Here we are in the Spring 2022 Quarterly Review. I have to hope and believe you know what this means by now. It’s been like eight years. To reiterate, 10 reviews a day for this week. I’ve also added next Monday to the mix because there’s just so, so, so much out there right now, so this Quarterly Review will total 60 albums covered. It could easily be more. And more. And more. You get the point.

So while we’re on the edge of this particular volcano, looking down into the molten center of the Quarterly Review itself, I’ll say thanks for reading if you do at any point, and I hope you find something to make doing so worth the effort.

Here we go.

Quarterly Review #1-10:

Spidergawd, VI

Like clockwork, Spidergawd released V (review here), in 2019, and amid the chaos of 2020, they announced they’d have a new record out in 2021 — already the longest pause between LPs of their career — for which they’d be touring. The Norwegian outfit — who aren’t so much saviors of rock as a reminder of why it doesn’t need saving in the first place — at last offer the nine songs and 41 minute straight-ahead drive of VI with their usual aplomb, energizing a classic heavy rock sound and reveling in the glorious hooks of “Prototype Design” and “Running Man” at the outset, throwing shoulders with the sheer swag of “Black Moon Rising,” and keeping the rush going all the way until “Morning Star” hints toward some of their prior psych-prog impulses. They’ve stripped those back here, and on the strength of their songwriting and the shining lights that seem to accompany their performance even on a studio recording, they remain incomparable in working to the high standard of their own setting.

Spidergawd on Facebook

Stickman Records website

Crispin Glover Records website

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Eight Bells, Legacy of Ruin

The first Eight Bells full-length for Prophecy Productions, Legacy of Ruin comes six years after their second LP, Landless (review here), and finds founding guitarist/vocalist Melynda Marie Jackson, bassist/guitarist/vocalist Matt Solis, drummer Brian Burke, a host of guests and producer Billy Anderson complicating perceptions of Pacific Northwestern US black metal. Across the six songs and in extended cuts like “The Well” and closer “Premonition,” Eight Bells remind of their readiness to put melodies where others fear tread, and to execute individualized cross-genre breadth that even in the shorter “Torpid Dreamer” remains extreme, whatever else one might call it in terms of style. “The Crone” and other moments remind of Enslaved, but seem to be writing a folklore all their own in that.

Eight Bells on Facebook

Prophecy Productions on Bandcamp

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Blue Rumble, Blue Rumble

Swiss four-piece Blue Rumble bring organically-produced, not-quite-vintage-but-retro-informed heavy psych blues boogie on their self-titled debut full-length, impressing with the sharp edges around which the grooves curve, the channel-spanning, shred-ready solo of the guitars, and the organ that add so much to where vocals might otherwise be. The five-minute stretch alone of second cut “Cosmopolitan Landscape,” which follows the garage urgency of opener “God Knows I Shoulda Been Gone,” runs from a mellow-blues exploration into a psych hypnosis and at last into a classic-prog freakout before, miraculously, returning, and that is by no means the total scope of the album, whether it’s the winding progressions in “Cup o’ Rosie (Just Another Groovy Thing),” the laid back midsection of “Sunset Fire Opal” or the hey-is-that-flute on the shorter pastoral interlude “Linda,” as if naming the song before that “Think for Yourself” wasn’t enough of a Beatles invocation. The strut continues unabated in “The Snake” and the grittier “Hangman,” and closer “Occhio e Croce” (‘eye and cross,” in Italian) shimmers with Mellotron fluidity atop its central build, leaving the raw vitality of the drums to lead into a big rock finish well earned. Heads up, heavy rock and rollers. This is hot shit.

