Much like this imperfect but undervalued Pentagram album, I have spent many decades in the dank underground today, and I only just re-emerge under the deadline to slime out this gibberish upon my keyboard and hope that it reaches some vigilant ears somewhere out in the cosmos before I dissolve into an unrecognizable jelly and the tide goes too far out.
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.
I was going to post something entirely different, something quirky and breezy, but as night descends and temperatures drop to an unseasonable chill, it resonates hollowly and I find myself returning to the realms of doom and death. Runemagick is a long-running player in the death/doom game, predating the current boom by two decades, yet they haven't quite received their due in my opinion. Nevertheless, they grimly soldier on, producing album after album of dense, occult misery reeking of Armageddon. This particular example, their eighth LP from 2004, is a sprawling and ambitious epic incorporating many diverse influences without straying too far from its plodding, elephantine gait. Preceded by the more straightforward Darkness Death Doom, and followed by the more funereal Envenom, this full length reflects a murky high-water mark from a band who has yet to produce anything of less than excellent quality.
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.
Here's a quick little stab from the Zodiac Killers, a misanthropic short-attention span punk band featuring Greg Lowery of the Rip Offs. It's fast, brutal, mean-spirited, full of self-loathing, and most of the songs are under a minute long. Still, they're catchy and distinct and tuneful in spite of all the bile. Bonus points for that awful MSPaint cover too!
From deep within the bowels of the SST back catalog comes Blind Idiot God, an instrumental experimental metal band named for the Mad Demon Sultan swirling oblivious in the roiling nuclear heart of the universe, ringed by hideous pipers dancing and trilling. In keeping with this, the noise they create is decidedly non-linear and deliberately unpredictable, swerving wildly from atonal clatter to dubbed-out black vacuums of space to passages of fragile, terrible beauty. This wild stylistic flailing is held in check somewhat by the bands roots in the hardcore scene, which helps prevent the album from sounding like the mathy crossover metal bands that followed in the wake of this debut, who often mistake complex arrangement for actual songwriting, for conveying depth and dynamic and more nebulous, nameless concepts. To these ears, many modern explorers of this type of transcendental hypno-metal such as Krallice and Orthrelm owe a debt to these gentlemen, as do I. So shall you.
It's been a bit since we had a feral and ferocious album of Lovecraftian black metal to drool and excrete all over, hasn't it? The raging wind outside and the constant flickering of lights makes this album seem appropriate for the moment, and how can one resist that album title? Philly's Blood Storm (two words, no hyphen, thank you) play straightforward and fairly orthodox black metal in the oldest sense: bits and pieces of Celtic Frost and Venom sprinkled with early Mayhem and Emperor, with perhaps a twist of thrash metal in the vocals and the more mid-tempo songs. Most of the album is blastbeat/atonal riff/ semi-intelligible blasphemy though (and some well-placed spooky organ) - no surprises, but no clean vocals or banjos either. Aside from the excellent Lovecraftian "Yoggothian Slayers," we have primarily songs either directly and plainly about wizards or obliquely delivered in forgotten tongues (these, too, probably concern wizards). Yes, this sounds just about perfect right now - let's hope the power holds out...
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.
Well then, sorry about that Ziggurat business, here's something to make up for it: The new seven inch record from Denver's Speedwolf. Two songs, slightly over four minutes of bullshit-free speed thrash (although the b-side settles into a nice mid-tempo trot) to cleanse out your turd-filled ears. This is pretty new, so you should probably shotgun two beers and try to buy it here.
Well, it's certainly not Samhain season yet, but since it's the first day of September, let's fire up some Forgotten Land and dance naked around the bonfire, shall we? Another mysterious one-man project, FL combines ambient drones with field recordings and sounds of nature, no-fi black doom with pagan bacchanalia. FL also possesses one of the most excellent black metal logos of all time. Words are wasted describing such music, and in debating the inherent contradictions of downloading such organic material in digital form - luckily we're not here to debate, we're here to burn!
Ritualistic ambient noise rattling deep within the gullet of this Siberian shaman, operating from the deepest reaches of frozen Mother Russia. Present here are Tuvan throat singing, handmade wind instruments, befleshed percussion, mouth harp, industrial hissing, and the ringing clarion of shotguns fired out into the wintry night. A practitioner of the darkest militant form of Bon-po Buddhism and also more esoteric rites - as evidenced by the Black Sun circle themes (the band name and album title can both translate to mean Black Sun) - this mysterious hermit declares one man war on the light. An alternate loose translation of the band moniker:
Apologies, sweet sprouts, but my brain is crippled by a brutal and merciless hangover. Here's some Bone Awl, weirdly the only one left after the great hard drive crash. 
Greetings! Today finds your host in much better health and spirits, and he has brought wonderful presents for the little ones. This is a recording of what I believe to be the last Rudimentary Peni show, ten years after their "final" one, in the wake of considerable hardship concerning the mental health of their leader Mr. Nick Blinko. More remarkably, this contains perhaps the only recorded live versions of any tracks from "Cacophony," arguably the most famous and important Lovecraftian album of all time. Although my sickness this week has been more gastrointestinal than mental, this sudden upswing in energy and vitality reminded me of this show and thus I share my germs with you.
The first full-length album by Swamp favorites Brown Jenkins allows me to draw this streak of doom albums to a nasty, buzzing close. Suffocating atmosphere and the strangled heartbeat that pulses beneath the floorboards of this recording create unrest and unease in all who behold its splendid foulness.
One of your humble host's favorite aspects of the outer fringes of metal is the fetishizing of sub-sub-genres; many "extreme" bands exist within one of their very own, as is the case with Eight Hands for Kali. Here we have one fifty-five minute song in the seemingly paradoxical category of "Buddhist War Doom," which, while difficult to picture perhaps, rolls nicely off of the tongue. Say it aloud three times:
Mysterious levitating black metal seemingly of the intentionally inscrutable school, but recorded clearly enough so that it is not just a mad spiral of sound. These songs and the instruments playing them are separate and distinct - whether or not this is a desirable effect depends upon the tenderness of one's ears. Your humble host is not too jaded to enjoy lo-fi squall or pompous hubris, and this contains veins of both. My limited French helps none in translating these distant howls, but the subject matter is maddeningly apparent.
Any album with two multi-syllabic adjectives in the title automatically peaks my interest, but few are as truly malevolent and purposefully ugly as this beast. Recorded in 1993 but unreleased until years later, this forward thinking monstrosity predated the wave of strange, angsty, nihilistic heavy metal that gained some momentum in the nineties before splintering into horrid rap hybrids, numerous forms of "industial music," slack-jawed crossover fodder, et cetera. In all honesty I cannot say that I love this record in the way that I do my other children but I certainly do listen to it often at the end of a long black day.
Well, horrid ones, today brings us the documentary film The Eldritch Influence, an exploration of the Old Man's impact on society and culture. While boasting many famous talking heads of varying relevance (Stuart Gordon, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, ST Joshi, etc.) this work often pads itself with Blair Witch-style tomfoolery (made most unconvincing by a laughable papier-mâché Cthulhu) and interviews with nebbishy LARPers and other nonentities. Still, this will be of great interest to the converted and the already-damned.
