Shub-Niggurath Please

Vader - Out of the Deep
Morbus Chron - Red Hook Horror
Necromandus - Nightjar
Arkham Witch - Dagon's Bell
Briton Rites - A Meeting in the Woods
Orchid - Eyes Behind the Wall
Noctum - The Seance
The Wounded Kings - Return of the Sorcerer
Innsmouth - The She-Goat Quandary
Portal - Omnipotent Crawling Chaos
Abgott - Book 3-The Eye of Yog-Sothoth
Vasaeleth - Wrathful Deities
Necronomicon - Dreaming of the Old Ones
Thergothon - The Twilight Fade

Happy Halloween

Briton Rites - For Mircala

 

Greetings, dearies!  I have once again returned to the Swamp, and am back among you.  Today I have for you one of the great unheard doom albums of the last year, the debut album from Georgia's hirsute Briton Rites. Effortlessly evoking the dark history of doom metal without sounding artificially retro or atavistic, For Mircala is a loose concept album centered around vampirism and Lovecraftian dimensional bleedthrough.  I have a particular weakness for metal bands with literate and diverse sources, and these chaps certainly deliver on that front: the title cut is based on a pre-Dracula vampire novel; "The Right Hand of Doom" is grounded in a Robert E. Howard short story starring his demon-hunting Puritan, Solomon Kane; several other are grounded in Hammer Horror flicks and pulpy supernatural melodrama.  Musically, it owes a heavy debt to the doomier side of NWOBHM, like Witchfinder General of Pagan Altar, with killer vocals from Phil Swanson (of such Swamp favorites as Hour of 13, Seamount, and Atlantean Kodex) and guitars by Howie Bentley of legendary Georgia metal band Cauldron Born.  More importantly, every song is memorable, catchy, and tough - no pretty stuff here, just doom and blood and haze.

The doom evoked by the words he spoke, as the hand began to crawl

Unaussprechlichen Kulten - Wake Up in the Night of Walpurgis

Crusty Chilean ESL death metallers Unaussprechlichen Kulten sing entirely within the orbit of the Cthulhu mythos, and are obviously well versed and fervent. I haven't but precious moments to type, so I'll not mince words: this album is crucial to your understanding of the universe. Further growth will simply cease until you absorb this precious nourishment, for your minds and many wriggling tentacles.
The Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Youngs

Cthulhu Coloring Book

Eyeball it here.
Buy a real one here.

Azathoth - Azathoth

Just a brief little bite sized morsel for the ravening hordes today! Azathoth (hailing from Fresno, of all places) claims the genre of symphonic black metal as their own, but these ears detect much influence from the Dissection/At the Gates school of melodic death metal as well. Although there are keyboards throughout the album, they are much subtler in the mix than the multi-tracked guitar parts and dual vocals. Of the six songs present, however, the first and last are classical piano workouts and the other tracks are almost startlingly succinct. From the band and album names one can suss out the usual tasty Lovecraftian themes, especially in their love for the titular Demon Sultan, and they must have presciently played to my prejudice by naming a track "Alhazred," but there is also an ode to Barker's Hellraiser saga (containing a nasty sample from the movie) in addition to a ghostly tale of doomed romance and a love song to succubi. While this is their only release, it seems, it is solid, diverse, and thoughful, and it's always better to leave them clamouring for more....
Swirling desert sands surround my disembodied ka
As I gaze unblinking into the unblinking eye of Ra

Colin Timothy Gagnon - Fungi from Yuggoth

Quite a strange little artifact tonight wee ones, an album of cinematic space jazz with its creator and seemingly sole musician, one Colin Timothy Gagnon, reading Lovecraft's entire sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth in chilly monotone, punctuated by eerie whispers and mysterious scraping noises. Much of this seems produced on a cheap keyboard, but strangely the tinny horn sections and rubbery pounding of tribal drums gain a bit of eldritch majesty in context. The poetry of H.P. Lovecraft has never received the attention that his prose works continually enjoy, and I'll admit they have tested even my attention span at times, but this strange Gagnon person seems to have devoted much research and experimentation to this project with no chance of monetary reward or public recognition outside of esoteric circles such as this Swamp. Not to be dissuaded, his enthusiasm carries much weight here, turning his monotone delivery and low-budget cinematic ambition into positives, creating an atmosphere of dread against all odds. Quite the role model for those lone figures among, locked in your room, shouting alien gibberish into your tape machine, driven by urges beyond your ken.
Silent and lean and cryptically proud...

