The title of your first album Hatred for Mankind was pretty self-explanatory regarding the themes. How much of that is carried over onto the latest album Widowmaker?

Widowmaker is a separate root to Hatred For Mankind. It represents another tentacle or facet to the open wound that is Dragged Into Sunlight. Widowmaker is a beast of its own making and very much another head to the hydra. It was never intended that Widowmaker would be a follow up to Hatred For Mankind. The two recordings draw on entirely different influence and differ vastly.

A ‘widowmaker’ is an embolism of the heart. It is the internal combustion that is more than likely to determine life. There is no compromise and in that respect, Widowmaker draws on the same conceptual extremity as Hatred For Mankind.

Thematically, what differs?

Whilst Hatred For Mankind is an external projection, Widowmaker represents the internal. The recordings have a different sound and a different voice, musically attaining the same feeling in the listener, yet following a very different path.

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On June 7th, 2013, DARK BUDDHA RISING release their new album entitled Dakhmandal via Svart Records, and it is an unholy sonic ritual that the world should hear! Every song on this album is a hymn to the underworld that will make you want to gaze into the clouds of darkness! CVLT Nation is streaming the new DARK BUDDHA RISING track “H” below…Check out their June/July tour dates with NEUROSIS!

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Text by Sam HaiNe

You never quite know what will cross your path late at night while aimlessly trekking through the internet. Amidst the various obscure word searches you might just find something worth your time. This is exactly the case when I somehow stumbled upon this mixtape from Purple Tape Pedigree & Steady Bloggin’.

Screwing Yourself To Live: A Chopped & Slowed Tribute To Black Sabbath, is a collection of Black Sabbath songs that have been meticulously slowed and throwed by Geng-Grizzly.

If you haven’t the slightest clue what chopped & screwed is, it is the remixing of songs by slowing the tempo down to between 60 and 70 quarter-note beats per minute and using techniques such as scratches, doubles and stop-time to chop the song into a chopped up version of its original. This technique was first developed in Houston, Texas by the late DJ Screw and has grown in popularity into its own sub-culture.

The result of this on Black Sabbath results in something rare and successful. Why is very simple; slowing the tempo down will either reveal sloppy production or highlight exceptional production. Black Sabbath still to this day is one of the best bands of musicians ever to play. The slower/screwed tempos here put breathing room between each instrument and give them defined textures, often turning riffs into walls of distorted doom and blues. The vocals are dropped down to their lowest level with an almost non-human effect. Throw in some film samples throughout the mixtape and you have here my friends a darkly fuzzed out head trip down to the bottom of a codeine bottle.

Oxtongue might not be familiar to a lot of my fellow doom-heads, but from here on out they should be. Combining subtle atmospherics with the oft-imitated dirge rumble of Holy Mountain-era Sleep and a crushing, misanthropic fuzz wall is what these Canadian cats are all about. And it works damn well, with “Where The Light Is Mute” winding its way across 31 minutes of acid-dipped grooves and a hollowed, depressing stomp.

The album comes on slowly, with the first five minutes of opener “Humanity: Born In The Way Of Eternal Grief” devoted to a simmering riff backed with subtle whispers and ambient melodic touches. “Humanity…” lurches from one lynchpin groove to the next, the whole mass held together with reverb-drenched shrieks and moans that give a mournful flare to the crushing heaviness. While the riffs at times become a murky edifice of reiteration, they never lose the sense of dynamism that runs like a black vein through this whole album. The tone and timbre of the guitars changes so slowly in spots that, before you’re fully aware, you’ve gone from listening to a chugging bit of repetition to being engulfed in a bongload of atmosphere. And, just as easily, Oxtongue shift into the forceful and infinitely heavy “Anguish: Abide With Suffering,” which sets the same dragging tone as the opening track but follows a much more direct approach. It would have been easy for Oxtongue to take the path that far too many “doom metal” bands have and churn out 15 minute tracks full of bone-dry, Neurosis-aping schlock. Instead, they’ve created something that is at turns groovy, startlingly heavy, and dynamic. Oxtongue manage to strike a near-perfect balance of creativity and nihilism that stretches out into the black edges of emotion that serves as the mark of a truly talented band.

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DAY THREE
The third day was probably one of the heaviest of the fest. The place is packed, it’s Saturday, and something heavy’s cooking!

COUGH
So here I start my super sonic marathon with Cough. It was probably one of the performances that many people were most excited to see after their cancellation last year. I had the chance to see them in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, shortly after they released the brilliant Ritual Abuse. That show was rad, so my expectations were high. The set mostly included tracks from their recent split with Windhand, Reflection of the Negative, which I hadn’t time to give a spin yet so I felt a bit blindfolded, but it was cool to discover their new songs live. Kind of disappointed they didn’t leave more room for some of their bigger “hits” like “Crooked Spine” or “Killing Fields,” but the atmosphere they conveyed was definitely as obscure and suffocating as I remembered…

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Label:MusicFearSatan

Are you ready to re-enter a psychedelic state of mind? The split record between Huata and Bitcho will be the perfect companion for your trip to places where gravity has no place and time has no meaning. Three songs from the two bands are paying homage to the psychedelic side of doom, filled with great synth sounds that will make your head spin, dreamy voices and heavy riffs.

So to break it down: Huata contribute two songs to this split album, the fifteen-minute long “The Retaliator,” with its majestic heavy sound, the 60s and 70s influenced groove and the vocals buried deep in the mix, completely out of this world sonic manipulation of synths to create an unworldly ambience that will entrap the listener with its mesmerizing quality. The repetitive themes also assist the hypnotic process; an almost Sleep-ish (from the Jerusalem era) feeling overflows from the song. The second offering of Huata is a heavier, more compact track. Still in the same style but maybe focusing a bit more on their heavy guitars and sludge background than on their psychedelic elements, which are still obviously there (and quite noticeable), but they are not the main focus of the track.

