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1000 results for “empire_state_building_lights”
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Tonight the Empire State Building will be lit signature white.
#NYC -
Tonight the Empire State Building will be lit yellow in honor of HYROX’s Return to NYC.
#NYC -
Tonight the Empire State Building will be lit red, white, and blue in honor of Memorial Day.
#NYC -
Tonight the Empire State Building will be lit red, white, and blue in honor of Memorial Day.
#NYC -
Tonight the Empire State Building will be lit maroon in honor of Fordham University's Commencement.
#NYC -
Tonight the Empire State Building will be lit red & white stripes, blue, and gold in honor of 50 Days out from Sail4th 250.
#NYC -
Tonight the Empire State Building will be lit signature white.
#NYC -
Empire State Building is lit up in red, black, and green tonight to commemorate Martin Luther King Day.
Happy Martin Luther King Day everyone!
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Empire State Building is lit up in red, black, and green tonight to commemorate Martin Luther King Day.
Happy Martin Luther King Day everyone!
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‘March to May the 4th’ lights up New York City as Empire State Building feels the Force
#EmpireStateBuilding #ImperialMarch
The Imperial March trooped its way to the Empire State Building to begin the March to May the 4th..
https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/film-music-tv/march-to-may-the-4th-lights-up-new-york-city-as-empire-state-building-feels-the-force/?feed_id=20551 -
New York City Travel, Food, and Highlights – 2025
A couple of weeks ago, Selene and I took a family trip to New York. We did some cool stuff — some of it, rather touristy perhaps, but cool stuff nonetheless. I was going to show you a few highlights in a Monday update post, but then I ended up with about 280 pictures to go through.
Anyway, it was too much to be part of anything else. So here you go: here are pictures of cool things we did or delicious food that we ate.
Day 1
Arrival and Train Rides
We flew into JFK airport reasonably early in the day, then took the Long Island Rail Road into the city.
As we waited for our train to get to the station, I have a brief meeting with some locals.
Personally, I enjoy train rides. I find them relaxing.
We got off at Grand Central, which is always fun to explore. Here’s the ceiling.
From Grand Central, our intention was to walk to our hotel, but we got tired of lugging our suitcases around. So we cabbed it!
The Nintendo Store
After dropping our bags off at the hotel, we started a slow migration toward the Empire State building… but we weren’t due there until after sunset. Time for plenty of stops along the way… the first of which… was the Nintendo Store.
Super touristy. Very crowded. Do not recommend. Not really sure what all the fuss is about, but hey, I got to see Mario, Luigi, and Link.
There was also a Pikachu, but there were far too many people around to take a picture.
Next, more walking! By this point, we all realized that we hadn’t really eaten much all day, so we stopped and got a hot dog.
Selene maintains that this hot dog was delicious. I, however, believe that we were all just very hungry.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
This is like the second or third time we’ve tried to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I don’t remember what happened before to cause the mission to fail, but we always found the doors locked.
We were very happy to find them unlocked and open this time.
There was actually a wedding service going on. I thought it was interesting that you could just walk in while people were getting married. There was some very beautiful music playing and the pipe organ was epic — you could really feel it in the core of your being.
It’s got crazy ceilings.
New York Public Library
It was getting later in the day, but it still wasn’t dark enough for the nighttime view of the city we were hoping to get at Empire, so there was time for one more stop: The New York Public Library.
The ceiling of the upper floor is painted beautifully. Yes, lots of crazy ceilings in NY.
Okay, call me uninformed if you wish, as I hadn’t been to any sort of physical library in a long time, but I really expected to see books somewhere inside.
“Where can we see some books?” I asked one of the attendants. I really just wanted to experience the smell of old books. You know? Libraries have a smell.
He educated that all of the books are kept underground in Bryant Park — and you have to make a request to have them brought up to you. Go figure.
And with that minor disappointment, it was finally dark enough outside.
The Empire State Building
Is it possible to do anything in New York City that is more touristy than the Empire State building? I don’t think so.
And you obviously have to pose inside of King Kong’s hand.
Here’s a couple of pictures of the view from the observation floor that is fully enclosed by windows.
And here’s a couple of pics from the top where everything is out in the open air.
Aren’t we cute?
Tacombi
By the time we descended back to ground level, we realized we were all very hungry again. On the same block, there’s a little taco place called Tacombi, so we popped in. It was delicious.
I actually got a burrito, but it was still delicious. And the churros are from a Christmas market that was going on in Bryant Park.
Day 2
The second day of our trip started with more walking.
This is a building shaped like a trunk.
Liberty Bagels
Is it legal to visit New York without getting a bagel? I don’t think it should be.
We waited in a giant line at Liberty Bagels. That place is ridiculously packed — and rightfully so, their bagels are delicious and they have an insane selection of cream cheeses.
I got their famous Rainbow Bagel, topped with half blueberry and half strawberry cream cheese. It was really good.
Central Park
This is probably one of my favorite places in New York. I’d like to go on a warm, Spring day to have a picnic.
And then all of a sudden, a thick fog rolled in and covered the tops of buildings.
And it started to rain. We took shelter in a nearby tunnel as we listened to a street performer play some classical guitar songs.
Then, off to the museum!
The MET Museum
The MET is one of those places where you could literally walk around all day and not be done.
I mean, I frequently search their archives for pictures of ancient stuff to use for the articles that I write, so seeing it in person is always awesome.
Like artwork on amphorae…
Or statues of dudes and carvings of stuff…
And look, it’s Pan! IO Pan!
And I can always get lost in the Ancient Egyptian wing…
They were currently doing an exhibition called “Divine Egypt.”
Yeah, of the nearly 300 photos I took, most of them are from the MET. I could have probably done an entire post just with those pictures.
And we finally got a chance to walk through the instruments section of the museum.
Alright, back to the hotel. It was raining really hard and we all needed a little rest.
Pasta Eater
We wanted to eat pasta, so we went to a place called Pasta Eater. Out of all the many places to eat pasta, however, this one was chosen specifically because they make one of the dishes in a wheel of parmesan cheese.
I’ve never had a bad experience with pasta made inside of a cheese wheel. Have you?
Macy’s
We stopped in at Macy’s flagship store, mostly because I needed a bathroom, but also in hopes that we could recreate some sort of Elf extravaganza by looking at Christmas tree displays through department store windows. There weren’t any decorated windows with trees, unfortunately.
They did have some sort of Christmas village going on in the lower floor, but we arrived 5 minutes after it was shut down and the security guard was very quick to let me know it was closed and that we should all gtfo.
I don’t really understand how a retail store has so many things that it can occupy such a large space. I’ve been in entire shopping malls that are smaller than this one Macy’s store. Capitalism at its finest.
Serendipity 3
Don’t worry. Even though we ate all that pasta earlier, we saved room for dessert.
We stopped into Serendipity 3 without a reservation and were initially told that it would be 45 minutes for a table. After some brief witchcraft, they sat us immediately.
After all, we just wanted to try their famous hot chocolate.
We got the s’mores flavor and it was unexpectedly delightful.
Pizza
As much as there should be a law against visiting New York without getting a bagel, there should also be one about pizza.
But I don’t care about bagels so much as I do pizza. And it doesn’t matter how much food we’ve already eaten or what time of day it is… if I walk by 20 different places that say “$1.50 Pizza” in neon lights, I’m going to have to go get one sooner or later.
And then it was time for bed.
Day 3
We had to check out of our hotel in the morning, but they held our bags for us so we could continue wandering around the city for a while.
I don’t know what this building is, but I guess I thought it looked cool, so I took a few pictures of it.
Our first stop of the day was a bookstore… uhhh… sorry, but I’m a little light on the details here. It was supposed to be where the filmed the tv show You or something like that. It didn’t catch my interest at all, so I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we sat outside in the rain for about 20 minutes past their scheduled opening time and nobody ever opened the store.
After that, we went to a little underground subway mall to check out some comics.
But the final stop of the day… truly the highlight… perhaps even the coolest part of the entire trip… was sushi.
Shirokuro
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to dine in a 2D comic strip? Maybe in a hand-drawn, black and white world?
Well… that’s basically what this place is.
It was pretty trippy.
But aside from the aesthetics, they also had amazing sushi.
I’ve never really been a sushi person. I’ll eat it, but I’ve never been like, “hey, I really want sushi right now.”
They may have converted me.
Seriously, it was that good.
Heading Home
And that was one of our last stops for the trip. We caught an Uber Airport Shuttle at the Port Authority Bus Station and went for a long drive to LaGuardia Airport.
LaGuardia was recently remodeled, apparently. We were there briefly for our last New York visit and it felt like one small, musty room… and the only food option was a tiny little shop that had some donuts, coffee, and snacks. But now… it’s huge! You basically have to walk through an entire shopping mall before you get to the gates. They even have a giant fountain of water that rains down from the ceiling with color-changing lights.
Once we made it past all the shopping, we were greeted by a large fight status display screen that claimed our return flight was cancelled. We continued to the gate to ask questions — there was nobody there, but the gate status said delayed.
And then it got delayed a little bit longer.
And then a little bit longer…
We eventually did make it back to Florida, however. I think in total we lost about 3 hours from the delays. Very happy it wasn’t a cancellation.
#eats #food #metMuseum #newYork #newYorkCity #nyc #pasta #pastaEater #serendipity3 #shirokuro #sushi #travel
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New York City Travel, Food, and Highlights – 2025
A couple of weeks ago, Selene and I took a family trip to New York. We did some cool stuff — some of it, rather touristy perhaps, but cool stuff nonetheless. I was going to show you a few highlights in a Monday update post, but then I ended up with about 280 pictures to go through.
Anyway, it was too much to be part of anything else. So here you go: here are pictures of cool things we did or delicious food that we ate.
Day 1
Arrival and Train Rides
We flew into JFK airport reasonably early in the day, then took the Long Island Rail Road into the city.
As we waited for our train to get to the station, I have a brief meeting with some locals.
Personally, I enjoy train rides. I find them relaxing.
We got off at Grand Central, which is always fun to explore. Here’s the ceiling.
From Grand Central, our intention was to walk to our hotel, but we got tired of lugging our suitcases around. So we cabbed it!
The Nintendo Store
After dropping our bags off at the hotel, we started a slow migration toward the Empire State building… but we weren’t due there until after sunset. Time for plenty of stops along the way… the first of which… was the Nintendo Store.
Super touristy. Very crowded. Do not recommend. Not really sure what all the fuss is about, but hey, I got to see Mario, Luigi, and Link.
There was also a Pikachu, but there were far too many people around to take a picture.
Next, more walking! By this point, we all realized that we hadn’t really eaten much all day, so we stopped and got a hot dog.
Selene maintains that this hot dog was delicious. I, however, believe that we were all just very hungry.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
This is like the second or third time we’ve tried to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I don’t remember what happened before to cause the mission to fail, but we always found the doors locked.
We were very happy to find them unlocked and open this time.
There was actually a wedding service going on. I thought it was interesting that you could just walk in while people were getting married. There was some very beautiful music playing and the pipe organ was epic — you could really feel it in the core of your being.
It’s got crazy ceilings.
New York Public Library
It was getting later in the day, but it still wasn’t dark enough for the nighttime view of the city we were hoping to get at Empire, so there was time for one more stop: The New York Public Library.
The ceiling of the upper floor is painted beautifully. Yes, lots of crazy ceilings in NY.
Okay, call me uninformed if you wish, as I hadn’t been to any sort of physical library in a long time, but I really expected to see books somewhere inside.
“Where can we see some books?” I asked one of the attendants. I really just wanted to experience the smell of old books. You know? Libraries have a smell.
He educated that all of the books are kept underground in Bryant Park — and you have to make a request to have them brought up to you. Go figure.
And with that minor disappointment, it was finally dark enough outside.
The Empire State Building
Is it possible to do anything in New York City that is more touristy than the Empire State building? I don’t think so.
And you obviously have to pose inside of King Kong’s hand.
Here’s a couple of pictures of the view from the observation floor that is fully enclosed by windows.
And here’s a couple of pics from the top where everything is out in the open air.
Aren’t we cute?
Tacombi
By the time we descended back to ground level, we realized we were all very hungry again. On the same block, there’s a little taco place called Tacombi, so we popped in. It was delicious.
I actually got a burrito, but it was still delicious. And the churros are from a Christmas market that was going on in Bryant Park.
Day 2
The second day of our trip started with more walking.
This is a building shaped like a trunk.
Liberty Bagels
Is it legal to visit New York without getting a bagel? I don’t think it should be.
We waited in a giant line at Liberty Bagels. That place is ridiculously packed — and rightfully so, their bagels are delicious and they have an insane selection of cream cheeses.
I got their famous Rainbow Bagel, topped with half blueberry and half strawberry cream cheese. It was really good.
Central Park
This is probably one of my favorite places in New York. I’d like to go on a warm, Spring day to have a picnic.
And then all of a sudden, a thick fog rolled in and covered the tops of buildings.
And it started to rain. We took shelter in a nearby tunnel as we listened to a street performer play some classical guitar songs.
Then, off to the museum!
The MET Museum
The MET is one of those places where you could literally walk around all day and not be done.
I mean, I frequently search their archives for pictures of ancient stuff to use for the articles that I write, so seeing it in person is always awesome.
Like artwork on amphorae…
Or statues of dudes and carvings of stuff…
And look, it’s Pan! IO Pan!
And I can always get lost in the Ancient Egyptian wing…
They were currently doing an exhibition called “Divine Egypt.”
Yeah, of the nearly 300 photos I took, most of them are from the MET. I could have probably done an entire post just with those pictures.
And we finally got a chance to walk through the instruments section of the museum.
Alright, back to the hotel. It was raining really hard and we all needed a little rest.
Pasta Eater
We wanted to eat pasta, so we went to a place called Pasta Eater. Out of all the many places to eat pasta, however, this one was chosen specifically because they make one of the dishes in a wheel of parmesan cheese.
I’ve never had a bad experience with pasta made inside of a cheese wheel. Have you?
Macy’s
We stopped in at Macy’s flagship store, mostly because I needed a bathroom, but also in hopes that we could recreate some sort of Elf extravaganza by looking at Christmas tree displays through department store windows. There weren’t any decorated windows with trees, unfortunately.
They did have some sort of Christmas village going on in the lower floor, but we arrived 5 minutes after it was shut down and the security guard was very quick to let me know it was closed and that we should all gtfo.
I don’t really understand how a retail store has so many things that it can occupy such a large space. I’ve been in entire shopping malls that are smaller than this one Macy’s store. Capitalism at its finest.
Serendipity 3
Don’t worry. Even though we ate all that pasta earlier, we saved room for dessert.
We stopped into Serendipity 3 without a reservation and were initially told that it would be 45 minutes for a table. After some brief witchcraft, they sat us immediately.
After all, we just wanted to try their famous hot chocolate.
We got the s’mores flavor and it was unexpectedly delightful.
Pizza
As much as there should be a law against visiting New York without getting a bagel, there should also be one about pizza.
But I don’t care about bagels so much as I do pizza. And it doesn’t matter how much food we’ve already eaten or what time of day it is… if I walk by 20 different places that say “$1.50 Pizza” in neon lights, I’m going to have to go get one sooner or later.
And then it was time for bed.
Day 3
We had to check out of our hotel in the morning, but they held our bags for us so we could continue wandering around the city for a while.
I don’t know what this building is, but I guess I thought it looked cool, so I took a few pictures of it.
Our first stop of the day was a bookstore… uhhh… sorry, but I’m a little light on the details here. It was supposed to be where the filmed the tv show You or something like that. It didn’t catch my interest at all, so I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we sat outside in the rain for about 20 minutes past their scheduled opening time and nobody ever opened the store.
After that, we went to a little underground subway mall to check out some comics.
But the final stop of the day… truly the highlight… perhaps even the coolest part of the entire trip… was sushi.
Shirokuro
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to dine in a 2D comic strip? Maybe in a hand-drawn, black and white world?
Well… that’s basically what this place is.
It was pretty trippy.
But aside from the aesthetics, they also had amazing sushi.
I’ve never really been a sushi person. I’ll eat it, but I’ve never been like, “hey, I really want sushi right now.”
They may have converted me.
Seriously, it was that good.
Heading Home
And that was one of our last stops for the trip. We caught an Uber Airport Shuttle at the Port Authority Bus Station and went for a long drive to LaGuardia Airport.
LaGuardia was recently remodeled, apparently. We were there briefly for our last New York visit and it felt like one small, musty room… and the only food option was a tiny little shop that had some donuts, coffee, and snacks. But now… it’s huge! You basically have to walk through an entire shopping mall before you get to the gates. They even have a giant fountain of water that rains down from the ceiling with color-changing lights.
Once we made it past all the shopping, we were greeted by a large fight status display screen that claimed our return flight was cancelled. We continued to the gate to ask questions — there was nobody there, but the gate status said delayed.
And then it got delayed a little bit longer.
And then a little bit longer…
We eventually did make it back to Florida, however. I think in total we lost about 3 hours from the delays. Very happy it wasn’t a cancellation.
#eats #food #metMuseum #newYork #newYorkCity #nyc #pasta #pastaEater #serendipity3 #shirokuro #sushi #travel
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New York City Travel, Food, and Highlights – 2025
A couple of weeks ago, Selene and I took a family trip to New York. We did some cool stuff — some of it, rather touristy perhaps, but cool stuff nonetheless. I was going to show you a few highlights in a Monday update post, but then I ended up with about 280 pictures to go through.
Anyway, it was too much to be part of anything else. So here you go: here are pictures of cool things we did or delicious food that we ate.
Day 1
Arrival and Train Rides
We flew into JFK airport reasonably early in the day, then took the Long Island Rail Road into the city.
As we waited for our train to get to the station, I have a brief meeting with some locals.
Personally, I enjoy train rides. I find them relaxing.
We got off at Grand Central, which is always fun to explore. Here’s the ceiling.
From Grand Central, our intention was to walk to our hotel, but we got tired of lugging our suitcases around. So we cabbed it!
The Nintendo Store
After dropping our bags off at the hotel, we started a slow migration toward the Empire State building… but we weren’t due there until after sunset. Time for plenty of stops along the way… the first of which… was the Nintendo Store.
Super touristy. Very crowded. Do not recommend. Not really sure what all the fuss is about, but hey, I got to see Mario, Luigi, and Link.
There was also a Pikachu, but there were far too many people around to take a picture.
Next, more walking! By this point, we all realized that we hadn’t really eaten much all day, so we stopped and got a hot dog.
Selene maintains that this hot dog was delicious. I, however, believe that we were all just very hungry.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
This is like the second or third time we’ve tried to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I don’t remember what happened before to cause the mission to fail, but we always found the doors locked.
We were very happy to find them unlocked and open this time.
There was actually a wedding service going on. I thought it was interesting that you could just walk in while people were getting married. There was some very beautiful music playing and the pipe organ was epic — you could really feel it in the core of your being.
It’s got crazy ceilings.
New York Public Library
It was getting later in the day, but it still wasn’t dark enough for the nighttime view of the city we were hoping to get at Empire, so there was time for one more stop: The New York Public Library.
The ceiling of the upper floor is painted beautifully. Yes, lots of crazy ceilings in NY.
Okay, call me uninformed if you wish, as I hadn’t been to any sort of physical library in a long time, but I really expected to see books somewhere inside.
“Where can we see some books?” I asked one of the attendants. I really just wanted to experience the smell of old books. You know? Libraries have a smell.
He educated that all of the books are kept underground in Bryant Park — and you have to make a request to have them brought up to you. Go figure.
And with that minor disappointment, it was finally dark enough outside.
The Empire State Building
Is it possible to do anything in New York City that is more touristy than the Empire State building? I don’t think so.
And you obviously have to pose inside of King Kong’s hand.
Here’s a couple of pictures of the view from the observation floor that is fully enclosed by windows.
And here’s a couple of pics from the top where everything is out in the open air.
Aren’t we cute?
Tacombi
By the time we descended back to ground level, we realized we were all very hungry again. On the same block, there’s a little taco place called Tacombi, so we popped in. It was delicious.
I actually got a burrito, but it was still delicious. And the churros are from a Christmas market that was going on in Bryant Park.
Day 2
The second day of our trip started with more walking.
This is a building shaped like a trunk.
Liberty Bagels
Is it legal to visit New York without getting a bagel? I don’t think it should be.
We waited in a giant line at Liberty Bagels. That place is ridiculously packed — and rightfully so, their bagels are delicious and they have an insane selection of cream cheeses.
I got their famous Rainbow Bagel, topped with half blueberry and half strawberry cream cheese. It was really good.
Central Park
This is probably one of my favorite places in New York. I’d like to go on a warm, Spring day to have a picnic.
And then all of a sudden, a thick fog rolled in and covered the tops of buildings.
And it started to rain. We took shelter in a nearby tunnel as we listened to a street performer play some classical guitar songs.
Then, off to the museum!
The MET Museum
The MET is one of those places where you could literally walk around all day and not be done.
I mean, I frequently search their archives for pictures of ancient stuff to use for the articles that I write, so seeing it in person is always awesome.
Like artwork on amphorae…
Or statues of dudes and carvings of stuff…
And look, it’s Pan! IO Pan!
And I can always get lost in the Ancient Egyptian wing…
They were currently doing an exhibition called “Divine Egypt.”
Yeah, of the nearly 300 photos I took, most of them are from the MET. I could have probably done an entire post just with those pictures.
And we finally got a chance to walk through the instruments section of the museum.
Alright, back to the hotel. It was raining really hard and we all needed a little rest.
Pasta Eater
We wanted to eat pasta, so we went to a place called Pasta Eater. Out of all the many places to eat pasta, however, this one was chosen specifically because they make one of the dishes in a wheel of parmesan cheese.
I’ve never had a bad experience with pasta made inside of a cheese wheel. Have you?
Macy’s
We stopped in at Macy’s flagship store, mostly because I needed a bathroom, but also in hopes that we could recreate some sort of Elf extravaganza by looking at Christmas tree displays through department store windows. There weren’t any decorated windows with trees, unfortunately.
They did have some sort of Christmas village going on in the lower floor, but we arrived 5 minutes after it was shut down and the security guard was very quick to let me know it was closed and that we should all gtfo.
I don’t really understand how a retail store has so many things that it can occupy such a large space. I’ve been in entire shopping malls that are smaller than this one Macy’s store. Capitalism at its finest.
Serendipity 3
Don’t worry. Even though we ate all that pasta earlier, we saved room for dessert.
We stopped into Serendipity 3 without a reservation and were initially told that it would be 45 minutes for a table. After some brief witchcraft, they sat us immediately.
After all, we just wanted to try their famous hot chocolate.
We got the s’mores flavor and it was unexpectedly delightful.
Pizza
As much as there should be a law against visiting New York without getting a bagel, there should also be one about pizza.
But I don’t care about bagels so much as I do pizza. And it doesn’t matter how much food we’ve already eaten or what time of day it is… if I walk by 20 different places that say “$1.50 Pizza” in neon lights, I’m going to have to go get one sooner or later.
And then it was time for bed.
Day 3
We had to check out of our hotel in the morning, but they held our bags for us so we could continue wandering around the city for a while.
I don’t know what this building is, but I guess I thought it looked cool, so I took a few pictures of it.
Our first stop of the day was a bookstore… uhhh… sorry, but I’m a little light on the details here. It was supposed to be where the filmed the tv show You or something like that. It didn’t catch my interest at all, so I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we sat outside in the rain for about 20 minutes past their scheduled opening time and nobody ever opened the store.
After that, we went to a little underground subway mall to check out some comics.
But the final stop of the day… truly the highlight… perhaps even the coolest part of the entire trip… was sushi.
Shirokuro
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to dine in a 2D comic strip? Maybe in a hand-drawn, black and white world?
Well… that’s basically what this place is.
It was pretty trippy.
But aside from the aesthetics, they also had amazing sushi.
I’ve never really been a sushi person. I’ll eat it, but I’ve never been like, “hey, I really want sushi right now.”
They may have converted me.
Seriously, it was that good.
Heading Home
And that was one of our last stops for the trip. We caught an Uber Airport Shuttle at the Port Authority Bus Station and went for a long drive to LaGuardia Airport.
LaGuardia was recently remodeled, apparently. We were there briefly for our last New York visit and it felt like one small, musty room… and the only food option was a tiny little shop that had some donuts, coffee, and snacks. But now… it’s huge! You basically have to walk through an entire shopping mall before you get to the gates. They even have a giant fountain of water that rains down from the ceiling with color-changing lights.
Once we made it past all the shopping, we were greeted by a large fight status display screen that claimed our return flight was cancelled. We continued to the gate to ask questions — there was nobody there, but the gate status said delayed.
And then it got delayed a little bit longer.
And then a little bit longer…
We eventually did make it back to Florida, however. I think in total we lost about 3 hours from the delays. Very happy it wasn’t a cancellation.
#eats #food #metMuseum #newYork #newYorkCity #nyc #pasta #pastaEater #serendipity3 #shirokuro #sushi #travel
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New York City Travel, Food, and Highlights – 2025
A couple of weeks ago, Selene and I took a family trip to New York. We did some cool stuff — some of it, rather touristy perhaps, but cool stuff nonetheless. I was going to show you a few highlights in a Monday update post, but then I ended up with about 280 pictures to go through.
Anyway, it was too much to be part of anything else. So here you go: here are pictures of cool things we did or delicious food that we ate.
Day 1
Arrival and Train Rides
We flew into JFK airport reasonably early in the day, then took the Long Island Rail Road into the city.
As we waited for our train to get to the station, I have a brief meeting with some locals.
Personally, I enjoy train rides. I find them relaxing.
We got off at Grand Central, which is always fun to explore. Here’s the ceiling.
From Grand Central, our intention was to walk to our hotel, but we got tired of lugging our suitcases around. So we cabbed it!
The Nintendo Store
After dropping our bags off at the hotel, we started a slow migration toward the Empire State building… but we weren’t due there until after sunset. Time for plenty of stops along the way… the first of which… was the Nintendo Store.
Super touristy. Very crowded. Do not recommend. Not really sure what all the fuss is about, but hey, I got to see Mario, Luigi, and Link.
There was also a Pikachu, but there were far too many people around to take a picture.
Next, more walking! By this point, we all realized that we hadn’t really eaten much all day, so we stopped and got a hot dog.
Selene maintains that this hot dog was delicious. I, however, believe that we were all just very hungry.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
This is like the second or third time we’ve tried to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I don’t remember what happened before to cause the mission to fail, but we always found the doors locked.
We were very happy to find them unlocked and open this time.
There was actually a wedding service going on. I thought it was interesting that you could just walk in while people were getting married. There was some very beautiful music playing and the pipe organ was epic — you could really feel it in the core of your being.
It’s got crazy ceilings.
New York Public Library
It was getting later in the day, but it still wasn’t dark enough for the nighttime view of the city we were hoping to get at Empire, so there was time for one more stop: The New York Public Library.
The ceiling of the upper floor is painted beautifully. Yes, lots of crazy ceilings in NY.
Okay, call me uninformed if you wish, as I hadn’t been to any sort of physical library in a long time, but I really expected to see books somewhere inside.
“Where can we see some books?” I asked one of the attendants. I really just wanted to experience the smell of old books. You know? Libraries have a smell.
He educated that all of the books are kept underground in Bryant Park — and you have to make a request to have them brought up to you. Go figure.
And with that minor disappointment, it was finally dark enough outside.
The Empire State Building
Is it possible to do anything in New York City that is more touristy than the Empire State building? I don’t think so.
And you obviously have to pose inside of King Kong’s hand.
Here’s a couple of pictures of the view from the observation floor that is fully enclosed by windows.
And here’s a couple of pics from the top where everything is out in the open air.
Aren’t we cute?
Tacombi
By the time we descended back to ground level, we realized we were all very hungry again. On the same block, there’s a little taco place called Tacombi, so we popped in. It was delicious.
I actually got a burrito, but it was still delicious. And the churros are from a Christmas market that was going on in Bryant Park.
