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If you take a look at what’s happening on the indie scene in recent years, many artists and

Read Loudwire's review of the career-spanning documentary 'Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition.' Continue reading…

Cradle of Filth's Dani Filth opens up about writing his autobiography, preparing for a U.S. tour and shares an update on his collaboration with Ed Sheeran. Continue reading…

There are few concepts in the Western tradition as misunderstood as that of “the death of God.” It is not a triumphant proclamation, nor a call for apathetic nihilism. What has been coined in recent online discourse as a ‘meaning crisis’ is only barely getting the point. The Loss of Transcendence—some universal, ultimate, mind-independent Truth and set of values—is a beginning, an event that should prompt critical thought and action and confrontation of a human condition that we sedate ourselves out of with belief in a higher power or sense and reason in the universe; hope; or the rescinding of responsibility to the idea that ‘nothing matters.¹² The Great Observer seem to have done their homework for the most part, with their debut channeling their thrashy blackened death into a philosophical call to action that blends Existentialism with Stoicism and Epicureanism. Fresh on the scene and immediately going all-in in aggression and storytelling, what can The Great Observer give to us?

On the face of it, Loss of Transcendence is standard black/death/thrash, with a rotating emphasis on each of those three components. Sticking primarily to up-tempo, gritty riffing in a vein somewhere between Necrophobic, Tomb Mold, and Morbid Angel—though a less flashy iteration—The Great Observer do nonetheless find time to linger in some cavernousness that vaguely recalls Disembowelment. They further emphasise their mean streak with a pervasive vocal echo that adds to the grime of the throaty howls and is compounded during the many instances when such vocals are multi-tracked or delivered as a group. But not all of this energy is used in service of evil; there’s a strong anthemic side to these choruses and a jaunty bombast to many a beat. In many ways, it gives off the aura of classical extreme metal—back when Black Metal was an album title, and ugliness, speed, and aggression were the name of the game in a fundamentally different way to how they are now. And yet, under the layers of dirt and behind the malevolence lie small seeds of nuance, and it is to Loss of Transcendence’s great detriment that they remain scattered seeds alone.

Loss of Transcendence flirts with many things—intrigue, atmosphere, tenacity—but never quite wins any of them over. Riffs generally check boxes for pugnacity, but even at their most brutish and slick (“The Great Observer,” “Impervious Creation”), they have no edge, no force. At the worst end, guitar lines are entirely blunt thanks to nondescript, generic-sounding melodies and patterns (“Herald of Thorns,” “How Far the Faithless will Venture”). It’s unfortunate that all of the best guitar sits in the record’s back half, with “Impervious Creation” and “The Weight of Being Free” delivering shimmying, sliding shredding capable of winning over the harshest of critics, and the latter track featuring a genuinely beautiful, buttery smooth solo that combines everything great about grimy yet gorgeous extreme metal. The frequent use of group vocals, which sometimes creates an impressive miasma of harrowing calls (“Impervious Creation,” title track), falls awkwardly flat when delivered as rousing shouts (“Sentenced at High Noon,” “At The Summit of Consciousness,” “The Weight…”) thanks to the latter’s surprising corniness. The Great Observer also experiment in an exasperatingly random manner with distortion, with a liquid, Worm-adjacent effect appearing in random snatches never to develop (“Parénklisis (Fallen Into Existence),” “How Far…,” “The Weight…,” title track); and the worst part is that it’s good! The pace, generally high, is also stymied by not one but two synth-heavy instrumentals as “Parénklisis…” opens the album with a gravitas that never appears again, and “Ékstasis (The Lonesome Path)” needlessly presses pause for two minutes of ambience and whispering.

In reality, Loss of Transcendence feels frustratingly lukewarm. A mix that pushes guitars erratically between the far background and the very forefront, and a baffling decision³ to layer vocal tracks and reverb like lasagna over these riffs (“The Great Observer,” “Sentenced at High Noon,” “The Weight…,” title track) makes what could be decent blackened death sound almost poor. Almost the only time the guitars sound good is when they sound great, soloing in sudden clarity (“Sentenced…,” “Impervious Creation”) and with fluent expressiveness (“The Weight…,”), and these highlights appear exclusively in the second half. Given this, it becomes harder to forgive the swing of strangely upbeat gang shouts (“Sentenced…,” “Herald of Thorns”) and a brusque attitude to riff-writing that tends to shy away from character.

