Kez Whelan
, January 20th, 2021 09:23
Don t worry about the metal whoppers taking part in the recent attempted coup, says Kez Whelan, there are a lot more relevant statements being made out there.
Asphyx
Any hopes 2021 would see a return to relative normality have been dashed in record time as Iced Earth guitarist Jon Schaffer made headlines for the first time in, ooh, well over a decade this week, after being snapped amongst the armed, riotous mob of MAGA terrorists that stormed the US capitol.
It’s depressing, but hardly surprising; Schaffer has always been a reactionary right-wing idiot, as anyone who’s had the misfortune of sitting through his unbearably maudlin 9/11-themed ballad, When The Eagle Cries will attest.
UK black metallers Antre find the darkness within on new EP, Dark Spectrum…
Words: Olly Thomas
The soundtrack to Cyberpunk 2077 is probably one of the last places you’d expect to find a black metal band from Nottingham. And while a multi-million dollar game seems an odd fit for as resolutely underground an outfit as Antre, the four tracks on offer on this excellent EP reveal that their razor-sharp racket is brilliant in its own right, with or without any high-profile multimedia collaborations.
Through These Dead Eyes kicks things off, a brief atmospheric intro soon giving way to vicious blasting and the unrelentingly harsh vocals of Patrick MacDonald. It’s abundantly clear that Antre can summon forth the fiery furnaces and icy chill that have long fuelled black metal, but as the EP progresses, they prove that they can harness other methods of attack. Mask Of The Saviour channels everything from melodic death to hardcore to post-metal, even throwing in a spoken word se