Blue Rumble on Instagram

Blue Rumble on Bandcamp

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The Mountain King, WolloW

It’s palindrome time on Mainz, Germany’s The Mountain King‘s WolloW. Once the solo-project of guitarist/vocalist/programmer Eric McQueen, the experimentalist band here includes guitarist Frank Grimbarth and guest bassist Jack Cradock — you can really hear that bass on “II In Grium Imus Noctem Aram et Consumimur Igni” (hope you practiced your conjugations) and through five songs, they cross genres from the atmospheric heavygaze-meets-Warning of “I Bongnob” through the blackened crunch of the above-noted second cut to a gloriously dreamy and still morose title-track, and the driving expanse of “V DNA Sand.” Then they do it backwards, as “V DNA Sand” seems to flip halfway through. But they’re also doing it backwards at the same time as forward, so as The Mountain King work back toward album finale “bongnoB I,” what was reversed and what wasn’t has switched and the listener isn’t really sure what’s up or down, where they are or why. This, of course, is exactly the point. Take that, form and structure! Open your mind and let doom in!

The Mountain King on Facebook

Cursed Monk Records website

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Sheev, Mind Conductor

Berlin trio Sheev prove adept at skirting the line of outright aggression, and in fact crossing it, while maintaining control over their direction and execution. Mind Conductor is their debut album, and it works well to send signals of its complexity, samples and obscure sounds on “The Workshop” giving over the riffs of immediate impact on “Well Whined.” The channel-spanning guitar pulls on “Saltshifter,” the harmonies in the midsection of “All I Can,” the going-for-it-Danny–Carey-style drums on the penultimate “Baby Huey” (and bonus points for that reference) — all of these and so much more in the nine-song/53-minute span come together fluidly to create a portrait of the band’s depth of approach and the obvious consideration they put into what they do. Closer “Snakegosh” may offer assurance they don’t take themselves too seriously, but even that song’s initial rolling progression can’t help but wind its way through later angularities. It will be interesting to hear the direction they ultimately take over the course of multiple albums, but don’t let that draw focus from what they accomplish on this first one.

Sheev on Facebook

Sheev on Bandcamp

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Elk Witch, Beyond the Mountain

Dudes got riffs. From Medford, Oregon, Elk Witch draw more from the sphere of modern heavy rockers like earlier The Sword or Freedom Hawk than the uptempo post-Red Fang party jams for which much of the Pacific Northwest is known, but the groove is a good time just the same. The six tracks of Beyond the Mountain are born out of the trio’s 2021 debut EP — wait for it — The Mountain, but the four songs shared between the two offerings have been re-recorded here, repositioned and sandwiched between opener “Cape Foulweather” and closer “The Plight of Valus,” so the reworking feels consistent from front to back. And anyway, it’s only been a year, so ease up. Some light burl throughout, but the vocals on “Coyote and the Wind’s Daughters” remind me of Chritus in Goatess, so there’s some outright doom at work too, though “Greybeard Arsenal” might take the prize for its shimmering back-half slowdown either way, and “The Plight of Valus” starts out with a seeming wink at Kyuss‘ “El Rodeo,” so nothing is quite so simply traced. Raw, but they’ll continue to figure out where they’re headed, and the converted will nod knowingly. For what it’s worth, I dig it.

Elk Witch on Facebook

StoneFly Records store

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KYOTY, Isolation

If “evocative” is what New Hampshire post-metallic mostly-instrumentalists KYOTY were going for with their third full-length, could they possibly have picked something better to call it than Isolation? It’d be a challenge. And with opener “Quarantine,” songs like “Ventilate,” “Languish,” “Faith,” and “Rift,” “Respite” and closer “A Fog, A Future Like a Place Imagined,” the richly progressive unit working as the two-piece of Nick Filth and Nathaniel Parker Raymond weave poetic aural tapestries crushing and spacious in kind with the existential dread and vague flashes of hope in pandemic reality of the 2020s thus far. Still, they work in impressionist fashion, so that the rumbling crackle of “Onus” and the near-industrial slog of “Respite” represent place and idea while also standing apart as a not-quite-objective observer, the lighter float of the guitar in “Faith” becoming a wash before its resonant drone draws it to a close. At 70 minutes, there’s a lot to say for a band who doesn’t have lyrics, but spoken lines further the sense of verse, and remind of the humanity behind the programming of “Holter” or the especially pummeling “Rift.” An album deep enough you could listen to it for years and hear something new.