Payne's Gray - Kadath Decoded

We've got a doozy for you today, little ones, so take a seat and perhaps do some breathing exercises to steel yourself against this onslaught on your earholes. Short-lived German prog band Payne's Gray (tellingly named after a muddy bluish-gray pigment) seemingly only ever managed to self-release two cassettes and this album before vanishing off the face of the earth, but they certainly left a...memorable epitaph. Certainly Lovecraft's crowning epic The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is prime material for an overblown concept album, ripe as it is with bizarre detail, episodic travelogue anecdotes, and sprawling geography, and surely Germany is as good as any place for pretentious puffy-shirted doofuses to make such an album, but when it's all said and done, how the hell does it end up sounding like this, especially in 1995? Far beyond your typical flute-happy technical pomposity (although there is by no means a lack of flute playing at any point), Payne's Gray is a virtual bubbling fondue pot in which the myriad concepts and styles are dipped and gummed together into one heart-attack inducing cheese-coated unidentifiable blob. Cheap synths, electronic drums, baroque acoustic guitar runs, wildly off-key wailing from not one but two mustachioed singers, impenetrable syncopated rhythms seemingly created to stifle foot-tapping or head-nodding, and a baffling central theme somehow all add up to create something even larger than the sum of its parts. Oh, my kingdom for a lyric sheet! The mind whirls.

I realize there's been quite a bit of questionable prog posted here in the past few weeks, but we can't just listen to stoner rock and Swamp Dogg all the time, it makes the brain lazy. No apologies.

Busy warrior during night
Changing paws to fearsome weapon
Jumping then on moonshine heights
Where you fight the terrors threat-on.

Aldebaran - Dwellers in Twilight

Poetically named after the distant star circled by a dark planet ruled by The High Priest Not to Be Described, a.k.a. He Who Cannot Be Named, Portland's crusty doomslingers Aldebaran deliver evil with the patience of an undying embodiment, an apotheosis of gleeful, dancing chaos. Wikipedia would ignorantly have it that this nameless entity is an avatar of our beloved Nyarlathotep, but true scholars know that all signs point to Hastur the Unspeakable, the half-brother of Cthulhu. Much like the monstrous yellow-robed flautist himself, the band slowly allows its "music" to unfold over a seeming eternity, drawing the incautious into its sinister bliss while draining them dry of life and hope. The album begins simply, with ringing open whole notes, but slowly melodic fragments appear and eventually begin to overlap and intertwine, with sinister growls and bellowed cries competing for earspace in an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere. Surrender to their charms and be lost, little speck.
A motionless descent sightless and silent into blackened gulphs

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

Finngálkn - Tyranny From Beyond the Styx

Unlike many similar blogs of this ilk, your dreamlike navigator relies on anonymity rather than name recognition. Granted, several blogs operate under this same pretense. However, they tend to be thinly-veiled self-reflective puff pieces at best and glorified (read: boring) fanzines that one doesn't even have to fold and staple (or, y'know, fill with content) at worst. As a non-converstionalist and a constant rider of the sub-par public transit system here in the parallel universe that jostles up next to yours, I understand the stony silence of most Swamp residents (or transients) as the end result of either serious scholarship or skull-crushing fear and tend to proceed without feedback one way or another. However, here's some more Doom Metal and if you have a hard time understanding it you just come talking to Uncle Abdul - don't be shy, but don't speak up if you sleep well.

Wait, what were we talking about?

Baby's First Mythos

Not normally one to buy into the cutesyfying of the Mythos, I nonetheless was charmed by this little booklet of ABC's designed to help rear little monsters properly. This is a scan of the old black-and-white handmade edition; the book has recently been re-issued in color (and "now with X!") and is available for purchase elsewhere.
Hmm....

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...

David McCallum - The Haunter of the Dark

The rarest of three Lovecraftian LPs narrated by veteran Scottish genre actor David McCallum, fittingly a story (the middle part of a trilogy) dealing with the power of the number three. A personal favorite here in the Swamp, at three in the morning.
Open The Shining Trapezohedron.

Varathron - Genesis of Apocryphal Desires

Protean Greek Black Metal, from one of the bands that defined the subgenre. I need not pontificate on this too much, for the sharp-eared student of metal already has this or is downloading it now. Another excellent example of multi-syllabic ESL wizardry.
Unremastered for maximum hiss.

Nyarlathotep - Slub Lord in Eternal Rest

Here the truism holds that horrid people make the most sublime music (if indeed this can be called "music"). Future members of a hipster false metal band who shall not be named, Nyarlathotep eschew their eventual narcissism and quest for fame by releasing two unhealthily fattened blobs of sludge anonymously and sans cover art to a seemingly miniscule audience in 2001, well before the outbreak of vile shrieking peacock metal they would be osmosed by shortly later. One detects the hand (or tentacle) of larger forces at work in their rise to notoriety and awaits the inevitable gory comeuppance.

Portal - Lurker at the Threshold

Perhaps the most mysterious force active in the realm of non-Euclidean death metal, Portal is no merely longer spoken of in hushed tones by the twisted acolytes of forces best forgotten; their growing army of degenerate followers slowly encroaches on more lighted lands. Clad in a tattered and cobwebbed exoskeleton seemingly acquired from long years spent in trapped in dusty attics, Portal finds apotheosis in this era in the form of a man with a broken cuckoo clock where once reposed a hideous inhuman visage.
Be Warned.