It’s always a shame when a concept I’m particularly interested in is delivered in mediocre form. Loss of Transcendence strikes as an album that would have had heads spinning and Bibles being reached for in the early 90s but now its grit cannot make up for its shortcomings. Failing to develop their best ideas and sidelining their assets far too often, The Great Observer still haven’t seen how to capitalise on their strengths, and Loss of Transcendence loses more than higher values as a result.

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Rating: Disappointing
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: BlackSeed Productions
Website: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: April 30th, 2026

The post The Great Observer – Loss of Transcendence Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

New York’s own Jessica Lynn is back with a fresh track, and this time she’s turning up the gain. Her latest single, “Truckin’”, has just landed on all digital platforms, and it sees the singer-songwriter trading in some of her Nashville polish for the raw energy of the rock bands she grew up playing in. … Continue reading Jessica Lynn leans into her rock roots with new single “Truckin’”

In this two part article focusing on the strange and unexpected, we take a look at some uncharacteristically weird diversions from otherwise conventional bands that have taken fans by surprise. It’s not always the more consciously left field or avant garde artists that are renowned for releasing some of the weirdest and most defiantly unclassifiable […]

The post Into The Strange: When bands momentarily go weird (part one) appeared first on Louder Than War.

Cage Fight’s Rachel Aspe took a while to find herself, but a surprising message from a beloved metal hero changed everything

After a quick trip to celebrate their 15th anniversary earlier this year, Against The Current have revealed that they are coming back to the UK and Europe in the Autumn.

Hot on the heels of the release of their new single ‘Heavenly’, the band will be heading back over for the Till Death & Back tour, making their way through seven countries.

Vocalist Chrissy Costanza had this to say about the run, stating, “We’re so excited to head out on the Till Death & Back Tour this fall. After reuniting with everyone at our 15th Anniversary shows, we can’t wait to bring that same energy onto bigger stages. Not to mention, there will be a LOT of new music, so we hope our fans are ready.“

So without further ado, here are all the dates you need to know:

OCTOBER

30 – GLASGOW SWG3 (TV Studio)
31 – LEEDS Leeds Beckett Students Union

NOVEMBER

01 – MANCHESTER Academy
03 – BIRMINGHAM O2 Institute
04 – LONDON O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire
06 – PARIS Le Trianon
07 – SAARBRÜCKEN Garage
08 – BRUSSELS Ancienne Belgique
11 – KÖLN E-Werk
12 – UTRECHT TivoliVredenburg
13 – HAMBURG Grosse Freiheit 36
14 – BERLIN Metropol
16 – VIENNA Simm City
17 – MUNICH Muffathalle
19 – ZURICH Komplex 457
20 – STUTTGART LKA Longhorn
21 – WIESBADEN Schlachthof

Tickets will go on general sale from May 08 at 10am local time.

And to get you ready to go, here is ‘Heavenly’:

The post Against The Current Announce UK/EU Headline Tour appeared first on Rock Sound.

The wait is officially over. Atlanta’s finest, Sevendust, have unleashed their 15th studio album, One, today via Napalm Records. To celebrate the release, the guys have also shared a new focus track, “Construct”, which perfectly captures that signature blend of crushing riffs and Lajon Witherspoon’s soul-stirring vocals. Nearly three decades into their career, the quintet … Continue reading Sevendust drop new album ‘One’ in runup to winter UK headline tour

[Cover art by Mister Curse]

Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface. Stack Overflow in…Corpse Pile Interface?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a corpse pile, by any other word would smell as putrid” – billy shakes

Forgive my bastardization of that quote, the silly misnomer, the callous abandonment of MLA formatting, but A Forest of Stars have led my mind down a path both dark and curious. I’ve spent the better part of a month trying to distill this record’s idiosyncrasies into a quick n’ quippy 900-word snack and you know what? I’m still not quite there, and because I am a person for whom spite is continual nourishment, I’d like to open with a rough draft that for an embarrassingly long time was the front-runner for final formatting.

