Behold! The Monolith
Defender, Redeemist
BTM Records

As proven before, Behold! The Monolith’s stoner sludge is for subhumans only, and it is on Defender, Redeemist, their second full-length, that the LA trio delve further into the subterranean, digging out their descent with sledgehammers, not shovels. Defender, Redeemist is rife with ground and pound riffs, and tracks like “Halv King,” “Desolizator,” “We Are the Worm,” and “Witch Hunt Supreme” are a glorious feast of mud pies and smegma cakes, each one belching out High On Fire fury amidst tremulous and atmospheric aggression. However, it’s on the album’s three longest songs, “Redeemist,” “Cast On The Black/Lamentor/Guided By The Southern Cross,” and “Bull Colossi,” that the band is at its most heinous, laying down an ageless, soul-sucking black metal doom that ebbs, flows, and screams in myriad glorious ways. Add to that Billy Anderson’s production work and Dusty Peterson’s art work (which kind of reminds me of a re-imagined Screaming for Vengeance), and Defender, Redeemist is one hell of a monster on so many different levels.

Listen to “Halv King” from Defender, Redeemist!

Blood Ceremony
Living With the Ancients
Rise Above

It’s been three years since Toronto’s Blood Ceremony drew us into their sect of satyrs with their self-titled debut, binding us to dungeon walls until such a time our sacrifice was desired, and it seems that moment has indeed arrived. Sorcerers of retro ritual rock, Blood Ceremony lay down doom-powered riffs over top hellfire organ, but their weapon of choice is the dark mistress Alia O’Brien, whose mastery of voice and flute are the spells that bind and hypnotize. Like its predecessor, Living With the Ancients is a bone-carved chalice overflowing with the fog of a pagan prog potion, and where one ends with a hymn to Pan the other begins with another such ode to the great half-man, half-goat God, thus continuing the sacred bloodline of influence and imagery that courses through all they do. You’ll also find demons, witches, hermits, magicians, ancient Roman priests, and W. Somerset Maugham’s caricature of Aleister Crowley at this monster’s ball, a medieval European masquerade not unlike the pentagram parties thrown by The Devil’s Blood, Ghost, Year of the Goat, Witchcraft, and so on. So, go ahead, offer yourself up to Blood Ceremony’s wicked ways. You’ll be glad you did.

Listen to “My Demon Brother” from Living With the Ancients!

In the first movie, you’ve got these six chicks, all of ‘em adrenaline junkies, who take a vacation in the Appalachian Mountains to go cave diving. Although it’s more like cave crawling, because these are unexplored caves without much room, see, and since the goal of these movies, as much as I can gather, is to make you squirm one way or another, they lean heavily on the claustrophobic button. So there they are, crawling through rocky cracks deep in the Earth’s belly, in these unmarked, unexplored caves (because that’s more of a thrill despite the fact that no one knows where you are) with dust, debris, and water falling all around them. They don’t really know where the hell they’re going, so they just keep making their way deeper and deeper. Then there’s a mini avalanche of some sort and their only way out has just been cut off. The rocks also fell on one of their equipment bags; the one with the rope, so that’s a major setback. Anyway, this shit goes on for about an hour, and will only really make you uncomfortable if you hate the dark and have a major fear of being trapped in a small space. Or buried alive. For everyone else it’s 60 minutes of watching six women crawl around in caves. But then, finally, the cave monsters show up.

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