Three & Seven is the debut release from enigmatic New York entity Occultation, and a fantastic example of the forward-thinking retro-tinged metal that has seen a surge of renewed interest in recent months. Placing a strong emphasis on crafting a palpably thick witching environment than other releases in the same eclectic category, the band skillfully crafts a black cathedral of sound that drips with Sabbath and Mercyful Fate flare. With near every track on the album, Occultation manages to capture perfectly that distinctive sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach upon realizing you’ve stumbled upon something you shouldn’t have – and the subsequently sudden dizzying flash of panic that stems from being unable to find a way out. A grotesque and withered hand greets you from beyond the void, bearing a cryptic invitation into a rich sonic catacomb of horror. You are beckoned.

The most strikingly apparent aesthetic choices present on Three & Seven is the viscous layer of reverb these songs sport like a cloak, lending a very dark and dreamlike atmosphere that tends to blurr a lot of the edges between the individual instruments in the mix. While initially a little off-putting, the ‘cabalistic ceremony in a wine cellar’ effect has grown on me substantially with repeated playthroughs. The whirring atypical song structure found throughout the album sits as a stark contrast against the mesmerizing circular waltz of Nameless Void’s (of Negative Plane) fretboard. The viscous bass gives a dismal oomph to each incantation while the guitar continues to evolve throughout. Occultation have nailed the art of switching things up to keep it fresh, and the pace on this album shifts so often that the funeral procession doesn’t ever get bogged down in one spot.

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Catching sideways glances from the local creatures that always seem to be shuffling aimlessly through the disheveled heart of crime-stricken Pomona, crusty metal folk from near and far gathered outside of The Glass House for Scion’s second sponsored metal show in the area in as many years. Last year’s Scion Rock Fest dominated the landscape of downtown Pomona for an entire day, occupying both the Glass House, Fox Theatre, and two festival tents setup in a street temporarily off-limits to traffic. Say what you will about the premise of a car company putting on shows clashing with the average metal listener’s rapidity to decry bands/labels/people as having ‘sold out’, (and the weirdness of Scion giving away labeled business socks to last year’s attendees), but someone somewhere in Scion’s marketing department clearly has a finger on the pulse of niche extreme music… and if bending the knee for ‘the man’ means getting to see the likes of Agalloch, Dark Castle, Morbid Angel, Floor, Dispirit, and Yob for free in my college town? Fuck it.

Scion scaled back the festival a bit this year, choosing instead to place the spotlight on current niche metal ‘it’ label Profound Lore and a handful of their talented artists from across the US. Having received considerable praise for putting out consistently excellent releases across a broad spectrum of the metal soundscape, it was both gratifying and a bit surreal to see the one-man label put on a pedestal by a behemoth of a corporate entity, and witnessing the energy some of Profound Lore’s younger blood brought to the table alongside titans Yob and Loss was absolutely astounding.

Pallbearer began the afternoon’s show with some soulfully crafted throwback doom. The group’s debut full length Sorrow and Extinction has garnered a fair bit of well-deserved attention, being featured on NPR and receiving impressive reviews across the board. Finding the perfect blend of musical intricacy, crushing pace and soaring vocals, Pallbearer’s impressive forward-thinking-but-retro-tinged musicianship captivated the eager midday crowd. Speaking of the vocals, sweet christ do they kill. Singer Brett Campbell jumps from contemplative, almost timid wavering utterances to passionately majestic high notes with an absolutely heartfelt conviction – I’d say the various Dio and Rush comparisons being hurled towards the dude are more than apt, this is seriously stirring stuff. Pallbearer’s impassioned and strangely uplifting (for doom) music lends itself incredibly well to a live setting. If you have the chance to see these guys in the near future, you have no excuses.

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A forboding mire of dark synthesizers welcome us to Come the Thaw’s beautifully meloncholic landscape. The ominous drone is only allowed to build briefly before being pierced by a sharp inhalation and a breathy, unsure question:

…How…how will you ever find me now? When your wound is faded, and it’s lost its sound?

