With bands like Kurokuma and Allfather making some very heavy waves, the underground doom scene in the UK found itself in a very healthy state moving into the close of 2016, perhaps more properous than it had been in a long while. There seemed to be new doom and sludge bands oozing through the woodwork on a weekly basis, but since the fashion for slow and heavy never gets old, the ever expanding scene had more than enough room to accommodate…and, this, obviously could only be a good thing.
Tag Archives: metal
BARROW WIGHT – Kings In Sauron’s Service
Over the years, the Lord of the Rings trilogy has been a fairly popular inspiration for concept albums. Even before Peter Jackson’s world dominating, award winning film adaptations, rock bands were looking to Tolkien for lyrical themes. Magnum‘s Bob Catley released an entire album of Middle Earth based songs back at the turn of the millennium; Blind Guardian released a full album of Tolkien tales two years previously. It could be said that many prog, power metal and battle metal bands are obsessed, but few have taken Tolkien to heavier places than Barrow Wight.
MORAG TONG – Through Clouded Time EP
Having worked hard at creating meaty and reverbed sludge metal perfection on stages across the south of England and beyond, London’s Morag Tong entered the studio to lay down a few tracks at the tail end of 2015. The resultant EP, ‘Through Clouded Time’, released at the beginning of the new year, presents four numbers of sheer weightiness that not only act as a great snapshot of Morag Tong’s purer musical intents, but also instantly asserts itself as an underground sludge classic.
Watch ‘Lilith’, the new video clip from Carved
Italian melodic death metallers Carved have released a new video for their track ‘Lilith’, which you can watch in full below.
The track comes from the band’s 2016 LP ‘Kyrie Elieson’ which was released on October 28th.
BLACK OATH – Litanies In The Dark EP
With three full lengths and a handful of EP’s behind them, Italy’s Black Oath have built a cult following since the late noughties, been featured on a Black Sabbath tribute disc and released an underground classic in 2015’s ‘To Below and Beyond’, an album which definitely pushed the band farther up the league table. A hard act to follow, 2016’s ‘Litanies In The Dark’ EP acts as a mere distraction, plugging a gap by featuring four leftovers recorded between 2012-2015. A couple of these tracks are worthy of adding to the Oath canon, others not: as is often the way with leftovers, they are sometimes left over for a reason.