Goldicot Culls The Week - II

Double time

Round two, another 140 in the bag, a running total of 300, and a lot to talk about. 

For the mainstream, this was even worse than last week. Only Nuclear Blast even tried, with The Halo Effect blanched to the utmost bland, and Napalm, with Tremonti, which I didn’t listen to (yet) because I’m not divorced. (Yet.) Thankfully, everybody else fired on all cylinders, with a crazy strong week for any part of the year, much more for January. Boggles the mind it does, to have so much profuse praise half a month in. If this continues, 2025 will be the Year of the Overrate. 

I was only going to write three blurbs a week, but I had to give up this week due to the strength of these six albums. Don’t get used to it, but pray that we get to.

6 - Barshasketh - Antinomian Asceticism

From the excellent World Terror Committee, is monstrous, aggressive black metal of the classic ilk. Pure energy and striking flourish abound throughout an oppressive storm replete with lightning bolt melodies and thunderous assaults. And best of all, strange, gothic singing wafting up from within on an air of menace and mystery. Now hear this: in a ranking of Bandcamp blurbs, WTC’s promo writer would rank at the top, a delightful primer and starting point for both music and theme. If you like your black metal theological, album and blurb alike are essential.

5 - Clouds - Desprins

In a slow year for funeral doom one must turn to atmodoom and hope that it isn’t doomgaze, or worse, post-rock masquerading as doom. Desprins is more than enough to satisfy the true craving, bearing heavy crosses in the authentic nineties make, swung in sweeping arcs ending in pure blunt force. Clouds achieve the spirit behind the genre, that tragic majesty imbued into the yawning chasmal riffs, in the form of a single flute, whistling mournful song, echoing the lone piper scoring the field of death its unheard memorial. And for the connoisseurs: abysmal growls par excellence from doom veteran Daniel Neagoe. 

4 - Uulatia Digir - Uuliatia Digir

From out of nowhere, an abstract and tribal metal collective from Poland releases the first true avant-garde metal release of 2025, an evocative visual disconcerto of jazz and black metal achieving near symphonic heights of disturbing grandeur. The dual vocalists, male and female, conjure a ritualistic feel that bolsters the unusual structures employed, harrowing crescendos where just before the summit, the bottom falls out, an ascent for the sake of the plummet. This album sounds like the work of veteran professionals, with adept dynamics for intensely expressive volume changes and a spacious mix for a complicated ensemble of operatic blackened jazz metal witchery. A wonderful addition to the chamber metal compendiums. 

3 - Faithxtractor - Loathing & the Noose

In the twilight zone of liminal spaces between genres, there is a type of death metal totally devoid of positivity, no mirth even in violence, only grim determination in the face of inexorable doom. True musical nihilism of this type is a rarity, too easily pulled back to the hedonism of adrenaline, or dragged to depths of depression that shear away the resolve of death metal. Faithxtractor is right in that gray shade, fueled by pure contempt and loathing, with death metal that is not exactly furious, but implacably brutal, and inevitable. Even the melodies in the ostensible exuberance of a guitar solo sound less like resignation and more like the last, final gasp of breath, forced out from the husk. Everything else is doom, oppressive, calloused doom, even as it sounds like technical death metal, all that you feel is doom. 

2 - Ethel Cain - Perverts

Prayer is many different things. The materialists call it meditation, the secularists, contemplation, mystics say it is communication, and believers know the truth: it is silence. Sometimes, the silencing is of yourself, and what remains is all the greater, and sometimes the silencing is of everything else, and you are all you that’s left. Perverts is an album of prayer, and an album of many different silences. At its most literal, Ethel Cain serves as a guide to quiet seclusion and its introspection, forcing self-reflection by the absence of distraction, where you, the listener, haunt yourself. At its most literary, Perverts is a verb in the Dantean sense, where all vice is inverted virtue, corrupted by sin into perversions of the good and the graceful. Here those virtues, of love and closeness, are mirrored in musical counterpart, beautiful tones stretched into agonizing distances, quiet dark romance into regretful dirge, love into pleasure and pleasure into masturbation. Some of the songs are hymns, both antiquated and modern, profound in their uncomfortable earnestness, and some are worshipful, yet it is unclear if that worship is in hope or in despair. This is an album to spend time alone with.

1 - doseone & Steel Tipped Dove - All Portrait, No Chorus

This is a sign I should be listening to more hip hop. By far my favorite release so far, and it’s all on account of how damn fun this is. I could talk about the production, obviously delightful with genuine interaction between bar and beat, or the variety, a mix of downbeat, nocturnal conversations and energetic vitriolic screeds, or the technicality of the lines themselves, a nonstop tying of a tongue-twisted gordian knot of seemingly infinite length, every syllable endlessly amending the last – but I want to talk about doesone’s larynx. I’ve never heard oral timbral technique like this before, where the shape of the mouth, throat and glottis are themselves producing the flow. It’s not just an original voice, this is a performance to rival professional voice actors in a totally original way, so much more expression contained in the spit. I may sound like a complete idiot here, but I listen stopped dead in my tracks with my jaw on the floor every time when I hear the insane inflection and vocal metric modulation happening here. I’m trying to break records in 2025, but now? Now all I want to do is listen to doseone.