fronting Fucked and Bound were already on their way to making her a legend. The star of the show is Lisa Mungo, whose chameleonic voice leads the rest of the band into battle. I can hear punishing D-beat, amorphous sludge metal, noise rock skronk, even the proggy hardcore of bands like Refused and Fucked Up. (A previous album, Suffrage, was released under the name Fucked and Bound.) As concise as they are at getting their point across, Filth Is Eternal find time to bring in a wide range of sounds. The Seattle hardcore band rips through 12 songs in 20 minutes on their sorta-debut LP, Love Is a Lie, Filth Is Eternal. Filth Is Eternalįilth Is Eternal doesn’t waste a second. It’s another triumph for frontman Abysmal Specter and his merry troupe of sad vampires. Asmita Vijay Virkar plays the disintegrating melody of “Ceaseless Spiral Staircase” on a sitar-a George Harrison in corpse paint. On the title track, the opera singer Alejandro Luévanos contributes vocals that sound like they’re being piped in from a crackly 78. Still, there are some new wrinkles here that make Iam Vampire Castle one of the best entries in the band’s discography. How have they not already put a song called “Vampyric Witch Ghost” or “Sad Vampire” on one of the 16 releases they’ve released in the last year? By now, the Old Nick aesthetic is so dialed in that if you’ve heard any of their records, you know what to expect. There are a couple of song titles on Iam Vampire Castle that I’m shocked Old Nick hasn’t used already.
If you’re looking for something unapologetically old school, look no further. Musically, Nunslaughter still lives in the mid-’80s moment when black metal, death metal, and thrash were indistinguishable and intertwined. Joe Lowrie is more than up to the task, his groove-driven style a perfect foil to Don’s primordial songs of satanism and perversion. Frontman Don of the Dead made the difficult decision to carry on with the band when longtime drummer Jim Sadist died suddenly in 2015, and this is the first LP to include another person behind the kit. Red Is the Color of Ripping Death is the Cleveland miscreants’s first long-player since 2014’s Angelic Dread, and it’s still a thrill to hear them thrashing about in (relatively) long-form.
They’ve only made five full-length albums, though, so each one is a rare event worth tuning in for. The band has released somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 records dating back to their formation in 1987.
You could be forgiven for dipping in and out of the Nunslaughter experience. With their help, Cimarusti has once again made one of the finest black metal albums of the year. Dan Binaei ( Racetraitor), Trevor Shelley de Brauw ( Pelican), Ryan Wichmann ( Sick/Tired), and experimental composer Brett Naucke lend a wide variety of new sounds to the Annihilus universe. Song also feels like a bigger record than Ghanima, thanks in part to the who’s who of Chicago legends that round out the contributors list. They’ve just been tightened so their emotional truth hits you just as hard as their physical thwack. The songs are still bathed in enough reverb and feedback to drown in. That’s not to say there’s not still plenty of sonic ugliness. Follow a Song from the Sky is Cimarusti’s second full-length as Annihilus, and it’s a sleeker, more sophisticated expression of his vision. On last year’s Ghanima, Luca Cimarusti ran black metal through a filter of his own sensibilities, incorporating elements of noise rock, shoegaze, and minimal synth into its brutalist palette. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track