Like how I was saying in the recent Faun review, there has been a rise in more classic/traditional instruments in the rock/metal. Jo Quail has been one of the leading lights in challenging expectations of what sort of acts can be featured on a metal festival like up.
As a cellist, composer and experimental musician, she has released six previous records as well as countless collaborations with many metal bands, becoming an established name on the UK scene and beyond.
Notan is album number seven but it's something of precursor. These are the beginnings of a project that will culminate with a full orchestral album in 2025 called Ianus, Notan then marks the beginning of that project, the cursory sketches of a much bigger ending.
Notan is the Japanese concept of the interplay between light and dark, Jo uses cello, electric cello and piano to curate these soundscapes, the sound design as usual is superb, the instruments all creating their own paths through the songs.
First Rain is beautiful, just a piano piece that works on space, quietness but the album opens with Butterfly Dance, a track a lot more aggressive than it's namesake, invoking matriarchal authority it's an epic, industrial beginning to this record that shifts into Rex.
A song that has a history, having been around since 2010, it's gone through several changes to the what it is today, a nine minute piece of majesty that is a rightful first single to this album that is about duality, both extreme darkness and shimmering light experience here.
Each track is live, captured as if it's one of those lauded performances at Arctangent et al but with all the trappings of a studio environment. An album that balances polarity, Notan maybe a beginning to something bigger but it's an evocative wonderful record in its own right. 9/10
Korp – And Darker It Shall Become (Independent) [Spike]
Sometimes a band doesn’t just make music, they conjure an atmosphere so tangible it feels like standing in the teeth of a storm. With And Darker It Shall Become, Korp channel that sensation across ten tracks of melodic blackened death metal that balance complete aggression with grim, almost cinematic grandeur.
From the moment Blood Upon the Throne erupts, you’re flung into a maelstrom of tremolo riffs, blast beats, and scalding vocal lines that could strip paint. It’s a hell of a hook straight out of the gate and within 30 seconds I knew this one wasn’t letting go. Furious Tempest Rise lives up to its name, a surge of speed and venom that blasted through my speakers making the walls shake, but later in headphones I picked out subtle guitar textures under the chaos, those icy little details that reward focus.
I Swear Allegiance takes on a ritualistic bent, its mid-tempo churn giving the impression of a march into darkness. It transported me straight back to watching a winter sky collapse over the Norfolk countryside, cold, endless, and strangely comforting. Bloodstorms pushes harder, riding that galloping blackened death current into something both punishing and strangely exhilarating.
The centrepiece for me was The Ritual. Here the band lean into atmosphere bringing layered guitars, sharp shifts in pacing, and a vocal performance that feels genuinely incantatory. It’s the kind of track that makes headphones essential, as if the whole song is whispering arcane promises behind the obvious savagery. Heaven Ablaze follows with searing immediacy, a torch held against the night sky, blazing with righteous fury.
As the record heads into its final act, The Night’s Embrace slows into shadowy melodicism delivering a haunting yet heavy reminder that brutality can carry strange beauty. Black Winter Masses and Feast Upon The Spineless snap the intensity back with sharp, precise riffing that recalls Dissection’s cold fury without imitation. And then Graced By Flames closes things out, an infernal curtain call that feels final yet leaves you craving another descent.
Production-wise, it’s raw enough to keep the blackened bite intact, but polished enough that the orchestrations and harmonies don’t drown in the maelstrom. I listened to this in the car and it’s pure firepower, each riff like a hammer blow. It’s a recipe for a speeding ticket but on headphones it becomes a different beast, layered, immersive, and suffocating in the best possible way.
Korp don’t just play blackened death metal, they make it feel alive, as if the songs themselves are entities clawing into existence. And Darker It Shall Become is as much ritual as a record, and one of those rare albums that hits hard no matter how or where you listen.
Unrelenting yet immersive, savage yet strangely beautiful. Korp have carved a ritual in sound, and stepping inside it is irresistible. 9/10
Condition Critical – Degeneration Chamber (Independent) [Spike]
This isn’t nostalgia; it’s a revival drenched in fire. Condition Critical’s Degeneration Chamber crashes in not with fanfare, but with friction and keeps grinding. Nine tracks, just under 34 minutes, but even the silence between riffs feels violent.
The riffs are industrial in their precision, but in headphones the layers reveal themselves: sneaky tempo shifts, bass lines that crawl beneath chaos, and drums that feel like marrow-deep bruisers.
