As a side project of members of Negură Bunget, Din Brad delivers very interesting and exotic Neofolk music that creates an atmosphere unlike anything we have ever listened to. With “Dor”, the band crafts 11 tracks of dark and somber music that will send chills down your spine and will make you appreciate and dig-up more about Romanian folklore and history.

Opening with the bone chilling “Amar”, the music of Din Brad is stripped down from any Metal influences and presents traditional instruments (i.e. panpipe) surrounded a by heavy atmospheric elements and a the excellent and enchanting exotic vocals of Alma. The lush and organic sound to the band is pretty awesome since it transports you to outer worldly locations in one instant. The folkish edge of the male vocals in songs like “Poarce'n Suflet Greu Păcatu” might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it gives that sense of authenticity to the music that many other Neofolk bands are lacking these days.

Hailing from Portugal today we have another entry into the Sludge/Doom Metal category with Process of Guilt and their latest opus “FÆMIN”. Featuring a few ex-members of Doomsters Before The Rain, we thought this band will move past the traditional Sludge/Doom approach, but they just manage to replicate what bands like Year of No Light, Bison B.C, etc. achieve with their heavy distorted guitars and mid-tempo spurts of anger.

“Empire” starts with some nice feedback and then it goes into the endless repetitive loop of riffing and drums that most Sludge bands opt for, but the band never seems to really get out of this funk. While we understand the genre dictates for something like this, we can’t really see any value or different between the previously mentioned bands. “Blindfold” is a bit faster paced, but it also quickly drowns in repetitiveness and dulls the listener into submission. The band wrote 5-6 riffs and they just stick to them for the duration of this release.

With the current boom of Psychedelic Occult Rock/Metal bands like Ghost, Year of the Goat and The Devil’s Blood, it is not surprising that the next excellent band we listen to in this genre has to be from Finland. Jess and the Ancient Ones are finally delivering their debut full-length self-titled release this May and it features seven tracks spanning around 53 minutes of pure musical greatness.

Jess and the Ancient Ones sound is timeless and it evokes countless greats like Merciful Fate, Black Sabbath, Yes, and the more contemporary Jex Thoth and Sabbath Assembly. Opening with the extra catchy “Prayer for Death and Fire”, this release is off to a great start thanks to the band’s playfulness and excellent abilities to craft old-school sounding music but not sounding like a re-hash of any other band.

Making its way from Germany, today we have Essenz’s latest full-length released titled “Mundus Numen”. With a very healthy mix of traditional Doom Metal with some Black Metal and Sludge hints, this release takes you down to the bowels of hell and back with a very powerful and dark sound. For six tracks, “Mundus Numen” showcases the band’s tuned low guitars and raw power when it comes to speed things up.

“Extinguish Shapes - Innermediate” opens this release with very powerful Sludgy riffs that nicely morph back and forth to painful Doom sections. The atmospheric elements make this track even more dense thanks to their unconventional nature, and the female vocals add a very nice extra touch. Before we know it, “Sea of Light – Pleroma” explodes in our face with some furious Black Metal in the vein of bands like Watain and Horna. The switch from Doom to BM is pretty rapid and very well engineered to deliver a powerful blow. This track again drones back between furious BM riffs and some deeper slower passages.

Hailing from Portugal, today we have a band that ‘waited’ for 17 years to release their second full-length release. Disaffected’s last album was back in 1995 and with “Rebirth” they deliver a very interesting and unique sounding release that is quite hard to categorize, but it’s very enjoyable to listen to. Mixing powerful guitar lines with hectic bass guitar sections, pummeling drums, crazy keyboards and harsh vocals, Disaffected has managed to catch us off-guard and produce something totally unique and different.

After a very weird and trippy intro, “C.ult O.f M.y A.shes” and “Getting Into the Labyrinth” feature a wave of powerful guitars laid on top of intricate drumming. The vocals are very aggressive and they nicely add more brutality to the overall mix of thing. The structure of these songs is quite weird and unpredictable, and while there are some melodic portions, they keyboards and the bass guitar line seem to be on a completely different plane of existence. “Dreaming III (A Nightmare)” moves into more Avant-garde areas with a very chaotic nature and a crazy feeling of a terrible nightmare, as the name states.