Day 2
The second day of our trip started with more walking.
This is a building shaped like a trunk.
Liberty Bagels
Is it legal to visit New York without getting a bagel? I don’t think it should be.
We waited in a giant line at Liberty Bagels. That place is ridiculously packed — and rightfully so, their bagels are delicious and they have an insane selection of cream cheeses.
I got their famous Rainbow Bagel, topped with half blueberry and half strawberry cream cheese. It was really good.
Central Park
This is probably one of my favorite places in New York. I’d like to go on a warm, Spring day to have a picnic.
And then all of a sudden, a thick fog rolled in and covered the tops of buildings.
And it started to rain. We took shelter in a nearby tunnel as we listened to a street performer play some classical guitar songs.
Then, off to the museum!
The MET Museum
The MET is one of those places where you could literally walk around all day and not be done.
I mean, I frequently search their archives for pictures of ancient stuff to use for the articles that I write, so seeing it in person is always awesome.
Like artwork on amphorae…
Or statues of dudes and carvings of stuff…
And look, it’s Pan! IO Pan!
And I can always get lost in the Ancient Egyptian wing…
They were currently doing an exhibition called “Divine Egypt.”
Yeah, of the nearly 300 photos I took, most of them are from the MET. I could have probably done an entire post just with those pictures.
And we finally got a chance to walk through the instruments section of the museum.
Alright, back to the hotel. It was raining really hard and we all needed a little rest.
Pasta Eater
We wanted to eat pasta, so we went to a place called Pasta Eater. Out of all the many places to eat pasta, however, this one was chosen specifically because they make one of the dishes in a wheel of parmesan cheese.
I’ve never had a bad experience with pasta made inside of a cheese wheel. Have you?
Macy’s
We stopped in at Macy’s flagship store, mostly because I needed a bathroom, but also in hopes that we could recreate some sort of Elf extravaganza by looking at Christmas tree displays through department store windows. There weren’t any decorated windows with trees, unfortunately.
They did have some sort of Christmas village going on in the lower floor, but we arrived 5 minutes after it was shut down and the security guard was very quick to let me know it was closed and that we should all gtfo.
I don’t really understand how a retail store has so many things that it can occupy such a large space. I’ve been in entire shopping malls that are smaller than this one Macy’s store. Capitalism at its finest.
Serendipity 3
Don’t worry. Even though we ate all that pasta earlier, we saved room for dessert.
We stopped into Serendipity 3 without a reservation and were initially told that it would be 45 minutes for a table. After some brief witchcraft, they sat us immediately.
After all, we just wanted to try their famous hot chocolate.
We got the s’mores flavor and it was unexpectedly delightful.
Pizza
As much as there should be a law against visiting New York without getting a bagel, there should also be one about pizza.
But I don’t care about bagels so much as I do pizza. And it doesn’t matter how much food we’ve already eaten or what time of day it is… if I walk by 20 different places that say “$1.50 Pizza” in neon lights, I’m going to have to go get one sooner or later.
And then it was time for bed.
Day 3
We had to check out of our hotel in the morning, but they held our bags for us so we could continue wandering around the city for a while.
I don’t know what this building is, but I guess I thought it looked cool, so I took a few pictures of it.
Our first stop of the day was a bookstore… uhhh… sorry, but I’m a little light on the details here. It was supposed to be where the filmed the tv show You or something like that. It didn’t catch my interest at all, so I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we sat outside in the rain for about 20 minutes past their scheduled opening time and nobody ever opened the store.
After that, we went to a little underground subway mall to check out some comics.
But the final stop of the day… truly the highlight… perhaps even the coolest part of the entire trip… was sushi.
Shirokuro
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to dine in a 2D comic strip? Maybe in a hand-drawn, black and white world?
Well… that’s basically what this place is.
It was pretty trippy.
But aside from the aesthetics, they also had amazing sushi.
I’ve never really been a sushi person. I’ll eat it, but I’ve never been like, “hey, I really want sushi right now.”
They may have converted me.
Seriously, it was that good.
Heading Home
And that was one of our last stops for the trip. We caught an Uber Airport Shuttle at the Port Authority Bus Station and went for a long drive to LaGuardia Airport.
LaGuardia was recently remodeled, apparently. We were there briefly for our last New York visit and it felt like one small, musty room… and the only food option was a tiny little shop that had some donuts, coffee, and snacks. But now… it’s huge! You basically have to walk through an entire shopping mall before you get to the gates. They even have a giant fountain of water that rains down from the ceiling with color-changing lights.
Once we made it past all the shopping, we were greeted by a large fight status display screen that claimed our return flight was cancelled. We continued to the gate to ask questions — there was nobody there, but the gate status said delayed.
And then it got delayed a little bit longer.
And then a little bit longer…
We eventually did make it back to Florida, however. I think in total we lost about 3 hours from the delays. Very happy it wasn’t a cancellation.
#eats #food #metMuseum #newYork #newYorkCity #nyc #pasta #pastaEater #serendipity3 #shirokuro #sushi #travel
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New York City Travel, Food, and Highlights – 2025
A couple of weeks ago, Selene and I took a family trip to New York. We did some cool stuff — some of it, rather touristy perhaps, but cool stuff nonetheless. I was going to show you a few highlights in a Monday update post, but then I ended up with about 280 pictures to go through.
Anyway, it was too much to be part of anything else. So here you go: here are pictures of cool things we did or delicious food that we ate.
Day 1
Arrival and Train Rides
We flew into JFK airport reasonably early in the day, then took the Long Island Rail Road into the city.
As we waited for our train to get to the station, I have a brief meeting with some locals.
Personally, I enjoy train rides. I find them relaxing.
We got off at Grand Central, which is always fun to explore. Here’s the ceiling.
From Grand Central, our intention was to walk to our hotel, but we got tired of lugging our suitcases around. So we cabbed it!
The Nintendo Store
After dropping our bags off at the hotel, we started a slow migration toward the Empire State building… but we weren’t due there until after sunset. Time for plenty of stops along the way… the first of which… was the Nintendo Store.
Super touristy. Very crowded. Do not recommend. Not really sure what all the fuss is about, but hey, I got to see Mario, Luigi, and Link.
There was also a Pikachu, but there were far too many people around to take a picture.
Next, more walking! By this point, we all realized that we hadn’t really eaten much all day, so we stopped and got a hot dog.
Selene maintains that this hot dog was delicious. I, however, believe that we were all just very hungry.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
This is like the second or third time we’ve tried to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I don’t remember what happened before to cause the mission to fail, but we always found the doors locked.
We were very happy to find them unlocked and open this time.
There was actually a wedding service going on. I thought it was interesting that you could just walk in while people were getting married. There was some very beautiful music playing and the pipe organ was epic — you could really feel it in the core of your being.
It’s got crazy ceilings.
New York Public Library
It was getting later in the day, but it still wasn’t dark enough for the nighttime view of the city we were hoping to get at Empire, so there was time for one more stop: The New York Public Library.
The ceiling of the upper floor is painted beautifully. Yes, lots of crazy ceilings in NY.
Okay, call me uninformed if you wish, as I hadn’t been to any sort of physical library in a long time, but I really expected to see books somewhere inside.
“Where can we see some books?” I asked one of the attendants. I really just wanted to experience the smell of old books. You know? Libraries have a smell.
He educated that all of the books are kept underground in Bryant Park — and you have to make a request to have them brought up to you. Go figure.
And with that minor disappointment, it was finally dark enough outside.
The Empire State Building
Is it possible to do anything in New York City that is more touristy than the Empire State building? I don’t think so.
And you obviously have to pose inside of King Kong’s hand.
Here’s a couple of pictures of the view from the observation floor that is fully enclosed by windows.
And here’s a couple of pics from the top where everything is out in the open air.
Aren’t we cute?
Tacombi
By the time we descended back to ground level, we realized we were all very hungry again. On the same block, there’s a little taco place called Tacombi, so we popped in. It was delicious.
I actually got a burrito, but it was still delicious. And the churros are from a Christmas market that was going on in Bryant Park.
Day 2
The second day of our trip started with more walking.
This is a building shaped like a trunk.
Liberty Bagels
Is it legal to visit New York without getting a bagel? I don’t think it should be.
We waited in a giant line at Liberty Bagels. That place is ridiculously packed — and rightfully so, their bagels are delicious and they have an insane selection of cream cheeses.
I got their famous Rainbow Bagel, topped with half blueberry and half strawberry cream cheese. It was really good.
Central Park
This is probably one of my favorite places in New York. I’d like to go on a warm, Spring day to have a picnic.
And then all of a sudden, a thick fog rolled in and covered the tops of buildings.
And it started to rain. We took shelter in a nearby tunnel as we listened to a street performer play some classical guitar songs.
Then, off to the museum!
The MET Museum
The MET is one of those places where you could literally walk around all day and not be done.
I mean, I frequently search their archives for pictures of ancient stuff to use for the articles that I write, so seeing it in person is always awesome.
Like artwork on amphorae…
Or statues of dudes and carvings of stuff…
And look, it’s Pan! IO Pan!
And I can always get lost in the Ancient Egyptian wing…
They were currently doing an exhibition called “Divine Egypt.”
Yeah, of the nearly 300 photos I took, most of them are from the MET. I could have probably done an entire post just with those pictures.
And we finally got a chance to walk through the instruments section of the museum.
Alright, back to the hotel. It was raining really hard and we all needed a little rest.
Pasta Eater
We wanted to eat pasta, so we went to a place called Pasta Eater. Out of all the many places to eat pasta, however, this one was chosen specifically because they make one of the dishes in a wheel of parmesan cheese.
I’ve never had a bad experience with pasta made inside of a cheese wheel. Have you?
Macy’s
We stopped in at Macy’s flagship store, mostly because I needed a bathroom, but also in hopes that we could recreate some sort of Elf extravaganza by looking at Christmas tree displays through department store windows. There weren’t any decorated windows with trees, unfortunately.
They did have some sort of Christmas village going on in the lower floor, but we arrived 5 minutes after it was shut down and the security guard was very quick to let me know it was closed and that we should all gtfo.
I don’t really understand how a retail store has so many things that it can occupy such a large space. I’ve been in entire shopping malls that are smaller than this one Macy’s store. Capitalism at its finest.
Serendipity 3
Don’t worry. Even though we ate all that pasta earlier, we saved room for dessert.
We stopped into Serendipity 3 without a reservation and were initially told that it would be 45 minutes for a table. After some brief witchcraft, they sat us immediately.
After all, we just wanted to try their famous hot chocolate.
We got the s’mores flavor and it was unexpectedly delightful.
Pizza
As much as there should be a law against visiting New York without getting a bagel, there should also be one about pizza.
But I don’t care about bagels so much as I do pizza. And it doesn’t matter how much food we’ve already eaten or what time of day it is… if I walk by 20 different places that say “$1.50 Pizza” in neon lights, I’m going to have to go get one sooner or later.
And then it was time for bed.
Day 3
We had to check out of our hotel in the morning, but they held our bags for us so we could continue wandering around the city for a while.
I don’t know what this building is, but I guess I thought it looked cool, so I took a few pictures of it.
Our first stop of the day was a bookstore… uhhh… sorry, but I’m a little light on the details here. It was supposed to be where the filmed the tv show You or something like that. It didn’t catch my interest at all, so I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we sat outside in the rain for about 20 minutes past their scheduled opening time and nobody ever opened the store.
After that, we went to a little underground subway mall to check out some comics.
But the final stop of the day… truly the highlight… perhaps even the coolest part of the entire trip… was sushi.
Shirokuro
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to dine in a 2D comic strip? Maybe in a hand-drawn, black and white world?
Well… that’s basically what this place is.
It was pretty trippy.
But aside from the aesthetics, they also had amazing sushi.
I’ve never really been a sushi person. I’ll eat it, but I’ve never been like, “hey, I really want sushi right now.”
They may have converted me.
Seriously, it was that good.
Heading Home
And that was one of our last stops for the trip. We caught an Uber Airport Shuttle at the Port Authority Bus Station and went for a long drive to LaGuardia Airport.
LaGuardia was recently remodeled, apparently. We were there briefly for our last New York visit and it felt like one small, musty room… and the only food option was a tiny little shop that had some donuts, coffee, and snacks. But now… it’s huge! You basically have to walk through an entire shopping mall before you get to the gates. They even have a giant fountain of water that rains down from the ceiling with color-changing lights.
Once we made it past all the shopping, we were greeted by a large fight status display screen that claimed our return flight was cancelled. We continued to the gate to ask questions — there was nobody there, but the gate status said delayed.
And then it got delayed a little bit longer.
And then a little bit longer…
We eventually did make it back to Florida, however. I think in total we lost about 3 hours from the delays. Very happy it wasn’t a cancellation.
#eats #food #metMuseum #newYork #newYorkCity #nyc #pasta #pastaEater #serendipity3 #shirokuro #sushi #travel
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Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
-
Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
-
Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
-
Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
-
Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
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Death from above: the thread about the 1916 Zeppelin air raid that terrorised Edinburgh and Leith
It was fittingly dark and late when I started to write this, but here follows the story of the Zeppelin air raid on Edinburgh and Leith of 2-3 April 1916. It’s a long-ish story which I’ll break down into 3 parts. Hopefully as we go I can clarify a few points and add some extra details to other versions of it
Part 1. Prelude
“The First Zeppelin Seen from Piccadilly Circus, 8 September 1915”, Andrew Carrick Gow, 1915. IWM Art.5216
The frightening and fascinating new technology of Zeppelins burst quite literally into the British public consciousness on 19-20 January 1915 when an attack on Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn and Sheringham left four dead and fifteen injured. Follow up raids are a failure, until bigger and more capable Zeppelins arrive and in April and May 1915 towns across the southeast of England from Ipswich to Dover are targeted and hit. Three are killed and there is public outrage. Public and newspaper ire is directed as much at the authorities for failing to protect the populace and smite the aerial menace as much as at the German military. In September a Zeppelin humiliatingly appears with impunity over London.By the end of 1915, 203 people have been killed and a further 711 injured in monthly raids over (mainly) the Eastern and South Eastern counties of England. The authorities have been largely impotent in response, but try to mobilise the public outrage as a recruiting tool.
Recruiting poster, 1915. Library of Congress.British companies also utilise the Zeppelin scare in patriotic advertising. North British Rubber, based in Fountainbridge in Edinburgh and the largest rubber products producer in the British empire, took out adverts in the illustrated papers imploring customers to Buy British as German rubber companies made the fabric for Zeppelins.
“The German Menace”, North British Rubber advert from the Graphic, 30 October 1915The Daily Mail is amongst popular newspapers which offer its loyal readers a compensation scheme should they or their family be killed or injured by a Zeppelin air raid.
Daily Mail advertisement poster for Zeppelin insurance scheme for its readers. IWM Art.IWM PST 13010There are public awareness campaigns, warning people what to look out for when scouring the skies for aerial attackers.
Public Information Poster. IWM PST 13660In early 1916, during a winter lull in the bombing campaign, George Currie MP for the Leith Burghs asked the Scottish Secretary about what was to be done by local authorities to guard against the aerial threat .
George Currie MP in 1914A week later, the Secretary for Scotland, the Rt. Hon Thomas Mackinnon Wood, issues the “Lighting Order”, which obliges local authorities to implement a basic blackout and put in place warning measures of air raids, but leaves the details to local discretion.
Thomas Mackinnon Wood Esq, MP, Lafayette Negative ArchiveA debate rages in Edinburgh Town Council about the best way to enact the order. The Chief Constable wants a complete night-time blackout but is felt to be over-reacting and over-stepping his authority. An audible warning is felt to be unnecessary and might just draw people out onto the street anyway. It is eventually settled that in the event of an air raid, the Corporation Electrical Department will dim the lighting supply as a warning before cutting it entirely as a blackout. However the gas lighting supply (the predominant domestic lighting) will not be dimmed or cut, over fears that it will lead to leaks from unlit lights when the supply is restarted.
This means that there is no warning system in place for people who use gas lighting – the majority – and the blackout will not be effective. However this is accepted. After all, Edinburgh is very far away from it all and probably feels its isolation is protection enough. The burgh of Leith follows suit and issues similar orders, however these do not apply to the shipping sitting in Leith Roads and they continue to burn lights at night.
The raids begin again at the end of January 1916 with the full moon; 57 are killed and 117 injured. There is respite as a result of the weather at the end of February but the Zeppelins return at the end of March. On the night of the 31st, 43 are killed and 66 wounded. But a Zeppelin is shot down during that raid, to public jubilation.
Zeppelin L15 sinking in the Thames Estuary after having been fatally damaged by defensive gunfire.On the next night (1-2 April), it is the North East of England that is hit, 16 people are killed and 100 are injured. The bombs are creeping northwards, but are still more than 100 miles from Edinburgh
Part 2. The Raid
On the bright spring morning of April 2nd 1916, the residents of Edinburgh open their morning newspapers to read headlines and horrifying details of the latest series of raids. Unknown to them, something sinister is stirring 500 miles to the east.
At the Nordholz naval air base north of Bremerhaven, the Imperial German Navy readies four of the latest P-class Zeppelins for a raid on Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, the base of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet – the most powerful fighting force on the high seas.
The Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet in the Firth of Forth, aerial photo taken from a British airship late in the warIn the early afternoon, Zeppelins L13 (pictured), L14, L16 and L22 take off and begin their long voyage west. These 163m long, 4-engined craft have a crew of 19, cruise at 39mph, can reach an altitude of 11,600 feett and carry up to 2,000kg of bombs; high explosive and incendiary.
L13L13 soon develops engine troubles and turns for home. L14, L16 and L22 press on west, but are troubled by a northerly wind that blows them well off course. L16 makes for the secondary objective of Tyneside but drops her bombs 11 miles off target. L22 gets a bit lost and mistakes the river Tweed for the Tyne, bombing fields around Chirnside. She will later claim to have destroyed one of the bridges over the Tyne.
L14 – under the capable command of Lt. Commander Alois Bocker – however is on course and schedule. She passes the Scottish coast near St. Abb’s Head, being spotted here and possibly engaged by Royal Navy destroyers (although they have no practical weapons to really do so). Nevertheless, the alarm is now raised and the Admiralty dispatches the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron from Rosyth on a pre-determined search pattern of the Forth to look for the raider. At East Fortune naval air base, Sub Lt. GA Cox is scrambled in an Avro 504C fighter on an ultimately fruitless interception mission. Cox will be injured later trying to land his rickety aircraft in the dark.
An Avro 504C aircraft, a type with marginal performance specifically rushed into service as an anti-Zeppelin defence.And in Edinburgh and Leith, the warning message is received by the authorities that an air raid may be imminent, and the electric lights are dimmed and the tramway is stopped. The fire brigade, hospitals and Red Cross are put on alert.
Bocker turns L14 turn back out to sea after passing St. Abbs, using the Isle of May in the outer reaches of the Forth to get their bearings, then flying directly down the middle of the Firth. They appear over Inchkeith around 11:15PM. Over Inchkeith they do what Zeppelin attackers often do; they stop to take their bearings, floating high over the island. The night is clear but there is a low haze and they cannot make out their target from the glazed cabin high above the sea.
The command cabin of L22 after the war, where Bocker and his men would have looked out from over the ForthInstead, the welcoming lights of the ships in Leith Roads point Bocker towards the docks and L14 sets off again with a new target in mind. Bocker is familiar with the port having visited it as a sailor in peacetime and he knows if he follows its river it will lead him to the city centre of Edinburgh.
The Leith Police spot L14 around 11:25, approaching from Inchkeith. She is flying high, perhaps as high as 10,000ft. The zeppelin (the black track on the below map) is heading southwest, straight towards the heart of Leith.
L14’s approach to Leith over the Sands, towards the Albert DockThe first three bombs are unleashed here. Bomb 1, a 50kg high explosive (yellow marker), lands in the Edinburgh dock, sinks two rowing boats and destroys the skylight windows of a Danish sailing vessel. The two incendiaries, bombs 2 and 3, land near the Albert Dock but cause no damage beyond a burnt fence which is quickly extinguished.
The first 3 bombs dropped.Bombs 4 and 5 are High Explosive. They hit a grain warehouse in the Timberbush and the Custom House Quay. Damage is done to property from flying masonry and smashed glass, but it’s largely superficial and nobody is hurt.
Bombs 4 and 5 Land near the Shore.Bomb 6 is high explosive, it hits the roof of the tenement at 2 Commercial St. and takes L14‘s first victim; 61 year old engineer Robert Love- husband of Ann Porteous and father of James – is killed as he sleeps in his bed in the top floor flat.
Robin Love, contemporary newspaper photo, provenance unknownBomb 6 causes a fatality. Bomb 7 lands nearby.A few doors down at 14 Commercial Street, bomb 7 – an incendiary – smashes through the roof and then through the floor of the top floor flat before starting a fire in the flat below. The elderly woman who had been sleeping in her bed calmly got up and poured a pan of water in the hole and extinguished it. More bombs rapidly drop. 8, 9 and 10 are incendiaries and land on Sandport Street. A fire is started and rapidly extinguished and no further damage is caused.
Bombs 8, 9 and 10 land in Sandport StreetBomb 11 is another 50kg HE. It comes down in Innes & Grieve’s whisky bond on Ronaldson’s Wharf and sets the spirit store on fire. The inferno lights up the night sky, making the job of navigating the Zeppelin and aiming the bombs easier. The entire stock, worth £44k (an enormous sum in 1916) is destroyed. It is not insured against aerial attack (this seems to be a recurrent situation at the time, special “air raid insurance” schemes were set up to cover where other insurance would not) . Bomb 12, an incendiary, lands at 15 Church St. and falls through the roof into a room where a mother and 3 children are asleep. The flats are set on fire but the residents have a lucky escape before it is quenched.
Bombs 11 & 12Bocker now steers L14 along a course following the Water of Leith. A stick of four incendiary bombs is dropped around Mill lane. The St. Thomas Church manse is largely destroyed, but the minister and his family are miraculously unharmed. Clearly he had been saying his prayers as somehow he, his wife and their servant girl asleep in the attic were spared.
St. Thomas’ ManseThe attic room of the manse, note the bomb-shaped hole in the floorDamage caused to St. Thomas’ Manse. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe St. Thomas’ School next door and the Leith Hospital across the street get lucky escapes as bombs 14 and 15 land directly outside. Bomb 16, landing on Hawthorn & Co’s shipyard, sets fire to a fence but it is quickly put out. L14 continues its course along the Water of Leith.
Bombs 13, 14, 15 and 16.Four HE bombs are dropped over the industrial quarter of Bonnington. Seemingly little damage is done beyond smashed windows, but when the dust settles it is found that little David Robb, just 1 year old and who had been sleeping in his cot has been tragically killed by shrapnel. David’s parents, Robert and Jane, were just getting over the loss of another infant the previous year.
Bombs 17, 18, 19 and 20. Those at 200 Bonnington Road cause a fatality.The “disconsolate” Robert Robb gave an upsetting interview to a journalist which, unusually for the time, passed the censors.
Robert Robb’s newspaper interview.L14 had now completed wreaking its terrible toll on Leith. Bocker took his bearings again from the Water of Leith and turned his ship to head south, directly towards the city centre of Edinburgh. It is 11:50PM. an HE bomb, number 21, is dropped, landing on waste ground at the end of Bellevue Terrace. It blows out windows in houses and flats for streets around and demolishes a tin shed, but no further damage is done. Likewise bomb 22, an incendiary, does no damage when it lands on the road surface of The Mound.
L14‘s course takes it just past the Castle atop its promontory. The next bomb, 23, is another 50kg HE (my map has it coloured wrong). It crashes through the roof of the Georgian townhouse at 39 Lauriston Place. The McLaren family are awake inside and hear it descending on them.
Dr Mclaren and his wife and teenage daughter miraculously are unharmed at 39 Lauriston Place, despite the damage. The family reputedly still have a piece of the bomb’s nose cap. The Skins – the Edinburgh Special School for children with ringworm – next door is also damaged.
The damage caused to 39 Lauriston Place. The house was demolished in the early 1970sThis bomb claims a victim though. David Robertson, a 27 year old soldier invalided out of the Royal Field Artillery, is outside in an adjacent street to see what is going on and is hit in the stomach by flying shrapnel, later succumbing to his injuries.
David Robertson. Contemporary newspaper image, via Newbattle at War.Bomb 24 is high explosive. It lands in the playground of George Watson’s College school and causes extensive damage to classrooms. It is perilously close to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh next door. Bomb 25 is an incendiary and lands near Jawbone Walk on the Meadows without causing damage.
Bombs 24 – 26 near The MeadowsL14 continues south over the Meadows before making a turn to east, dropping bomb 26 – another 50kg HE – as it does so. This comes down in the tenement at 82 Marchmont Crescent. It fails to properly explode but its kinetic energy carries it through floors and ceilings to the ground floor flat at no. 80. It is this bomb that is now on display at the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune.
Bomb 26, now on display at the Museum of Flight. © SelfMeandering east across the Southside, incendiaries are dropped (bombs 27 and 29) at Hatton and Blacket Places, landing in gardens and doing no damage. An HE bomb comes down at 183 Causewayside and “practically wrecked” the tenement. Six are injured, four of whom are hospitalised. One of the injured, 71 year old Wilhelminha Henderson, will succumb to her injuries in the following days and dies in hospital of a heart attack brought on by the shock.
Bombs 27 – 29 dropped across the SouthsideL14 now makes a U-turn back towards the city. This time it passes directly over the Royal Infirmary, dropping an incendiary (bomb 30) as it does so. This comes down on a roof but fails to do any damage.
This is the incendiary on the roof of the RIE. This was a conical-shaped bomb with a central fuse. Inside the cone was a mix of oil and kerosene, on the outside it was wrapped in tar-soaked rope. It was not particularly effective and would be replaced by fearsome Thermite weapons towards the end of the war.
The bomb on the roof of the RIEThere are multiple eye-witness reports of seeing “blue lights” dropping from the Zeppelin. What people were seeing was the long streamers on the incendiary bomb’s tail, which were meant to stabilise it, catching the light as it fell. One of these incendiaries from the night is also on display at East Fortune.
Incendiary bomb at the Museum of Flight. The top portion fitted over the lower one, this weapon has been disassembled to show its construction. © SelfBomb 31.L14 is now on a heading directly for the Castle. Another HE bomb – number 31 – is dropped, coming down in the Grassmarket outside the White Hart Hotel and Gothenburg tavern. Four men gathered in the area are injured and more damage is done to buildings. One of the injured, a 45 year Corporation Porter by the name of William Breakey, will die shortly afterwards from his injuries having been struck on the chest by flying debris
William Breakey. Contemporary newspaper image, via Newbattle at War.Most of the windows in the area were blown out. Buildings took the scars of flying debris. Given how usually busy and how densely overpopulated the neighbourhood was, it was remarkable that the death and injury toll here was not much higher.
Crowds gather in the Grassmarket the next day to inspect the damage. Note that all the windows are blown out.Animated transition showing the damage caused in the Grassmarket against the street todayL14 was perhaps aiming for the Castle, as bomb 31 at the Grassmarket and 32 and 33 – which fall immediately after – are in a straight line across it. Bomb 32 hits the southwest face of the Castle Rock. The Castle gunners impotently fire two blank rounds from the One O’Clock Gun in response. At the County Hotel on Lothian Road number 33 falls, an HE bomb, and there is another miraculous escape. The bomb explodes in the hotel roof causing extensive damage, but casualties are limited to a woman resident in a bedroom below suffering slight injuries .
Bombs 32 and 33 dropped as L14 flies over the CastleHaving missed the castle, L14 continues on its course before picking up its navigational maker of the Water of Leith again. Again a 180° turn is made, again bombs are unleashed as it does so. What Bocker is aiming for is anyone’s guess. Perhaps railways, perhaps the prominently large building of Donaldson’s Hospital. But all 3 bombs land in the river and although countless windows are blown out – including Donaldson’s chapel stained glass – there are no injuries.