KYOTY on Facebook

Deafening Assembly on Bandcamp

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Red Eye, The Cycle

Andalusian storytellers Red Eye make it plain from the outset that their ambitions are significant, and the seven songs of their third full-length play out those ambitions across ultra-flowing shifts between serenity and heft, working as more than just volume trades and bringing an atmospheric sprawl that is intended to convey time as well as place. In 46 minutes, they do for doom and various other microgenres — post-metal, some more extreme moments in “Beorg” and the morse-code-inclusive closer “Æsce” — what earlier Opeth did for death metal, adding shifts into unbridled folk melody and sometimes minimalist reach. Clearly meant to be taken in its entirety, The Cycle functions beautifully across its stretch, and the four-piece of guitarist/vocalist Antonio Campos (also lyrics), guitarist/vocalist Pablo Terol, bassist Antonio Muriel and drummer Ángel Arcas, bear weight of tone and history in kind, self-aware that the chants in “Tempel” brim with purpose, but expressive in the before and after such that they wherever they will and make it a joy to follow.

Red Eye on Facebook

Alone Records store

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Stoned Horses, Stoned Horses

Originally recorded to come out in 2013, what would’ve been/is the Stoned Horses‘ self-titled debut full-length runs 12 tracks and swaps methodologies between instrumentalism and more verse/chorus-minded sludge rock. Riffs lead, in either case, and there’s a sense of worship that goes beyond Black Sabbath as the later “Scorpions Vitus” handily confirms. The semi-eponymous “A Stoned Horse” is memorable for its readiness to shout the hook at you repeatedly, and lest a band called Stoned Horses ever be accused of taking themselves too seriously, “My Horse is Faster Than Your Bike” is a sub-two-minute riffer that recalls late-’90s/early-’00s stoner rock fuckery, before everyone started getting progressive. Not short on charm, there’s plenty of substance behind it in “Le Calumet” like a northern Alabama Thunderpussy or the last cut, “The Legend of the Blue Pig,” which dares a bit more metal. Not groundbreaking, not trying to be, it’s a celebration of the tropes of genre given its own personality. I have nothing more to ask of it except what happened that it sat for nearly a decade without being released.

Stoned Horses on Facebook

From the Urn on Bandcamp

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Gnome, King

Antwerpen’s Gnome make it a hell of a lot of fun to trace their path across King, their second full-length, bringing in The Vintage Caravan‘s Óskar Logi early for “Your Empire” and finding a line between energetic, on-the-beat delivery and outright aggression, letting “Ambrosius” set the tone for what follows as they careen though cuts like the instrumental “Antibeast,” the swinging and catchy “Wencelas” and the crunching “Bulls of Bravik.” How do they do it? With the magic of shenanigans! As King (which “Wencelas” was) plays out, the suitably hatted trio get up to high grade nonsense on “Kraken Wanker” before “Stinth Thy Clep” and the 11-minute we-can-do-whatever-we-want-so-let’s-do-that-yes closer “Platypus Platoon” buries its later march amid a stream of ideas that, frankly, kind of sounds like it could just keep going. They are adventurous throughout the eight songs and 42 minutes, but have a solid foundation nonetheless of tone and consciousness, which are what save King from being a mess. It’s a hard balance to strike that they make sound easy.

