Vader - The Beast

Poland's unkillable death metal O.G.s  Vader put out a tough-as-nails album this year, Welcome to the Morbid Riech, which I highly recommend.  This record, from 2004, finds the band in a more eldritch mood than usual, with a pronounced Lovecraftian bent to the lyrics and an obsession with the black abyss of the sea.  The music, of course, pretty much just sounds like Vader always does: thrashy first-wave death metal with Piotr Paweł Wiwczarek's hoarse throaty bellows booming over the top.  You can't go wrong with a Vader record, unless you're an asshole.

I Shall Prevail

Moss & Torture Wheel - The Bridge ov Madness

Well, wee ones, I must once again take a brief sabbatical from the Swamp, but as is tradition I leave you with a favorite to tide you over. Moss has appeared here before, and this split with similar-minded funeral doom purveyors Torture Wheel is among the best of their catalog. Here's what you're in for: crushing slowness, echoed wailing from the next dimension over, deeply occult and deliberately opaque themes, and a primordial moaning that seems to suggest continental drift more than the rhythm section of a band. Listen to this on repeat until I rejoin you upon Sunday and we shall discuss what you have learned.
Aldebaran

Throng of Shoggoths - Nauseated and Terrified for the Future

Well, this is certainly destined to end up here sooner or later, so let's just go ahead and get it on! Throng of Shoggoths is a sludgy doom monster from Alabama, dedicated to the Lovecraftian and the foul. Leaning heavily towards the obscenely slow but occasionally erupting into fierce and nasty hardcore, this unpredictable beast of a demo splits the difference between Buzzov*en-styled drug sludge, Swedish death/doom, and crusty crossover metal. Truly impressive; I have high hopes for these gentlemen in the future.
Buy here.
Ftagn here.

Methuselah - The Sleeper in the Abyss

I was initially quite overjoyed to discover this obscure slab of funereal doom based upon several lesser-known Lovecraftian works, but upon opening my mind to its dark whispers the horror of my situation was thrown into sharp relief. Paced as slowly as the passage of aeons, littered with cruel, unintelligible voices calling obscenities in forgotten languages, framed by seemingly random notes plucked out on dusty, detuned piano, and hinting unsubtly at a universe of more horrid things, The Sleeper in the Abyss is the last recorded testament of British hermit Methuselah. As to his whereabouts I cannot speak, but surely he must've been in the final stages of syphilitic insanity by the time of this recording, for it contains nary a shred of human warmth or sympathy. A cold, bleak void yawns outward from my headphones and into my ears.
Ecce Lex

Wreck of the Hesperus - The Sunken Threshold

Tonight's invocation is a hefty slab of funereal doom courtesy of Ireland's literary-minded Wreck of the Hesperus on their only full length. While not quite the squishy amorphous ooze of Tyranny or Catacombs, this is certainly a far cry from the relatively upbeat stylings of your traditional doom ensemble. It's foul and raspy and stretched nigh to oblivion, and despite the sub-aquatic theme I get a dry dusty bone-rattle ambiance from it, but it still sounds like a live band playing in a room together. There's a distinct death/doom hue in keeping with the style all the wee ones are so in tune with these days as well - not exactly normative songwriting but not a random lump of squirtly noises either. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
A tomb won't be immune

Buried at Sea - Ghost

Here's another fine example of the fact that "EPs" by doom metal bands are longer than many people's albums. In fact, what we have here, despite its thirty minute running time, is one song stretched to span an ocean. I have no idea what the lyrical subject matter may be, but as the vocals only bob to the surface around halfway and mostly vanish thereafter, we're obviously more concerned here with atmosphere and menace. While quite heavy in parts, there are stretches of grainy static punctuated by clanging bells, chirping noise, and distant footsteps in the sand. To me this is evocative of later Blind Dead films Ghost Galleon and Night of the Seagulls, both of which are sluggishly paced but punctuated by genuine moments of repulsive horror. Plus, we have this beautiful cover art to hint at what is entombed herein.

Angantyr - Hævn

Angantyr of Denmark play a furious, haughty and regal form of black metal seemingly descended directly from Bathory but mixed with some unique atmospheric touches such a a cello whirling crazily to keep up with the guitars on the first song, "Et Varsel Om Død." Lyrically the seem (judging from unreliable old Google translate) to be focused on Danish history: named after the first Danish king and foe of Chrisitanity, they long for a return to supposedly simpler pagan times. Nothing too earth shattering there, many black metal bands concern themselves with identical themes, but the particular nautical bent to this album has charmed your host, what with my soft spot for sea monsters.
Re-released (with a cooler cover than this) by Northern Silence earlier this year. Buy one here.
Blod For Blod, Liv For Liv

Leviatan

Seemingly the only thing recorded by this anonymous Finnish combo, we have here four strange blurts of primitive and surprisingly sophisticated black metal with sheets of burnished bronze guitar flash and numerous subtly layered, varied vocals, from the familiar blackened croak (which reminds me a bit of Peste Noir), to pitch-shifted chanting and female choirs of jubilant gibberish low in the background. Whilst this may sound fairly standard-issue on paper, the actual songs are memorable, haunting, and blood-chilling. We shall never see another release by this quickly defunct act, but this brief self-fulfilling prophecy stands as a marker on their pile of stones and skulls.
Rivers Flowing Blood

Tyranny - Tides of Awakening

Greetings, Swamplings! I was going to throw together something special for this, our 200th post together, but as usual time has been short and your humble host extremely busy in his solemn scholarship. However, we shall post this fine Finnish album of funeral doom, which encompasses both kinds of music: Lovecraftian and dystopian. Similar to that Catacombs album posted some time back, this sludgy mound of plankton moves along at a glacial pace, gurgling and spewing sludge merrily, content to inhabit a plane seldom visited by ignorant humanity. Parts of this record distantly resemble traditional doom metal, but over time it descends into pure squall and squirt, undecipherable to the untrained ear. This slippery album can be difficult for puny minds to grasp, but attempts in that direction will surely stretch your consciousness enough to gaze into the yawning abyss without, perhaps, snapping your sanity in half.
Entreaties To The Primaeval Chaos

