Columnus Metallicus: Heavy Metal for March Reviewed by Kez Whelan

Following last year’s collaboration with Full Of Hell, it was only a matter of time until former Endless Blockade mastermind Andrew Nolan joined forces with mates and fellow collab enthusiasts The Body. This time it’s his (and fellow Endless Blockade alumni Ryan Bloomer’s) industrial outfit Intensive Care, whose nightmarish fusion of noise rock and death industrial feels like a perfect fit for The Body. Was I Good Enough? is just as noisy and abrasive as you’d expect from this pairing, but what’s startling is how oddly meditative it is. There’s a palpable tension throughout, sure, but the hissing soundscapes, dubbed out rhythms and throbbing bass on tracks like ‘Swallowed By The God’ have a curiously zen-like quality to them, allowing vast, pulsating beats to roll on with a hypnotic, lolloping calmness. 

That’s not to say Was I Good Enough? isn’t still uncomfortably intense at points – ‘At Death’s Door’ is built around one of Chip King’s most downright evil doom riffs, as Nolan’s confrontational Bastard Noise-esque ranting builds in volume alongside fizzing electronics, before the whole thing implodes in a vortex of deep, ink black bass. ‘The Riderless Mount’, meanwhile, takes its cues from Houston chopped and screwed pioneer DJ Screw, melting The Body’s sludgy sound into a molten, viscous soup, sloshing around erratically atop woozy hip hop beats and leg-quaking sub-bass. The supreme low-end and intoxicated industrial dub aesthetic across the whole record feels similar to some of The Bug’s more recent work, albeit with lashings of searing power electronics and gristly doom riffing – and if that doesn’t perk your ears up, you’re probably on the wrong site.

On the subject of collaborations that seem so perfectly paired you can’t believe they haven’t already happened yet, how did it take until 2025 for Mick Barr (of Krallice, Orthrelm and loads more) to team up with Tim Wyskida (of Khanate, Blind Idiot God and, indeed, loads more)? The bulk of their debut album as The Overmold comprises the sprawling self-titled track, a half hour free improv drone metal behemoth that finds ominous chords and distant disembodied vocals drifting across sparse, expressive percussion. Around halfway in, Barr unleashes some of those nightmarishly repetitive Orthrelm-esque tremolo runs he’s so good at as Wyskida’s exquisitely clattering drumming picks up in intensity, but rather than linearly building to an all-too-predictable crescendo, the piece seems to ebb and flow in intensity, maintaining an uneasy tension as it drifts through labyrinthine corridors of sinister drones and maddeningly nimble riffs that erupt out of nowhere. 

The remaining tracks are much, much shorter but by no means throwaway – ‘Song Of The Beyonders’ pairs skeletal yet emotive black metal riffs with haunting folk melodies from Judith Berkson, as Wyskida keeps a brisk, jazzy pace beneath, whilst a genuinely psychedelic flavour bubbles out of ‘Buildings Of Skin’s stargazing licks and spacious cymbal splashes. Following the tension of ‘The Overmold’, these three pieces feel like a welcome exhale and feel even more expansive as a result, despite their shorter length. This collaboration could have been an hour of sparse noodling and it would probably still have been compelling, but there’s a real depth and understated beauty to the finished result that rewards attentive listening. 

Having successfully made the leap from bedroom project to full band effort with 2022’s Black Blood, this fifth full-length could be UK black metal outfit Abduction’s most powerful and fully realised work yet. On the themes behind Existentialismus, vocalist and head honcho A|V has explained that in contrast to previous works, which maintained a hope that humanity was on the cusp of some sort of “epoch-defining alteration of consciousness”, this album finds him coming to terms with that being “probably just a pipe dream which we will never reach,” with mankind heading towards nothing more than “mutually assured destruction” instead. Earlier Abduction albums like All Pain As Penance were fueled less by the genre’s typical misanthropy and more a mystical, bestial otherness that seemed to lurk just beyond the reach of human perception, but now that a robust hatred for mankind has begun to more severely impact the band’s writing process, it’s wielded with neither relish nor pride, but a deep, profound sadness that flows like a river through songs like crushing 11-minute closer ‘Vomiting At Baalbek’ or the yearning ‘Razors Of Occam’, complete with achingly sad chanted vocals swirling amidst stoic tremolo picked riffs. 