Opening track Wretched Aggression sets the tone being a warpath-cut opener that hooks without asking permission. Then Deconstructive Horrors slams you into a pit bringing unexpected angles, stuttering rhythms, riff curves that feel like ambushes. Cranial Dissolution coughs up skull-melting fretwork, while Hydroponic Mutation suddenly flips into a creeping, almost dissonant groove that drips dread.
Postmortal Simulation is the track I kept looping. It’s a weird, echo-laden duel of melody and collapse. The kind of song that transports you into a rusted processing unit. It’s relentless but strangely reflective. From there, Psychological Epidemic and Incubation Disposal mash morbidity and cadence into something you can’t look away from.
Even the titles feel like lab notes scribbled in a panic. Cryonic Intestinal Preservation is as unsettling as it sounds, cold, clinical, and unforgiving. The closer, Excarnation, is a last-gasp choleric chant, dense, urgent, and final.
This album doesn’t just revive brutal thrash; it masterfully layers it with complexity. The riffs twist unpredictably, the rhythm is rarely static, and the band never lets the engine idle. One moment, you’re locked into a gallop: the next, the floor shifts beneath you. Think Demolition Hammer with existential dread or a juke-box funeral.
Surgical thrash that leaves everything laid bare. Degeneration Chamber isn’t lean, it’s leaner, meaner, and honed to cut. 8/10
The Switch - No Way Out (Frontiers Music Srl) [Matt Bladen]
The Switch are new band but with members who will be familiar to fans of melodic rock/AOR. Formed by twin brothers Tom and James Martin (Nitrate/ex-Vega), Cruzh bassist Dennis Butabi Borg and singer Bobby John, The Switch are another band from the Martin brothers that greatly pulls from the FM Rock/AOR sound of the mid 80's.
Filled with nostalgia, Dennis Butabi Borg compares it to "steering a Testarossa in the Outrun arcade machine while chewing Juicy Fruits and cranking music on your walkman" so the sun is low in the sky, everything glimmers with neon and the hazy days turn into hot and crazy nights, inspiring you to cling on to the last bit of summer even in a stone lashed September.
It's the first record that Tom and James had complete control over so this is their music, what inspires them, what they like to listen to and the perfect distillation of what they want a band to sound like, built on a concept of a band on a US Tour who get involved with an underworld mob, it sounds like the sort of 80's slop I would happily watch, especially if this was the soundtrack.
With No Way Out, The Switch debut an album with plenty of experience within it. AOR/FM Radio Rock that's slickly delivered and perfectly retro. 8/10
As a cellist, composer and experimental musician, she has released six previous records as well as countless collaborations with many metal bands, becoming an established name on the UK scene and beyond.
Notan is album number seven but it's something of precursor. These are the beginnings of a project that will culminate with a full orchestral album in 2025 called Ianus, Notan then marks the beginning of that project, the cursory sketches of a much bigger ending.
Notan is the Japanese concept of the interplay between light and dark, Jo uses cello, electric cello and piano to curate these soundscapes, the sound design as usual is superb, the instruments all creating their own paths through the songs.
First Rain is beautiful, just a piano piece that works on space, quietness but the album opens with Butterfly Dance, a track a lot more aggressive than it's namesake, invoking matriarchal authority it's an epic, industrial beginning to this record that shifts into Rex.
A song that has a history, having been around since 2010, it's gone through several changes to the what it is today, a nine minute piece of majesty that is a rightful first single to this album that is about duality, both extreme darkness and shimmering light experience here.
Each track is live, captured as if it's one of those lauded performances at Arctangent et al but with all the trappings of a studio environment. An album that balances polarity, Notan maybe a beginning to something bigger but it's an evocative wonderful record in its own right. 9/10
Korp – And Darker It Shall Become (Independent) [Spike]
Sometimes a band doesn’t just make music, they conjure an atmosphere so tangible it feels like standing in the teeth of a storm. With And Darker It Shall Become, Korp channel that sensation across ten tracks of melodic blackened death metal that balance complete aggression with grim, almost cinematic grandeur.
From the moment Blood Upon the Throne erupts, you’re flung into a maelstrom of tremolo riffs, blast beats, and scalding vocal lines that could strip paint. It’s a hell of a hook straight out of the gate and within 30 seconds I knew this one wasn’t letting go. Furious Tempest Rise lives up to its name, a surge of speed and venom that blasted through my speakers making the walls shake, but later in headphones I picked out subtle guitar textures under the chaos, those icy little details that reward focus.
I Swear Allegiance takes on a ritualistic bent, its mid-tempo churn giving the impression of a march into darkness. It transported me straight back to watching a winter sky collapse over the Norfolk countryside, cold, endless, and strangely comforting. Bloodstorms pushes harder, riding that galloping blackened death current into something both punishing and strangely exhilarating.
