Stoned

In keeping with the spirit of the season, let's all listen to Acid Witch's superior second LP, Stoned.  This album was easily one of my favorites last year, and still gets frequent rotation in the Swamp, especially this week.  Acid Witch explores the sort of death/doom purveyed by Coffins and Hooded Menace, but in contrast to the dark and cryptic vibe of those bands they explode with technicolor gore, like a Suspiria-inspired marker set by Lisa Frank found in the cheap costume aisle of your local grocery store, the kind that get you high as hell.  With festive seasonal gusto in the lyrics and a warm layer of horror-movie organ to fend off the foul weather, and several trippy digressions into cinematic abstraction belying the knuckle-dragging facade, Stoned glows like a pillar of green flame rising from a distant pile of corpses.

Thundering Hooves

Ancient Rites - Dim Carcosa

I present to you a fine slab of Lovecraftian cheese courtesy of Belgian black metallers Ancient Rites. Cheese, you say? Oh yes, my friends, this is black metal at its Bal-Sagothy nerdiest, neither scary nor kvlt. However, despite the innate goofiness of the "symphonic black metal" approach and the muddled viking/satanic/Lovecraftian potpourri of lyrical themes, we still have a solid album of catchy and strange music that doesn't sound like anybody else. Of note beyond the title track are the fish metal-leaning "North Sea" and the operatic apocalypse hymn "Götterdämmerung." Mercifully they also have the good sense to keep songs short and to trim the album to a fat-free 45 minutes, so as not to break the spell. Behold!
...And the Horns Called for War

Thou Shalt Suffer - Into the Woods of Belial

Thou Shalt Suffer was the pre-Emperor death metal band of Ihsahn, Ildjarn, and Samoth. This compilation contains their demo, 7" EP, and a live set, all recorded in 1991, just before the shift from death metal into black. Consequently this group gets little love from die-hard black metal nerds and is rarely held up as an example of classic old-school death metal, either. Sad, that is, because the material here is pure, soul-snuffing Lovecraftian foulness. Hints of their future direction crop up during the intro, various gothic keyboard flourishes, and, in the case of Ildjarn, the gritty, hissing sound quality. Thou Shalt Suffer eventually became an ambient/drone side project for Ihsahn before he struck out under his own name - look for the album Somnium if that sounds like your cup of tea, but be warned there is little in common with this.
I seek the path of obscurity

Blood Storm - Death By The Stormwizard

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...
Unseen in the midst
Of the seven evil winds

Nyarlathotep and Gnome - Story - Legendary Japanese Wolves (split)

Wacky and terrifying at the same time, the way only the Japanese can do. Nyarlathotep (not to be confused with this Nyarlathotep) play abstract and echo-laden doom that sounds like four people in separate wings of an asylum, pounding on radiator pipes and hollering down the toilet bowl. Gnome spins some sinister high-pitched black metal that, though strangely melodic, manages to chill the blood with its inescapable suffocating claustrophobia. The singer sounds absolutely bonkers, like a schoolgirl with a horse skull where her head should be.
Canis Lupus Hodophilax

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

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...