Goldicot Culls The Week - IV

by Goldicot

Tue, 4 Feb 2025

Read in 4 minutes

4/4

weekly

If I had time to listen to it all, I would. I don’t. This week, my defeat, already ever present, became known to me, when 20 albums a day was not enough, and when bygone weeks had albums I’d missed. This sensation of defeat feels like relief; having failed, I am free of the fear of failure. But not of its consequences. Henceforth I shall have two sections here: three from the present, as is tradition, and the misses from yesterweek, however many they should be. Hark! Here comes one now:

GOLDICOT RECALLS THE WEEK

Black metal is a chameleonic genre, able to fully assimilate into other forms while still remaining fully black metal. While other genres may be capable of masquerading in other guises, black metal subsumes the chosen form, transforming the other into a version of itself. One of the most fascinating examples of this is displayed by Ferox Occulta, playing nothing but black metal, deceptively simple black metal, but from those confines producing something mysterious and hauntingly… other. Daimon is ambient, not in structure or input, yet the music pulls one to the same place. It’s an album of nocturnal whispering, like wind whistling through forlorn corridors, wandered through in a trance, dark yet familiar. There’s not a lot of music that evokes this particular shade of night, but some kindred spirits may be Sleepwalker or The Ruins of Beverast – high praise for strange bedfellows. 

If you design something to be tourist-proof, the universe will design a better tourist. Even the most veteran do-nothing has something to look forward to, whether Season of Mist’s year debut with The Great Old Ones, Transcending Obscurity’s second consecutive week of dominance, or The Flenser’s year debut Kathryn Mohr – so attractive tourist-bait Pitchfork themselves gave it an 8.4. If you’re not a tourist then you know the eating’s good at the dives: New Standard Elite unleashed their first volley of top-tier slamuaries and Putrefactive let loose experimental derangements of a new breed. In a weird twist, the biggest label this week, Sony, released Wardruna’s new record Birna, confounding tourists and locals alike. All well, but was it good? See below.

Pastel tech death has to be some of the most fun you can have on a consistent basis. Dissoshit is too dour, thrash is too rare, and blackgaze is too bad. But when you see those Combat Evolved color palettes on a random landscape, you know there’s fun to be had. A bass solo here, absurd amounts of syncopation there,  blasts and bleats all over. Fleshbore is like a trickshot compilation of sick pastel tech death br00tz, replete with all the newest strats and all the classic moves, featuring all your favorite influences. It’s enough to win you over, and it did me in the end: they worked hard to ensure nary a moment passes without a sick riff and a surprise, on occasion achieving true groovy greatness and even some heavy duty slamming. Special bonus points go to the vocalist, everywhere everything all at once, a dominance only matched by Archspire (with particular homage paid to their flow.)

Metal Archives calls Discordant Meditation “experimental death metal.” The experiment must be perpetual motion, ‘cause Tragic Creature doesn’t stop moving even once in its half-hour crusade against peace. Or maybe the experiment was serial high quality – what if every moment was as good as every other moment, and every moment was good? And what if there were just a ton of moments, like a lot? At times furious enough to feel like deathgrind, then slow and mean enough to be death-doom, and then almost weird enough to remind one of Demilich, but lighter, jazzier, grinning wider. Their Bandcamp blurb offers a much more accurate description of the experiment: psychotic death metal.

How many Croatian metal bands have you heard? To my knowledge, the only ones I’ve heard are Divlje jagode, Prognan (who released a gargantuan 2025 release) and Pogavranjen. This amounts to nothing but a massive blind spot, whence Exterior Palnet explodes, with a version of dissoblack so vibrant I’d call it ecstatic, but that’s taken, so instead I’ll dub it exuberant. The energy is so high on Haragma II it reminds one of the liveliest of genres like technical thrash, and this energy is matched by no end of delightful twisted riffing and a legitimately astonishing all-fills no-filler drumwork performance. The all-caliber firing barrage is so strong, it nearly supersedes the standard hallmark of the genre, the dispassionate rasping vocals which were once an intentional choice for progenitors DsO (and later Mgła/Kriegsmaschine), here are almost lifeless, drained of color against a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of writhing technicality. Perhaps the best metal release of January, and a high note to begin the end of the month on.