Bombs 34-36 are dropped as L14 U-turns over ColtbridgeL14s new course takes it back directly over the Castle agai but this time no bombs are dropped; not until it is well past it at least. Bomb 37, a high explosive, comes down outside the tenement at 16 Marshall Street off Nicolson Square.
L14 is almost retracing its steps, the Castle is crossed 3 times. Bomb 37 falls well beyond it.This will be the most deadly bomb. Residents had gathered in the passageway of the building, probably up and about due to the excitement of it all and taking shelter within as the drone of the Zeppelin’s engines approached again. The 50kg bomb strikes the pavement outside, the blast is driven into the stair of No. 16 and kills six men and boys standing within instantly. It injures a further seven.
The victims are William Smith 15, his father John Smith 41, Henry Rumble 17, David Graham 5, William Ewing 23 and Victor MacFarlane. The injured include the brother and son of the deceased Smiths and the father of Henry Rumble. Private Thomas Donoghue, 24, of the 3/4 Royal Scots who was home on leave was also injured. He had been visiting family. He would succumb to serious injuries to the abdomen and is the 7th fatality from Marshall Street.
Animated transition image showing the damage caused to No. 16 Marshall Street against the building todayThe bomb at Marshall Street fell at about 00:25AM, fully an hour after L14 was first spotted approaching Leith. And still it droned on over the city, at complete liberty to undertake its terrible deeds. As it continues on its course, two more HE bombs are dropped. 38 lands in the tenement at Haddon’s Court and 39 comes down in the tenement at 69 St. Leonard’s Hill. Each of these bombs will claim a victim.
Bombs 38 and 39At Haddon’s Court, James Farquhar, a 73 year old mason, will die 5 days later from his injuries in hospital. At St. Leonard’s Hill, 4 year old Cora Edmond Bell is killed in her bed.
L14‘s course takes it over the south western edge of the King’s Park. Here the City finally fights back, soldiers have been dispatched to the Salisbury Crags (where there was a military rifle range) and engage the Zeppelin with a Lewis and a Vickers machine gun. L14 drops four of its last five bombs, an incendiary and three HEs. It is perhaps aiming for the railway yard at St. Leonard’s, or the flashes of gunfire far below, but no damage is done beyond to some walls and the gunners have no chance of hitting the Zeppelin anyway at its altitude.
Bombs 40-43 fall in the King’s ParkThe last bomb, number 44, falls further south in the grounds of Prestonfield House at around 00:40AM (times in the records vary and conflict slightly). L14 now turns east around the south of Arthur’s Seat and strikes a course for home.
In the approximate hour and 15 minutes when it was over Edinburgh and Leith, it dropped 44 bombs, caused 14 fatalities and 24 injuries. No targets of any military value had been hit, a whisky bond and a manse had been destroyed, and countless thousands of window panes smashed.
Part 3. The Aftermath
It took until April 4th, the day after the morning after the raid, for the events in Edinburgh and Leith to hit the papers. Reporting censorship restrictions kept things vague and just referred to “south east Scottish counties” and “an eastern coastal town” .
The Scotsman praised the public response “the raid… naturally caused some excitement, but failed to produce any panic or do otherwise than steel the hearts of the people against the nation capable of using such barbarous methods of warfare against the civilian population“.
The first 3 Funerals took place on the afternoon of April 5th. A further 4 Funerals took place on the 6th. Municipal representatives were present and there “were numerous manifestations of public sympathy as the cortège passed.” It was announced that the National Relief Fund had made “provisional arrangements” to give grants to local committees for the purchase of furniture for displaced persons. It was anticipated that applications would be made to the fund for indirect losses, e.g. loss of lodgers.
The lack of accurate reporting meant rumours and gossip was rife. The word on the street in Dundee was that the Scott Monument had been destroyed. Visitors from there to family in Edinburgh asked if they could please go and see the ruins? Unable to report the facts, the Scotsman settled for odd editorials, for instance extolling the virtues of traditional Scottish construction over suspect English ways.
Scottish stone proved more resisting than English bricks; instead of the crumbling ruins of houses… the only evidence of the raid on the tough fabric of Scottish buildings was shattered windows and indentations on the walls. This first raid on the costs of Scotland has been a great triumph for the Scottish builder.
Scotsman editorial opinion after the raidAnd there was an even weirder one on how the general lack of public panic was some sort of proof evident of the racial and genetic purity of the people of Edinburgh and Leith.
The Lord Provost, who was in London on council business, met with John French, 1st Earl of Ypres and Commander-in-Chief of the British Home Forces to “explain to him the position of matters in connection with the raid“. French was reportedly “quite sympathetic.” Sympathies were sent from war-torn France.
French sympathy with Scottish sufferersAnd in the letters columns, recriminations were quick to come. Multiple organisations of the city worthies and self appointed committees of dignitaries wrote their opinions about what must be done. All that could be agreed was that something must be done. Given the woeful state of the anti-aircraft defences in the country, Mr Ralph Richardson wrote to suggest that local authorities must be empowered to raise their own air forces, as they did fire services “to defend the lives and property of the lieges committed to their care“. There was also the question of the warning and blackouts. It was ordered that the gas supply would be cut along with the electricity in the event of a raid. Stricter blackout conditions were made, to be “drastically enforced” due to the “slackness in various parts of the city”
The Army provided a rudimentary anti-aircraft battery on Corstorphine Hill. Manned by artillery volunteers the gun was a QF 13pdr 6cwt Mk.I. This was a “marginally effective” weapon, and indeed was a cast off. Only 20 had been made before replaced by something better. This had likely been sent to Scotland as a token gesture to show that the military authorities were doing something, anything, in response. The battery was provided with a searchlight and an acoustic direction finder, which was meant to help locate the direction from which a Zeppelin was approaching from the noise of its engines (it didn’t really work).
13 pounder AA gun on Corstorphine HillSound locator device and searchlight on Corstorphine Hill.These defences were more morale-boosting “security theatre” than anything effective. However subsequent “War Weapons Week” campaigns encouraged the public in Edinburgh to directly finance better anti aircraft weapons to guard against the Zeppelin threat.
Scottish War Weapons Week poster. IWM PST 10244The proximity of the bombs to Edinburgh castle worried the governor, who wrote to the Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland to inform him that the Regalia of Scotland had been moved for safekeeping from the Crown Room to the Castle vaults.
Letter from the Governor of Edinburgh Castle to the Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland in Whitehall NRS HH31/21/1 fol.19At least two babies born just before or after the raid were named in its honour;
- Catherine O’May Campbell Raida Smith was born 2nd April to Janet Smith at 49 Montague Street
- Raida Alexandra Douglas was born May 21st to Barbara Mackay Douglas of 88 Nicholson Street
Raida Smith’s father, Peter, made an appeal against conscription on account of his wife “remaining ill… she did not make a good recovery and has been nervous and sleepless since… A strain that at present she is ill able to bear“. I don’t know if he was successful.
The L14 would become the most successful German Zeppelin of the War. It made 17 attacks on Britain and dropped 22 tonnes of bombs. Alois Bocker was shot down commanding L33 in September 1916 over London. He survived, was captured and reportedly treated well as a Prisoner of War.
Alois BockerIn 2016 on the centenary of the attack, Edinburgh University Library published a fascinating first hand account of the aftermath, from the diaries of schoolboy Archibald Campbell who had roamed the city the day after taking notes of his impressions.
Points to Clarify
There are many good accounts of this story, however there are various points and facts which have inevitably become confused or corrupted (with honest intention) over time. I will try to clear up those that I have identified.
Firstly, only one Zeppelin, L14, bombed Edinburgh and Leith. L22 never made it and erroneous reports of it being over the city persist. German and British official records all agree that only L14 was within 100 miles of Edinburgh that night. L14 was much higher – 10,000ft – than you might think. It was dark and unlit, many people heard it, very few saw anything. As it flitted between pockets of cloud and light and went back and forth over the city it would be easy to think that you had seen or heard 2.
Secondly, there are no photos of L14 over the city. There are photos that purport to be it, but this is of the civilian airliner Graf Zeppelin over the city in 1930. There are other mockups too. But they are just that. The illustration below from the “Illustrated London News” shows what people *might* have seen in the night sky had they been able to get a view of L14 – but it qould have required a good set of binoculars or a telescope. It is an older, smaller model of Zeppelin though.
“Illustrated London News,” September 18th 1915The third point concerns the number of bombs and fatalities.
- 20 bombs were dropped in Leith and 24 in Edinburgh, Leith was a separate burgh at this time and some accounts overlook this nuance and thus get the total wrong.
- 14 people lost their lives in total; some reports miss out some of those who died of their injuries up to 5 days later, they are listed in the table below
As far as I’m aware, there are 3 public memorials to the air raid.
- A flagstone on the Grassmarket where William Breakey was fatally wounded.
- a piece of damaged masonry from the old Grassmarket Corn Exchange, now removed to the back of the Apex Hotel car park (see picture below)
- A plaque on the Castle Rock, near where the bomb fell there. There is a picture on this site;
The events of this night were commemorated back in 2016 but still don’t really pervade the local public consciousness, at least not to the extent of the attacks made during WW2.
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Stuck in the Filter: March 2025’s Angry Misses
By Kenstrosity
Spring is in the air, and with it comes… an insane number of cicadas! Yes, that’s right, Brood XIV spawned this year and is currently overwhelming my staff as they trudge through embuggened ducts to clear out the Filter of semi-precious metal. I bet it’s fucking loud in there…
…. eh I’m sure they are all fine. Just fine. Anyway, enjoy the spoils of our toils!
Kenstrosity’s Gloopy Grubber
Acid Age // Perilous Compulsion [February 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
Belfast’s wacky thrash conglomerate Acid Age came out of absolutely nowhere back in March, unleashing their fourth LP Perilous Compulsion and equipping it with one helluva van-worthy cover. This is some funky, bluesy, quasi-psychedelic thrash metal that pulls no punches. Riffs abound, bonkers songwriting pervades, immense groove agitates. From the onset, “Bikini Island” establishes Perilous Compulsion as a no-nonsense, balls-out affair which reminds me heavily of Voivod and a simplified Flummox informed by Atheist’s progressive proclivities, and expanded by a touch of Pink Floyd’s nebulous jams. Of course, thrash remains Acid Age’s hero flavor, as choice cuts “State Your Business,” “Revenge for Sale,” and closing one-two punch “Rotten Tooth” and “Hamster Wheel” clearly demonstrate. While their fearless exploration of style and structure maintains a sky-high level of interest, it also introduces a couple of challenges. Firstly, this material can feel a bit disjointed at first, but focused spins reward the listener greatly as all of Perilous Compulsion’s moving parts start to mesh and move in unison. Secondly, Acid Age throws a spotlight on a few brilliant inclusions that, over time, I wish were more often utilized—namely, the delightfully bluesy harmonica solos on “Rotten Tooth.” Regardless, Acid Age put themselves on my map with Perilous Compulsion. I recommend you put them on yours, too!
Owlswald’s Desiccated Discoveries
Verbian // Casarder [March 21st, 2025 – Lost Future Records]
It’s unjust that Portuguese rockers Verbian—who have been producing quality post-rock since 2019’s Jaez—haven’t received the attention they deserve. Fusing elements of post-rock with metal, psychedelic, and stoner, Casarder is Verbian’s third full-length and the first with new drummer Guilherme Gonçalves. Taking the sounds and inspirations of 2020’s Irrupção and enriching it with new permutations and modulations, Casarder’s largely instrumental character rides punchy riffs and roiling grooves—à la Russian Circles and Elder—to transmit its thought-provoking legitimacy. Dystopian and surreal séances, via echoing Korg synthscapes (“Pausa Entre Dias,” “Vozes da Ilha”) and celestial harmonies, permeate Casarder’s forty-three-minute runtime, translating Madalena Pinto’s striking Aeon Flux-esque cover art with precision. Ominous horn sections and crusty recurrent vocals (“Marcha do Vulto,” “Depois de Toda a Mudança”) by guitarist Vasco Reis and bassist Alexandre Silva underscore Verbian’s individuality in a crowded post-rock domain. Gonçalves’s drumming—with his intricate and enchanting hard rock and samba rhythms (“Nada Muda,” “Fruta Caída do Mar”)—adds a new dimension to Verbian’s sound, assuring my attention never falters. The group describes Casarder as communicating the “…insecurities of artistic expression and personal exposure when it comes to fearing being judged for something that is somewhat outside of what is done in each artist’s niche.” Indeed, Casarder reveals Verbian is unafraid to forge their own path, and the results are gripping.
Symbiotic Growth // Beyond the Sleepless Aether [March 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
Beyond the Sleepless Aether, the sophomore effort by Ontario, Canada’s Symbiotic Growth, immediately caught my attention with its dreamy-looking cover. Building upon their 2020 self-titled debut, the Canadian trio hones epic and long-form progressive death metal soundscapes, narrating a quest for meaning across alternate realities in mostly lengthy, yet rewarding, tracks that blend technicality, atmosphere, and melody. The group frequently employs dynamic shifts, moving between raging brutality and serene shoegaze beauty (“Arid Trials and Barren Sands,” “The Sleepless Void”). This is achieved through complex and vengeful passages alongside atmospheric synth lines and softer piano interludes (“Sires of Boundless Sunset,” “Of Painted Skies and Dancing Lights”), cultivating an air of wonder, mystery, and ethereality that permeates much of Symbiotic Growth’s material. “The Architect of Annihilation” echoes the style of Ne Obliviscaris with its blend of clean harmonies and harsh growls meshed with tremolo-picked arpeggiations and catchy hooks (the guitar solo even features a violin-like quality). “Lost in Fractured Reveries” evokes In Mourning with its parallel synth and guitar lines giving way to devastating grooves that make it impossible not to headbang. Although some fine-tuning remains—the clean vocals could use some more weight and tracks like “Of Painted Skies and Dancing Lights” and “The Architect of Annihilation” overstay their welcome at times—Beyond the Sleepless Aether shows Symbiotic Growth’s burgeoning talent and signals the group is one to watch in progressive death metal.
Dear Hollow’s Drudgery Sludgery Hoist
Spiritbox // Tsunami Sea [March 7th, 2025 – Pale Chord Records | Rise Records]
From humble beginnings in a more artsy-fartsy djent post-Iwrestledabearonce world to becoming the darlings of Octane Radio, Spiritbox has seen quite the ascent. While it’s easy to look at their work and scoff at its radio-friendliness, sophomore full-length Tsunami Sea shows Courtney LaPlante and company sticking to their guns. Simultaneously more obscure and more radio-friendly in its selection of tracks, expect its signature blend of colossal riffs and ethereal melodies guided by LaPlante’s siren-then-sea serpent dichotomy of furious roars and haunting cleans. Yes, Spiritbox helms its attack with the radio singles (“Perfect Soul,”1 “Crystal Roses”) in layered soaring choruses and touches of hip-hop undergirded by fierce grooves, but the meat of Tsunami Sea finds the flexibility and patience in the skull-crushing brutality (“Soft Spine,” “No Loss, No Love”) and its more exploratory songwriting that amps layers of the ethereal and the hellish with catchy riffs and vocals alike (“Fata Morgana,” “A Haven of Two Faces”). It’s far from perfect, and its tendency towards radio will be divisive, but it shows Spiritbox firing on all cylinders.
Unfleshing // Violent Reason [March 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
I am always tickled pink by blackened crust. It takes the crusty violence and propensity for filth and adds black metal’s signature sinister nature. Unfleshing is a young, unsigned blackened crust band from St. Louis, and with debut Violent Reason, you can expect a traditional punk-infused beatdown with a battered guitar tone and sinister vocals. However, more than many, the quartet offers a beatdown that feels as atmospheric as it is pummeling. Don’t get me wrong, you get your skull caved in like the poor guy on the cover with minute-long crust beatdowns (“Body Bag,” “From the Gutter”) and full-length smackdowns (“Knife in the Dark,” “Final Breath”), both styles complete with scathing grooves, squalid feedback, climactic solos and punishing blastbeats, atop a blackened roar dripping with hate. But amid the full-throttle assault, Unfleshing utilizes ominous black metal chord progressions and unsettling plucking to add a more dynamic feature to Violent Reason (“Cathedral Rust,” “One With the Mud”). The album never overstays, and while traditional, it’s a hell of a start for Unfleshing.
Ghostsmoker // Inertia Cult [March 21st, 2025 – Art as Catharsis Records]
Ghostsmoker seems like the perfect stoner metal band name, but aside from the swampy guitar tone, there’s something much sinister lurking. Proffering a caustic blackened doom/sludge not unlike Thou, Wormphlegm, and Sea Bastard, the Melbourne group quartet devotes a crisp forty-two minutes to sprawling doom weighted by a crushing guitar tone that rivals Morast‘s latest, and shrieked vocals straight from the latest church burning. Beyond what’s expected from this particular breed of devastation, Ghostsmoker infuses an evocative patience reminiscent of post-metal’s more sludgy offerings like Neurosis or Pelican, lending a certain atmosphere and mood of dread and wilderness depicted on its cover. From the outright chugging attacks of churning aggression (“Elogium,” “Haven”) to the more experimental and thoughtful pieces (“Bodies to Shore,” instrumental closer “The Death of Solitude”), Inertia Cult largely feels like a journey through uncharted forests, with voices whispering from the trees. Ghostsmoker is something special.
GardensTale’s Paralyzed Spine
Spiine // Tetraptych [March 27th, 2025 – Self Released]
Is it still a supergroup release when half the lineup are session musicians? Spiine is made up of Sesca Scaarba (Virgin Black) and Xen (ex-Ne Obliviscaris), but on debut Tetraptych they are joined by guests Waltteri Väyrynen (Opeth) and Lena Abé (My Dying Bride). Usually, so much talent put into the same room does not yield great results. Tetraptych is one hell of an exception. A monstrous slab of crawling heaviness, Spiine lurches with abject despair through the mires of deathly funeral doom. Though I usually eschew this genre, my attention remains rapt through a variety of variations. The songwriting keeps the 4 tracks progressing, slow and steady builds, and the promise of momentary tempo changes working a two-pronged structural plan to buoy the majestic yet miserable riffs. “Oubliiette” is the best example here, going from galloping death-doom to Georgian choirs to a fantastic bridge where all the instrumentation hits only on the roared syllables. Xen’s unholy bellows flatten any objections I may have had, managing both thunder and deepest woe in the same notes. The subtle orchestration and occasional choir arrangements finish the package with regal grandeur, and the lush and warm production is the cherry on top. If you feel like drowning your sorrows with an hour of colossal doom, this is the album for you.
Saunders’ Stenched Staples
Ade // Supplicium [March 14th, 2025 – Time to Kill Records]
Sometimes unjustly pigeonholed as the Roman-inspired version of Nile, the hugely underrated Ade have punched out a solid career of quality death metal releases since emerging roughly fifteen years ago, charting their own path. Albums like 2013’s ripping Spartacus and 2019’s solid Rise of the Empire represent a tidy snapshot of the band’s career. Fifth album Supplicium, their first LP in six years, marks a low-key, welcome return. Exotic instrumentation and attention to history and storytelling are alive and well in the Ade camp, as is their penchant for punishing, unrelenting death, featuring a deftly curated mix of bombast, brutality, technical spark, and epic atmospheres. Edoardo Di Santo (Hideous Divinity) joins a largely refreshed line-up, including a new bassist and second guitarist since their last album. Line-up changes aside, familiar Ade tools of harrowing ancient Roman tales and modern death destruction remain as consistently solid as always. Top-notch riffs, intricate arrangements, fluid tempo shifts, and explosive drumming highlight songs that frequently flex their flair for drama-fueled atmospheres, hellfire blasts, and burly grooves. The immense, multi-faceted “Burnt Before Gods,” exotic melodies and raw savagery of “Ad Beastias!,” spitfire intensity of “Vinum,” and epically charged throes of “From Fault to Disfigurement” highlight more solid returns from Ade.
Masters of Reality // The Archer [March 28th, 2025 – Artone Label Group/Mascot Records]
Underappreciated desert rock pioneers and quirky stalwarts Masters of Reality returned from recording oblivion some fifteen-plus years since they last unleashed an LP. Led by the legendary Chris Goss and his collaborative counterparts across a career that first kicked off in the late ’80s, Masters of Reality return sounding inspired, wisened, and a little more chilled. Re-tinkering their familiar but ever-shifting sound, Masters of Reality incorporate woozy, bluesy laidback vibes featuring their oddball songwriting traits through a sedate, intriguing collection of new songs. The Archer showcases Masters of Reality’s longevity as seasoned, skilled songwriters, regardless of the shifting rock modes they explore. While perhaps lacking some of the energetic spark and earworm hooks of albums like Sunrise on the Sufferbus and Deep in the Hole, The Archer still marks a fine return outing. Goss’ signature voice is in fine form, and the bluesy, psych-drenched guitars, cushy basslines, ’60s and ’70s influences, and spacey vibes create a comforting haze. The delightfully dreamy, trippy “Chicken Little,” laidback hooks and old school charms of “I Had a Dream,” lively, quirky grooves of “Mr Tap n’ Go,” and moody, melancholic balladry of “Powder Man” highlight another diverse, strange brew from the veteran act.
Tyme’s Unheard Annunciations
Doomsday // Never Known Peace [March 28th, 2025 – Creator-Destructor Records]
March’s filter means spring is here, mostly, which is when I start searching for bands to populate my annual edition of Tyme’s Mowing Metal. There’s nothing I enjoy more than cracking a cold beer, sliding my headphones over my ears, and hopping on the mower to complete one of summer’s—at least for me—most enjoyable chores. A band that will feature prominently this summer is Oakland, California’s crossover thrash quintet Doomsday, and their Creator-Destructor Records debut album, Never Known Peace. Doomsday lays down a ton of mindless fun in the vein of other crossover greats like Enforced and Power Trip. There are riffs aplenty on this deliciously executed hardcore-tinged thrashtastic platter full of snarly, spiteful, Jamey Jasta-esque vocals, trademark gang shouts, and, oh, did I mention the riffs? Yeah, cuz there’s a butt-ton of ’em. Leads and solos are melodic (“Death is Here,” “Eternal Tombs”). Within its beefily warm mix, the chug-a-lug breakdowns run rampant across Never Known Peace‘s thirty-one minutes (seriously, there’s one in every track), leaving nary a tune that won’t have you at least bobbing your head and, at most, causing your neck a very nasty case of whipthrash. I’m going to be listening to Never Known Peace ALOT this summer, on and off my mower, and while I don’t care that the lawn lines in my yard will be a little wavier this year than others, I’ll chalk it up to the beer and the head banging Doomsday‘s Never Known Peace instills.
Rancid Cadaver // Mortality Denied [March 21st, 2025 – Self Released]
Another filter, another fetid fragment of foulness; this month, it’s up-and-coming deathstarts Rancid Cadaver and their independently released debut album Mortality Denied. Adam Burke’s excellent cover art caught my eye during a quick dip into the Bandcamp pool and had me pushing play. A thick slab of murderous meat ripe with fatty veins of Coffin Mulch and Morbific running through it, Mortality Denied overflows with tons of bestial vocals, crushing drums, barbaric bass, and squealing solos, all ensorcelled within the majesty of Rancid Cadaver‘s miasmic riff-gurgitations (“Slurping the Cerebral Slime,” “Mass of Gore,” and “Drained of Brains”). Fists will pump, and faces will stank during the Fulci-friendly “Zombified,” a pulverizing slow-death chug fest with an intro that landed me right back on the shores of Dr. Menard’s island of the undead.2 This quartet of Glaswegians has plopped down a death metal debut that ages like wine, getting better and better with consecutive spins. Surprisingly, Rancid Cadaver is unsigned, but I’m confident that status should change before we see a sophomore effort, and you can bet I’ll be there when that happens.
Dolphin Whisperer’s Unsophisticated Slappers
Crossed // Realismo Ausente [March 21st, 2025 – Zegema Beach Records]
Timing means everything in groove. I know that some people say that they have a hard time finding that kind of bob and sway in extreme music. But with an act like Spain’s Crossed, whose every carved word and every skronked guitar noise follows an insatiable punky stride, groove lies in every moment of third full-length Realismo Ausente. Whether it’s on the classic beat of D (“Vaciar Un Corazón,” “Cuerpo Distorsionado”), the twanging drone of a screaming bend (“Monotonía de la lluvia en la Ventana”), or the Celtic Frost-ed hammer of a chord crush (“Catedral”), a calculated, urgent, and intoxicating cadence colors the grayscale attitude throughout. But just because Crossed can find a groove in any twisted mathy rhythm—early Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan come to mind on quick cuts like “Cerrojo” and “Sentirse Solo”—doesn’t mean that their panic chord-loaded crescendos and close-outs can’t rip your head clean off in banging ecstasy. Easy listening and blackened hardcore can’t go hand-in-hand, but Crossed does their very best to make unintelligible, scathing screeches and ceiling-scraping feedback hissing palatable against crunchy punk builds and throbbing, warm bass grumbles. Likewise, Realismo Ausente stabs into a dejected body tales of loathing, fear, self-rejection, and defeated existence—nothing smiles in its urgent and apathetic crevices. But despite the lack of light at the end of the tunnel of Crossed’s horror-touched vision of impassioned hardcore, an analog warmth and human spirit trapped inside a writhing and pleading throat reveal a presence that’s still fighting. It’s the fight that counts. If you didn’t join the fight last time, now’s as good a time as any.
Nothing // The Self Repair Manifesto [March 26th, 2025 – Self Released]
If you noticed a tree zombie heading steaming through its trepanned opening, then you too found the same initial draw I had to The Self Repair Manifesto. Nothing complex often can draw us to the things we desire, yet in Nothing’s particular attack of relentless, groove-based death metal, many nooks of additional interest exist. The Self Repair Manifesto’s tribal rhythm-stirred “Initiation,” in its bouncy play, does little to set up the double-kick pummel and snarling refrains that lurk in this brutal, Australian soundscape. The simple chiming cymbal-fluttering bass call-and-response of “Subterfuge,” the throat singing summoning of “The Shroud,” the immediate onslaught of “Abrogation”—all in under 30 minutes, an infectious and progressive experience unfolds. And never fear, living by the motto “no clean singing,”3 Nothing has no intention of traveling the wandering and crooning path of an Opeth or In Vain. Rather, Nothing finds a hypnotic rhythmic presence both in fanciful kit play that stirs a foot shuffle and high-tempo stick abuse that urges bodies on bodies in the pit (“Subterfuge,” “The Shroud”), much in the same way you might hear in early Decapitated or Hate Eternal works. With flair of their own, though, and a mic near the mouth vessel of each member (yes, even the drummer!) to maintain a layered harsh intensity, Nothing serves a potent blend of death metal that is as jam-able as it is gym-able. Whether you seek gains or progressive enrichment, Nothing is the answer.
Steel Druhm’s Massive Aggressive
Impurity // The Eternal Sleep [ March 7th, 2025 – Hammerheart Records]
Impurity’s lust for all things Left Hand Path is not the least bit Clandestine, and on their full-length debut, The Eternal Sleep, they attempt to craft their own ode to the rabid HM-2 worship of the early 90s Swedeath sound. No new elements are shoehorned in aside from vaguely blackened ones, and there’s not the slightest effort to push the boundaries of the admittedly limited Swedeath sound. The Eternal Sleep sounds like the album that could have come between Entombed’s timeless debut and the Clandestine follow-up, and that’s not a bad place to be. It’s heavy, brutish, buzzing death metal with an OSDM edge, and it hits like a runaway 18-wheeler full of concrete and titanium rebar. One only needs to weather the shitstorm of opener “Denial of Clarity” to realize this is the deep water of the niche genre. It’s extremely heavy, face-melting death with more fuzz and buzz than your brain can process. Other cuts feel like a direct lift from Left Hand Path and/or Clandestine (“Tribute to Creation,”) and fetid Dismember tidbits creep in during “Pilgrimage to Utumno,” and these feel like olde friends showing up unexpectedly at the hometown watering hole. Swedeath is all about those ragged, jagged riffs, and they’re delivered in abundance over The Eternal Sleep, and despite the intrinsic lack of originality, Impurity pump enough steroids and Cialis into the genre archetypes to make the material endearing and engaging. Yes, you’ve heard this shit before. Now hear it again, chumbo!