As Lorraine Rath and Jessica Way’s hauntingly serene voices swim circles around one another and the steady ambience both, I realized I was listening to the most heartfelt and crushingly depressing album 2012 has thus far offered.

Rath’s bass lines begin to drive the song as the keys slowly die and album opener Ruined Ground continues onward, steadily joined by carefully measured drum work and fleeting guitar notes that seem to gracefully waltz around the other instruments. In familiar Worm Ouroboros fashion, the band builds a spectacularly gentle procession before becoming truly heavy… but Come the Thaw approaches that heavy from a completely different angle than the band’s doom-filled S/T release. Things never really reach the crushing weight of Worm’s last album, whose murky depths drew many an apt Asunder comparison. For a band who have thus far tooled themselves around that transition between fragile beauty and ass-kicking doom and sludge riffs, you’d think that significantly downplaying that approach would hold this album back, but I will happily go on the record as saying this: Come the Thaw doesn’t need it.

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Having cemented themselves firmly in the midst of the continually developing Pacific Northwestern black metal scene alongside local titans such as Skagos, Alda, Fauna and others, Addaura have recently released a searing follow up to 2010′s excellent self-titled demo. In a clear but functional egress from the typical themes of being within and experiencing flurried snow, furious rivers and timeless forests, Burning for the Ancient comes across as a rumination on the frustrations of miserable city life and the pining to return to the simpler roots of an era lost to the sands of time. Dig it.

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The dimming of the sickly yellow lights barely managing to fill Eli’s Mile High in Oakland signified that the extensive pre-set preparations San Francisco native black noise trio Sutekh Hexen had undertaken were coming to a close. The group took their place on stage cocooned by the rumbling feedback emanating forth from the front of the bar, surrounded by a fitting vanguard of effects pedals, loop stations, candles, and hard liquor. I was unfamiliar with Sutekh Hexen’s particular hybrid of seething hellnoises, but found myself intrigued by the band’s atypical approach to live music, though I’m not quite sure music is even the proper term I’d use to describe the hideous sonic atrocity these guys seem to excel at. This is ugly, hate-filled stuff that stands as an affront to the delicate post-metal that seems so prevalent at the moment.

Incense filled the air and candlelight played over the impressive effects chain littering the floor as the band’s stringed instruments began drowning themselves in layer after layer of reverb, distortion and delay. The noise continued on, a strange audio funeral procession that swelled in stature and density until the individual instruments were buried underneath the weight of their own descent into weirdness. The chaos halted only for the occasional soft guitar passage before plunging back into the mire, sporadic black metal riffs only briefly discernible before once again drowning in the dissonance.

Sutekh Hexen manages to capture some of the vitriol of second wave black metal and blend it with a healthy dose of Sacrificial Totem-esque dark and unsettling noises, albeit with (perhaps intentionally) none of the finesse of either comparison. If you’re the type who enjoys subjecting themselves to the soundtrack of a satanic summoning inside of a rusted machine factory, you’d do well to check these dudes out. It’ll be interesting to see what Sutekh Hexen is able to do as the band refines its sound in future releases.

Read the rest of this epic review plus view a mind melting photo essay after the jump!
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Chelsea Wolfe’s set began with the hauntingly heartfelt ‘Movie Screen’, which the group has performed for the recently released Room 205 video series. The deceptively simple and short lyrics are repeated throughout the song’s entirety, gradually being joined by Chelsea’s vocal loops that swim and dance around the music. Dylan Fujioka’s precise drum work carried guitar slides and synth passages that slowly built the song into a cacophonous otherworldly drone folk piece that radiated a beautifully strange, almost palpable melancholic warmth. Getting into Chelsea Wolfe’s style of music (somewhere between Burzum, Selda Bagcan, Bob Dylan and the apocalypse) wasn’t difficult for me, being something of an avid drone and noise fan, but what really struck me was the band’s knack for blending horrendously grating or unsettling ambient noise that manages to mingle seamlessly with both bluesy rustic overtones and Chelsea’s own powerfully emotive vocal prowess. This is music about the horror of life, the anguish of love, and the beauty of death – music that inspires empathy through its sheer weight.

