Review: Jack Harlon & The Dead Crows – Inexorable Opposites (2026)
Melbourne’s Jack Harlon & The Dead Crows built their mythology around a drug-addicted gunslinger moving through a science fiction Western landscape.
Author: Lihi Laszlo
De Mortem et Diabolum 2025: Personal Highlights
Another December in Berlin, another weekend spent hiding from the sleet inside the massive concrete shell of the ORWOhaus for De Mortem et Diabolum.
Review: The Howling Void – The Glow Of A Distant Fire (2025)
The April 2025 release of The Glow Of A Distant Fire, the ninth full-length album by The Howling Void, the monolithic, San Antonio, Texas-based one-person project of Ryan Wilson, is less an evolution than a culmination of his symphonic funeral doom style, immediately asserting itself as a standard for the genre. While deeply rooted in the genre’s defining characteristics of glacial pacing and oppressive atmosphere, the album distinguishes itself by leveraging immense soundscapes, aimed for intense philosophical introspection.
Beyond the Doom: Lamp of Murmuur – The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy (2025)
This newest album, The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy, is the synthesis of those extremes, a commandingly ambitious work that finds M. channeling the dark theatricality of the past while pushing the speed and grandeur established on the previous record.
Swordman of Doom: A tribute to Tatsuya Nakadai
The cinematic legacy of Nakadai, born Motohisa Nakadai in Tokyo in 1932, finds its foundation in a unique artistic discipline. He maintained throughout his life a primary dedication to the stage, grounding his entire career in the rigorous, psychologically focused principles of the Shingeki drama movement. This training in realism gave his screen presence a distinct quality: a profound articulator of internal conflict, his characters were defined by a reserved demeanor, a powerful intensity, and an emotional control that differentiated his style from the more physically explosive performances of his peers.
Review: Pilgrimage – From Amber to Sun (2025)
Attention! Pilgrimage have unleashed their second album, From Amber to Sun, an overwhelming masterclass in Death-Doom Metal saturation. This cross-border alliance, anchored by musicians from Malta and The Netherlands, constructs sloe, monolithic structures of sound. Titanic low-end frequencies and ice-age tempos establish an immense, terrifying scale.
DOOM CINEMA: PI (1998)
The greatest lesson we take from Pi today is the terrifying clarity of its warning. We learn that the relentless pursuit of absolute pattern and predictability can destroy the self. The film holds a mirror to our current obsession with algorithmic governance and big data prediction. We are increasingly seeking the definitive formula – be it in finance, politics, or social media, that promises to eliminate chance and deliver perfect control. Pi is relevant today because it cautions us against the inherent doom of believing the universe is reducible to a sequence of inputs and outputs.
Review: Evoken – Mendacium (2025)
Evoken stands as one of the fundamental pillars of American extreme doom metal. Formed in 1992 (under the initial name Funereus), this New Jersey collective has spent over three decades helping to define the sound of funeral doom – a genre characterized by its glacial pace, overwhelming psychological gravity, and mournful atmosphere.
Review: Spaceship Landing: A Tribute to KYUSS (2025)
Released by the digital label Witching Cult, this twenty-track collection gathers a global lineup to honor the architects of desert rock. A map of fuzz and heat drawn anew, tracing the dry pulse of Palm Desert through bands scattered across the world: France, Italy, USA, Norway, Germany, Spain, Finland, Australia… what unites them is the enduring current that runs through Kyuss: that raw desert pulse carried forward in new hands, and reimagined under different suns.
Review: Death Has Spoken – Elegy (2025)
Formed in 2017 in Białystok, Poland, Death Has Spoken have grown into a reliable presence within the country’s doom/death scene. Poland keeps a firm grip on its doom offerings, and this band stands near its center – serious, unhurried, and fully grounded in craft. Now releasing their third full-length, Elegy, they sound mature, massive, direct, and always within reach.