#AcidAge #Ade #AmericanMetal #ArtAsCatharsisRecords #ArtoneLabelGroup #Atheist #AustralianMetal #BeyondTheSleeplessAether #BlackMetal #BlackenedCrust #BlackenedHardcore #CanadianMetal #Casarder #CelticFrost #CoffinMulch #Converge #CreatorDestructorRecords #Crossed #Crust #DeathMetal #Decapitated #DesertRock #DillingerEscapePlan #DoomMetal #Doomsday #Elder #Enforced #Flummox #Fulci #Ghostsmoker #Hardcore #HateEternal #HideousDivinity #Impurity #InMourning #InVain #InertialCult #InternationalMetal #ItalianMetal #iwrestledabearonce #LostFutureRecords #MascotRecords #MastersOfReality #Mathcore #MelodicMetal #Metalcore #Morast #Morbific #MortalityDenied #MyDyingBride #NeObliviscaris #Neurosis #NeverKnownPeace #Nile #Nothing #Opeth #PaleChordRecords #Pelican #PerilousCompulsion #PinkFloyd #PortugueseMetal #PostRock #PostMetal #PowerTrip #ProgressiveDeathMetal #ProgressiveMetal #ProgressiveThrashMetal #PyschedelicRock #RancidCadaver #RealismoAusente #Review #Reviews #RiseRecords #RussianCircles #ScottishMetal #SeaBastard #SelfReleased #SixpenceNoneTheRicher #SludgeMetal #SpanishMetal #Spiine #Spiritbox #StonerMetal #Supplicium #SymbioticGrowth #TechnicalDeathMetal #Tetraptych #TheArcher #TheEternalSleep #TheSelfRepairManifesto #Thou #ThrashMetal #TimeToKillRecords #TsunamiSea #UKMetal #Unfleshing #Verbian #ViolentReason #VirginBlack #Voivod #Wormphlegm #ZegemaBeachRecords
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Stuck in the Filter: March 2025’s Angry Misses
By Kenstrosity
Spring is in the air, and with it comes… an insane number of cicadas! Yes, that’s right, Brood XIV spawned this year and is currently overwhelming my staff as they trudge through embuggened ducts to clear out the Filter of semi-precious metal. I bet it’s fucking loud in there…
…. eh I’m sure they are all fine. Just fine. Anyway, enjoy the spoils of our toils!
Kenstrosity’s Gloopy Grubber
Acid Age // Perilous Compulsion [February 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
Belfast’s wacky thrash conglomerate Acid Age came out of absolutely nowhere back in March, unleashing their fourth LP Perilous Compulsion and equipping it with one helluva van-worthy cover. This is some funky, bluesy, quasi-psychedelic thrash metal that pulls no punches. Riffs abound, bonkers songwriting pervades, immense groove agitates. From the onset, “Bikini Island” establishes Perilous Compulsion as a no-nonsense, balls-out affair which reminds me heavily of Voivod and a simplified Flummox informed by Atheist’s progressive proclivities, and expanded by a touch of Pink Floyd’s nebulous jams. Of course, thrash remains Acid Age’s hero flavor, as choice cuts “State Your Business,” “Revenge for Sale,” and closing one-two punch “Rotten Tooth” and “Hamster Wheel” clearly demonstrate. While their fearless exploration of style and structure maintains a sky-high level of interest, it also introduces a couple of challenges. Firstly, this material can feel a bit disjointed at first, but focused spins reward the listener greatly as all of Perilous Compulsion’s moving parts start to mesh and move in unison. Secondly, Acid Age throws a spotlight on a few brilliant inclusions that, over time, I wish were more often utilized—namely, the delightfully bluesy harmonica solos on “Rotten Tooth.” Regardless, Acid Age put themselves on my map with Perilous Compulsion. I recommend you put them on yours, too!
Owlswald’s Desiccated Discoveries
Verbian // Casarder [March 21st, 2025 – Lost Future Records]
It’s unjust that Portuguese rockers Verbian—who have been producing quality post-rock since 2019’s Jaez—haven’t received the attention they deserve. Fusing elements of post-rock with metal, psychedelic, and stoner, Casarder is Verbian’s third full-length and the first with new drummer Guilherme Gonçalves. Taking the sounds and inspirations of 2020’s Irrupção and enriching it with new permutations and modulations, Casarder’s largely instrumental character rides punchy riffs and roiling grooves—à la Russian Circles and Elder—to transmit its thought-provoking legitimacy. Dystopian and surreal séances, via echoing Korg synthscapes (“Pausa Entre Dias,” “Vozes da Ilha”) and celestial harmonies, permeate Casarder’s forty-three-minute runtime, translating Madalena Pinto’s striking Aeon Flux-esque cover art with precision. Ominous horn sections and crusty recurrent vocals (“Marcha do Vulto,” “Depois de Toda a Mudança”) by guitarist Vasco Reis and bassist Alexandre Silva underscore Verbian’s individuality in a crowded post-rock domain. Gonçalves’s drumming—with his intricate and enchanting hard rock and samba rhythms (“Nada Muda,” “Fruta Caída do Mar”)—adds a new dimension to Verbian’s sound, assuring my attention never falters. The group describes Casarder as communicating the “…insecurities of artistic expression and personal exposure when it comes to fearing being judged for something that is somewhat outside of what is done in each artist’s niche.” Indeed, Casarder reveals Verbian is unafraid to forge their own path, and the results are gripping.
Symbiotic Growth // Beyond the Sleepless Aether [March 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
Beyond the Sleepless Aether, the sophomore effort by Ontario, Canada’s Symbiotic Growth, immediately caught my attention with its dreamy-looking cover. Building upon their 2020 self-titled debut, the Canadian trio hones epic and long-form progressive death metal soundscapes, narrating a quest for meaning across alternate realities in mostly lengthy, yet rewarding, tracks that blend technicality, atmosphere, and melody. The group frequently employs dynamic shifts, moving between raging brutality and serene shoegaze beauty (“Arid Trials and Barren Sands,” “The Sleepless Void”). This is achieved through complex and vengeful passages alongside atmospheric synth lines and softer piano interludes (“Sires of Boundless Sunset,” “Of Painted Skies and Dancing Lights”), cultivating an air of wonder, mystery, and ethereality that permeates much of Symbiotic Growth’s material. “The Architect of Annihilation” echoes the style of Ne Obliviscaris with its blend of clean harmonies and harsh growls meshed with tremolo-picked arpeggiations and catchy hooks (the guitar solo even features a violin-like quality). “Lost in Fractured Reveries” evokes In Mourning with its parallel synth and guitar lines giving way to devastating grooves that make it impossible not to headbang. Although some fine-tuning remains—the clean vocals could use some more weight and tracks like “Of Painted Skies and Dancing Lights” and “The Architect of Annihilation” overstay their welcome at times—Beyond the Sleepless Aether shows Symbiotic Growth’s burgeoning talent and signals the group is one to watch in progressive death metal.
Dear Hollow’s Drudgery Sludgery Hoist
Spiritbox // Tsunami Sea [March 7th, 2025 – Pale Chord Records | Rise Records]
From humble beginnings in a more artsy-fartsy djent post-Iwrestledabearonce world to becoming the darlings of Octane Radio, Spiritbox has seen quite the ascent. While it’s easy to look at their work and scoff at its radio-friendliness, sophomore full-length Tsunami Sea shows Courtney LaPlante and company sticking to their guns. Simultaneously more obscure and more radio-friendly in its selection of tracks, expect its signature blend of colossal riffs and ethereal melodies guided by LaPlante’s siren-then-sea serpent dichotomy of furious roars and haunting cleans. Yes, Spiritbox helms its attack with the radio singles (“Perfect Soul,”1 “Crystal Roses”) in layered soaring choruses and touches of hip-hop undergirded by fierce grooves, but the meat of Tsunami Sea finds the flexibility and patience in the skull-crushing brutality (“Soft Spine,” “No Loss, No Love”) and its more exploratory songwriting that amps layers of the ethereal and the hellish with catchy riffs and vocals alike (“Fata Morgana,” “A Haven of Two Faces”). It’s far from perfect, and its tendency towards radio will be divisive, but it shows Spiritbox firing on all cylinders.
Unfleshing // Violent Reason [March 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
I am always tickled pink by blackened crust. It takes the crusty violence and propensity for filth and adds black metal’s signature sinister nature. Unfleshing is a young, unsigned blackened crust band from St. Louis, and with debut Violent Reason, you can expect a traditional punk-infused beatdown with a battered guitar tone and sinister vocals. However, more than many, the quartet offers a beatdown that feels as atmospheric as it is pummeling. Don’t get me wrong, you get your skull caved in like the poor guy on the cover with minute-long crust beatdowns (“Body Bag,” “From the Gutter”) and full-length smackdowns (“Knife in the Dark,” “Final Breath”), both styles complete with scathing grooves, squalid feedback, climactic solos and punishing blastbeats, atop a blackened roar dripping with hate. But amid the full-throttle assault, Unfleshing utilizes ominous black metal chord progressions and unsettling plucking to add a more dynamic feature to Violent Reason (“Cathedral Rust,” “One With the Mud”). The album never overstays, and while traditional, it’s a hell of a start for Unfleshing.
Ghostsmoker // Inertia Cult [March 21st, 2025 – Art as Catharsis Records]
Ghostsmoker seems like the perfect stoner metal band name, but aside from the swampy guitar tone, there’s something much sinister lurking. Proffering a caustic blackened doom/sludge not unlike Thou, Wormphlegm, and Sea Bastard, the Melbourne group quartet devotes a crisp forty-two minutes to sprawling doom weighted by a crushing guitar tone that rivals Morast‘s latest, and shrieked vocals straight from the latest church burning. Beyond what’s expected from this particular breed of devastation, Ghostsmoker infuses an evocative patience reminiscent of post-metal’s more sludgy offerings like Neurosis or Pelican, lending a certain atmosphere and mood of dread and wilderness depicted on its cover. From the outright chugging attacks of churning aggression (“Elogium,” “Haven”) to the more experimental and thoughtful pieces (“Bodies to Shore,” instrumental closer “The Death of Solitude”), Inertia Cult largely feels like a journey through uncharted forests, with voices whispering from the trees. Ghostsmoker is something special.
GardensTale’s Paralyzed Spine
Spiine // Tetraptych [March 27th, 2025 – Self Released]
Is it still a supergroup release when half the lineup are session musicians? Spiine is made up of Sesca Scaarba (Virgin Black) and Xen (ex-Ne Obliviscaris), but on debut Tetraptych they are joined by guests Waltteri Väyrynen (Opeth) and Lena Abé (My Dying Bride). Usually, so much talent put into the same room does not yield great results. Tetraptych is one hell of an exception. A monstrous slab of crawling heaviness, Spiine lurches with abject despair through the mires of deathly funeral doom. Though I usually eschew this genre, my attention remains rapt through a variety of variations. The songwriting keeps the 4 tracks progressing, slow and steady builds, and the promise of momentary tempo changes working a two-pronged structural plan to buoy the majestic yet miserable riffs. “Oubliiette” is the best example here, going from galloping death-doom to Georgian choirs to a fantastic bridge where all the instrumentation hits only on the roared syllables. Xen’s unholy bellows flatten any objections I may have had, managing both thunder and deepest woe in the same notes. The subtle orchestration and occasional choir arrangements finish the package with regal grandeur, and the lush and warm production is the cherry on top. If you feel like drowning your sorrows with an hour of colossal doom, this is the album for you.
Saunders’ Stenched Staples
Ade // Supplicium [March 14th, 2025 – Time to Kill Records]
Sometimes unjustly pigeonholed as the Roman-inspired version of Nile, the hugely underrated Ade have punched out a solid career of quality death metal releases since emerging roughly fifteen years ago, charting their own path. Albums like 2013’s ripping Spartacus and 2019’s solid Rise of the Empire represent a tidy snapshot of the band’s career. Fifth album Supplicium, their first LP in six years, marks a low-key, welcome return. Exotic instrumentation and attention to history and storytelling are alive and well in the Ade camp, as is their penchant for punishing, unrelenting death, featuring a deftly curated mix of bombast, brutality, technical spark, and epic atmospheres. Edoardo Di Santo (Hideous Divinity) joins a largely refreshed line-up, including a new bassist and second guitarist since their last album. Line-up changes aside, familiar Ade tools of harrowing ancient Roman tales and modern death destruction remain as consistently solid as always. Top-notch riffs, intricate arrangements, fluid tempo shifts, and explosive drumming highlight songs that frequently flex their flair for drama-fueled atmospheres, hellfire blasts, and burly grooves. The immense, multi-faceted “Burnt Before Gods,” exotic melodies and raw savagery of “Ad Beastias!,” spitfire intensity of “Vinum,” and epically charged throes of “From Fault to Disfigurement” highlight more solid returns from Ade.
Masters of Reality // The Archer [March 28th, 2025 – Artone Label Group/Mascot Records]
Underappreciated desert rock pioneers and quirky stalwarts Masters of Reality returned from recording oblivion some fifteen-plus years since they last unleashed an LP. Led by the legendary Chris Goss and his collaborative counterparts across a career that first kicked off in the late ’80s, Masters of Reality return sounding inspired, wisened, and a little more chilled. Re-tinkering their familiar but ever-shifting sound, Masters of Reality incorporate woozy, bluesy laidback vibes featuring their oddball songwriting traits through a sedate, intriguing collection of new songs. The Archer showcases Masters of Reality’s longevity as seasoned, skilled songwriters, regardless of the shifting rock modes they explore. While perhaps lacking some of the energetic spark and earworm hooks of albums like Sunrise on the Sufferbus and Deep in the Hole, The Archer still marks a fine return outing. Goss’ signature voice is in fine form, and the bluesy, psych-drenched guitars, cushy basslines, ’60s and ’70s influences, and spacey vibes create a comforting haze. The delightfully dreamy, trippy “Chicken Little,” laidback hooks and old school charms of “I Had a Dream,” lively, quirky grooves of “Mr Tap n’ Go,” and moody, melancholic balladry of “Powder Man” highlight another diverse, strange brew from the veteran act.
Tyme’s Unheard Annunciations
Doomsday // Never Known Peace [March 28th, 2025 – Creator-Destructor Records]
March’s filter means spring is here, mostly, which is when I start searching for bands to populate my annual edition of Tyme’s Mowing Metal. There’s nothing I enjoy more than cracking a cold beer, sliding my headphones over my ears, and hopping on the mower to complete one of summer’s—at least for me—most enjoyable chores. A band that will feature prominently this summer is Oakland, California’s crossover thrash quintet Doomsday, and their Creator-Destructor Records debut album, Never Known Peace. Doomsday lays down a ton of mindless fun in the vein of other crossover greats like Enforced and Power Trip. There are riffs aplenty on this deliciously executed hardcore-tinged thrashtastic platter full of snarly, spiteful, Jamey Jasta-esque vocals, trademark gang shouts, and, oh, did I mention the riffs? Yeah, cuz there’s a butt-ton of ’em. Leads and solos are melodic (“Death is Here,” “Eternal Tombs”). Within its beefily warm mix, the chug-a-lug breakdowns run rampant across Never Known Peace‘s thirty-one minutes (seriously, there’s one in every track), leaving nary a tune that won’t have you at least bobbing your head and, at most, causing your neck a very nasty case of whipthrash. I’m going to be listening to Never Known Peace ALOT this summer, on and off my mower, and while I don’t care that the lawn lines in my yard will be a little wavier this year than others, I’ll chalk it up to the beer and the head banging Doomsday‘s Never Known Peace instills.
Rancid Cadaver // Mortality Denied [March 21st, 2025 – Self Released]
Another filter, another fetid fragment of foulness; this month, it’s up-and-coming deathstarts Rancid Cadaver and their independently released debut album Mortality Denied. Adam Burke’s excellent cover art caught my eye during a quick dip into the Bandcamp pool and had me pushing play. A thick slab of murderous meat ripe with fatty veins of Coffin Mulch and Morbific running through it, Mortality Denied overflows with tons of bestial vocals, crushing drums, barbaric bass, and squealing solos, all ensorcelled within the majesty of Rancid Cadaver‘s miasmic riff-gurgitations (“Slurping the Cerebral Slime,” “Mass of Gore,” and “Drained of Brains”). Fists will pump, and faces will stank during the Fulci-friendly “Zombified,” a pulverizing slow-death chug fest with an intro that landed me right back on the shores of Dr. Menard’s island of the undead.2 This quartet of Glaswegians has plopped down a death metal debut that ages like wine, getting better and better with consecutive spins. Surprisingly, Rancid Cadaver is unsigned, but I’m confident that status should change before we see a sophomore effort, and you can bet I’ll be there when that happens.
Dolphin Whisperer’s Unsophisticated Slappers
Crossed // Realismo Ausente [March 21st, 2025 – Zegema Beach Records]
Timing means everything in groove. I know that some people say that they have a hard time finding that kind of bob and sway in extreme music. But with an act like Spain’s Crossed, whose every carved word and every skronked guitar noise follows an insatiable punky stride, groove lies in every moment of third full-length Realismo Ausente. Whether it’s on the classic beat of D (“Vaciar Un Corazón,” “Cuerpo Distorsionado”), the twanging drone of a screaming bend (“Monotonía de la lluvia en la Ventana”), or the Celtic Frost-ed hammer of a chord crush (“Catedral”), a calculated, urgent, and intoxicating cadence colors the grayscale attitude throughout. But just because Crossed can find a groove in any twisted mathy rhythm—early Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan come to mind on quick cuts like “Cerrojo” and “Sentirse Solo”—doesn’t mean that their panic chord-loaded crescendos and close-outs can’t rip your head clean off in banging ecstasy. Easy listening and blackened hardcore can’t go hand-in-hand, but Crossed does their very best to make unintelligible, scathing screeches and ceiling-scraping feedback hissing palatable against crunchy punk builds and throbbing, warm bass grumbles. Likewise, Realismo Ausente stabs into a dejected body tales of loathing, fear, self-rejection, and defeated existence—nothing smiles in its urgent and apathetic crevices. But despite the lack of light at the end of the tunnel of Crossed’s horror-touched vision of impassioned hardcore, an analog warmth and human spirit trapped inside a writhing and pleading throat reveal a presence that’s still fighting. It’s the fight that counts. If you didn’t join the fight last time, now’s as good a time as any.
Nothing // The Self Repair Manifesto [March 26th, 2025 – Self Released]
If you noticed a tree zombie heading steaming through its trepanned opening, then you too found the same initial draw I had to The Self Repair Manifesto. Nothing complex often can draw us to the things we desire, yet in Nothing’s particular attack of relentless, groove-based death metal, many nooks of additional interest exist. The Self Repair Manifesto’s tribal rhythm-stirred “Initiation,” in its bouncy play, does little to set up the double-kick pummel and snarling refrains that lurk in this brutal, Australian soundscape. The simple chiming cymbal-fluttering bass call-and-response of “Subterfuge,” the throat singing summoning of “The Shroud,” the immediate onslaught of “Abrogation”—all in under 30 minutes, an infectious and progressive experience unfolds. And never fear, living by the motto “no clean singing,”3 Nothing has no intention of traveling the wandering and crooning path of an Opeth or In Vain. Rather, Nothing finds a hypnotic rhythmic presence both in fanciful kit play that stirs a foot shuffle and high-tempo stick abuse that urges bodies on bodies in the pit (“Subterfuge,” “The Shroud”), much in the same way you might hear in early Decapitated or Hate Eternal works. With flair of their own, though, and a mic near the mouth vessel of each member (yes, even the drummer!) to maintain a layered harsh intensity, Nothing serves a potent blend of death metal that is as jam-able as it is gym-able. Whether you seek gains or progressive enrichment, Nothing is the answer.
Steel Druhm’s Massive Aggressive
Impurity // The Eternal Sleep [ March 7th, 2025 – Hammerheart Records]
Impurity’s lust for all things Left Hand Path is not the least bit Clandestine, and on their full-length debut, The Eternal Sleep, they attempt to craft their own ode to the rabid HM-2 worship of the early 90s Swedeath sound. No new elements are shoehorned in aside from vaguely blackened ones, and there’s not the slightest effort to push the boundaries of the admittedly limited Swedeath sound. The Eternal Sleep sounds like the album that could have come between Entombed’s timeless debut and the Clandestine follow-up, and that’s not a bad place to be. It’s heavy, brutish, buzzing death metal with an OSDM edge, and it hits like a runaway 18-wheeler full of concrete and titanium rebar. One only needs to weather the shitstorm of opener “Denial of Clarity” to realize this is the deep water of the niche genre. It’s extremely heavy, face-melting death with more fuzz and buzz than your brain can process. Other cuts feel like a direct lift from Left Hand Path and/or Clandestine (“Tribute to Creation,”) and fetid Dismember tidbits creep in during “Pilgrimage to Utumno,” and these feel like olde friends showing up unexpectedly at the hometown watering hole. Swedeath is all about those ragged, jagged riffs, and they’re delivered in abundance over The Eternal Sleep, and despite the intrinsic lack of originality, Impurity pump enough steroids and Cialis into the genre archetypes to make the material endearing and engaging. Yes, you’ve heard this shit before. Now hear it again, chumbo!
#AcidAge #Ade #AmericanMetal #ArtAsCatharsisRecords #ArtoneLabelGroup #Atheist #AustralianMetal #BeyondTheSleeplessAether #BlackMetal #BlackenedCrust #BlackenedHardcore #CanadianMetal #Casarder #CelticFrost #CoffinMulch #Converge #CreatorDestructorRecords #Crossed #Crust #DeathMetal #Decapitated #DesertRock #DillingerEscapePlan #DoomMetal #Doomsday #Elder #Enforced #Flummox #Fulci #Ghostsmoker #Hardcore #HateEternal #HideousDivinity #Impurity #InMourning #InVain #InertialCult #InternationalMetal #ItalianMetal #iwrestledabearonce #LostFutureRecords #MascotRecords #MastersOfReality #Mathcore #MelodicMetal #Metalcore #Morast #Morbific #MortalityDenied #MyDyingBride #NeObliviscaris #Neurosis #NeverKnownPeace #Nile #Nothing #Opeth #PaleChordRecords #Pelican #PerilousCompulsion #PinkFloyd #PortugueseMetal #PostRock #PostMetal #PowerTrip #ProgressiveDeathMetal #ProgressiveMetal #ProgressiveThrashMetal #PyschedelicRock #RancidCadaver #RealismoAusente #Review #Reviews #RiseRecords #RussianCircles #ScottishMetal #SeaBastard #SelfReleased #SixpenceNoneTheRicher #SludgeMetal #SpanishMetal #Spiine #Spiritbox #StonerMetal #Supplicium #SymbioticGrowth #TechnicalDeathMetal #Tetraptych #TheArcher #TheEternalSleep #TheSelfRepairManifesto #Thou #ThrashMetal #TimeToKillRecords #TsunamiSea #UKMetal #Unfleshing #Verbian #ViolentReason #VirginBlack #Voivod #Wormphlegm #ZegemaBeachRecords
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Stuck in the Filter: March 2025’s Angry Misses
By Kenstrosity
Spring is in the air, and with it comes… an insane number of cicadas! Yes, that’s right, Brood XIV spawned this year and is currently overwhelming my staff as they trudge through embuggened ducts to clear out the Filter of semi-precious metal. I bet it’s fucking loud in there…
…. eh I’m sure they are all fine. Just fine. Anyway, enjoy the spoils of our toils!
Kenstrosity’s Gloopy Grubber
Acid Age // Perilous Compulsion [February 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
Belfast’s wacky thrash conglomerate Acid Age came out of absolutely nowhere back in March, unleashing their fourth LP Perilous Compulsion and equipping it with one helluva van-worthy cover. This is some funky, bluesy, quasi-psychedelic thrash metal that pulls no punches. Riffs abound, bonkers songwriting pervades, immense groove agitates. From the onset, “Bikini Island” establishes Perilous Compulsion as a no-nonsense, balls-out affair which reminds me heavily of Voivod and a simplified Flummox informed by Atheist’s progressive proclivities, and expanded by a touch of Pink Floyd’s nebulous jams. Of course, thrash remains Acid Age’s hero flavor, as choice cuts “State Your Business,” “Revenge for Sale,” and closing one-two punch “Rotten Tooth” and “Hamster Wheel” clearly demonstrate. While their fearless exploration of style and structure maintains a sky-high level of interest, it also introduces a couple of challenges. Firstly, this material can feel a bit disjointed at first, but focused spins reward the listener greatly as all of Perilous Compulsion’s moving parts start to mesh and move in unison. Secondly, Acid Age throws a spotlight on a few brilliant inclusions that, over time, I wish were more often utilized—namely, the delightfully bluesy harmonica solos on “Rotten Tooth.” Regardless, Acid Age put themselves on my map with Perilous Compulsion. I recommend you put them on yours, too!
Owlswald’s Desiccated Discoveries
Verbian // Casarder [March 21st, 2025 – Lost Future Records]
It’s unjust that Portuguese rockers Verbian—who have been producing quality post-rock since 2019’s Jaez—haven’t received the attention they deserve. Fusing elements of post-rock with metal, psychedelic, and stoner, Casarder is Verbian’s third full-length and the first with new drummer Guilherme Gonçalves. Taking the sounds and inspirations of 2020’s Irrupção and enriching it with new permutations and modulations, Casarder’s largely instrumental character rides punchy riffs and roiling grooves—à la Russian Circles and Elder—to transmit its thought-provoking legitimacy. Dystopian and surreal séances, via echoing Korg synthscapes (“Pausa Entre Dias,” “Vozes da Ilha”) and celestial harmonies, permeate Casarder’s forty-three-minute runtime, translating Madalena Pinto’s striking Aeon Flux-esque cover art with precision. Ominous horn sections and crusty recurrent vocals (“Marcha do Vulto,” “Depois de Toda a Mudança”) by guitarist Vasco Reis and bassist Alexandre Silva underscore Verbian’s individuality in a crowded post-rock domain. Gonçalves’s drumming—with his intricate and enchanting hard rock and samba rhythms (“Nada Muda,” “Fruta Caída do Mar”)—adds a new dimension to Verbian’s sound, assuring my attention never falters. The group describes Casarder as communicating the “…insecurities of artistic expression and personal exposure when it comes to fearing being judged for something that is somewhat outside of what is done in each artist’s niche.” Indeed, Casarder reveals Verbian is unafraid to forge their own path, and the results are gripping.
Symbiotic Growth // Beyond the Sleepless Aether [March 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
Beyond the Sleepless Aether, the sophomore effort by Ontario, Canada’s Symbiotic Growth, immediately caught my attention with its dreamy-looking cover. Building upon their 2020 self-titled debut, the Canadian trio hones epic and long-form progressive death metal soundscapes, narrating a quest for meaning across alternate realities in mostly lengthy, yet rewarding, tracks that blend technicality, atmosphere, and melody. The group frequently employs dynamic shifts, moving between raging brutality and serene shoegaze beauty (“Arid Trials and Barren Sands,” “The Sleepless Void”). This is achieved through complex and vengeful passages alongside atmospheric synth lines and softer piano interludes (“Sires of Boundless Sunset,” “Of Painted Skies and Dancing Lights”), cultivating an air of wonder, mystery, and ethereality that permeates much of Symbiotic Growth’s material. “The Architect of Annihilation” echoes the style of Ne Obliviscaris with its blend of clean harmonies and harsh growls meshed with tremolo-picked arpeggiations and catchy hooks (the guitar solo even features a violin-like quality). “Lost in Fractured Reveries” evokes In Mourning with its parallel synth and guitar lines giving way to devastating grooves that make it impossible not to headbang. Although some fine-tuning remains—the clean vocals could use some more weight and tracks like “Of Painted Skies and Dancing Lights” and “The Architect of Annihilation” overstay their welcome at times—Beyond the Sleepless Aether shows Symbiotic Growth’s burgeoning talent and signals the group is one to watch in progressive death metal.