The centrepiece for me was The Ritual. Here the band lean into atmosphere bringing layered guitars, sharp shifts in pacing, and a vocal performance that feels genuinely incantatory. It’s the kind of track that makes headphones essential, as if the whole song is whispering arcane promises behind the obvious savagery. Heaven Ablaze follows with searing immediacy, a torch held against the night sky, blazing with righteous fury.
As the record heads into its final act, The Night’s Embrace slows into shadowy melodicism delivering a haunting yet heavy reminder that brutality can carry strange beauty. Black Winter Masses and Feast Upon The Spineless snap the intensity back with sharp, precise riffing that recalls Dissection’s cold fury without imitation. And then Graced By Flames closes things out, an infernal curtain call that feels final yet leaves you craving another descent.
Production-wise, it’s raw enough to keep the blackened bite intact, but polished enough that the orchestrations and harmonies don’t drown in the maelstrom. I listened to this in the car and it’s pure firepower, each riff like a hammer blow. It’s a recipe for a speeding ticket but on headphones it becomes a different beast, layered, immersive, and suffocating in the best possible way.
Korp don’t just play blackened death metal, they make it feel alive, as if the songs themselves are entities clawing into existence. And Darker It Shall Become is as much ritual as a record, and one of those rare albums that hits hard no matter how or where you listen.
Unrelenting yet immersive, savage yet strangely beautiful. Korp have carved a ritual in sound, and stepping inside it is irresistible. 9/10
Condition Critical – Degeneration Chamber (Independent) [Spike]
This isn’t nostalgia; it’s a revival drenched in fire. Condition Critical’s Degeneration Chamber crashes in not with fanfare, but with friction and keeps grinding. Nine tracks, just under 34 minutes, but even the silence between riffs feels violent.
The riffs are industrial in their precision, but in headphones the layers reveal themselves: sneaky tempo shifts, bass lines that crawl beneath chaos, and drums that feel like marrow-deep bruisers.
Opening track Wretched Aggression sets the tone being a warpath-cut opener that hooks without asking permission. Then Deconstructive Horrors slams you into a pit bringing unexpected angles, stuttering rhythms, riff curves that feel like ambushes. Cranial Dissolution coughs up skull-melting fretwork, while Hydroponic Mutation suddenly flips into a creeping, almost dissonant groove that drips dread.
Postmortal Simulation is the track I kept looping. It’s a weird, echo-laden duel of melody and collapse. The kind of song that transports you into a rusted processing unit. It’s relentless but strangely reflective. From there, Psychological Epidemic and Incubation Disposal mash morbidity and cadence into something you can’t look away from.
Even the titles feel like lab notes scribbled in a panic. Cryonic Intestinal Preservation is as unsettling as it sounds, cold, clinical, and unforgiving. The closer, Excarnation, is a last-gasp choleric chant, dense, urgent, and final.
This album doesn’t just revive brutal thrash; it masterfully layers it with complexity. The riffs twist unpredictably, the rhythm is rarely static, and the band never lets the engine idle. One moment, you’re locked into a gallop: the next, the floor shifts beneath you. Think Demolition Hammer with existential dread or a juke-box funeral.
Surgical thrash that leaves everything laid bare. Degeneration Chamber isn’t lean, it’s leaner, meaner, and honed to cut. 8/10
The Switch - No Way Out (Frontiers Music Srl) [Matt Bladen]
The Switch are new band but with members who will be familiar to fans of melodic rock/AOR. Formed by twin brothers Tom and James Martin (Nitrate/ex-Vega), Cruzh bassist Dennis Butabi Borg and singer Bobby John, The Switch are another band from the Martin brothers that greatly pulls from the FM Rock/AOR sound of the mid 80's.
Filled with nostalgia, Dennis Butabi Borg compares it to "steering a Testarossa in the Outrun arcade machine while chewing Juicy Fruits and cranking music on your walkman" so the sun is low in the sky, everything glimmers with neon and the hazy days turn into hot and crazy nights, inspiring you to cling on to the last bit of summer even in a stone lashed September.
It's the first record that Tom and James had complete control over so this is their music, what inspires them, what they like to listen to and the perfect distillation of what they want a band to sound like, built on a concept of a band on a US Tour who get involved with an underworld mob, it sounds like the sort of 80's slop I would happily watch, especially if this was the soundtrack.
With No Way Out, The Switch debut an album with plenty of experience within it. AOR/FM Radio Rock that's slickly delivered and perfectly retro. 8/10
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