Anal Nunchuks' Almostopster: Harakiri for the Sky - III: Trauma

by Anal Nunchuks on Sun, Mar 17, 2024

Edgy vortexer, complains about album runtime constantly, then chooses a 70 minute long.

Harakiri for the Sky occupies a very special place in my heart. It was 2017, I’d just come to Canada and high school life had me unravelling at the seams, and I’d just discovered metal due to one site that cannot be named. I was heavily into melodic death metal and shaking off my metalcore past, and I found myself drawn to the Finnish unhappiness of Insomnium. Black metal, meanwhile, proved a tough nut to crack – I found most of it devoid of memorable melody, emotional connection, and poignant themes.

Almostopster

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Goldi's Almostopster: Circle of Dust - Disengage

by Goldi on Mon, Mar 11, 2024

This week, it's a vortex heavyweight's turn to choose an album

My first memories of music are wishing it was heavier. Before I had internet access, I spent years quietly combing through my father’s record collection looking for something, anything, that had aggression, playing CD after CD of soft rock, CCM, pop, 80s dance, disco, and for years my precious treasure vault amounted to “Godzilla” by Blue Öyster Cult and “Hammerhead” by The Offspring and the handful of songs where Christian contemporary rock artists accidentally played something with balls.

almostopster

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Abso's Almostopter: Kase.O - El Circulo

by Abso on Mon, Mar 4, 2024

The yearly community project begins

The vortex has been running for nearly as long as it takes Carlos to type “I’m an overrater” and every year we’ve enjoyed a unique and often challenging project. This year we have the almostopster and it’s time to pick an album that’s so very close to being perfect and can actually see your absolutely terrible reliquary list, but isn’t allowed in. It’s reliquary adjacent: it can look but not touch anything.

almostopster

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Dissimulator - Lower Form Resistance and the limits of thrash revivalism

by Snyde on Mon, Feb 5, 2024

"The conscious present is an awareness of the past (...) which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show." - T.S. Eliot

“Thrash metal” as a scene died in 1991, its coup de grâce coming in the form of a little black square from the San Francisco Bay Area. In less than a decade, the genre’s customs, tropes and taboos were codified, calcified and cast aside. As a natural off-shoot, technical thrash metal met its demise soon after the main branch had withered. Of course, a scant few bands held fast to their stylistic roots in the ensuing years but, in general terms, any thrash metal album released after 1993 (but especially after 2000, when the dust had settled on mainstream music’s identity crisis) can be called ‘revivalist’.

thrash Dissimulator Voivod Sovereign

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