Dear Hollow’s Drudgery Sludgery Hoist
Spiritbox // Tsunami Sea [March 7th, 2025 – Pale Chord Records | Rise Records]
From humble beginnings in a more artsy-fartsy djent post-Iwrestledabearonce world to becoming the darlings of Octane Radio, Spiritbox has seen quite the ascent. While it’s easy to look at their work and scoff at its radio-friendliness, sophomore full-length Tsunami Sea shows Courtney LaPlante and company sticking to their guns. Simultaneously more obscure and more radio-friendly in its selection of tracks, expect its signature blend of colossal riffs and ethereal melodies guided by LaPlante’s siren-then-sea serpent dichotomy of furious roars and haunting cleans. Yes, Spiritbox helms its attack with the radio singles (“Perfect Soul,”1 “Crystal Roses”) in layered soaring choruses and touches of hip-hop undergirded by fierce grooves, but the meat of Tsunami Sea finds the flexibility and patience in the skull-crushing brutality (“Soft Spine,” “No Loss, No Love”) and its more exploratory songwriting that amps layers of the ethereal and the hellish with catchy riffs and vocals alike (“Fata Morgana,” “A Haven of Two Faces”). It’s far from perfect, and its tendency towards radio will be divisive, but it shows Spiritbox firing on all cylinders.
Unfleshing // Violent Reason [March 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
I am always tickled pink by blackened crust. It takes the crusty violence and propensity for filth and adds black metal’s signature sinister nature. Unfleshing is a young, unsigned blackened crust band from St. Louis, and with debut Violent Reason, you can expect a traditional punk-infused beatdown with a battered guitar tone and sinister vocals. However, more than many, the quartet offers a beatdown that feels as atmospheric as it is pummeling. Don’t get me wrong, you get your skull caved in like the poor guy on the cover with minute-long crust beatdowns (“Body Bag,” “From the Gutter”) and full-length smackdowns (“Knife in the Dark,” “Final Breath”), both styles complete with scathing grooves, squalid feedback, climactic solos and punishing blastbeats, atop a blackened roar dripping with hate. But amid the full-throttle assault, Unfleshing utilizes ominous black metal chord progressions and unsettling plucking to add a more dynamic feature to Violent Reason (“Cathedral Rust,” “One With the Mud”). The album never overstays, and while traditional, it’s a hell of a start for Unfleshing.
Ghostsmoker // Inertia Cult [March 21st, 2025 – Art as Catharsis Records]
Ghostsmoker seems like the perfect stoner metal band name, but aside from the swampy guitar tone, there’s something much sinister lurking. Proffering a caustic blackened doom/sludge not unlike Thou, Wormphlegm, and Sea Bastard, the Melbourne group quartet devotes a crisp forty-two minutes to sprawling doom weighted by a crushing guitar tone that rivals Morast‘s latest, and shrieked vocals straight from the latest church burning. Beyond what’s expected from this particular breed of devastation, Ghostsmoker infuses an evocative patience reminiscent of post-metal’s more sludgy offerings like Neurosis or Pelican, lending a certain atmosphere and mood of dread and wilderness depicted on its cover. From the outright chugging attacks of churning aggression (“Elogium,” “Haven”) to the more experimental and thoughtful pieces (“Bodies to Shore,” instrumental closer “The Death of Solitude”), Inertia Cult largely feels like a journey through uncharted forests, with voices whispering from the trees. Ghostsmoker is something special.
GardensTale’s Paralyzed Spine
Spiine // Tetraptych [March 27th, 2025 – Self Released]
Is it still a supergroup release when half the lineup are session musicians? Spiine is made up of Sesca Scaarba (Virgin Black) and Xen (ex-Ne Obliviscaris), but on debut Tetraptych they are joined by guests Waltteri Väyrynen (Opeth) and Lena Abé (My Dying Bride). Usually, so much talent put into the same room does not yield great results. Tetraptych is one hell of an exception. A monstrous slab of crawling heaviness, Spiine lurches with abject despair through the mires of deathly funeral doom. Though I usually eschew this genre, my attention remains rapt through a variety of variations. The songwriting keeps the 4 tracks progressing, slow and steady builds, and the promise of momentary tempo changes working a two-pronged structural plan to buoy the majestic yet miserable riffs. “Oubliiette” is the best example here, going from galloping death-doom to Georgian choirs to a fantastic bridge where all the instrumentation hits only on the roared syllables. Xen’s unholy bellows flatten any objections I may have had, managing both thunder and deepest woe in the same notes. The subtle orchestration and occasional choir arrangements finish the package with regal grandeur, and the lush and warm production is the cherry on top. If you feel like drowning your sorrows with an hour of colossal doom, this is the album for you.
Saunders’ Stenched Staples
Ade // Supplicium [March 14th, 2025 – Time to Kill Records]
Sometimes unjustly pigeonholed as the Roman-inspired version of Nile, the hugely underrated Ade have punched out a solid career of quality death metal releases since emerging roughly fifteen years ago, charting their own path. Albums like 2013’s ripping Spartacus and 2019’s solid Rise of the Empire represent a tidy snapshot of the band’s career. Fifth album Supplicium, their first LP in six years, marks a low-key, welcome return. Exotic instrumentation and attention to history and storytelling are alive and well in the Ade camp, as is their penchant for punishing, unrelenting death, featuring a deftly curated mix of bombast, brutality, technical spark, and epic atmospheres. Edoardo Di Santo (Hideous Divinity) joins a largely refreshed line-up, including a new bassist and second guitarist since their last album. Line-up changes aside, familiar Ade tools of harrowing ancient Roman tales and modern death destruction remain as consistently solid as always. Top-notch riffs, intricate arrangements, fluid tempo shifts, and explosive drumming highlight songs that frequently flex their flair for drama-fueled atmospheres, hellfire blasts, and burly grooves. The immense, multi-faceted “Burnt Before Gods,” exotic melodies and raw savagery of “Ad Beastias!,” spitfire intensity of “Vinum,” and epically charged throes of “From Fault to Disfigurement” highlight more solid returns from Ade.
Masters of Reality // The Archer [March 28th, 2025 – Artone Label Group/Mascot Records]
Underappreciated desert rock pioneers and quirky stalwarts Masters of Reality returned from recording oblivion some fifteen-plus years since they last unleashed an LP. Led by the legendary Chris Goss and his collaborative counterparts across a career that first kicked off in the late ’80s, Masters of Reality return sounding inspired, wisened, and a little more chilled. Re-tinkering their familiar but ever-shifting sound, Masters of Reality incorporate woozy, bluesy laidback vibes featuring their oddball songwriting traits through a sedate, intriguing collection of new songs. The Archer showcases Masters of Reality’s longevity as seasoned, skilled songwriters, regardless of the shifting rock modes they explore. While perhaps lacking some of the energetic spark and earworm hooks of albums like Sunrise on the Sufferbus and Deep in the Hole, The Archer still marks a fine return outing. Goss’ signature voice is in fine form, and the bluesy, psych-drenched guitars, cushy basslines, ’60s and ’70s influences, and spacey vibes create a comforting haze. The delightfully dreamy, trippy “Chicken Little,” laidback hooks and old school charms of “I Had a Dream,” lively, quirky grooves of “Mr Tap n’ Go,” and moody, melancholic balladry of “Powder Man” highlight another diverse, strange brew from the veteran act.
Tyme’s Unheard Annunciations
Doomsday // Never Known Peace [March 28th, 2025 – Creator-Destructor Records]
March’s filter means spring is here, mostly, which is when I start searching for bands to populate my annual edition of Tyme’s Mowing Metal. There’s nothing I enjoy more than cracking a cold beer, sliding my headphones over my ears, and hopping on the mower to complete one of summer’s—at least for me—most enjoyable chores. A band that will feature prominently this summer is Oakland, California’s crossover thrash quintet Doomsday, and their Creator-Destructor Records debut album, Never Known Peace. Doomsday lays down a ton of mindless fun in the vein of other crossover greats like Enforced and Power Trip. There are riffs aplenty on this deliciously executed hardcore-tinged thrashtastic platter full of snarly, spiteful, Jamey Jasta-esque vocals, trademark gang shouts, and, oh, did I mention the riffs? Yeah, cuz there’s a butt-ton of ’em. Leads and solos are melodic (“Death is Here,” “Eternal Tombs”). Within its beefily warm mix, the chug-a-lug breakdowns run rampant across Never Known Peace‘s thirty-one minutes (seriously, there’s one in every track), leaving nary a tune that won’t have you at least bobbing your head and, at most, causing your neck a very nasty case of whipthrash. I’m going to be listening to Never Known Peace ALOT this summer, on and off my mower, and while I don’t care that the lawn lines in my yard will be a little wavier this year than others, I’ll chalk it up to the beer and the head banging Doomsday‘s Never Known Peace instills.
Rancid Cadaver // Mortality Denied [March 21st, 2025 – Self Released]
Another filter, another fetid fragment of foulness; this month, it’s up-and-coming deathstarts Rancid Cadaver and their independently released debut album Mortality Denied. Adam Burke’s excellent cover art caught my eye during a quick dip into the Bandcamp pool and had me pushing play. A thick slab of murderous meat ripe with fatty veins of Coffin Mulch and Morbific running through it, Mortality Denied overflows with tons of bestial vocals, crushing drums, barbaric bass, and squealing solos, all ensorcelled within the majesty of Rancid Cadaver‘s miasmic riff-gurgitations (“Slurping the Cerebral Slime,” “Mass of Gore,” and “Drained of Brains”). Fists will pump, and faces will stank during the Fulci-friendly “Zombified,” a pulverizing slow-death chug fest with an intro that landed me right back on the shores of Dr. Menard’s island of the undead.2 This quartet of Glaswegians has plopped down a death metal debut that ages like wine, getting better and better with consecutive spins. Surprisingly, Rancid Cadaver is unsigned, but I’m confident that status should change before we see a sophomore effort, and you can bet I’ll be there when that happens.
Dolphin Whisperer’s Unsophisticated Slappers
Crossed // Realismo Ausente [March 21st, 2025 – Zegema Beach Records]
Timing means everything in groove. I know that some people say that they have a hard time finding that kind of bob and sway in extreme music. But with an act like Spain’s Crossed, whose every carved word and every skronked guitar noise follows an insatiable punky stride, groove lies in every moment of third full-length Realismo Ausente. Whether it’s on the classic beat of D (“Vaciar Un Corazón,” “Cuerpo Distorsionado”), the twanging drone of a screaming bend (“Monotonía de la lluvia en la Ventana”), or the Celtic Frost-ed hammer of a chord crush (“Catedral”), a calculated, urgent, and intoxicating cadence colors the grayscale attitude throughout. But just because Crossed can find a groove in any twisted mathy rhythm—early Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan come to mind on quick cuts like “Cerrojo” and “Sentirse Solo”—doesn’t mean that their panic chord-loaded crescendos and close-outs can’t rip your head clean off in banging ecstasy. Easy listening and blackened hardcore can’t go hand-in-hand, but Crossed does their very best to make unintelligible, scathing screeches and ceiling-scraping feedback hissing palatable against crunchy punk builds and throbbing, warm bass grumbles. Likewise, Realismo Ausente stabs into a dejected body tales of loathing, fear, self-rejection, and defeated existence—nothing smiles in its urgent and apathetic crevices. But despite the lack of light at the end of the tunnel of Crossed’s horror-touched vision of impassioned hardcore, an analog warmth and human spirit trapped inside a writhing and pleading throat reveal a presence that’s still fighting. It’s the fight that counts. If you didn’t join the fight last time, now’s as good a time as any.
Nothing // The Self Repair Manifesto [March 26th, 2025 – Self Released]
If you noticed a tree zombie heading steaming through its trepanned opening, then you too found the same initial draw I had to The Self Repair Manifesto. Nothing complex often can draw us to the things we desire, yet in Nothing’s particular attack of relentless, groove-based death metal, many nooks of additional interest exist. The Self Repair Manifesto’s tribal rhythm-stirred “Initiation,” in its bouncy play, does little to set up the double-kick pummel and snarling refrains that lurk in this brutal, Australian soundscape. The simple chiming cymbal-fluttering bass call-and-response of “Subterfuge,” the throat singing summoning of “The Shroud,” the immediate onslaught of “Abrogation”—all in under 30 minutes, an infectious and progressive experience unfolds. And never fear, living by the motto “no clean singing,”3 Nothing has no intention of traveling the wandering and crooning path of an Opeth or In Vain. Rather, Nothing finds a hypnotic rhythmic presence both in fanciful kit play that stirs a foot shuffle and high-tempo stick abuse that urges bodies on bodies in the pit (“Subterfuge,” “The Shroud”), much in the same way you might hear in early Decapitated or Hate Eternal works. With flair of their own, though, and a mic near the mouth vessel of each member (yes, even the drummer!) to maintain a layered harsh intensity, Nothing serves a potent blend of death metal that is as jam-able as it is gym-able. Whether you seek gains or progressive enrichment, Nothing is the answer.
Steel Druhm’s Massive Aggressive
Impurity // The Eternal Sleep [ March 7th, 2025 – Hammerheart Records]
Impurity’s lust for all things Left Hand Path is not the least bit Clandestine, and on their full-length debut, The Eternal Sleep, they attempt to craft their own ode to the rabid HM-2 worship of the early 90s Swedeath sound. No new elements are shoehorned in aside from vaguely blackened ones, and there’s not the slightest effort to push the boundaries of the admittedly limited Swedeath sound. The Eternal Sleep sounds like the album that could have come between Entombed’s timeless debut and the Clandestine follow-up, and that’s not a bad place to be. It’s heavy, brutish, buzzing death metal with an OSDM edge, and it hits like a runaway 18-wheeler full of concrete and titanium rebar. One only needs to weather the shitstorm of opener “Denial of Clarity” to realize this is the deep water of the niche genre. It’s extremely heavy, face-melting death with more fuzz and buzz than your brain can process. Other cuts feel like a direct lift from Left Hand Path and/or Clandestine (“Tribute to Creation,”) and fetid Dismember tidbits creep in during “Pilgrimage to Utumno,” and these feel like olde friends showing up unexpectedly at the hometown watering hole. Swedeath is all about those ragged, jagged riffs, and they’re delivered in abundance over The Eternal Sleep, and despite the intrinsic lack of originality, Impurity pump enough steroids and Cialis into the genre archetypes to make the material endearing and engaging. Yes, you’ve heard this shit before. Now hear it again, chumbo!
#AcidAge #Ade #AmericanMetal #ArtAsCatharsisRecords #ArtoneLabelGroup #Atheist #AustralianMetal #BeyondTheSleeplessAether #BlackMetal #BlackenedCrust #BlackenedHardcore #CanadianMetal #Casarder #CelticFrost #CoffinMulch #Converge #CreatorDestructorRecords #Crossed #Crust #DeathMetal #Decapitated #DesertRock #DillingerEscapePlan #DoomMetal #Doomsday #Elder #Enforced #Flummox #Fulci #Ghostsmoker #Hardcore #HateEternal #HideousDivinity #Impurity #InMourning #InVain #InertialCult #InternationalMetal #ItalianMetal #iwrestledabearonce #LostFutureRecords #MascotRecords #MastersOfReality #Mathcore #MelodicMetal #Metalcore #Morast #Morbific #MortalityDenied #MyDyingBride #NeObliviscaris #Neurosis #NeverKnownPeace #Nile #Nothing #Opeth #PaleChordRecords #Pelican #PerilousCompulsion #PinkFloyd #PortugueseMetal #PostRock #PostMetal #PowerTrip #ProgressiveDeathMetal #ProgressiveMetal #ProgressiveThrashMetal #PyschedelicRock #RancidCadaver #RealismoAusente #Review #Reviews #RiseRecords #RussianCircles #ScottishMetal #SeaBastard #SelfReleased #SixpenceNoneTheRicher #SludgeMetal #SpanishMetal #Spiine #Spiritbox #StonerMetal #Supplicium #SymbioticGrowth #TechnicalDeathMetal #Tetraptych #TheArcher #TheEternalSleep #TheSelfRepairManifesto #Thou #ThrashMetal #TimeToKillRecords #TsunamiSea #UKMetal #Unfleshing #Verbian #ViolentReason #VirginBlack #Voivod #Wormphlegm #ZegemaBeachRecords
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Stuck in the Filter: March 2025’s Angry Misses
By Kenstrosity
Spring is in the air, and with it comes… an insane number of cicadas! Yes, that’s right, Brood XIV spawned this year and is currently overwhelming my staff as they trudge through embuggened ducts to clear out the Filter of semi-precious metal. I bet it’s fucking loud in there…
…. eh I’m sure they are all fine. Just fine. Anyway, enjoy the spoils of our toils!
Kenstrosity’s Gloopy Grubber
Acid Age // Perilous Compulsion [February 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
Belfast’s wacky thrash conglomerate Acid Age came out of absolutely nowhere back in March, unleashing their fourth LP Perilous Compulsion and equipping it with one helluva van-worthy cover. This is some funky, bluesy, quasi-psychedelic thrash metal that pulls no punches. Riffs abound, bonkers songwriting pervades, immense groove agitates. From the onset, “Bikini Island” establishes Perilous Compulsion as a no-nonsense, balls-out affair which reminds me heavily of Voivod and a simplified Flummox informed by Atheist’s progressive proclivities, and expanded by a touch of Pink Floyd’s nebulous jams. Of course, thrash remains Acid Age’s hero flavor, as choice cuts “State Your Business,” “Revenge for Sale,” and closing one-two punch “Rotten Tooth” and “Hamster Wheel” clearly demonstrate. While their fearless exploration of style and structure maintains a sky-high level of interest, it also introduces a couple of challenges. Firstly, this material can feel a bit disjointed at first, but focused spins reward the listener greatly as all of Perilous Compulsion’s moving parts start to mesh and move in unison. Secondly, Acid Age throws a spotlight on a few brilliant inclusions that, over time, I wish were more often utilized—namely, the delightfully bluesy harmonica solos on “Rotten Tooth.” Regardless, Acid Age put themselves on my map with Perilous Compulsion. I recommend you put them on yours, too!
Owlswald’s Desiccated Discoveries
Verbian // Casarder [March 21st, 2025 – Lost Future Records]
It’s unjust that Portuguese rockers Verbian—who have been producing quality post-rock since 2019’s Jaez—haven’t received the attention they deserve. Fusing elements of post-rock with metal, psychedelic, and stoner, Casarder is Verbian’s third full-length and the first with new drummer Guilherme Gonçalves. Taking the sounds and inspirations of 2020’s Irrupção and enriching it with new permutations and modulations, Casarder’s largely instrumental character rides punchy riffs and roiling grooves—à la Russian Circles and Elder—to transmit its thought-provoking legitimacy. Dystopian and surreal séances, via echoing Korg synthscapes (“Pausa Entre Dias,” “Vozes da Ilha”) and celestial harmonies, permeate Casarder’s forty-three-minute runtime, translating Madalena Pinto’s striking Aeon Flux-esque cover art with precision. Ominous horn sections and crusty recurrent vocals (“Marcha do Vulto,” “Depois de Toda a Mudança”) by guitarist Vasco Reis and bassist Alexandre Silva underscore Verbian’s individuality in a crowded post-rock domain. Gonçalves’s drumming—with his intricate and enchanting hard rock and samba rhythms (“Nada Muda,” “Fruta Caída do Mar”)—adds a new dimension to Verbian’s sound, assuring my attention never falters. The group describes Casarder as communicating the “…insecurities of artistic expression and personal exposure when it comes to fearing being judged for something that is somewhat outside of what is done in each artist’s niche.” Indeed, Casarder reveals Verbian is unafraid to forge their own path, and the results are gripping.
Symbiotic Growth // Beyond the Sleepless Aether [March 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
Beyond the Sleepless Aether, the sophomore effort by Ontario, Canada’s Symbiotic Growth, immediately caught my attention with its dreamy-looking cover. Building upon their 2020 self-titled debut, the Canadian trio hones epic and long-form progressive death metal soundscapes, narrating a quest for meaning across alternate realities in mostly lengthy, yet rewarding, tracks that blend technicality, atmosphere, and melody. The group frequently employs dynamic shifts, moving between raging brutality and serene shoegaze beauty (“Arid Trials and Barren Sands,” “The Sleepless Void”). This is achieved through complex and vengeful passages alongside atmospheric synth lines and softer piano interludes (“Sires of Boundless Sunset,” “Of Painted Skies and Dancing Lights”), cultivating an air of wonder, mystery, and ethereality that permeates much of Symbiotic Growth’s material. “The Architect of Annihilation” echoes the style of Ne Obliviscaris with its blend of clean harmonies and harsh growls meshed with tremolo-picked arpeggiations and catchy hooks (the guitar solo even features a violin-like quality). “Lost in Fractured Reveries” evokes In Mourning with its parallel synth and guitar lines giving way to devastating grooves that make it impossible not to headbang. Although some fine-tuning remains—the clean vocals could use some more weight and tracks like “Of Painted Skies and Dancing Lights” and “The Architect of Annihilation” overstay their welcome at times—Beyond the Sleepless Aether shows Symbiotic Growth’s burgeoning talent and signals the group is one to watch in progressive death metal.
Dear Hollow’s Drudgery Sludgery Hoist
Spiritbox // Tsunami Sea [March 7th, 2025 – Pale Chord Records | Rise Records]
From humble beginnings in a more artsy-fartsy djent post-Iwrestledabearonce world to becoming the darlings of Octane Radio, Spiritbox has seen quite the ascent. While it’s easy to look at their work and scoff at its radio-friendliness, sophomore full-length Tsunami Sea shows Courtney LaPlante and company sticking to their guns. Simultaneously more obscure and more radio-friendly in its selection of tracks, expect its signature blend of colossal riffs and ethereal melodies guided by LaPlante’s siren-then-sea serpent dichotomy of furious roars and haunting cleans. Yes, Spiritbox helms its attack with the radio singles (“Perfect Soul,”1 “Crystal Roses”) in layered soaring choruses and touches of hip-hop undergirded by fierce grooves, but the meat of Tsunami Sea finds the flexibility and patience in the skull-crushing brutality (“Soft Spine,” “No Loss, No Love”) and its more exploratory songwriting that amps layers of the ethereal and the hellish with catchy riffs and vocals alike (“Fata Morgana,” “A Haven of Two Faces”). It’s far from perfect, and its tendency towards radio will be divisive, but it shows Spiritbox firing on all cylinders.
Unfleshing // Violent Reason [March 28th, 2025 – Self Released]
I am always tickled pink by blackened crust. It takes the crusty violence and propensity for filth and adds black metal’s signature sinister nature. Unfleshing is a young, unsigned blackened crust band from St. Louis, and with debut Violent Reason, you can expect a traditional punk-infused beatdown with a battered guitar tone and sinister vocals. However, more than many, the quartet offers a beatdown that feels as atmospheric as it is pummeling. Don’t get me wrong, you get your skull caved in like the poor guy on the cover with minute-long crust beatdowns (“Body Bag,” “From the Gutter”) and full-length smackdowns (“Knife in the Dark,” “Final Breath”), both styles complete with scathing grooves, squalid feedback, climactic solos and punishing blastbeats, atop a blackened roar dripping with hate. But amid the full-throttle assault, Unfleshing utilizes ominous black metal chord progressions and unsettling plucking to add a more dynamic feature to Violent Reason (“Cathedral Rust,” “One With the Mud”). The album never overstays, and while traditional, it’s a hell of a start for Unfleshing.
Ghostsmoker // Inertia Cult [March 21st, 2025 – Art as Catharsis Records]
Ghostsmoker seems like the perfect stoner metal band name, but aside from the swampy guitar tone, there’s something much sinister lurking. Proffering a caustic blackened doom/sludge not unlike Thou, Wormphlegm, and Sea Bastard, the Melbourne group quartet devotes a crisp forty-two minutes to sprawling doom weighted by a crushing guitar tone that rivals Morast‘s latest, and shrieked vocals straight from the latest church burning. Beyond what’s expected from this particular breed of devastation, Ghostsmoker infuses an evocative patience reminiscent of post-metal’s more sludgy offerings like Neurosis or Pelican, lending a certain atmosphere and mood of dread and wilderness depicted on its cover. From the outright chugging attacks of churning aggression (“Elogium,” “Haven”) to the more experimental and thoughtful pieces (“Bodies to Shore,” instrumental closer “The Death of Solitude”), Inertia Cult largely feels like a journey through uncharted forests, with voices whispering from the trees. Ghostsmoker is something special.
GardensTale’s Paralyzed Spine
Spiine // Tetraptych [March 27th, 2025 – Self Released]
Is it still a supergroup release when half the lineup are session musicians? Spiine is made up of Sesca Scaarba (Virgin Black) and Xen (ex-Ne Obliviscaris), but on debut Tetraptych they are joined by guests Waltteri Väyrynen (Opeth) and Lena Abé (My Dying Bride). Usually, so much talent put into the same room does not yield great results. Tetraptych is one hell of an exception. A monstrous slab of crawling heaviness, Spiine lurches with abject despair through the mires of deathly funeral doom. Though I usually eschew this genre, my attention remains rapt through a variety of variations. The songwriting keeps the 4 tracks progressing, slow and steady builds, and the promise of momentary tempo changes working a two-pronged structural plan to buoy the majestic yet miserable riffs. “Oubliiette” is the best example here, going from galloping death-doom to Georgian choirs to a fantastic bridge where all the instrumentation hits only on the roared syllables. Xen’s unholy bellows flatten any objections I may have had, managing both thunder and deepest woe in the same notes. The subtle orchestration and occasional choir arrangements finish the package with regal grandeur, and the lush and warm production is the cherry on top. If you feel like drowning your sorrows with an hour of colossal doom, this is the album for you.
Saunders’ Stenched Staples
Ade // Supplicium [March 14th, 2025 – Time to Kill Records]
Sometimes unjustly pigeonholed as the Roman-inspired version of Nile, the hugely underrated Ade have punched out a solid career of quality death metal releases since emerging roughly fifteen years ago, charting their own path. Albums like 2013’s ripping Spartacus and 2019’s solid Rise of the Empire represent a tidy snapshot of the band’s career. Fifth album Supplicium, their first LP in six years, marks a low-key, welcome return. Exotic instrumentation and attention to history and storytelling are alive and well in the Ade camp, as is their penchant for punishing, unrelenting death, featuring a deftly curated mix of bombast, brutality, technical spark, and epic atmospheres. Edoardo Di Santo (Hideous Divinity) joins a largely refreshed line-up, including a new bassist and second guitarist since their last album. Line-up changes aside, familiar Ade tools of harrowing ancient Roman tales and modern death destruction remain as consistently solid as always. Top-notch riffs, intricate arrangements, fluid tempo shifts, and explosive drumming highlight songs that frequently flex their flair for drama-fueled atmospheres, hellfire blasts, and burly grooves. The immense, multi-faceted “Burnt Before Gods,” exotic melodies and raw savagery of “Ad Beastias!,” spitfire intensity of “Vinum,” and epically charged throes of “From Fault to Disfigurement” highlight more solid returns from Ade.
Masters of Reality // The Archer [March 28th, 2025 – Artone Label Group/Mascot Records]
Underappreciated desert rock pioneers and quirky stalwarts Masters of Reality returned from recording oblivion some fifteen-plus years since they last unleashed an LP. Led by the legendary Chris Goss and his collaborative counterparts across a career that first kicked off in the late ’80s, Masters of Reality return sounding inspired, wisened, and a little more chilled. Re-tinkering their familiar but ever-shifting sound, Masters of Reality incorporate woozy, bluesy laidback vibes featuring their oddball songwriting traits through a sedate, intriguing collection of new songs. The Archer showcases Masters of Reality’s longevity as seasoned, skilled songwriters, regardless of the shifting rock modes they explore. While perhaps lacking some of the energetic spark and earworm hooks of albums like Sunrise on the Sufferbus and Deep in the Hole, The Archer still marks a fine return outing. Goss’ signature voice is in fine form, and the bluesy, psych-drenched guitars, cushy basslines, ’60s and ’70s influences, and spacey vibes create a comforting haze. The delightfully dreamy, trippy “Chicken Little,” laidback hooks and old school charms of “I Had a Dream,” lively, quirky grooves of “Mr Tap n’ Go,” and moody, melancholic balladry of “Powder Man” highlight another diverse, strange brew from the veteran act.