While we wait for some more new music from Winterfylleth, Candlelight is re-releasing their debut full-length release “The Ghost of Heritage”. With a complete overhaul in the packaging and a remastered sound, this excellent album sounds even more impressive and clear than before, showcasing Winterfylleth’s destructive nature.

The wall of distorted guitars is immediately set with the devastating opening track “Mam Tor (The Shivering Mountain)”. In this track the band shows their polished BM sound similar to Wolves In The Throne Room and those kinds of bands. The riffing is punishing, but the harsh screams are just magical in this context. There are some clean choir-like vocals that add creepiness to the song and nicely contrast the excellent guitar work. Things turn a bit into the unknown with the atmospheric acoustic guitar driven track “The March to Maldon”, a very nice and momentum building song. This track was just the buildup before the explosive “Brithnoth: The Battle of Maldon”.

Hailing from Finland, today we have Burning Point and their super catchy Melodic Power Metal released titled “The Ignitor”. With a very exciting mixture of modern Melodic Power Metal elements and a traditional Heavy Metal, Burning Point delivers a very well-crafted release full of powerful guitar sections, catchy chorus parts, and an overall epic feeling that only a handful of bands can pull off.

Taking the listener back to the time when Power Metal was epic and felt like an adrenaline shock, “Eternal Flame” delivers a very apt opening for such a fun and engaging release. The band does a great job in establishing a basic core of guitar driven melodies where the keyboards and virtuoso-passages take a back seat and let the rest of the elements shine. Pete Ahonen vocals are spot on and have a powerful range, on tracks like “In The Fire’s of My Self” and “In the Night”, they carry the songs magically and seemingly effortless. “In the Night” has also that classic Heavy Metal vibe thanks to the chorus section that many newer bands seem to be forgetting about.

Arriving from Alrealon Musique, today we have a very interesting double release that while not entirely our main cup of tea, we actually enjoyed a lot. FluiD is an experimental electronic hip-hop musician that mixes elements from Ambient and Drone with some beats delivering a pretty interesting experience similar to Ulver’s trip-hop phase. We have previously reviewed John 3:16’s music and we were quite impressed with his interesting combination of Darkwave with a dose of Drone and some guitar driven sections.

Opening this release we have the first three tracks belonging to FluiD. In “Angels Pt. II”, the song opens with a cavernous feeling and some nice minimalist touches that create an interesting atmosphere, some interesting Drone elements are thrown into the mix to create a very weird but intoxicating vibe. The organs in “Plague” give an extra creepy sound to the track and nicely culminate the build-up from the opening sections of the song. Driven by interesting beats, “Forewarning” nicely closes down the FluiD section of our promo leaving a very puzzling, but equally satisfying experience from this very interesting artist.

With a very interesting thematically concept revolving around setting the Egyptian book of the dead through some very disturbing music, the one man project The Horn delivers “Volume Ten”. Claiming to play “Pure Ancient Occult Egyptian Space Metal”, this musician delivers 14 tracks of brutal and weird music that are not for everybody, but some might enjoy due to its combination of Black Metal with Noise and Ambient/Drone elements.

When it comes to originality we must say that we haven’t quite heard anything as disruptive as The Horn in this “Volume Ten” release. Unleashing a wall of sound in the intro “The Portal Opens”, the truly decadent reality of The Horn’s musical destruction is first felt on “Spell 165”. With a raw-as-fuck approach to Metal, this track is a beast when it comes to raw brutality and devastation. Some industrial elements are made present in the hypnotic “Spell 124”, making this band quite unpredictable at first glance.

Saudi Arabia’s most interesting ‘ethnic’ Black Metal band is back with another release that features intriguing middle-eastern atmospheres and crushing Black Metal merged to near perfection. With “Kitab Al Awthan”, Al-Namrood pushes forward in their musical exploration delivering over 47-minutes of intelligently written music that is both captivating and very brutal.

Opening with the lush “Mirath Al Shar”, the album instantly transports you to a somber and mysterious place thanks to the excellent atmosphere created. The production this time is considerably better and you can really hear the richness of the band’s percussions and epicness of their middle-eastern influences. The rawness of their Black Metal foundations is first unleashed on “Min Trab Al Jahel”, and we again noticed considerable improvement in the production values when compared to their previous release. The fusion of atmospheric keyboards and the raw distorted guitars is majestic, giving that creepy feeling of being trapped in a maze similar to the ones in the Prince of Persia games.