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There is no better way to be made an instant fan of an unfamiliar band than to witness them absolutely destroy an intimate venue under relentless aural barrage, and that is precisely how I was turned onto Los Angeles’ very own stoner doom trio Behold! The Monolith. This is a band that plays their fucking heart out in a concrete walled room lit by a floodlight – the kind of opener you had no experience with before but rush home eager to devour their sonic offerings after the show.

Defender, Redeemist begins with the doom drenched Guardian’s Procession, whose crushing, down-tuned chords waver and oscillate just long enough to establish an armor clad war-march of a tempo before being beaten to the ground by an explosion of second track Halv King‘s fast paced destructive goodness. Just as the song’s furious pace and hoarse vocals nearly cement it as a competent sludgey-thrash-hardcore crossover, you’re kicked in the face by oldschool Southern rock licks and chops that’ll keep you tuned in and guessing for the album’s entire runtime. While a lot of genre-blending metal bands tend to try and walk a delicate line between their specific combination of outside influences, D,R chooses instead to blur a myriad of styles together with what equates to the delicacy of slamming a fucking dumptruck into them – and I fully intend that to be a complement.

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You there. I see it in your face. In the shitty cutup Voivod tank and throwback hightops you’re rocking. You’re sick of all the lullaby post metal, the dudes with pseudonyms running around forests, the endlessly microscopic labeling and infinite subcategorization, aren’t you? What you want need is a heaping, healthy dosage of thrash rife with furious riffwork, time-space continuum altering solos, and cheesy scifi-apocalypse themed subject matter, isn’t it?

Of-fucking-course it is, and Vektor’s recently released Outer Isolation is about to melt your face off. The Tempe, AZ four piece play a breakneck style of science fiction-drenched techthrash that’s as talented and enjoyable as it is goofy. The guys really have a knack for tying space-noise ambient passages, delicate clean interludes, frenzied lead guitar work, and astral robopocaylptic conspiracy theories together into a maddening roller coaster ride through the cosmos that remains interesting throughout its duration. Join us on Isolation’s progressive thrash space adventure as we see how many more scifi adjectives I can jam into this review after the jump!

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Alcest’s particular style of fairyworld post-metal doesn’t need a whole lot of introduction. The group’s dreamy, fantasy-like aesthetic seems to have struck a chord deep within the average metal fan’s dorky, frostbitten heart – winning them a place in many album collections right alongside their more aggressive contemporaries. Les Voyages De L’Âme comes two years after 2010′s well received Écailles de Lune, though the two are quite different stylistically. The familiar Alcest framework is well represented and accounted for: ephemeral soft vocals that accompany warm, clean guitars whose brittleness is continually drown out by waves of distortion, blast beats, and frontman Neige’s distinct harsh vocals. Does the album stack up to the band’s previous tales from distant sunbathed lands? Check out the review and the official video for the single Autre Temps after the jump!

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Tucked away in a quaint, unobtrusive corner of Los Angeles’ Chinatown, CVLT Nation and Ear/Splitters managed to squeeze three absolutely devastating doom groups into the very personal Mountain Bar: Laudanum, Destroy Judas, and Behold! The Monolith tore this place to the fucking ground. The cozy venue provided an intimate way to slip into that specific breed of drone-facilitated catharsis that we find ourselves seeking so often. I cannot emphasize enough the sheer emotional engagement the bands themselves brought to the table, and the close proximity of the bar allowed for. Each band showcased their own unique and welcomed spin on the genre, from Behold! The Monolith‘s droning stoner rock, to drowning in Destroy Judas’ powerful, shoegaze-esque desolation, to Laudanum’s guided tour to the unnerving depths of the human mind – this was not your typical doom lineup. Check out the photos and read the full show writeup after the jump!00

Behold! The Monolith started off the night with a set that tread somewhere between throwback 90s stoner metal, soft melodic passages and dense, encompassing drone portions – all while managing to remain interesting.

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