‘Truth Is As Sharp A Sword As Vengeance’ goes even further with forlorn clean vocals lending a gothic flavour to the band’s caustic grimness, with a sample of David Lynch’s iconic interview with actor Harry Dean Stanton (“How would you like to be remembered?” /  “Doesn’t matter.”) heightening the nihilistic atmosphere. The seething ‘Pyramidia Liberi’, meanwhile, balances this sense of sorrow with a more abrasive approach, with absolutely ferocious riffing and skin-flaying blasts (courtesy of Beyond Grace drummer Ed Gorrod) colliding with bitterly morose melodies and tortured, expressive howls. Boasting massive production from Ian Boult at Nottingham’s Stuck On A Name Studios, it’s a huge step up from Abduction’s solo era on a sonic level and as much as a songwriting one too, with the vast, obsidian guitar tone carrying a genuine darkness with it. A lot of black metal’s bleakness can seem juvenile or, worse, self-parodic, but here it’s very much earned, lending this album an authentic emotional weight all of its own.

London post metal quartet Wren’s third album feels particularly emotionally charged too; their music always has done, of course, but after the band lost a close friend to suicide over the lockdown period, there’s an even more cathartic quality to Black Rain Falls, alongside an ever deeper undercurrent of darkness. If 2020’s Groundswells found the band pushing beyond the early Isis worship of their debut Auburn Rule into subtler, more ethereal territory, Black Rain Falls feels like a perfect middle ground between the two. Opener ‘Flowers Of Earth’ and the caustic ‘Betrayal Of The Self’ dish out hulking great riffs, earth-quaking grooves and some of guitarist Owen Jones’ most impassioned roars yet, but tracks like the eight minute ‘Toil In The Undergrowth’ expand the band’s sound into more meditative terrain, whilst ‘Precede The Flint’s gloomy, looping intro seemingly has more in common with Slint than, say, Cult Of Luna (well, until those huge lumbering riffs come crashing down during the song’s climax, of course). 

Despite the heavy subject matter and outpouring of negative feelings, Black Rain Falls isn’t an entirely bleak record – the huge, yearning chords and clean, swelling licks that punctuate ‘Metric Of Grief’ allow a glimmer of hope into Wren’s tumultuous pummel, whilst also making the record’s darker moments feel even more powerful by contrast. At a lean 36 minutes, it’s their shortest record yet too, with nary an ounce of flab on it – even the delicate ambient interlude ‘Cerebral Drift’ feels integral to the record’s flow, helping the gut-punching riffing that follows to hit even harder. After all they’ve been through, here’s hoping this record was as cathartic for these guys to make as it is to listen to. 

This London quartet’s take on dark, cavernous death metal has always felt pretty unique, even as far back as their 2020 demo – but as the artfully gruesome, almost Unsane-esque cover art for their second full-length (and Relapse debut) suggests, the violence at their heart of their sound has come into an almost uncomfortably clear focus here. From the second the vivid title track kicks off the record, it’s immediately apparent the band have upped their game; the riffs are even more memorably sinister, the precision blasting hits even harder and vocalist Jo Chen’s guttural bellows and high-pitched shrieks sound more unhinged than ever.

