Posts Tagged ‘MetalReview’

Album of the day: Dodecahedron – Dodecahedron

Posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Lovingly pinched from Metal Review: The unfortunate reality about diving ass-over-ankles into the mystical forests and blood-stained steppes of extreme metal (or any other niche art-form, for that matter) is that the longer one spends banging the heads that will not bang and frowning the frowns that will not frown, the joy of hearing something completely new is irretrievably lost.

To wit: I bought Opeth’s Blackwater Park on an absolutely blind whim, and as much as I still love the album, I’m pretty sure that what I really love is my recollection of first experiencing the album, free of any prior understanding or expectation. I mean, it’s not like trading childlike wonder for aspirations to encyclopedic metal-nerd-dom is the world’s biggest heartbreak, but still, there’s no girlfriend like your first girlfriend.

All of this is mere preface to the point: I had no idea who or what the fuck Dodecahedron was before giving this album a whirl, and even if I’m in a position now to be able to contextualize and trace the lineage of the album, it’s a rare thing indeed for a brand new band to jump straight out of Zeus’s head with such a fully- and finely-realized debut album that slaps me in the mouth and knocks me flat on my ass. Dodecahedron is a startlingly good album, and although none of its components are entirely novel, their particular combination results in fifty-odd minutes of fresh and mostly thrilling post-black metal acrobatics.

The gut-level feeling I get from Dodecahedron is that of a very compelling fusion of Deathspell Omega and Dødheimsgard, taking the dark and winding dissonance of recent Deathspell, but playing it with the lightness of touch that DHG perfected on 666 International.

Dodecahedron never really tips the scales into full-on industrial / black metal turf, however, and the overall sound is more cosmic than claustrophobic. Atonal chamber metal without the baroque stuffiness of Deathspell, but still with a whiff of futurism (without any of the overt mechanical signifiers of Dødheimsgard), this paranoid Dutch racket should also appeal to those of you who have welcomed the recent efforts from Aosoth and Axis of Perdition into your wee bastard hearts.

Continue reading: Review of Dodecahedron – Dodecahedron | Metal Review.

Tags: black metal, Dan Obstkrieg, Dodecahedron, MetalReview, Season of Mist
Posted in 2012, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended | No Comments »

Album of the day: Eyehategod – Preaching The End Time Message (LP)

Posted on Friday, July 1st, 2011

Lovingly pinched from MetalReview: It’s nice for a (sorta) hardworking metal reviewer to take a break from the torrent of metalcore releases once and a while, and it’s doubly nice to do so for the sake of an excellent and underappreciated band. NOLA greats Eyehategod are, obviously, back in the ...read more