A Forest of Stars – Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface (An Exhaustively Researched and Edited Review by I. Hams

• Pure / Depraved
• Delight / Disgust
• Rigid / Slack
• Playful / Stern
• Verbose / Succinct

~fin~

With Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface, you are getting a new A Forest of Stars album. It CAN be simplified to that degree. You lose a few pixels at distance but the bird’s-eye view is enough to grasp the overall topography. In fact, when revisiting The Corpse of Rebirth, it’s remarkable how consistent the group has been in illustrating their own peculiarities. I imagine a bespoke 2007 boardroom, whiteboard festooned with bird bones and other elegant / grotesque talismans, crammed to the outer rim with tiny letters written in great haste and with too much downward pressure. In the center, circled and roughly italicized, a set of rules by which to proceed. The gentlemen (and lady) around the long table smoke and nod appreciatively toward the fruit of their labor – the bylaws of A Forest of Stars council-decided and ratified. “This is unusual?”, you ask. “A band generally adhering to their own established sound throughout an almost 20-year career? Pish posh with your silly corporate analogy. That’s what bands do!” Yet, who does A Forest of Stars but A Forest of Stars? Who can sustain for six full-length albums a sound and structure so seemingly unsustainable at length? In THIS economy?!

“Ay, there’s the FUCKING rub” – Will S.

(An aside of full disclosure – I’ve always felt intimidated by my colleagues preternatural ability to shotgun their own reviews with FFOs and apt comparisons to existing works, both within metal and apart. I tried hard to compete with this one, but there’s only so many times I can think about David Lynch in a single day.)

Press copy for Stack Overflow describes the album as “British Black Metal”. Glean from that what you personally may – I, for one, take away “a fourth of a fifth of” not much. What does it mean for music to be “British” outside of its location of origin? Perhaps someone more anglophilic than I can give a right proper answer to that query. The quieter moments of A Forest of Stars’ music certainly evoke a pastoral quality: simple, open harmony with uncomplicated melody. Never do they stray into Akercocke-ian levels of brutal, though they do share a penchant for histrionics. Neither do they delve into the more folky/atmo vein ala a Wodensthrone or Fen. What remains?

A Forest of Stars as a black metal band also does not compute, though sufficient evidence exists to bolster that claim. Historically their album art has leaned into the dark and mysterious. They dress like Ren Faire aficionados. To date, they have roughly seven hours of recorded material, a significant chunk of which contains blast beats, tremolo-picked leads, raspy vocals. The troupe weave arcane tales, musically and lyrically, but upon cross-examination there is something else at play within their work, an out-of-body experience where the spirit of black metal is looking up at its earthly shell, gnashing its teeth at its decaying carcass.

Let’s pose a hypothetical. It is an alternate timeline and my ears have yet to be corrupted by A Forest of Stars in any capacity. You tap me on the shoulder and hand me an iPod (stay with me please it’s just a hypothetical) upon which is one file, “A Prophet for a Pound of Flesh” from A Shadowplay For Yesterdays. You goad me to sit in the nearest Victorian era-looking chair (we have to drive around a bit), and press play. Ten minutes later, upon the track’s conclusion, you ask me, “Now, sir, tell me about that black metal tune what you just heard, would ya?” My forehead would wrinkle, and you better believe that fucker sharpei wrinkles. “Black metal? You reductive, silly person. That was A Forest of Stars.”

“There is nothing either good or bad, but reviewing makes it so” – Billiam of Shake’s Pier

Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface eschews the compositional maximalism exhibited by A Shadowplay For Yesterdays. It’s downright reserved compared to Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes. It is, in ferocity, the mid-life lull to The Corpse of Rebirth‘s youthful bile. It is also their magnum opus.

“Ascension of the Clowns” lilts in on e-bowed guitar before the violin of Katheryne, Queen of the Ghosts’ violin establishes the opening theme. The rest of the ensemble enters soon and we are slowly waltzing, the stately theme floating elegantly over the band, patient and threatening like a snake preparing to uncoil. “I AM MY OWN MAGGOT CONSUMING MYSELF,” introduces the familiar mania of Mister Curse. This is the AFoS we know and love – the dichotomy of the uninhibited soapbox madman’s ravings underpinned by an accompaniment, as far as it may be presented within the intensity spectrum of black metal anyway, of a relatively staid group of musicians. Stack Overflow, however, more than any of their previous albums, widens that distance by a considerable degree. If we consider “vocals”‘ and “the rest of the instrumentation” as distinct elements that do NOT combine into the hegemonic whole that is “the music”, and further, if we consider these distinct elements as a dial, numbered 1-11, controlling a level of stability (in terms of the conventionally harmonic, the amount of frenzy in the delivery, etc), I picture the dials as shown below, except instead of boring words they are very cool knobs with numbers and LEDs:

VOCALS – 9 / THE REST OF THE INSTRUMENTATION – 4? 3? 

