Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory, Issue 1: Incipit
The essays I've read from the para-academic world of black metal theory have been hit or miss, but the value here is less in the sharp delineation of ideas and more in the rupturing atmosphere the best of these pieces exude.
Opera IX, The Gospel
Opera IX's theatrical, orchestral black metal still delivers the pomp and satanic circumstance on The Gospel. The orchestration does more work than the riffs, which honestly is a nice change of pace of this style of black metal. Bandcamp link.
Jim Thompson, A Swell-Looking Babe
You're in luck, we did an entire podcast episode about this book here just for your edification.
November's Doom is death-doom that always weighted their work heavier on the death side of the equation, until Hamartia. Hamartia still has moments of ferocious strength, but that is more of a moody balancing act throughout.
Volume Two
I'm not sure I ever really see myself getting sick of Victorian Christmas ghost tales. There is a glorious alternative here: you don't need to be bah humbug about the holiday--you can delight in the specters and murders and murderous specters it brings instead.
Imagine a mouth opening in anguish, the words emerging only as frost caught on the wind-bitten air. That's the kind of funereal doom that Helllight serves up on As We Slowly Fade--a kind of apocalypse that feels as personal as it does cosmic. Bandcamp link.
Brandon Graham, Multiple Warheads book 2: Ghostown
"Raiding the wizard's tower" is the barest of cliches, but even the most shopworn of concepts cannot escape become unfathomably something else when it comes into contact with Brandon Graham's Multiple Warheads.
The sound of the chora entering the lingual stage through shrieks and expressive rage against the abjection to come. Bandcamp link.
December arrives just in time for a fight with snowmen! But really, this bit of the story feels like a meditation on Wilde's thesis that each man kills the thing he loves.
Hagiographies are frequently uninteresting, but this one is. "Balzac did not pay his dues. He only paid in masterpieces: coin that was not legal tender in the Academie."
Not exactly a Christmas Eve tradition yet, but maybe it should be.