Gnome on Facebook

Polderrecords website

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What a record. I know Celtic Frost‘s legacy was already long since set by the time they returned to do Monotheist in 2006, and that their earlier works in 1984’s Morbid Tales EP, 1985’s debut album, To Mega Therion, and 1987’s Into the Pandemonium — not to mention what Thomas Gabriel Fischer and Martin Eric Ain had done previously in Hellhammer — had already cast them as one of the formative units not just of black metal, but of a new kind of heavy darkness in general. But 15 years later and long since the band fell apart all over again, Monotheist still resonates, and it’s still so goddamned dense. Thick to the point of making it difficult to move through. Righteous in the challenge it issued to its audience. Righteous in its unmitigated grandiosity. Righteous in its crush, righteous in its indulgent use of space and ambience. Righteous in its heft and heavy in its righteousness.

Fischer had gotten divorced in 2004, and that may well have played into some of the spit in his vocal approach on songs like “Progeny” or “Domain of Decay,” though as I recall many of these songs were older at least in their foundation. The CD came with extensive liner notes — a band putting out their first LP in 16 wanting to be understood are well within their rights to do so — with Ain and Fischer, sometimes opaque, sometimes straightforward, talking about the whens and wheres. If you got the digipak, it came with the extra track “Temple of Depression,” which is a welcome speedier thrust between “Os Abysmi vel Daath” and “Obscured,” but listening back to Monotheist now, I wonder if the album isn’t best served as a double-vinyl. Certainly CDs were already in decline in 2006 and now-clunky-looking iPods were high fashion, but vinyl had yet to make its mass-market comeback as the dominant physical format, but Monotheist works exceedingly well with breaks.

Part of that is the aforementioned density. Celtic Frost‘s sound is about more than just the chug of their riffs, and they never hit harder or certainly with more elaborate produciton behind them than they did on Monotheist, making their atmospheres all the more consuming. The 2LP edition traded out “Temple of Depression” for the more atmospheric “Incantation Against You,” with guest lead vocals by Simone Vollenweider — a performance worthy of the investment that was also a bonus track on the Japanese edition CD; you could go nuts keeping it all straight — but the way that the songs split up into sides highlights the natural flow from one movement into the next, the album working in stages until finding its culmination in “Triptych I: Totengott,” the 14-minute “Triptych II: Synagoga Satanae” and “Triptych III: Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale),” the last a four-minute orchestral instrumental answer back to previous Celtic Frost works that would be a fitting culmination to Celtic Frost‘s career even if they didn’t know it at the time.

The initial salvo of “Progeny,” “Ground” and “Dying God Coming into Human Flesh” is unfuckwithable. The immediacy of the first, the still-catchy crush of the second and the ambience of the third — it sets the stage perfectly for everything Celtic Frost and their vast array of guests, engineers, session players, etc. will offer throughout, the actual band involved being Fischer, Ain, drummer Franco Sesa and guitarist Erol Unala. Ain and Fischer sharing vocal duties on “A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh” particularly, in how it pushes wider the context of the listening experience, is a thing to be treasured in the message it sends to the audience. As heavy and as bludgeoning as Monotheist is, it stretches no less wide as it goes deeper.

And deeper is exactly where the LP version heads on side B, with “Drown in Ashes” bringing in guest singer Lisa Middelhauve (Xandria) in a grim duet with Fischer ahead of the return to harsh doom chug in “Os Abysmi vel Daath” — a landmark hook in any language — and the spacious, patient “Obscured,” again with Vollenweider turning in an emotive performance alongside Fischer, the two touching on harmony even as the distortion builds behind them. “Incantation Against You,” though it starts the next platter, builds in turn on that, with “Domain of Decay” bringing a return of sheer aural force for a quick four and a half minutes before “Ain Elohim” offers as pure a take on Satanism as I’ve ever encountered: “There is no god but the one that dies with me,” along with a stretch of pure avant garde metal that’s outside genre even as the band helped define it.

While we’re pushing boundaries, “Totengott” feels prescient 15 years later with its Ain-led ambient black metal, while “Synagoga Satanae” brings the summary of the proceedings — including co-producer Peter Tägtgren (Hypocrisy, Pain, etc.) on backing vocals — as a whole and “Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale)” serves as epilogue, a final, ultra-purposeful three-part ending that especially isolated on side D of the 2LP version underscores the strength of intention behind everything happening on Monotheist.