All that horseshit is to say this – now, more than ever before, do these two facets of A Forest of Stars utilize each other to maximize the band’s impact. The true strength of the output can be assessed in both direction – the halves’ tremendous ability to repel each other is equal to their ability to cleanly snap together. I didn’t understand that until I could step back and see both interactions. Admittedly, for the first number of listens to Stack Overflow I could not get past the rivalry. There are entire portions of songs, verses if you will, that Mister Curse chews the scenery into smaller and smaller pieces until you can’t remember what the backdrop looked like. Conversely, there are moments of sublime melodiousness where the band is laying back on a groove, locked into a melancholy chord progression, and you dread the moment Mister Curse returns. This is the game, though. You can’t have one without the other, and before long you itch for the yin to swallow the yang and the yang to regurgitate the yin.

“Roots Circle Usurpers” is an actualization of this concept. The first two minutes showcase the ability of our string players to awe with the understated. Delicate and deliberate violin melodies sing over a driving, folky clean guitar. Mr. Titus Lungbutter’s bass stays supportive but active, adding in some pleasing counterpoint. At 3:10, the curtain burns away and Mister Curse, though still smouldering, reins it in just a touch rhythmically, so that he and the band can finally dance together, if only for a few minutes. The track builds and builds to an enrapturing climax around 6:30, but like all earthly climaxes it is short-lived. Katheryne, Queen of Ghosts, enters, leading another waltz, her tone cool and calm. These two sections, in particular, are perfect examples of the type of maneuver A Forest of Stars can pull off album after album after album – the long and powerful full-band enchantment where the chord progression hits just in such a way where you never want it to end, and the stage-clearing aria, portentious and beautiful, a respite from what you’ve gone through and yet also a harbinger of future peril. And indeed, future peril arrives. Mister Curse rejoins the fray, howling and gnashing, as the track barrels forward to its rapturous end. The layering of the weeping, descending violin line over the crumbling blast beats and the guitars’ lovesick tremolo gives me goosebumps. To quote a salient lyric from a previous track – “WOW.”

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing” – William Shakespeare

He’s right, you know? Sometimes it’s difficult to convey the magnitude of one’s appreciation without flitting off into loving, unfortunately tangential directions. A track by track breakdown of Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface would give you the black and white play by play, sure, but does not that approach lose the “why” of it all? Guitars riff, drums pound, vocals howl, songs end and others begin. We’d get just as far reading copy descriptions of “Musical Black Metal”. The “why” is the “what” made human, and A Forest of Stars create deeply human music, despite their every effort to shock and disgust. They tap into suppressed and/or hidden feelings through the sheer force of the totality of the presentation. Final track, “Not Drinking Water”, epitomizes my point.

They don’t bring out every weapon in their arsenal to close the album. Mister Curse, for example, is so comparatively sedate as to possibly have been medicated (not out of the question considering his output over the previous 5 tracks). The song is composed extremely similarly to the other tracks on the album – long form, patient, ebbing and flowing from violent peaks to solemn valleys, a description that can apply equally to a majority of songs in their catalog. Did you forget the whiteboard? I digress. In fact, compared to some of the wilder moments of the album this far, “Not Drinking Water” is for the most part serene, pedestrian. Then, you arrive at the 37th second of the 8th minute.

I refuse to over-describe the last portion of the song, but suffice it to say it is so bludgeoning, so complete in its A Forest of Starsitude that if the band called it quits tomorrow, I couldn’t think of a more fitting conclusion. I’m giddy for you to get there and to absorb / be absorbed.

All these words and we didn’t even sniff the lyrics! Good luck with those. My American education learnt me some square dancing but this ain’t Kansas anymore. Endless, dithering descriptions of mood and we didn’t even discuss the immaculate production work! Interminable attempts to scrutinize the inscrutable and we didn’t unpack Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface?! By god, that was my opener! Could someone crank “God Save The King”, please?

A Forest of Stars – Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface (A Heavily Condensed and Lovingly Blunt Review by I. Hams

Indifference / Fascination

Repulsion / Connection

The End / The End

The post A Forest of Stars – Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface appeared first on Last Rites.