And after the devastation of Huata it is time for Bitcho to take charge and take us further into the realms of psychedelia. Suddenly the warm atmosphere that Huata brought to the album is almost instantly transformed into an industrial-like coldness and after the four minute intro into “10050 Cielo Drive”, Bitcho come out in full force, with their repetitive heavy riffs, bringing Godflesh instantly to mind, and their great synth sounds – they pin you to the floor, especially when the ritualistic chants kick in, you will be astonished. The mechanical beat entwined with the huge sounding riffs and the abnormal atmospheres are key to the sound of Bitcho, the end of the track where the sound becomes more aggressive before they almost triumphantly retreat to an even slower pace is truly awe-inspiring, and the effects on the vocals are also unreal to say the least.
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Label: Forcefield Records

There’s not much to say about Grime. Hailing from Trieste, Italy, these three dudes (they were four before becoming just three) came back in 2013 with their debut record, Deteriorate, their second in a discography that started with the self-titled EP back in 2011.

A quick search on the web will lead us to their facebook page where we can find, almost instantly, the kind of music the Italian trio plays and their goals for the music itself: “Their only goal is bringing destruction to a town near yours. Their sound is rooted into rotten burial ground and their songs are the sound of a decaying swamp filled with trash.”

Sinking our ears into the great (yeah, it is great) Deteriorate shows us a band that knows exactly what it is doing and that can transport us to a parallel universe. A few minutes in the universe of these guys and you will scream in a high-pitch/growl voice “SLUDGEEEEEE!!!!” Oh my fuckin’ god… This is exactly what we fans of old-school sludge needed.

The eight slabs of pure filth and destruction on this album are fuckin’ awesome. A drummer that pounds in your fuckin’ head like Thor with his hammer, a bass player that grooves all way around, a guitar player that delivers only addicting riffs and a vocalist that gives a very GOOD name to the genre… This is how you “sing” when you’re in a fuckin’ SLUDGE band.

What else can I say? Talk about each track? Fuck no. They’re are all great and they are filled with little details that make them unique and the record NOT boring at all… In fact it’s the other way around.

I LOVE THIS SHIT!!!! SLUDDGGGGEEEE!!!!!

Text and photos: Astrid Tonella

On this sunny beginning of May started the second edition of Heavy Days in Doomtown in Copenhagen, Denmark. The four days DIY sludge/doom/stoner fest who made a massive impression last year is back again, with an incredible line up (five bands performed their first European show ever), bringing fans of “all things slow and heavy” from all over Europe and beyond. For those who are unfamiliar with the festival (?!), HDDT is an event organized by the “Undergrundsmusikkens Fremme” (Underground music Promotion) who has been organizing for several years the now notorious “Kill-town Death Fest”. The concept, which makes this festival so unique, is to bring the DIY principles to the doom/stoner/sludge/psych scenes that are rarely exposed to these ethics and create music and culture without having any profit involved.

Huge congrats to the organizing crew for topping last year’s event, for the top-notch organization and for making this weekend absolutely amazing. With this edition, HDDT really proved that it can compete with other renewed European festivals – so if you haven’t attended yet, this is definitely not the fest you want to miss next year!

DAY ONE
The first day started off very well at Stengade, with a sold out warm-up show enabling the public to visit the art gallery placed on the first floor of the venue. For this edition, HDDT continued in line of last year, adding even more artists to the bill. The artistic dimension is to me a great addition that provides a very unique atmosphere to this festival and showcases artists who also contribute in making the scene something more than “just” music but a culture of its own. For this day, you were able to admire the incredible works of The 13th Sign Collective (D), responsible for the fest’s artwork, Manuel Tinnemans (NL), Timo Ketola (SWE), Sami Hynninen (FIN) and assist to a book reading by Ulrike Serowy, narrated by Mat McNervey from Hexvessel.

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When Orchid released their first full-length, Capricorn, in 2011, we literally had it on repeat for months in the CVLT Nation HQ. It’s hard to follow such a strong record, let alone top it in terms of epic storytelling and mammoth riffs, but in The Mouths of Madness, Orchid has done it! Mastered by Richard Whittaker (Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy) for Nuclear Blast Records, The Mouths of Madness will be officially released in North America tomorrow, May 14th. Today, CVLT Nation is more than honored to stream this outstanding album in full for you below! Stay tuned for a full review, for now take shelter from the ever-watching eye in the sky and immerse yourself in Orchid’s The Mouths of Madness…

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Its been over 20 years in the making, but New Zealand death metal machines Sinistrous Diabolus have finally unleashed their full length debut upon the hapless ears of humankind. Formed with ties to infamous occult acts Witchrist and Diocletian, Sinistrous Diabolus pay homage to a soundscape invoked in 1993 that pushed forth with the idealism of absolute soul crushing blasphemy. Total Doom // Desecration is 40-minutes of ritualized misery spanning across scathing constructs that push an atmosphere wrought with trepidation, and utter decay. Within, Sinistrous Diabolus reinvent older tracks, shaping them into a form that become a mesmerizing void, drawing all into its monolithic gaze.

Defined by the abhorrence of divine doctrine, Total Doom // Desecration maintains an aura of intense dispair that negate luminescent drones, and bury them in filth. Personified by torturous harmonies that dwell in the recesses of the mind, stagnating within putrid noise screeching amidst torrential waves of endless torment. Barbaric by design, this is an album that is enveloped by creeping movements that bore themselves into the chasms of your most desperate pleas, inexorably building towards a swirling downfall littered with apprehensive dread. Perverse passages give way to further doom that punishes throughout, offset by somber lachrymose undertones that hold no reverence for comfort.

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