Whilst a lot of death metal takes a shlocky, splatter movie approach to themes of violence and gore, there’s a disquieting realism at the core of Vacuous’ sound – In His Blood feels less like cheering along as another zombie head is splattered on your favourite moth-eaten VHS tape, and more like the abject despair that grips you whilst watching death tolls rise on the daily news (especially the enveloping gloom of ‘Public Humiliation’, a macabre churn likely to send chills down your spine). There’s a visceral quality to the record’s subject matter you don’t often find in death metal. Take songs like ‘Stress Positions’ or ‘Flesh Parade’ for instance; these songs deliver break-neck tremolo riffing and meaty chugging by the bucketload, but the subtle melodies that creep into each conjure a genuinely morbid atmosphere that sticks with you long after their pit-ready grooves have faded out. The band even cite The Cure as inspiration for the hauntingly ethereal ‘Hunger’, which alternates between lumbering death-doom riffage à la Spectral Voice and forlorn clean guitar swells that certainly would have felt at home on Disintegration. Death metal isn’t usually this emotive, but in Vacuous’ hands, it feels absolutely devastating.

In His Blood isn’t the only essential death metal record arriving this month – Denmark’s Phrenelith have finally unveiled their third full-length Ashen Womb, and it’s another cast iron banger. 2021’s Chimaera already felt like an even darker follow-up to the modern classic that is 2017’s Desolate Endscape, but Ashen Womb goes even further, heightening the crushing weight of the band’s mid-paced churn without plunging into full blown death-doom territory. New drummer Andreas Nordgreen (of Chaotian fame) does a fine job behind the kit, balancing leaden grooves with brutish hammer-blasts, even if he is a little buried in the mix at times (one feels that’s due to the suffocating density of the guitar tone here more than anything else). 

There are plenty of bands mining a similarly dark vein in the genre at the moment, but what really elevates Phrenelith above their peers is not just the rotten, intensely bleak atmosphere but also the memorability and infectiousness of their song-writing. There’s an economy to the structure of songs like ‘Lithopaedion’ (a term referencing a calcified stone fetus, if you were wondering) that foregoes the indulgent sprawl of many of their peers in favour of the punchier, more direct approach of the some of the genre’s godfathers – albeit smothered with liberal splashes of cavernous grime, of course. When the band do stretch things out, as on the six-minute ‘Nebulae’ or almost 10-minute title track, they suck you in with a terrifyingly persistent quicksand-like quality. Ashen Womb may not sway you if you’re not already on board with Phrenelith, but for the faithful this is yet another nourishing refinement of their intoxicatingly dark sound, and some of the finest straight-up death metal around.

It’s been a full decade since we last heard from heavy metal traditionalists Christian Mistress, but as soon as you hit play on this fourth full-length and that rollicking great riff that kicks off ‘City Of Gold’ roars into earshot, it’s as if they’ve never been away. Whilst firmly rooted in the genre’s 1980s heyday, there’s a uniquely passionate quality to the band’s approach that really helps them stand out – the soaring yet raspy vocals of frontwoman Christine Davis certainly help with this, adding bags of personality and an authentically raw, heartfelt edge that many similar acts who opt for more operatic wailing sorely lack. Davis’ triumphant pipes don’t seem to have aged at all over the past 10 years, giving tracks like ‘Voiceless’ an even more emotive quality – on the soaring hooks of up-tempo rocker ‘Demon’s Night’, meanwhile, she sounds like Stevie Nicks if she’d grown up on whiskey and NWOBHM rather than cocaine and blues.

There’s a more rocking swagger to Children Of The Earth overall, with the driving boogie ‘Death Blade’, shimmeringly poppy chorus of ‘Shadow’ and the Thin Lizzy-esque dual guitar licks of ‘Lake Of Memory’ harking back even further than the band’s usual influences. At the same time however, that yearning melancholy spirit that made Agony And Opium so addictive is still lurking beneath the surface, especially on the Priest-meets Coven bombast of single ‘Mythmaker’. Children Of The Earth may not outdo the band’s best material, but it’s further proof that Christian Mistress are one of the most singular voices of this era’s trad heavy metal revivalism. It’s good to have them back.