Tyme’s Unheard Annunciations
Doomsday // Never Known Peace [March 28th, 2025 – Creator-Destructor Records]
March’s filter means spring is here, mostly, which is when I start searching for bands to populate my annual edition of Tyme’s Mowing Metal. There’s nothing I enjoy more than cracking a cold beer, sliding my headphones over my ears, and hopping on the mower to complete one of summer’s—at least for me—most enjoyable chores. A band that will feature prominently this summer is Oakland, California’s crossover thrash quintet Doomsday, and their Creator-Destructor Records debut album, Never Known Peace. Doomsday lays down a ton of mindless fun in the vein of other crossover greats like Enforced and Power Trip. There are riffs aplenty on this deliciously executed hardcore-tinged thrashtastic platter full of snarly, spiteful, Jamey Jasta-esque vocals, trademark gang shouts, and, oh, did I mention the riffs? Yeah, cuz there’s a butt-ton of ’em. Leads and solos are melodic (“Death is Here,” “Eternal Tombs”). Within its beefily warm mix, the chug-a-lug breakdowns run rampant across Never Known Peace‘s thirty-one minutes (seriously, there’s one in every track), leaving nary a tune that won’t have you at least bobbing your head and, at most, causing your neck a very nasty case of whipthrash. I’m going to be listening to Never Known Peace ALOT this summer, on and off my mower, and while I don’t care that the lawn lines in my yard will be a little wavier this year than others, I’ll chalk it up to the beer and the head banging Doomsday‘s Never Known Peace instills.
Rancid Cadaver // Mortality Denied [March 21st, 2025 – Self Released]
Another filter, another fetid fragment of foulness; this month, it’s up-and-coming deathstarts Rancid Cadaver and their independently released debut album Mortality Denied. Adam Burke’s excellent cover art caught my eye during a quick dip into the Bandcamp pool and had me pushing play. A thick slab of murderous meat ripe with fatty veins of Coffin Mulch and Morbific running through it, Mortality Denied overflows with tons of bestial vocals, crushing drums, barbaric bass, and squealing solos, all ensorcelled within the majesty of Rancid Cadaver‘s miasmic riff-gurgitations (“Slurping the Cerebral Slime,” “Mass of Gore,” and “Drained of Brains”). Fists will pump, and faces will stank during the Fulci-friendly “Zombified,” a pulverizing slow-death chug fest with an intro that landed me right back on the shores of Dr. Menard’s island of the undead.2 This quartet of Glaswegians has plopped down a death metal debut that ages like wine, getting better and better with consecutive spins. Surprisingly, Rancid Cadaver is unsigned, but I’m confident that status should change before we see a sophomore effort, and you can bet I’ll be there when that happens.
Dolphin Whisperer’s Unsophisticated Slappers
Crossed // Realismo Ausente [March 21st, 2025 – Zegema Beach Records]
Timing means everything in groove. I know that some people say that they have a hard time finding that kind of bob and sway in extreme music. But with an act like Spain’s Crossed, whose every carved word and every skronked guitar noise follows an insatiable punky stride, groove lies in every moment of third full-length Realismo Ausente. Whether it’s on the classic beat of D (“Vaciar Un Corazón,” “Cuerpo Distorsionado”), the twanging drone of a screaming bend (“Monotonía de la lluvia en la Ventana”), or the Celtic Frost-ed hammer of a chord crush (“Catedral”), a calculated, urgent, and intoxicating cadence colors the grayscale attitude throughout. But just because Crossed can find a groove in any twisted mathy rhythm—early Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan come to mind on quick cuts like “Cerrojo” and “Sentirse Solo”—doesn’t mean that their panic chord-loaded crescendos and close-outs can’t rip your head clean off in banging ecstasy. Easy listening and blackened hardcore can’t go hand-in-hand, but Crossed does their very best to make unintelligible, scathing screeches and ceiling-scraping feedback hissing palatable against crunchy punk builds and throbbing, warm bass grumbles. Likewise, Realismo Ausente stabs into a dejected body tales of loathing, fear, self-rejection, and defeated existence—nothing smiles in its urgent and apathetic crevices. But despite the lack of light at the end of the tunnel of Crossed’s horror-touched vision of impassioned hardcore, an analog warmth and human spirit trapped inside a writhing and pleading throat reveal a presence that’s still fighting. It’s the fight that counts. If you didn’t join the fight last time, now’s as good a time as any.
Nothing // The Self Repair Manifesto [March 26th, 2025 – Self Released]
If you noticed a tree zombie heading steaming through its trepanned opening, then you too found the same initial draw I had to The Self Repair Manifesto. Nothing complex often can draw us to the things we desire, yet in Nothing’s particular attack of relentless, groove-based death metal, many nooks of additional interest exist. The Self Repair Manifesto’s tribal rhythm-stirred “Initiation,” in its bouncy play, does little to set up the double-kick pummel and snarling refrains that lurk in this brutal, Australian soundscape. The simple chiming cymbal-fluttering bass call-and-response of “Subterfuge,” the throat singing summoning of “The Shroud,” the immediate onslaught of “Abrogation”—all in under 30 minutes, an infectious and progressive experience unfolds. And never fear, living by the motto “no clean singing,”3 Nothing has no intention of traveling the wandering and crooning path of an Opeth or In Vain. Rather, Nothing finds a hypnotic rhythmic presence both in fanciful kit play that stirs a foot shuffle and high-tempo stick abuse that urges bodies on bodies in the pit (“Subterfuge,” “The Shroud”), much in the same way you might hear in early Decapitated or Hate Eternal works. With flair of their own, though, and a mic near the mouth vessel of each member (yes, even the drummer!) to maintain a layered harsh intensity, Nothing serves a potent blend of death metal that is as jam-able as it is gym-able. Whether you seek gains or progressive enrichment, Nothing is the answer.
Steel Druhm’s Massive Aggressive
Impurity // The Eternal Sleep [ March 7th, 2025 – Hammerheart Records]
Impurity’s lust for all things Left Hand Path is not the least bit Clandestine, and on their full-length debut, The Eternal Sleep, they attempt to craft their own ode to the rabid HM-2 worship of the early 90s Swedeath sound. No new elements are shoehorned in aside from vaguely blackened ones, and there’s not the slightest effort to push the boundaries of the admittedly limited Swedeath sound. The Eternal Sleep sounds like the album that could have come between Entombed’s timeless debut and the Clandestine follow-up, and that’s not a bad place to be. It’s heavy, brutish, buzzing death metal with an OSDM edge, and it hits like a runaway 18-wheeler full of concrete and titanium rebar. One only needs to weather the shitstorm of opener “Denial of Clarity” to realize this is the deep water of the niche genre. It’s extremely heavy, face-melting death with more fuzz and buzz than your brain can process. Other cuts feel like a direct lift from Left Hand Path and/or Clandestine (“Tribute to Creation,”) and fetid Dismember tidbits creep in during “Pilgrimage to Utumno,” and these feel like olde friends showing up unexpectedly at the hometown watering hole. Swedeath is all about those ragged, jagged riffs, and they’re delivered in abundance over The Eternal Sleep, and despite the intrinsic lack of originality, Impurity pump enough steroids and Cialis into the genre archetypes to make the material endearing and engaging. Yes, you’ve heard this shit before. Now hear it again, chumbo!
#AcidAge #Ade #AmericanMetal #ArtAsCatharsisRecords #ArtoneLabelGroup #Atheist #AustralianMetal #BeyondTheSleeplessAether #BlackMetal #BlackenedCrust #BlackenedHardcore #CanadianMetal #Casarder #CelticFrost #CoffinMulch #Converge #CreatorDestructorRecords #Crossed #Crust #DeathMetal #Decapitated #DesertRock #DillingerEscapePlan #DoomMetal #Doomsday #Elder #Enforced #Flummox #Fulci #Ghostsmoker #Hardcore #HateEternal #HideousDivinity #Impurity #InMourning #InVain #InertialCult #InternationalMetal #ItalianMetal #iwrestledabearonce #LostFutureRecords #MascotRecords #MastersOfReality #Mathcore #MelodicMetal #Metalcore #Morast #Morbific #MortalityDenied #MyDyingBride #NeObliviscaris #Neurosis #NeverKnownPeace #Nile #Nothing #Opeth #PaleChordRecords #Pelican #PerilousCompulsion #PinkFloyd #PortugueseMetal #PostRock #PostMetal #PowerTrip #ProgressiveDeathMetal #ProgressiveMetal #ProgressiveThrashMetal #PyschedelicRock #RancidCadaver #RealismoAusente #Review #Reviews #RiseRecords #RussianCircles #ScottishMetal #SeaBastard #SelfReleased #SixpenceNoneTheRicher #SludgeMetal #SpanishMetal #Spiine #Spiritbox #StonerMetal #Supplicium #SymbioticGrowth #TechnicalDeathMetal #Tetraptych #TheArcher #TheEternalSleep #TheSelfRepairManifesto #Thou #ThrashMetal #TimeToKillRecords #TsunamiSea #UKMetal #Unfleshing #Verbian #ViolentReason #VirginBlack #Voivod #Wormphlegm #ZegemaBeachRecords
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She’s Electric: the thread about the electrification of Edinburgh
Electricity first arrived in Edinburgh in 1881 when, on an experimental basis, a number of temporary public lights were installed around the city by the Corporation. Locations included on North Bridge, around Holyrood Square and Waverley Station.
Lawnmarket, 1954. H. D. Wyllie. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThese lights were powered by a portable steam engine and dynamo which had been sourced from London by Councillor Thomas Landale. Crowds came from far and wide to marvel at the clear, bright light, but were frequently disappointed as things would go wrong and the system had to be turned off after a few hours, sometimes for days at at time. The lighting contract was allowed to expire at the end of December and the city went back to the duller glow of its gas street lamps.
Our story really begins a decade later in 1891 when the Corporation was given the powers to provide the city with mains electricity under the 1890 Electric Lighting Act . When I say “provide the city“, I mean provide anyone who was willing and able to pay. A site for a power station was needed. It had to be central, for the most efficient distribution of electricity (there was no high voltage transmission at that time), and easily supplied with coal and yet not somewhere that would offend with its pollution as the New Street gasworks had. Such a site was found on Dewar Place at the West End, convenient for the Caledonian Railway who had an existing coal yard and small gasworks nearby. This site swallowed up a vestigial street called Tobago Place, one of those Edinburgh street names with a direct link to Caribbean plantation slavery.
Drag the slider to compare 1876 OS Town Plan centred on Dewar Place and Tobago Place and 1926 Goad Fire Insurance map of same. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAn elegant and unobtrusive red sandstone structure was completed to the designs of City Architect Robert Morham, in a style in keeping with the time (this was a period when red sandstone was increasingly being seen in the city). The technical side was overseen by long-serving Burgh Engineer John Aitken Cooper. There was a generating hall in the centre section, workshops to the north and offices to the south at the top of the street. There were initially eight high-speed reciprocating steam engines with a total mechanical power of 400 horsepower ( 300kw), that’s about the same as a top-of-the-range German executive car. Each of these was coupled directly to a DC dynamo that supplied voltage at both 230V and 460V DC for the central districts only. Later, alternators would be provided to supply outlying districts with AC voltage better suited to longer distance transmission at 2,000V and a frequency of 50Hz. The site was large enough for expansion up to 20 steam engines that would be capable of producing 6,000 horsepower. The whole undertaking, including laying 21.5 miles of under-street wiring, cost £100,000 (or about £15.3 million in 2019).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fotos_by_findlay/49992323861
The current was to be switched on at the Central Electric Lighting Station on 11th April 1895. The Corporation sent out invites to all of the worthies of the city to request their attendance at this grand occasion.
The Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council…
Wording of the invites to the switching on of Dewar Place power station
request the honour of your presence at
The Central Station, Dewar Place,
at 5 o’clock afternoon,
when you have the opportunity of inspecting the works prior to the turning on of the Electric Current on that evening (About 8 o’clock.)The turning on was to be done from a switch within the nearby Rutland Hotel where the celebratory banquet for the invited worthies was being held. The invite was as good as its word and the current began to flow at about 8PM when it was switched on to a toast of “Success to the electric light undertaking” by the Lady Provost, Mrs McDonald. And there was light! A line of electric arc lamps had been installed along the north side of Princes Street especially for the occasion. The spectacle of instant light attracted thronging crowds to marvel at this wonder of the age. With the brilliant light from the glowing carbons mounted 23 feet high every 50 yards, Princes Street could claim to be the best lit street in Europe. But this being Edinburgh, the Corporation had half of the lights turned off at midnight for reasons of economy!
The generating hall of Dewar PlaceFurther lamps were duly added to complete a line all the way from Haymarket to Waterloo Place. The city’s lighting plan was to illuminate the principal tram routes and so the network was quickly extended to Dean Bridge; Viewforth; Fountainbridge; down Leith Street; along the Bridges (which had seen the first gas lighting in Edinburgh not 80 years before, and it’s first electric lights in 1881); to Clerk Street and the Meadows; the Royal Mile and Waverley Bridge to Forrest Road via Cockburn Street. A contemporary verse recorded “When o’er our hills came lines with power, it was indeed our brightest hour;With fourteen lamps our street is bright, a pleasure now to walk by night“
Edinburgh had actually been pipped to public electric street lighting post by Leith. The Leith Dock Commissioners had the Victoria, the West and the East Old Docks lit by electric light in December 1894. A small generating station adjacent to the Commercial Graving Dock housed two steam engines and dynamos to power a system of arc and incandescent lights. The work was done at a cost of £4,000 by the Brush Electric Lighting Company. The Burgh of Leith would join in on the act too too, opening its own small power station on Junction Place in 1897 and turning on the first section of its electric street lights on Leith Walk on Friday December 23rd 1898.
Back in Edinburgh, demand far outstripped the supply from Dewar Place – on the day it started to operate, 177 street arc lamps and 40 private connections were already made with fully 1/2 of the generating capacity already subscribed for. The station was just too small and so it was extended as soon as 1897 to provide more capacity. But even with expansion, such was the demand for this new-fangled, must have, life changing stuff, that once again it was already not enough. But the site at Dewar Place had a fundamental problem; it was penned in on all sides which prevent it being realistically expanded any further – a new power station was needed.
A site next to Carson Street off Leith Walk was soon selected, conveniently adjacent to a railway that formed its northern boundary, allowing for direct deliveries of coal. You will know this street as McDonald Road; the old street by its former name was extended and renamed in 1897 to accommodate the new power station. The name is that of then Lord Provost, Sir Andrew McDonald, whose wife had turned on the electricity just a few years before.
Sir Andrew McDonald by William Ewart Lockhart. CC-BY-SA 4.0 StephencdicksonConstruction started in 1899, once again to the designs of City Architect Morham and Burgh Engineer Cooper. It was an altogether grander affair than Dewar Place; a modern and efficient steel frame infilled with bricks hidden behind a sandstone “Renaissance Basilica” facade which is complimented by a rather mismatched, octagonal, red-brick chimney. The Corporation had already been caught out twice in as many years with a rapid demand for expansion and so this building was to be big enough to meet future demand plus sufficient land was reserved to double or even triple it in size. If you look at the remains of the generation hall today (and in the photo below) you can see the stubs of the projecting steel arches for where the next half of the building could have gone. When completed it had a mechanical capacity of 5,000 horsepower but it was estimated it could total 20-30 thousand if the site were to be fully utilised.
McDonald Road today, retained as a transformer house. CC-BY-SA 2.0 Richard WebbPart of the project included an intriguing 1,220 yard tunnel under Leith Walk, from the top of McDonald Road to Little King Street (where John Lewis is now), to carry the 21 principal power cables into the city to a distribution node. This passageway is 6.5 feet high and 3.5 feet wide to allow workers access to maintain the cables without having to repeatedly dig the street up. When the station was connected to the network at the end of October 1899 it was noted that there were 245,000 electric lamps in the city (at this time the supply was only for domestic and municipal lighting) and that the peak load was 10,400 Amperes. New connections were being made at the rate of 1,500 lamps per week. A report of the Corporation’s Electric Lighting Department in 1905 recorded “The municipal reputation… has been greatly increased by its management of the electric light, the success of which has been quite phenomenal” It also went on “The waste of… plant is very considerable, arising not so much from ordinary tear and wear, but through carts and other vehicles coming into collision with the lamps…Breakages are… frequent… representing a considerable annual expenditure.”
Workers lay the electric cables in the passageway at the top of McDonald Road towards the city centre. Edinburgh World HeritageNotice in the above picture that there are no overhead electricwires for the passing tramcar; it was hauled instead by underground cables driven from a power house at nearby Shrubhill (and also from Tollcross, Henderson Row and Portobello). Edinburgh had decided to persist with a system which was already antiquated; the wires and poles for Electric trams would have been vulgar in its Georgian heart.
Let us now consider Leith again. In 1898 the Burgh had opened their small generating station on Junction Place, next to the Victoria Baths, to provide a supply for municipal and domestic lighting. It had five steam engines producing 660hp and was expanded continuously after that. I assume it may also have helped to heat the pool and public washing baths. The site required all coal to be brought in by horse cart and also included housing for the workers.
Junction Place Power Station, 1906, from a Goad Insurance Map. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandOn the subject of public transport, Leith rejected joining Edinburgh’s cable-hauled tramway, but that decision left her stuck with horse traction. And so in October 1904, the Leith Corporation took over the Edinburgh Street Tramways Company service within its boundaries and rapidly ripped the whole thing up, relaid it with stronger rails and electrified it. Nothing but the best for Leith! Electric trams of course need electricity, and so the Junction Place station was expanded once more to cope, up to 4,600hp with space for a further 4,000hp. The first electric tram ran as soon as August 1905 (think about that, Leith built an entire electric tram system in under a year…) but the extensions to the power supply did not complete until November 1906.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/15034108353
Back in Edinburgh, yet again the Corporation was quickly faced by the predicted demand problem. Demand for electricity at this time was insatiable and production could hardly keep up, even with the constant extensions to the stations in Edinburgh and Leith. In the ten years from 1903-1913, the amount sold doubled; actual demand was far in excess of this. The new station at McDonald Road had the space to expand, but the world had now settled on turbo-alternators (steam turbines producing AC current) as the most reliable and efficient way to produce electricity – rather than reciprocating piston engines producing DC current. The difficulty was that steam turbines have to exhaust into a vacuum and to create that vacuum you need a condenser; a very big and effective condenser. And to operate such a condenser, you need either a very large cooling tower or a huge supply of cooling water. McDonald Road had neither – there were cooling towers at Dewar Place for its small turbine units, but the vapour clouds they produced were totally unsuited to a city centre location, and the Water of Leith, although not too far off, was totally insufficient for cooling purposes.
Graph of Edinburgh Corporation’s sales of electricity, 1903-1918As an interim solution, it was proposed to draw cooling water Lochend Loch to the east and return it back, warmed, from whence it came. However Leith Corporation had a veto over this as it still used its former drinking water supply for industrial supply, and these customers were paying good money for water for cooling purposes too, and would not accept it being pre-warmed by neighbouring Edinburgh. This proposal came to nothing and instead, in 1908, an ingenious scheme was hatched whereby small, low pressure turbines were added running off of the exhaust steam of the reciprocating engines. To solve the condensing issue a shaft, 26 feet in diameter and 30 feet deep, was sunk down from the power house to intercept the main sewer running between Edinburgh and Leith. Four 18 inch pipes were run down this shaft through which the liquid contents of the sewer were pumped up into the power station and run through the condensers, before being returned to the sewer, nicely warmed. But for the long term it was back to the drawing board…
The drawing board required another new site and to solve the cooling question once and for all it was resolved to make use of the abundant waters of the Firth of Forth, which we all know to be reliably cold, even in the summer. There were two candidate sites, both logically on the outskirts to keep pollution away from the centre of the metropolis. One was at Granton, adjacent to the Edinburgh & Leith Gas Commissioners new gasworks, and the other was off the Kings Road at Portobello on the site of the Westbank Brick & Tile Works. Granton may have been attractive as land and infrastructure could have been shared with the existing gasworks, but it was half a mile distant from and at 100 feet elevation above the sea which would have required significant effort in pumping just to get to at the coolant. So Portobello was selected, right on the sea shore and just off the existing railway which gave it direct access to the plentiful and expanding supplies from the Lothian coalfield.In 1914, consulting engineer Alexander Kennedy was instructed to draw up plans and arrange quotes for a station with two of the latest turbo-alternators with a power output of 5MW and with ample room to expand as required.
But almost immediately Europe went to war and the Ministry of Munitions had all work big industrial works stopped in order that the country could focus its industrial might on the business of death and destruction. Unsurprisingly, the scheme was paused and production of electricity dropped in the war years due to forced economies, not increasing again until 1918. When the war ended, the Corporation wasted no time in dusting off their plans for Portobello; even in 1918 they were petitioning the Board of Trade to allow them to revive them. The Board referred things to Ministry of Reconstruction, who passed it to the Coal Conservation Sub-Committee. The men in grey suits in that opaque sounding sub-committee considered the matter and gave it their blessing; but only if it was undertaken on a grander scale so that it could also supply neighbouring counties. Alexander Kennedy took his 4 year old plans plans and scaled them up sixfold, proposing three 10MW turbo-alternator sets and expansion possibilities up to the giddy heights of 100MW. For comparison, the “small” coal power station demolished at Cockenzie in 2015 was 1,200MW.
The Board of Trade formally approved the scheme in June 1919 and contracts were issued in October. It would supply not just the burghs of Edinburgh and Leith but also a larger supply territory called the Edinburgh and Lothians Electricity District. This included Musselburgh, East Lothian and Midlothian – which it shared with the Lothians Electric Power Co. The new station would sit to the south of the King’s Road road and was directly accessed by an existing rail branch that had been laid for the Westbank brick through a short tunnel under the road. The boilers were supplied with fuel from a rail-served stockyard to the southwest via a conveyor system which ran in a tunnel under the road. The builders fed steam to three 12.5MW turbo-alternator sets that generated 3-phase AC electricity at 6,600V and 50Hz.
Portobello Power Station in 1930, aerial photo. Note on the left there is a railway running directly into the generating hall, which crosses over a dark black band. This is the coal conveyor from the rail-served stockyard to the southwest. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe railway and conveyor tunnels were nothing, however, when compared to those of the cooling system. Three 9ft diameter shafts were sunk down from the station to a depth of 60ft, below sea level, for a total depth of 85ft. From the base of these, 4.75ft diameter tunnels were driven some 1,500 yards out to sea, emerging from the seabed well below the lowest tide levels. This tunnelling was done in the same manner as London’s tube railways, lined with cast-iron segments and smoothed off with a skin of concrete. Two tunnels at any one time were used for the cooling water intake, the third to discharge the warmed water. The average temperature at the inlet was 12C and at the outlet was 19.5C. There was public optimism that this warm water might be used to heat a public swimming pool… The managers of the power station had to develop a pattern of cycling the discharge water through different temperatures for set periods of time and swapping each pipe between inlet and outlet to deal with the problem of mussels growing on the filter screens and blocking them.
Portobello Power Station was commissioned on Monday 11th July 1923 at 11:30AM, when it was opened by King George V and Queen Mary as part of a state visit to Scotland. It was fitting that the King was opening the power station on the King’s Road, as the latter street was named for the predecessor of his regnal number – George IV – who had ridden in his carriage down it a century before on a historic visit to Scotland to inspect the gentlemen Cavalry Volunteers parading on the beach. George V was given a thorough tour of the insides which interested him greatly – as a result of his time in the Navy he had developed a nostalgic fondness for boiler and turbine rooms.
The King and Queen are greeted by the Lord Provost, who handed them a golden key to unlock the door, and assembled worthies of the city before opening the power station.By the time Portobello had opened, the City of Edinburgh had absorbed the Burgh of Leith and was in the process of integrating the tram networks. It was switching its old cable-hauled system over to electric traction, just like Leith’s, which required an additional turbo-alternator to be installed at McDonald Road in the interim. In 1924 a further turbo-generator was installed at Portobello, bringing the total output up to 50MW. McDonald Road and Dewar Place could now be downgraded to the status of principal substations for the city, together with a third in the Cowgate. The 5MW tramway turbo-alternator from McDonald Road was transferred at this time to Portobello. Dewar Place also became the principal public office of the Edinburgh Corporation Electricity Supply Department and that’s where you went, until recent memory, to pay your bills in person. The ECES cypher can still be seen all over the city on lamp posts, tenement wiring cabinets and access covers.
ECES cypher on a lamp postAnd what became of Leith’s Junction Place power station? It was never big enough; after expansion in 1906, it was expanded again in 1910 but by 1919 it was at its limits and it had been agreed to take an additional bulk supply from Dewar Place. As part of Edinburgh’s settlement to the aggrieved folks of Leith for taking it over, it was to be converted to a public wash house; “at a cost of £20,000 it would be the largest washhouse in Edinburgh, with 100 tubs and a separate ironing room.” Edinburgh’s obligations clearly didn’t trouble her however and it took until 1926 to start work, with the result that it was not opened until January 1928. On opening, the Lord Provost said “the Council [has] now just about given Leith all that it needed and so they might give the Corporation a little breathing space to do something for other parts of the city?” The Convenor of the Plans and Works Committee went so far as to claim that Leith now had the “biggest and most up-to-date washhouse in the world!”. As a rather limited consolatory gesture, Edinburgh made it free to use for the first 3 days. This would remain the largest and busiest wash house in the city, it survived to become an automated laundrette about 1975 and was closed in the early 1980s.
In 1926, the Electricity (Supply) Act was passed to set up a “national grid” using a country-wide standard supply frequency and voltage. As one of the biggest and newest stations, and with room to expand, Portobello was selected to be the principal station for the East of Scotland. Conveniently too, Edinburgh had long ago selected 230V and 50Hz as its supply standard, which matched the new standard, and so no fundamental changes were required. Portobello was quickly expanded with two new 31.5MW sets, for a total of 118MW, well in excess of the planned 100MW.
One of the new Turbo-Alternators at Portobello. © Grace’s GuideIn 1929 the first transmission tower of the new National Grid was erected by the Central Electricity Board on the Mortonhall Estate. On April 30th 1930, the first phase of the Grid was inaugurated with the switching on of the Central Scotland Electricity Scheme by Minister of Transport, Herbert Morrison. He threw a switch at the new high tension transformer station at Portobello and energised the 132kv lines, connecting Edinburgh, Glasgow, Motherwell, Dundee and Stirling.
Herbert Morrison at the opening ceremony of the Central Scotland Electricity Scheme at Portobello, 30th April 1930.More generation required more boilers, which required more chimneys and required more coolant, so a 4th tunnel was sunk out into the Forth to bring in more seawater. The place ended up being a weird architectural mixture of a classically-inspired façade and a progressively more modern and austere industrial rear, as additional units were repeatedly added – with eventually seven stumpy, steam-punk style chimneys poking out of the back.
Portobello in 1930. © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn 1936, “Edinburgh’s Seaside” finally got its promised open-air pool, which had first been mooted before the power station had even been completed.
The open air pool on what looks like a cold day in 1930. This was a test of the wave machine prior to opening. In the background is the power station, now up to 8 chimneys. © Edinburgh City LibrariesWhether or not the pool was kept at the 20C promised from the hot water exhaust from the power station is a matter of much nostalgic debate. You can see many more postcard pictures of the pool at this website.