This is the kind of record a band does once in a career. It is all-consuming, an utter creative blowout, and in hindsight, it’s not surprising they didn’t make another. It’s not so much that they couldn’t have topped it — I won’t say a negative word about what Fischer has gone on to do in Triptykon in carrying forward what Celtic Frost established here, up to and including the 2020 live record from Roadburn 2019 completing Celtic Frost‘s “Requiem” — but it seems ludicrous now to think they would’ve done anything else. How could they? What’s left after you’ve already dug to the marrow of yourself and presented it to your listener? Sometimes there’s just nothing more that needs to be said.

Beautiful, genuinely engrossing, punishing, Monotheist is a museum piece for what heavy metal can be. That’s not what everyone will want from a given listening experience, but the last statement Celtic Frost would make was that if you weren’t going to meet them at their level, then you were only going to be obliterated for standing in their way, even at the cost of obliterating themselves.

One of the best albums the aughts had to offer, and of course rest in peace Martin Eric Ain, who passed away in 2017.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

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I’m having dental surgery on Monday. They’re putting a screw in the hole in my mouth here a molar was until I had it pulled, with an eventual eye toward a dental implant. I guess the screw will be an improvement over the presently empty spot, though that’s been an interesting experience. They had to take the tooth out in pieces it was so dug in, did a good amount of bone graft with some magical science pellets. I anticipate having a rod screwed into my jawline will present some discomfort. I don’t expect it to interrupt the flow of the Quarterly Review, and that and passive interest-in-what’s-gonna-happen is about the extent of my feelings on the matter, apart from the general nervousness about leaving the house, doing a thing, and so on.

Fucking Celtic Frost, man. How good is that record? I got to interview Martin Ain and Tom Fischer when they played New York on tour, in-person, and it was fucking awesome. They had rented an apartment downtown and then later that night they demolished B.B. King’s in Midtown Manhattan, and it was well worth breaking my blood oath never to go to Midtown. That room was pure love, despite the blanket of bleakness cast over the entire proceedings. So heavy. I just looked to see if there was any audio or video of it on YouTube, and there isn’t, but if you want to go down a rabbit hole, there’s plenty of older live stuff there.

This week brought the exhale that was being able to send The Pecan to daycamp for three hours every day. An easy pattern to fall into, thanks largely to the fact that he was in preschool before. We dropped him off a bit ago, in fact. He didn’t even look back at us as he went through the door, so I guess he likes it well enough. Very good.

That three-hour respite is huge, from 8:30-11:30. It allowed me to do the Quarterly Review this week while staying sane in the process, and since he still takes a rest in the afternoon — sometimes he naps, but mostly he just goes up to his room and farts around making various degrees of noise in unsupervised but contained fashion — I had some time to unwind, read a book, which is massive as far as my general quality of life goes.

I’m reading Star Trek books, as usual, a three-part series called ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ about Jim Kirk and Gary Mitchell, who dies in the (second) pilot of The Original Series, about how they’re best friends and Kirk has to deal with the fallout of having to kill Mitchell after he becomes a megalomaniac with godlike powers. You’d want to retcon it now making him a malevolent Q. And by you, I mean me, in fan-fic. As regards brain power, though, it’s this or that, and I’m better off here.

But that impulse is there for sure.

Come hang out in the Facebook group. It’s getting to be a whole thing.

New Gimme show today, as previously noted. You can listen free: https://gimmeradio.com. 5PM Eastern. Lotsa Neurosis, little bit of me talking about how good Neurosis are. Good fun.

That’s about all I’ve got. Thanks again to everybody who’s snagged some of the new merch. Thinking it might be time to end the run in another week or so, just because I’m starting to feel like a shill plugging it, but please know that your support is sincerely appreciated. Much love.

Great and safe weekend. Hydrate, watch your head, all that stuff. Have fun.

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