Clagg - Lord of The Deep

Despite some carping from the peanut gallery, we live in a heady time rife with exciting new metal records - in fact, despite my interest in the rare and bizarre records of yore, I've noticed that many recent posts have been from 2010, and this is no exception. Australia's leading lights of sludge doom, have squirted out this new slab of fishy horror and it has been on repeated rotation here at the Swamp. Despite the relentless pummeling, there really is quite a variety of sounds here: quiet instrumental mediation, stoner swagger, death metal pounding, funeral throbs, subliminal sonar. Something for all forms of life! Of course, this being brand new, I encourage you to pick it up here, but if you're a cheap bastard you can always just get one here as well. However, be warned: the sea level rises a bit each day.

Borow - Madness Comes From Sea Depth

Little information is available about this Russian death metal outfit, but here's their spidery new single "Madness Comes From Sea Depth," sure to please fans of death metal, fish metal, Lovecraftian metal, ESL metal, or all four. Some distinctive burbling from the singer, stormy sound effects, and some sort of exotic eastern string instrument lend flavour to this little mouthful of madness.

Catacombs - In The Depths Of R'lyeh

An all-time classic of the Lovecraftian sub-genre, this album burbles up from the bottom of the ocean and releases noxious green gases into the atmosphere. Here, doom metal is stretched to the furthest depths, beyond song structure, riffage, audible and distinguishable vocalization, and, for the most part, seemingly beyond the actual playing of notes. Glacially paced and teetering on the brink of unlistenable slurping, this is absolutely a must-have for any resident of the Swamp.
Where No Light Hath Shone... (But For That Of The Moon)

Teach Your Plants to Talk

In celebration of the upcoming 100th post here in the Swamp, your host has compiled these varied fragments from several of the tomes already featured here and from the many more that remain, so far, obscure. Here is a track listing - I will let the yawning infinity of madness speak for itself:
Joseph LoDuca - Introduction
Anaal Nathrakh - The Yellow King
Argus - Bending Time
Ironsword - Overlords Of Chaos
Arkham Witch - Legends of the Deep
Rotting Christ - The Old Coffin Spirit
Dagon - It Came from Beneath the Waves
Payne's Gray - Within the Vault
Bog People - Slow Green Pace
Brown Jenkins - Dagonite
Crystal Eyes - Dead City Dreaming
Dayglo Abortions - The Spawn of Yog Sothoth
Teen Cthulhu - The Great Race Of Yith
Electric Wizard - Dunwich
Fall of The Idols - Cold Air
The Grotesquery - The Terrible Old Man
Harvist - He Who Rises From the Deep
Kataklysm - Mystical Plane Of Evil
The Lamp Of Thoth - The Doom That Came To Sarnath
Mercyful Fate - The Mad Arab
Dunwich - Strange Sacrifice
The Wandering Midget - I Am the Gate
Krallice - Dimensional Bleedthrough
Henry Wentworth Akeley - Akeley's Wax Cylinder Recording

Teach Your Plants to Talk

Paranormal Ichthyology

Behold, foul ones!
Ignore that gibberish posted previously here, I have returned to the land of the lucid. Dagon, represented here, plays a wonderfully icky black/death/doom hybrid that virtually personifies the Fish Metal realms of the Swamp: Unintelligible rasping and howling, long stretches of ringing quarter notes, mood swings as unpredictable as the sea itself, pirates, sharks, pretentious three-part suites...
What's not to loathe?

Fungoid Stream - Celaenus Fragments

Thanks to the attentions of my scholarly colleague Shelby Cobras, I was recently informed that Fungoid Stream, esoteric Argentinian cinematic doom explorers, have released a new album.
This is not it.
In its wake, and at Mr. Cobras' not-so-subtle prodding, I present you with the group's first major work, based on the suitably suppressed Celaenus Fragments, relics barely decipherable even to one such as myself already waist-deep in esoterica, with runes and equations twirling around my increasingly fragile mind like the plankton and flotsam eddying just in and out of my swaying grasp. Subtle connexions can be made between this work and the infamous Dream Cycle Mythos, seemingly predating most of the research pertaining to the Old Ones, with the notable exceptions of "The Fungi From Yuggoth" and its uncoccooned form, "The Whisperer in the Darkness." I must confess I am intrigued with the slow but perceptible influence of Nyarlathotep-related material in flux this past fortnight, exemplified both by yesterday's post here and certain personal conundrums as yet unrevealed.
I shall buy the new album, and you shall tremble in its terrible shadow. But in the meantime...

Giant Squid - Monster in the Creek

Questions upon conundrums dipped in riddles. Can a record based upon freshwater sharks preying on scrawny hillbilly children purely out of desperate hunger be considered beauiful? Could this happen again, and would it make a good concept album ninety years from this day? What would Lester Stillwell, who was eaten by the eponymous monster in 1916, make of this cerebral slab of chum? If you were eaten by a shark tomorrow, what would they play at your funeral?
Will there be sequels?

Mars - Reign of Suns

Crustacean Doom from the deep, drifted onto to shore to fester under the harsh New Orleans sun. A hard exoskeleton of low-end hum surrounded by inky clouds of dueling guitar, thrashing tentacles, and resinous excretion. Sometimes moving with terrifying speed, but more frequently lurking in a darkened tide pool, patient, dreaming.
Watching.