Portobello in happier, sunnier timesBut the increasing demand for electricity was relentless and the Corporation had big plans afoot to significantly expand the station to 149MW, with a huge extension upwards and outwards to create the necessary space. Step up the wonderfully named Ebenezer James Macrae, City Architect. Macrae is one of those legendary figures in Edinburgh municipal architecture; he designed much of the modern city, and designed it well. He had a particular knack of being able to balance the vernacular tradition, the classicism of the “Athens of the North” and the modern. Frequently somewhat conservative, he broke his mould a bit and went for a strikingly modernist and austere red-brick and concrete block, but still with details hinting at Georgian Edinburgh.
Macrae’s sketch impression of the reconstruction of Portobello. The right hand, mirror-side of the rear extension was a proposal for future capacity and never completed. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe dominant addition was going to be an immense 350ft tall chimney to try and clear the worst of the stoor away from the washing lines of Portobello. This weighed in at 10,000 tons and had seven hundred and ten thousand (!) bricks in it. These could be conveniently be brought into the site directly by rail from local brickworks like Prestongrange, Roslin, Newbattle and Wallyford. People often say Scotland doesn’t have an architectural tradition in brick; perhaps it’s less pervasive than in England, but it is there. Portobello, after all, is a town founded on brick making and its power station was built on a brickworks, out of bricks!
South view of Portobello and Macrae’s chimney in 1967. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe original station was dwarfed by the new additions, hiding its mechanical innards from the public’s eyes behind a towering façade of red brick and glass.
The view of Macrae’s Portobello Power Station that greeted visitors arriving from Edinburgh. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe new structure was completed just in time for another war, a booklet published by the Corporation proudly called it the “Hub of Greater Edinburgh“. Note that the artist has made a couple of errors in the image of the power station.
After the war the electricity supply was nationalised and so in 1947 Edinburgh Corporation’s finest asset was transferred to the nascent South East Scotland Electricity Board. Expansion was then back on the cards and by 1950 Portobello’s output was up to 212.5MW (over twice the original expectations). More reshuffling occurred in 1955, when the SESEB and its west coast equivalent the SWSEB were merged to form the SSEB. By 1957 it was producing 272.5MW and had the highest thermal efficiency of any power station in the UK. It wasn’t all smooth going though; an explosion caused by seawater in the switchgear caused an Edinburgh-wide 2 hour blackout in 1953 and in 1961 there was a fire, which fortunately was quickly contained.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/61694981@N05/28594183680
The station continued keeping the lights twinkling in Edinburgh and the Lothians for a further 16 years, although it was soon playing second fiddle to the big new cousin along the coast at Cockenzie, which opened in 1967. The end came in 1977, when the huge new coal fired station opened at Longannet – one already fading from public consciousness – and a nuclear plant on the way along the coast at Torness.
The forlorn remains of Portobello Power Station’s grand red brick facade in 1980, with the open air swimming pond beyond. CC-by-NC-SA 4.0 from Edinburgh CollectedInevitably, Edinburgh was quick to demolish the place before somebody could think of anything else to do with it.
Demolition at Portobello.You can view a rather sad video of the demolition progress on YouTube here and you can still visit the old gates and fences if you happen to be passing, and there’s a building on the other side of the High Street that used to house some of the first National Grid switchgear on the other side of the road.
The former gates to Portobello Power Station. © SelfA remaining red brick switchgear building.And six years ago, the monumental civic coat of arms that was once proudly displayed over the entrance door turned up, broken into at least 3 pieces, in a council yard at Murrayburn, in Wester Hailes. An old council promise to incorporate it into a new sports centre for Portobello has long been quietly forgotten… I happened to be visiting a council facility at this yard in March 2023 and was very pleased to stumble upon it! Despite being split up, it remains in surprisingly good and bright condition.,
Parts of the Portobello Power Station coat of arms at an Edinburgh council storage yard in March 2023. Photo © SelfEdinburgh’s Latin motto “Nisi Dominus Frustra“, which runs on the banner beneath the coat of arms, is an abbreviation of Psalm 127, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” I’m not a believer myself, but I think there’s something in that…
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Carcharodon and Cherd’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024
By Carcharodon
Carcharodon
I’ve been writing here since 2018. This has been the hardest year to date. I feel like I say this every year right around this time but, for whatever reason, I’ve really struggled this year to find the motivation and inspiration to write. Indeed, I’ve often felt that I lacked the passion for the music. Rather than exploring the murkier depths of Bandcamp, I was often to be found in the company of old, non-metal friends like Nick Cave, 16 Horsepower and Tom Waits.
Despite my disappointment with the world, most of which is on literal or metaphorical fire, and my disillusionment with people, whose choices have caused most of that, there were bright glimmers. The phenomenal response to our Gondor-esque call for aid, when Kenstrosity‘s life was ripped apart by Hurricane Helene, reassured me there are still a few good people out there, a good number of whom read this blog.
Still, I managed to turn out a few reviews this year, including my first ever 5.0—more of which below—which was worth it for the Steel Ire it evoked alone. And there was the Fifteenalia, a celebration the like of which we will not see again (for obvious reasons), which I had the honour of steering from questionable inception to creaky delivery.
Ironically, despite my struggles on the writing front, This Place has played a significant part in keeping me sane. It’s been tolerable to welcome a few new staffers—some even raised up from the awful Place Below—to our serried ranks, while the older hands feel almost like family at this point, with everything that that entails. As ever, particular thanks go to Steel Druhm for his tireless intimidation, which just about keeps us honest, while Dolph, Dear Hollow, El Cuervo, Grier, Maddog, Sentynel and Thus Spoke, among others, have proved adequate companions for banter and gigs.
And with that, I wish you all the happiest of Listurnalias.
#ish. Pillar of Light // Caldera – A very late entry to this list, Pillar of Light should be a cautionary tale to bands and labels: release your shit earlier! With more time, the stunning Amenra-meets-Cult of Luna post-misery of Caldera could easily have placed in the top half of this list. While I know this is an album I will come to love and fully expect to regret not placing it higher here, the reality is that other entries have had longer to sink their hooks into me. I will just say that, for me, the apparently divisive vocals are a perfect fit for Pillar of Light’s style.
#10. Seth // La France des Maudits – Way back when,1 French black metallers Seth snuck onto my list of Honorable Mentions with La Morsure du Christ, a fantastic return to form after a lengthy absence. After a short gap, they’re back and this year’s La France des Maudits has cracked the list proper. Melodic, bordering on symphonic with the keys and choral arrangements, but also visceral and feral, Seth dropped an absolute banger. It doesn’t hurt that, as Thus Spoke pointed out in her review, it’s “downright impressive how rich and dynamic this sounds.”
#9. The Vision Bleak // Weird Tales – The Vision Bleak is not, to paraphrase Dr Grier, a band that has ever ‘got’ me. Or perhaps, I’ve never got them. But Weird Tales resonated with me enormously. And perhaps that’s because it’s not really like anything The Vision Bleak has done before. Structuring their gothic black metal (or should that be blackened goth metal?) into a single, flowing song (albeit one broken into parts) got my attention. But they held my attention because they actually managed to pull off this very-hard-to-execute vision. Weird Tales’ Type O Negative / Moonspell-inspired blackened sound clicked into place almost instantly for me and now I need to go back to TVB’s discography with newly-opened eyes.
#8. Necrowretch // Swords of Dajjal – The first 4.0 I delivered in an alarmingly high-scoring year, Necrowretch’s black-death fusion is something that I have returned to again. Hiding beneath the vicious, downright nasty surface of Swords of Dajjal, is a surprisingly subtle and well-crafted concept album. As I said in my review, there is zero bloat or filler on this record, which blazes with intensity, driven as much by the scything, razor-sharp riffs as the rasping, sepulchral vocals. The range of influences cited, both by me and by impressed commenters, shows how many different aspects there are to this killer record.
#7. Panzerfaust // The Suns of Perdition – Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion – After Chapter III: The Astral Drain, I was worried that Panzerfaust were running out of steam and inspiration to close out The Suns of Perdition saga. Thankfully, my concerns were misplaced. To Shadow Zion reeks of doom and destiny. Huge, brooding and intense, it is a captivating listen, with the stunning “The Damascene Conversions” sitting at its heart. From the sulfuric vocals to the masterful drumming, this was a worthy final chapter for The Suns of Perdition, which must go down as one of the best executed, most consistent multi-album concept pieces in metal.
#6. Spectral Wound // Songs of Blood and Mire – Spectral Wound just can’t miss. For a band that, superficially at least, plays fairly old school black metal, songwriting chops paired with brilliant execution mean these guys are anything but derivative. My favourite album of theirs to date, Songs of Blood and Mire is just tons of wicked, nasty fun. It’s hard to say exactly why, but I feel like everything Spectral Wound does has a slight knowing wink to it, which suggests that the band doesn’t take itself too seriously. For me, this is a huge positive, as a lot of black metal is so tediously earnest, where this is unflinchingly harsh, surprisingly melodic and drowning in swaggering groove. Great stuff.
#5. Mother of Graves // The Periapt of Absence – I’m a sucker for death doom. And The Periapt of Absence is some fucking great death doom. Mother of Graves were unknown to me before I stumbled across this album but their blending of old school Opeth (think somewhere between Morningrise and Orchid) with early Katatonia and Paradise Lost, plus a sprinkling of Clouds is stunning. All wrapped up in a pleasingly tight package, Mother of Graves smother the listener in unflinching, heartwrenching misery. And I love every minute of it. It’s that Peaceville Three sound we love, but feeling fresh, vibrant and vital.
#4. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – Me and death metal don’t always see eye to eye, and the last Devenial Verdict left only a passing impression. But Thus Spoke‘s tireless tongue-bathing promotion of Blessing of Despair convinced me to give it a chance. While I enjoy the stomping thuggery of Devenial Verdict’s dissonant death well enough, it’s the sudden mood swings into what TS described as “lethally graceful restraint” that really hooked me. Although worlds apart stylistically, on Blessing of Despair DV achieved what Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean did on Obsession Destruction: knowing precisely how far to push the suffocating, claustrophobic heaviness, before taking their foot off your throat for a minute. Then stamping on it again.
#3. Julie Christmas // Ridiculous and Full of Blood – Maddog predicted that I would lambast him as an underrating bastard for the 3.5 he deigned to award Ms Christmas. And he was quite correct. He’s a charlatan of the highest order. However, even I’m surprised by how high Ridiculous and Full of Blood has landed here. But, as someone not given to overly emotional reactions to music, I’m continually stunned by the reactions Julie—Can I call you Julie? No? Ok—extracts from me. I’m often on the edge of tears by the end of “The Lighthouse,” just like that cad Maddog, while the likes of “Not Enough” and “End of the World” (the latter with CoL’s Johannes Persson) have a scary edge to them, with Christmas at her maniacal, crooning, possessed, unpredictable best.
#2. A Swarm of the Sun // An Empire – Speaking of emotional responses, A Swarm of the Sun’s stripped back melancholy is right up there. If I say that An Empire is brighter and more uplifting than previous efforts The Rifts and The Woods, understand that this is a very relative statement. An Empire is drowning in sorrow and misery, and yet there is just a hint of brightness that shimmers and hovers around the edges, like a lunar halo. Slow and deliberate, haunting and cathartic, A Swarm of the Sun’s latest outing is just beautiful. End of. No discussion.2
#1. Kanonenfieber // Die Urkatastrophe – Y’all know I dropped a 5.0 on Die Urkatastophe, so it’s no surprise to find it here, sitting pretty, atop my list. There’s not much more praise that I can heap on Kanonenfieber’s sophomore record than I already did in my review. For me, it has everything and is more than I dared hope for as a follow up to my beloved Menschenmühle (my album of the year for 2021). It is brutal and vicious (“Panzerhenker” and “Ausblutingsschlacht”), anthemic (“Der Maulwurf” and “Menschenmühle”) and more. Crafted—and yes, that is the correct word—with huge skill and attention to detail, it is the storytelling, based on original source materials, that elevates this record to the next level for me. And if you don’t speak German, or are simply not into narrative in your metal, just go bang your fucking head to “Gott mit der Kavallerie”!
Honorable mentions In alphabetical order by band:
- 40 Watt Sun // Little Weight – Little Weight actually carries a lot of emotional weight. Melancholic, beautiful post-doom and shoegaze, rife with a rough honesty.
- Anciients // Beyond the Reach of the Sun – Long-form (arguably too-long-form in some respects) progressive death, which is wonderfully ambitious and overblown in its scale and delivery.
- Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose – Fantastic trad doom, channeling heavy doses of Candlemass. Early in the year, I thought this was top-5 material but it’s uneven, with the back half much stronger than the front, and I’ve cooled on it a touch.
- Nyktophobia // To the Stars – Just great, stomping melodeath. As I said in my review, it’s not massively original but it’s tight and well written, and easy to just kick back to. Sometimes, I don’t need more.
- Silhouette // Les Dires de l’Âme – This fantastic post-black album had a place on the list proper until Pillar of Light bulldozed its way in there very late in the day. Haunting, harrowing and beautiful, Silhouette’s debut is Great!
- Sumac // The Healer – Nothing about The Healer makes it an easy listen but Sumac’s fifth record is curiously beautiful for all its wandering, free-form abrasiveness.
- Vorga // Beyond the Palest Star – While it’s hard to disagree with Kenstrosity‘s criticism of the production on Beyond the Palest Star, what can I say? I still love it. It’s chunky, well written, well paced and powerful.
Surprises o’ the Year Ordered by most astounding first:
- Opeth // The Last Will and Testament – It’s been a long time since I was last genuinely interested in an Opeth album (2005’s Ghost Reveries, in case you were wondering). But, wouldn’t you just know it, Mikael Åkerfeldt and co are back (roars and all). I’m not ready to commit to a score for The Last Will (though I think El Cuervo‘s was possibly a smidge high) as I’ve not been able to spend enough time with it. But the fact I want to spend more time with it is, after 19 years of having no interest in Opeth’s output, a surprise. And a welcome one.
- Grand Magus // Sunraven – Another Swedish favourite of old, which I’d all but given up on, Grand Magus roared back this year with Sunraven. As an equally surprised Steel Druhm said in his review, this was the album he “feverishly hoped to get from Grand Magus … a grand return to prime form with the fire firmly back in the Balrog … the best Magus outing since 2012’s The Hunt”.
Disappointment o’ the Year Limited to a single musical disappointment, to avoid submitting a lengthy thesis:
- Zeal & Ardor // GREIF – I’m not angry, or even very surprised, just disappointed.3 While I accept that this is the album of a band in transition, there’s no getting away from the fact that it was a hugely disappointing album from a band that has abandoned the sound that made it what it was. And for what? They have not transitioned to something new and exciting, but with kinks to be worked out. Rather, on this record, Zeal & Ardor became something so pedestrian that any number of post-rock bands could’ve written it and, probably, done a better job. I may have overrated it.
Songs o’ the Year
- Julie Christmas – “The Lighthouse”
- Kanonenfieber – “Der Maulwurf”
- Selbst – “The Stench of a Dead Spirit”
- Panzerfaust – “The Damascene Conversions”
- Kanonenfieber – “Gott mit der Kavallerie”
- Devenial Verdict – “Garden of Eyes”
- Spectral Wound – “Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal”
- Silhouette – “Les Dires de l’Âme”
- Blue Heron – “Everything Fades”
- Zeal & Ardor – “Hide in Shade”
- Glare of the Sun – “Rain”
Cherd
Twenty-twenty-four was certainly a year that followed previous years and will precede still others. When I look back, I’ll likely remember it as the year I discovered the wonders of ADHD medication after decades of non-treatment, the difficult transition my poor Cherdlet experienced from kindergarten to first grade, and the incredible bucket list trip my wife and I took to Toronto to watch our favorite TV franchise filming new content courtesy of my very important Hollywood connections. No, not Robert Downey Jr. Much more important and better-looking. Hmm? Margot Robbie? She wishes. I also had the pleasure of meeting several of my fellow writers in person, and they are all much homelier than they let on with the exception of Madam X, who is a goddamned ray of sunshine.
On the musical front, I was able to check two bands off my “need to see live” list in Judas Priest and Archspire, whereby I discovered that Halford does exactly zero audience banter, and Archspire do nothing but. Fun shows, both. I didn’t listen to as much new music by volume this year than I have in previous years when I’d log between 200 and 400 releases, and that was largely due to my kid’s age and the level of interaction he needs. I have a feeling, however, that 2025 will see an uptick thanks to the new Heavys headphones I got for Christmas this year. As always, I want to thank the editors, particularly Steel Druhm and Doc Grier, for not sending me a mailbomb after all the late reviews I turned in (I’ll work on that in 2025), and the man himself, AMG, for building this community and for agreeing that Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek show.4
(ish) Chat Pile // Cool World – This is what it sounds like when Chat Pile make a “mature” record. As I noted in my October review, some of the most glaring weirdness and black humor the band is known for is missing in Cool World, which is why it’s here on my list instead of matching the lofty heights of my 2022 AOTY God’s Country. That said, this is consistently bleak in a way I like, and it boasts what are in my opinion the two best–if not most memorable–songs the band have written to date in “New World” and “Masc.” I’m a sucker for these Oklahomans and look forward to how their sound evolves from here.
#10. Glacial Tomb // Lightless Expanse – I’ve had an up and down journey with Glacial Tomb’s sophomore record, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still view this as one of the best things I’ve listened to this year. To consider a record this closely means you have to listen to it a lot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I logged more hours with Lightless Expanse than with any other album. I’ve made a big deal about the one-three punch of “Voidwomb/Enshrined in Concrete/Abyssal Host”, but it bears repeating since it’s my favorite consecutive stretch of death metal in 2024.
#9. Replicant // Infinite Mortality – If you peel back the veneer of disso-death and blackened blasts on Infinite Mortality, you’ll find a pounding hardcore heart comprised of equal parts beatdown and Converge. As technical as this music gets, and there is a lot going on here, Replicant never forget their primary duty as a metal band: snapping necks. On their third album, they’ve exquisitely composed a missive to unbridled aggression. I completely missed their previous albums, so I’m glad our Kenfren wouldn’t shut his excitable yap about this one.
#8. Spectral Voice // Sparagmos – “Alright skaters! This is the end of our free skate period. We’d like to once again thank you for spending your Saturday with us here at Family Fun Roller Rink and Arcade. It’s time to slow things down, down, way down, and you know what that means. That’s right, it’s couples’ skate. So, find that special someone you want to be interred on a cold stone slab with, gaze into each other’s empty eye sockets, and make your way around the rink as wave after wave of Spectral Voice’s death/funeral doom forcefully separates you from any light, hope, or happiness this wretched world might have accidentally given you. Remember, those who survive the next 45 minutes of tectonic plates colliding will get the chance to compete in roller limbo!”
#7. Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose – Despite being one of the biggest doom apologists on this site, Crypt Sermon failed to grab me with their highly acclaimed debut nearly ten years ago. I chalk this up to my unfamiliarity with the traditional doom style at the time. In recent years, I’ve binged large amounts of Candlemass, Saint Vitus, Cathedral, Solitude Aeturnus et al., so I finally have the frame of reference to see just how well Crypt Sermon’s third LP captures the swagger, majesty, and grit of a style few contemporary bands seem interested in playing. After the growing pains displayed on The Ruins of Fading Light, these Philly natives have worked out the kinks and delivered an air-tight slab of doomy goodness.
#6. Full of Hell // Coagulated Bliss – I regret waiving my seniority claim to Full of Hell releases, thus allowing Dolph to snap up review duties for Coagulated Bliss. It’s not that he did a bad job of reviewing the prolific experimental grind outfit’s latest. He did great, and he awarded it a deserved 4.0. But then he had the cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity, and the gumption to incorrectly lower his score. To make matters worse, it appeared nowhere on his year-end list. Not even a goll dern honorable mention. I’ve told him to his cetacean face that he’s wrong and I’m likely to do so again because this is Full of Hell’s best work since Trumpeting Ecstasy. In fact, it might be better.
#5. Ulcerate // Cutting the Throat of God – For most of their existence, Ulcerate was a highly acclaimed band that I just couldn’t get into. That changed four years ago with the release of Stare into Death and Be Still. Little changed in their intricate approach to dissonant death metal, but there was something warmer and more human to what I had previously considered a rather detached style. That trend continues with Cutting the Throat of God. I find this record best when taken as a whole, letting the experience unfold over the full runtime, like dream-walking through a hedge maze or being trapped in a velvet sack and discovering it’s much larger on the inside.5
#4. Thou // Umbilical – I waited a long time for a chance to review a new record by Thou, and when it finally came, they did not disappoint. As I said in my June review, “Like their chimerical American metal brethren Inter Arma, it doesn’t matter how many influences the band stuff into one album. They are all unified in sound under Thou’s banner. Bryan Funck’s acid-bit vocals are unmistakable and apparently unchangeable after 20 throat-shredding years. Also unchangeable? Thou’s ability to craft the most metallic-sounding guitar tone out there. As the standard bearer for…hell, as the entire sum of the second generation of Louisiana sludge, the sound they’ve forged isn’t the kind of sloppy muck you may associate with the term. It’s certainly thick, but it has a quality like two enormous steel I-beams violently striking each other.” If that doesn’t sell Umbilical for you, then here is where our paths diverge.
#3. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – I didn’t listen to Blessing of Despair for several weeks after it came out in October despite the fact Devenial Verdict’s previous record, Ash Blind, made my year-end list in 2022. When I finally got around to it earlier in December, it threatened to blow the doors right off my still nebulous list, climbing fast and high until ultimately landing here at number three. There is more immediacy than on Ash Blind, which took me a while to warm up to. That doesn’t mean the band skimps on the kind of thoughtful transitions and atmospherics they’ve come to be known for. It’s just that Blessing of Despair HAZ THE RIFFS, including my favorite death metal riff of the year in “Solus.”
#2. Void Witch // Horripilating Presence – When I revisited Horripilating Presence with the purpose of sorting out this list’s pecking order, I expected death-doomers Void Witch to fall mid-to-late top 10. Obviously, the opposite happened. For the life of me I don’t understand how this album didn’t gain more traction amongst the other writers and you, the unwashed commentariat. As I said back in July, “…the material on Horripilating Presence is Mohamed Ali levels of confident. The editing of ideas in each song and across the album’s taut 39 minutes is masterful, especially for a debut. No song hews too closely to any of the others, but all are of a piece, locking comfortably into place like an intricate puzzle box, and Void Witch have such sights to show you.”
#1. Inter Arma // New Heaven – Inter Arma never miss. Aside from being one of the best live acts in metal, every album they’ve released going back to 2013’s Sky Burial has been one successful evolution after another. As a very wise reviewer once said, “They’re the same shaggy beast as ever, but beneath that matted, coarse coat is a rippling form mid-shape shift, stretching, pulling, and crossing back on itself constantly over the course of New Heaven’s shockingly concise 42 minutes…If being all over the musical map sounds like a negative, you’ve probably never heard an Inter Arma record before. It seems whatever they throw at the wall sticks, and the listening experience across their (usually much longer) records never feels uneven. This is because they play everything with the same smoldering intensity and volatile mean streak.” What a record.
Honorable Mentions:
- Convulsing // Perdurance – I like this quote from Dear Hollow‘s review, so I’ll let him do the talking: “…Convulsing explores every nook and twist of a rhythm and melody until its inevitable conclusion is happened upon in tragic and fatal fashion.”
- Spectral Wound // Songs of Blood and Mire – Pound for pound, Spectral Wound are probably the most consistent no-frills black metal band currently in operation. Songs of Blood and Mire is another rager that’s as melodic as it is acidic.
- Lord Buffalo // Holus Bolus – This record was one redundant instrumental away from landing higher on this list. Looking forward to where these gothic country rockers go next.
Songs o’ the Year:
In alphabetical order by band:
Show 5 footnotes
- Apparently it was only 2021 but my goodness that feels a lifetime ago. ↩
- Regrettably, I suspect this may be the perfect way to start a discussion. Sigh. ↩
- Can you tell I’m a parent? ↩
- How could anyone disagree? – AMG ↩
- Like a TARDIS. ↩
#2024 #40WattSun #ASwarmOfTheSun #Anciients #BlogPosts #BlueHeron #CarcharodonAndCherdSTopTenIshOf2024 #ChatPile #Convulsing #CryptSermon #DevenialVerdict #FullOfHell #GlareOfTheSun #GrandMagus #InterArma #JulieChristmas #Kanonenfieber #Listurnalia #LordBuffalo #MotherOfGraves #Necrowretch #Nyktophobia #Opeth #Panzerfaust #PillarOfLight #Replicant #Selbst #Seth #Silhouette #SpectralVoice #SpectralWound #Sumac #TheVisionBleak #Thou #Ulcerate #VoidWitch #Vorga #ZealArdor
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Carcharodon and Cherd’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024
By Carcharodon
Carcharodon
I’ve been writing here since 2018. This has been the hardest year to date. I feel like I say this every year right around this time but, for whatever reason, I’ve really struggled this year to find the motivation and inspiration to write. Indeed, I’ve often felt that I lacked the passion for the music. Rather than exploring the murkier depths of Bandcamp, I was often to be found in the company of old, non-metal friends like Nick Cave, 16 Horsepower and Tom Waits.
Despite my disappointment with the world, most of which is on literal or metaphorical fire, and my disillusionment with people, whose choices have caused most of that, there were bright glimmers. The phenomenal response to our Gondor-esque call for aid, when Kenstrosity‘s life was ripped apart by Hurricane Helene, reassured me there are still a few good people out there, a good number of whom read this blog.
Still, I managed to turn out a few reviews this year, including my first ever 5.0—more of which below—which was worth it for the Steel Ire it evoked alone. And there was the Fifteenalia, a celebration the like of which we will not see again (for obvious reasons), which I had the honour of steering from questionable inception to creaky delivery.
Ironically, despite my struggles on the writing front, This Place has played a significant part in keeping me sane. It’s been tolerable to welcome a few new staffers—some even raised up from the awful Place Below—to our serried ranks, while the older hands feel almost like family at this point, with everything that that entails. As ever, particular thanks go to Steel Druhm for his tireless intimidation, which just about keeps us honest, while Dolph, Dear Hollow, El Cuervo, Grier, Maddog, Sentynel and Thus Spoke, among others, have proved adequate companions for banter and gigs.
And with that, I wish you all the happiest of Listurnalias.
#ish. Pillar of Light // Caldera – A very late entry to this list, Pillar of Light should be a cautionary tale to bands and labels: release your shit earlier! With more time, the stunning Amenra-meets-Cult of Luna post-misery of Caldera could easily have placed in the top half of this list. While I know this is an album I will come to love and fully expect to regret not placing it higher here, the reality is that other entries have had longer to sink their hooks into me. I will just say that, for me, the apparently divisive vocals are a perfect fit for Pillar of Light’s style.
#10. Seth // La France des Maudits – Way back when,1 French black metallers Seth snuck onto my list of Honorable Mentions with La Morsure du Christ, a fantastic return to form after a lengthy absence. After a short gap, they’re back and this year’s La France des Maudits has cracked the list proper. Melodic, bordering on symphonic with the keys and choral arrangements, but also visceral and feral, Seth dropped an absolute banger. It doesn’t hurt that, as Thus Spoke pointed out in her review, it’s “downright impressive how rich and dynamic this sounds.”
#9. The Vision Bleak // Weird Tales – The Vision Bleak is not, to paraphrase Dr Grier, a band that has ever ‘got’ me. Or perhaps, I’ve never got them. But Weird Tales resonated with me enormously. And perhaps that’s because it’s not really like anything The Vision Bleak has done before. Structuring their gothic black metal (or should that be blackened goth metal?) into a single, flowing song (albeit one broken into parts) got my attention. But they held my attention because they actually managed to pull off this very-hard-to-execute vision. Weird Tales’ Type O Negative / Moonspell-inspired blackened sound clicked into place almost instantly for me and now I need to go back to TVB’s discography with newly-opened eyes.
