Post-Millennial's Guide To Metal (And Some Other Stuff)

  Dominic Fernow, like many noise musicians, is an absolute machine when it comes to output. His most famous work, under the Prurient  moniker, falls into the harsh noise and power electronics genres, where crushing synthesizers and brutal noise machines blast the listener into a horrific and grotesque display of raw emotion unlike anything else. While occasionally branching off into the black metal and dark ambient rabbit holes, Fernow tends to rely on heavy distortion and incomprehensible vocals for his music. But,  Vatican Shadow , his ambient and industrial techno side project, had completely flown under my radar up until this point, and it is easy to understand why. Both ambient and techno are genres I hold very little knowledge about. I listen to 2814 , Burial , Brian Eno , Stars of the Lid,  and Tim Hecker , but even these artists are pretty huge amongst the ambient community, therefore jumping into something like this was a daunting task (and the fact that I ...

  A quick post to announce the inaugural edition of our weekly PMMetalGuide Podcast! In our first episode, we talk about the skewed bias that RateYourMusic has when it comes to metal album ratings in 2020. Check it out below! PMMetalGuide · PMMetalGuide Podcast Episode 1: RYMcore

DSBM is a genre I have long-fretted to get into. The downright real melancholia associated a good majority of artists who make it is extremely intimidating, and even more so uncomfortable. But recently, I have decided to take the plunge into the pitch-black waters that encompass and secrete from vile and depressing entities like Leviathan , Shining , Nodus Tollens,  and Gris , among others, and have reemerged with a very different mindset on the genre as a whole. While what I had thought about the genre does somewhat hold true with groups like Xasthur  and  I'm In A Coffin , a lot of other groups and projects either lean heavy into dissonant black metal or even into the atmospheric and epic side. For a niche subgenre, the style is actually somewhat varied, which definitely helps in my quest to listen to a lot of it.  While 0  (or  Núll ) isn't fully a DSBM band, they certainly have elements of that style in their music. The Icelandic supergroup of black met...

Ah yes, it is finally time for our token Mariusz Lewandowski review of the year! Lewandowski is a phenomenal surrealist painter who, in addition to many works on his own time, has contributed his talents to metal artwork. Most famously, he has contributed to Xenobiotic 's Mordrake , Mizmor 's Yodh: Live At Roadburn 2018  and Cairn , and, of course, Bell Witch 's Mirror Reaper . If you have Lewandowski commissioned artwork, your album means business, no matter what genre. To me, the grandiose and despondent style that the Pollack displays on these album covers perfectly fit the mood portrayed in doom metal: Sad, slow, and massive. Funeral doom, in particular, takes these aspects and cranks them to eleven, which is why examples like Mirror Reaper  are so impactful. The crushing weight of the music is perfectly exemplified by the ominous, looming forces in the art, and it looks like Quebec's Atramentus  took the hint.  The Canadian quintet's debut, Stygian , is a three...