#8. Necrowretch // Swords of Dajjal – The first 4.0 I delivered in an alarmingly high-scoring year, Necrowretch’s black-death fusion is something that I have returned to again. Hiding beneath the vicious, downright nasty surface of Swords of Dajjal, is a surprisingly subtle and well-crafted concept album. As I said in my review, there is zero bloat or filler on this record, which blazes with intensity, driven as much by the scything, razor-sharp riffs as the rasping, sepulchral vocals. The range of influences cited, both by me and by impressed commenters, shows how many different aspects there are to this killer record.
#7. Panzerfaust // The Suns of Perdition – Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion – After Chapter III: The Astral Drain, I was worried that Panzerfaust were running out of steam and inspiration to close out The Suns of Perdition saga. Thankfully, my concerns were misplaced. To Shadow Zion reeks of doom and destiny. Huge, brooding and intense, it is a captivating listen, with the stunning “The Damascene Conversions” sitting at its heart. From the sulfuric vocals to the masterful drumming, this was a worthy final chapter for The Suns of Perdition, which must go down as one of the best executed, most consistent multi-album concept pieces in metal.
#6. Spectral Wound // Songs of Blood and Mire – Spectral Wound just can’t miss. For a band that, superficially at least, plays fairly old school black metal, songwriting chops paired with brilliant execution mean these guys are anything but derivative. My favourite album of theirs to date, Songs of Blood and Mire is just tons of wicked, nasty fun. It’s hard to say exactly why, but I feel like everything Spectral Wound does has a slight knowing wink to it, which suggests that the band doesn’t take itself too seriously. For me, this is a huge positive, as a lot of black metal is so tediously earnest, where this is unflinchingly harsh, surprisingly melodic and drowning in swaggering groove. Great stuff.
#5. Mother of Graves // The Periapt of Absence – I’m a sucker for death doom. And The Periapt of Absence is some fucking great death doom. Mother of Graves were unknown to me before I stumbled across this album but their blending of old school Opeth (think somewhere between Morningrise and Orchid) with early Katatonia and Paradise Lost, plus a sprinkling of Clouds is stunning. All wrapped up in a pleasingly tight package, Mother of Graves smother the listener in unflinching, heartwrenching misery. And I love every minute of it. It’s that Peaceville Three sound we love, but feeling fresh, vibrant and vital.
#4. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – Me and death metal don’t always see eye to eye, and the last Devenial Verdict left only a passing impression. But Thus Spoke‘s tireless tongue-bathing promotion of Blessing of Despair convinced me to give it a chance. While I enjoy the stomping thuggery of Devenial Verdict’s dissonant death well enough, it’s the sudden mood swings into what TS described as “lethally graceful restraint” that really hooked me. Although worlds apart stylistically, on Blessing of Despair DV achieved what Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean did on Obsession Destruction: knowing precisely how far to push the suffocating, claustrophobic heaviness, before taking their foot off your throat for a minute. Then stamping on it again.
#3. Julie Christmas // Ridiculous and Full of Blood – Maddog predicted that I would lambast him as an underrating bastard for the 3.5 he deigned to award Ms Christmas. And he was quite correct. He’s a charlatan of the highest order. However, even I’m surprised by how high Ridiculous and Full of Blood has landed here. But, as someone not given to overly emotional reactions to music, I’m continually stunned by the reactions Julie—Can I call you Julie? No? Ok—extracts from me. I’m often on the edge of tears by the end of “The Lighthouse,” just like that cad Maddog, while the likes of “Not Enough” and “End of the World” (the latter with CoL’s Johannes Persson) have a scary edge to them, with Christmas at her maniacal, crooning, possessed, unpredictable best.
#2. A Swarm of the Sun // An Empire – Speaking of emotional responses, A Swarm of the Sun’s stripped back melancholy is right up there. If I say that An Empire is brighter and more uplifting than previous efforts The Rifts and The Woods, understand that this is a very relative statement. An Empire is drowning in sorrow and misery, and yet there is just a hint of brightness that shimmers and hovers around the edges, like a lunar halo. Slow and deliberate, haunting and cathartic, A Swarm of the Sun’s latest outing is just beautiful. End of. No discussion.2
#1. Kanonenfieber // Die Urkatastrophe – Y’all know I dropped a 5.0 on Die Urkatastophe, so it’s no surprise to find it here, sitting pretty, atop my list. There’s not much more praise that I can heap on Kanonenfieber’s sophomore record than I already did in my review. For me, it has everything and is more than I dared hope for as a follow up to my beloved Menschenmühle (my album of the year for 2021). It is brutal and vicious (“Panzerhenker” and “Ausblutingsschlacht”), anthemic (“Der Maulwurf” and “Menschenmühle”) and more. Crafted—and yes, that is the correct word—with huge skill and attention to detail, it is the storytelling, based on original source materials, that elevates this record to the next level for me. And if you don’t speak German, or are simply not into narrative in your metal, just go bang your fucking head to “Gott mit der Kavallerie”!
Honorable mentions In alphabetical order by band:
- 40 Watt Sun // Little Weight – Little Weight actually carries a lot of emotional weight. Melancholic, beautiful post-doom and shoegaze, rife with a rough honesty.
- Anciients // Beyond the Reach of the Sun – Long-form (arguably too-long-form in some respects) progressive death, which is wonderfully ambitious and overblown in its scale and delivery.
- Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose – Fantastic trad doom, channeling heavy doses of Candlemass. Early in the year, I thought this was top-5 material but it’s uneven, with the back half much stronger than the front, and I’ve cooled on it a touch.
- Nyktophobia // To the Stars – Just great, stomping melodeath. As I said in my review, it’s not massively original but it’s tight and well written, and easy to just kick back to. Sometimes, I don’t need more.
- Silhouette // Les Dires de l’Âme – This fantastic post-black album had a place on the list proper until Pillar of Light bulldozed its way in there very late in the day. Haunting, harrowing and beautiful, Silhouette’s debut is Great!
- Sumac // The Healer – Nothing about The Healer makes it an easy listen but Sumac’s fifth record is curiously beautiful for all its wandering, free-form abrasiveness.
- Vorga // Beyond the Palest Star – While it’s hard to disagree with Kenstrosity‘s criticism of the production on Beyond the Palest Star, what can I say? I still love it. It’s chunky, well written, well paced and powerful.
Surprises o’ the Year Ordered by most astounding first:
- Opeth // The Last Will and Testament – It’s been a long time since I was last genuinely interested in an Opeth album (2005’s Ghost Reveries, in case you were wondering). But, wouldn’t you just know it, Mikael Åkerfeldt and co are back (roars and all). I’m not ready to commit to a score for The Last Will (though I think El Cuervo‘s was possibly a smidge high) as I’ve not been able to spend enough time with it. But the fact I want to spend more time with it is, after 19 years of having no interest in Opeth’s output, a surprise. And a welcome one.
- Grand Magus // Sunraven – Another Swedish favourite of old, which I’d all but given up on, Grand Magus roared back this year with Sunraven. As an equally surprised Steel Druhm said in his review, this was the album he “feverishly hoped to get from Grand Magus … a grand return to prime form with the fire firmly back in the Balrog … the best Magus outing since 2012’s The Hunt”.
Disappointment o’ the Year Limited to a single musical disappointment, to avoid submitting a lengthy thesis:
- Zeal & Ardor // GREIF – I’m not angry, or even very surprised, just disappointed.3 While I accept that this is the album of a band in transition, there’s no getting away from the fact that it was a hugely disappointing album from a band that has abandoned the sound that made it what it was. And for what? They have not transitioned to something new and exciting, but with kinks to be worked out. Rather, on this record, Zeal & Ardor became something so pedestrian that any number of post-rock bands could’ve written it and, probably, done a better job. I may have overrated it.
Songs o’ the Year
- Julie Christmas – “The Lighthouse”
- Kanonenfieber – “Der Maulwurf”
- Selbst – “The Stench of a Dead Spirit”
- Panzerfaust – “The Damascene Conversions”
- Kanonenfieber – “Gott mit der Kavallerie”
- Devenial Verdict – “Garden of Eyes”
- Spectral Wound – “Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal”
- Silhouette – “Les Dires de l’Âme”
- Blue Heron – “Everything Fades”
- Zeal & Ardor – “Hide in Shade”
- Glare of the Sun – “Rain”
Cherd
Twenty-twenty-four was certainly a year that followed previous years and will precede still others. When I look back, I’ll likely remember it as the year I discovered the wonders of ADHD medication after decades of non-treatment, the difficult transition my poor Cherdlet experienced from kindergarten to first grade, and the incredible bucket list trip my wife and I took to Toronto to watch our favorite TV franchise filming new content courtesy of my very important Hollywood connections. No, not Robert Downey Jr. Much more important and better-looking. Hmm? Margot Robbie? She wishes. I also had the pleasure of meeting several of my fellow writers in person, and they are all much homelier than they let on with the exception of Madam X, who is a goddamned ray of sunshine.
On the musical front, I was able to check two bands off my “need to see live” list in Judas Priest and Archspire, whereby I discovered that Halford does exactly zero audience banter, and Archspire do nothing but. Fun shows, both. I didn’t listen to as much new music by volume this year than I have in previous years when I’d log between 200 and 400 releases, and that was largely due to my kid’s age and the level of interaction he needs. I have a feeling, however, that 2025 will see an uptick thanks to the new Heavys headphones I got for Christmas this year. As always, I want to thank the editors, particularly Steel Druhm and Doc Grier, for not sending me a mailbomb after all the late reviews I turned in (I’ll work on that in 2025), and the man himself, AMG, for building this community and for agreeing that Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek show.4
(ish) Chat Pile // Cool World – This is what it sounds like when Chat Pile make a “mature” record. As I noted in my October review, some of the most glaring weirdness and black humor the band is known for is missing in Cool World, which is why it’s here on my list instead of matching the lofty heights of my 2022 AOTY God’s Country. That said, this is consistently bleak in a way I like, and it boasts what are in my opinion the two best–if not most memorable–songs the band have written to date in “New World” and “Masc.” I’m a sucker for these Oklahomans and look forward to how their sound evolves from here.
#10. Glacial Tomb // Lightless Expanse – I’ve had an up and down journey with Glacial Tomb’s sophomore record, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still view this as one of the best things I’ve listened to this year. To consider a record this closely means you have to listen to it a lot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I logged more hours with Lightless Expanse than with any other album. I’ve made a big deal about the one-three punch of “Voidwomb/Enshrined in Concrete/Abyssal Host”, but it bears repeating since it’s my favorite consecutive stretch of death metal in 2024.
#9. Replicant // Infinite Mortality – If you peel back the veneer of disso-death and blackened blasts on Infinite Mortality, you’ll find a pounding hardcore heart comprised of equal parts beatdown and Converge. As technical as this music gets, and there is a lot going on here, Replicant never forget their primary duty as a metal band: snapping necks. On their third album, they’ve exquisitely composed a missive to unbridled aggression. I completely missed their previous albums, so I’m glad our Kenfren wouldn’t shut his excitable yap about this one.
#8. Spectral Voice // Sparagmos – “Alright skaters! This is the end of our free skate period. We’d like to once again thank you for spending your Saturday with us here at Family Fun Roller Rink and Arcade. It’s time to slow things down, down, way down, and you know what that means. That’s right, it’s couples’ skate. So, find that special someone you want to be interred on a cold stone slab with, gaze into each other’s empty eye sockets, and make your way around the rink as wave after wave of Spectral Voice’s death/funeral doom forcefully separates you from any light, hope, or happiness this wretched world might have accidentally given you. Remember, those who survive the next 45 minutes of tectonic plates colliding will get the chance to compete in roller limbo!”
#7. Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose – Despite being one of the biggest doom apologists on this site, Crypt Sermon failed to grab me with their highly acclaimed debut nearly ten years ago. I chalk this up to my unfamiliarity with the traditional doom style at the time. In recent years, I’ve binged large amounts of Candlemass, Saint Vitus, Cathedral, Solitude Aeturnus et al., so I finally have the frame of reference to see just how well Crypt Sermon’s third LP captures the swagger, majesty, and grit of a style few contemporary bands seem interested in playing. After the growing pains displayed on The Ruins of Fading Light, these Philly natives have worked out the kinks and delivered an air-tight slab of doomy goodness.
#6. Full of Hell // Coagulated Bliss – I regret waiving my seniority claim to Full of Hell releases, thus allowing Dolph to snap up review duties for Coagulated Bliss. It’s not that he did a bad job of reviewing the prolific experimental grind outfit’s latest. He did great, and he awarded it a deserved 4.0. But then he had the cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity, and the gumption to incorrectly lower his score. To make matters worse, it appeared nowhere on his year-end list. Not even a goll dern honorable mention. I’ve told him to his cetacean face that he’s wrong and I’m likely to do so again because this is Full of Hell’s best work since Trumpeting Ecstasy. In fact, it might be better.
#5. Ulcerate // Cutting the Throat of God – For most of their existence, Ulcerate was a highly acclaimed band that I just couldn’t get into. That changed four years ago with the release of Stare into Death and Be Still. Little changed in their intricate approach to dissonant death metal, but there was something warmer and more human to what I had previously considered a rather detached style. That trend continues with Cutting the Throat of God. I find this record best when taken as a whole, letting the experience unfold over the full runtime, like dream-walking through a hedge maze or being trapped in a velvet sack and discovering it’s much larger on the inside.5
#4. Thou // Umbilical – I waited a long time for a chance to review a new record by Thou, and when it finally came, they did not disappoint. As I said in my June review, “Like their chimerical American metal brethren Inter Arma, it doesn’t matter how many influences the band stuff into one album. They are all unified in sound under Thou’s banner. Bryan Funck’s acid-bit vocals are unmistakable and apparently unchangeable after 20 throat-shredding years. Also unchangeable? Thou’s ability to craft the most metallic-sounding guitar tone out there. As the standard bearer for…hell, as the entire sum of the second generation of Louisiana sludge, the sound they’ve forged isn’t the kind of sloppy muck you may associate with the term. It’s certainly thick, but it has a quality like two enormous steel I-beams violently striking each other.” If that doesn’t sell Umbilical for you, then here is where our paths diverge.
#3. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – I didn’t listen to Blessing of Despair for several weeks after it came out in October despite the fact Devenial Verdict’s previous record, Ash Blind, made my year-end list in 2022. When I finally got around to it earlier in December, it threatened to blow the doors right off my still nebulous list, climbing fast and high until ultimately landing here at number three. There is more immediacy than on Ash Blind, which took me a while to warm up to. That doesn’t mean the band skimps on the kind of thoughtful transitions and atmospherics they’ve come to be known for. It’s just that Blessing of Despair HAZ THE RIFFS, including my favorite death metal riff of the year in “Solus.”
#2. Void Witch // Horripilating Presence – When I revisited Horripilating Presence with the purpose of sorting out this list’s pecking order, I expected death-doomers Void Witch to fall mid-to-late top 10. Obviously, the opposite happened. For the life of me I don’t understand how this album didn’t gain more traction amongst the other writers and you, the unwashed commentariat. As I said back in July, “…the material on Horripilating Presence is Mohamed Ali levels of confident. The editing of ideas in each song and across the album’s taut 39 minutes is masterful, especially for a debut. No song hews too closely to any of the others, but all are of a piece, locking comfortably into place like an intricate puzzle box, and Void Witch have such sights to show you.”
#1. Inter Arma // New Heaven – Inter Arma never miss. Aside from being one of the best live acts in metal, every album they’ve released going back to 2013’s Sky Burial has been one successful evolution after another. As a very wise reviewer once said, “They’re the same shaggy beast as ever, but beneath that matted, coarse coat is a rippling form mid-shape shift, stretching, pulling, and crossing back on itself constantly over the course of New Heaven’s shockingly concise 42 minutes…If being all over the musical map sounds like a negative, you’ve probably never heard an Inter Arma record before. It seems whatever they throw at the wall sticks, and the listening experience across their (usually much longer) records never feels uneven. This is because they play everything with the same smoldering intensity and volatile mean streak.” What a record.
Honorable Mentions:
- Convulsing // Perdurance – I like this quote from Dear Hollow‘s review, so I’ll let him do the talking: “…Convulsing explores every nook and twist of a rhythm and melody until its inevitable conclusion is happened upon in tragic and fatal fashion.”
- Spectral Wound // Songs of Blood and Mire – Pound for pound, Spectral Wound are probably the most consistent no-frills black metal band currently in operation. Songs of Blood and Mire is another rager that’s as melodic as it is acidic.
- Lord Buffalo // Holus Bolus – This record was one redundant instrumental away from landing higher on this list. Looking forward to where these gothic country rockers go next.
Songs o’ the Year:
In alphabetical order by band:
#2024 #40WattSun #ASwarmOfTheSun #Anciients #BlogPosts #BlueHeron #CarcharodonAndCherdSTopTenIshOf2024 #ChatPile #Convulsing #CryptSermon #DevenialVerdict #FullOfHell #GlareOfTheSun #GrandMagus #InterArma #JulieChristmas #Kanonenfieber #Listurnalia #LordBuffalo #MotherOfGraves #Necrowretch #Nyktophobia #Opeth #Panzerfaust #PillarOfLight #Replicant #Selbst #Seth #Silhouette #SpectralVoice #SpectralWound #Sumac #TheVisionBleak #Thou #Ulcerate #VoidWitch #Vorga #ZealArdor
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Carcharodon and Cherd’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024
By Carcharodon
Carcharodon
I’ve been writing here since 2018. This has been the hardest year to date. I feel like I say this every year right around this time but, for whatever reason, I’ve really struggled this year to find the motivation and inspiration to write. Indeed, I’ve often felt that I lacked the passion for the music. Rather than exploring the murkier depths of Bandcamp, I was often to be found in the company of old, non-metal friends like Nick Cave, 16 Horsepower and Tom Waits.
Despite my disappointment with the world, most of which is on literal or metaphorical fire, and my disillusionment with people, whose choices have caused most of that, there were bright glimmers. The phenomenal response to our Gondor-esque call for aid, when Kenstrosity‘s life was ripped apart by Hurricane Helene, reassured me there are still a few good people out there, a good number of whom read this blog.
Still, I managed to turn out a few reviews this year, including my first ever 5.0—more of which below—which was worth it for the Steel Ire it evoked alone. And there was the Fifteenalia, a celebration the like of which we will not see again (for obvious reasons), which I had the honour of steering from questionable inception to creaky delivery.
Ironically, despite my struggles on the writing front, This Place has played a significant part in keeping me sane. It’s been tolerable to welcome a few new staffers—some even raised up from the awful Place Below—to our serried ranks, while the older hands feel almost like family at this point, with everything that that entails. As ever, particular thanks go to Steel Druhm for his tireless intimidation, which just about keeps us honest, while Dolph, Dear Hollow, El Cuervo, Grier, Maddog, Sentynel and Thus Spoke, among others, have proved adequate companions for banter and gigs.
And with that, I wish you all the happiest of Listurnalias.
#ish. Pillar of Light // Caldera – A very late entry to this list, Pillar of Light should be a cautionary tale to bands and labels: release your shit earlier! With more time, the stunning Amenra-meets-Cult of Luna post-misery of Caldera could easily have placed in the top half of this list. While I know this is an album I will come to love and fully expect to regret not placing it higher here, the reality is that other entries have had longer to sink their hooks into me. I will just say that, for me, the apparently divisive vocals are a perfect fit for Pillar of Light’s style.
#10. Seth // La France des Maudits – Way back when,1 French black metallers Seth snuck onto my list of Honorable Mentions with La Morsure du Christ, a fantastic return to form after a lengthy absence. After a short gap, they’re back and this year’s La France des Maudits has cracked the list proper. Melodic, bordering on symphonic with the keys and choral arrangements, but also visceral and feral, Seth dropped an absolute banger. It doesn’t hurt that, as Thus Spoke pointed out in her review, it’s “downright impressive how rich and dynamic this sounds.”
#9. The Vision Bleak // Weird Tales – The Vision Bleak is not, to paraphrase Dr Grier, a band that has ever ‘got’ me. Or perhaps, I’ve never got them. But Weird Tales resonated with me enormously. And perhaps that’s because it’s not really like anything The Vision Bleak has done before. Structuring their gothic black metal (or should that be blackened goth metal?) into a single, flowing song (albeit one broken into parts) got my attention. But they held my attention because they actually managed to pull off this very-hard-to-execute vision. Weird Tales’ Type O Negative / Moonspell-inspired blackened sound clicked into place almost instantly for me and now I need to go back to TVB’s discography with newly-opened eyes.
#8. Necrowretch // Swords of Dajjal – The first 4.0 I delivered in an alarmingly high-scoring year, Necrowretch’s black-death fusion is something that I have returned to again. Hiding beneath the vicious, downright nasty surface of Swords of Dajjal, is a surprisingly subtle and well-crafted concept album. As I said in my review, there is zero bloat or filler on this record, which blazes with intensity, driven as much by the scything, razor-sharp riffs as the rasping, sepulchral vocals. The range of influences cited, both by me and by impressed commenters, shows how many different aspects there are to this killer record.
#7. Panzerfaust // The Suns of Perdition – Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion – After Chapter III: The Astral Drain, I was worried that Panzerfaust were running out of steam and inspiration to close out The Suns of Perdition saga. Thankfully, my concerns were misplaced. To Shadow Zion reeks of doom and destiny. Huge, brooding and intense, it is a captivating listen, with the stunning “The Damascene Conversions” sitting at its heart. From the sulfuric vocals to the masterful drumming, this was a worthy final chapter for The Suns of Perdition, which must go down as one of the best executed, most consistent multi-album concept pieces in metal.
#6. Spectral Wound // Songs of Blood and Mire – Spectral Wound just can’t miss. For a band that, superficially at least, plays fairly old school black metal, songwriting chops paired with brilliant execution mean these guys are anything but derivative. My favourite album of theirs to date, Songs of Blood and Mire is just tons of wicked, nasty fun. It’s hard to say exactly why, but I feel like everything Spectral Wound does has a slight knowing wink to it, which suggests that the band doesn’t take itself too seriously. For me, this is a huge positive, as a lot of black metal is so tediously earnest, where this is unflinchingly harsh, surprisingly melodic and drowning in swaggering groove. Great stuff.
#5. Mother of Graves // The Periapt of Absence – I’m a sucker for death doom. And The Periapt of Absence is some fucking great death doom. Mother of Graves were unknown to me before I stumbled across this album but their blending of old school Opeth (think somewhere between Morningrise and Orchid) with early Katatonia and Paradise Lost, plus a sprinkling of Clouds is stunning. All wrapped up in a pleasingly tight package, Mother of Graves smother the listener in unflinching, heartwrenching misery. And I love every minute of it. It’s that Peaceville Three sound we love, but feeling fresh, vibrant and vital.
#4. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – Me and death metal don’t always see eye to eye, and the last Devenial Verdict left only a passing impression. But Thus Spoke‘s tireless tongue-bathing promotion of Blessing of Despair convinced me to give it a chance. While I enjoy the stomping thuggery of Devenial Verdict’s dissonant death well enough, it’s the sudden mood swings into what TS described as “lethally graceful restraint” that really hooked me. Although worlds apart stylistically, on Blessing of Despair DV achieved what Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean did on Obsession Destruction: knowing precisely how far to push the suffocating, claustrophobic heaviness, before taking their foot off your throat for a minute. Then stamping on it again.
#3. Julie Christmas // Ridiculous and Full of Blood – Maddog predicted that I would lambast him as an underrating bastard for the 3.5 he deigned to award Ms Christmas. And he was quite correct. He’s a charlatan of the highest order. However, even I’m surprised by how high Ridiculous and Full of Blood has landed here. But, as someone not given to overly emotional reactions to music, I’m continually stunned by the reactions Julie—Can I call you Julie? No? Ok—extracts from me. I’m often on the edge of tears by the end of “The Lighthouse,” just like that cad Maddog, while the likes of “Not Enough” and “End of the World” (the latter with CoL’s Johannes Persson) have a scary edge to them, with Christmas at her maniacal, crooning, possessed, unpredictable best.
#2. A Swarm of the Sun // An Empire – Speaking of emotional responses, A Swarm of the Sun’s stripped back melancholy is right up there. If I say that An Empire is brighter and more uplifting than previous efforts The Rifts and The Woods, understand that this is a very relative statement. An Empire is drowning in sorrow and misery, and yet there is just a hint of brightness that shimmers and hovers around the edges, like a lunar halo. Slow and deliberate, haunting and cathartic, A Swarm of the Sun’s latest outing is just beautiful. End of. No discussion.2
#1. Kanonenfieber // Die Urkatastrophe – Y’all know I dropped a 5.0 on Die Urkatastophe, so it’s no surprise to find it here, sitting pretty, atop my list. There’s not much more praise that I can heap on Kanonenfieber’s sophomore record than I already did in my review. For me, it has everything and is more than I dared hope for as a follow up to my beloved Menschenmühle (my album of the year for 2021). It is brutal and vicious (“Panzerhenker” and “Ausblutingsschlacht”), anthemic (“Der Maulwurf” and “Menschenmühle”) and more. Crafted—and yes, that is the correct word—with huge skill and attention to detail, it is the storytelling, based on original source materials, that elevates this record to the next level for me. And if you don’t speak German, or are simply not into narrative in your metal, just go bang your fucking head to “Gott mit der Kavallerie”!
Honorable mentions In alphabetical order by band:
- 40 Watt Sun // Little Weight – Little Weight actually carries a lot of emotional weight. Melancholic, beautiful post-doom and shoegaze, rife with a rough honesty.
- Anciients // Beyond the Reach of the Sun – Long-form (arguably too-long-form in some respects) progressive death, which is wonderfully ambitious and overblown in its scale and delivery.
- Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose – Fantastic trad doom, channeling heavy doses of Candlemass. Early in the year, I thought this was top-5 material but it’s uneven, with the back half much stronger than the front, and I’ve cooled on it a touch.
- Nyktophobia // To the Stars – Just great, stomping melodeath. As I said in my review, it’s not massively original but it’s tight and well written, and easy to just kick back to. Sometimes, I don’t need more.
- Silhouette // Les Dires de l’Âme – This fantastic post-black album had a place on the list proper until Pillar of Light bulldozed its way in there very late in the day. Haunting, harrowing and beautiful, Silhouette’s debut is Great!
- Sumac // The Healer – Nothing about The Healer makes it an easy listen but Sumac’s fifth record is curiously beautiful for all its wandering, free-form abrasiveness.
- Vorga // Beyond the Palest Star – While it’s hard to disagree with Kenstrosity‘s criticism of the production on Beyond the Palest Star, what can I say? I still love it. It’s chunky, well written, well paced and powerful.
Surprises o’ the Year Ordered by most astounding first:
- Opeth // The Last Will and Testament – It’s been a long time since I was last genuinely interested in an Opeth album (2005’s Ghost Reveries, in case you were wondering). But, wouldn’t you just know it, Mikael Åkerfeldt and co are back (roars and all). I’m not ready to commit to a score for The Last Will (though I think El Cuervo‘s was possibly a smidge high) as I’ve not been able to spend enough time with it. But the fact I want to spend more time with it is, after 19 years of having no interest in Opeth’s output, a surprise. And a welcome one.
- Grand Magus // Sunraven – Another Swedish favourite of old, which I’d all but given up on, Grand Magus roared back this year with Sunraven. As an equally surprised Steel Druhm said in his review, this was the album he “feverishly hoped to get from Grand Magus … a grand return to prime form with the fire firmly back in the Balrog … the best Magus outing since 2012’s The Hunt”.
Disappointment o’ the Year Limited to a single musical disappointment, to avoid submitting a lengthy thesis:
- Zeal & Ardor // GREIF – I’m not angry, or even very surprised, just disappointed.3 While I accept that this is the album of a band in transition, there’s no getting away from the fact that it was a hugely disappointing album from a band that has abandoned the sound that made it what it was. And for what? They have not transitioned to something new and exciting, but with kinks to be worked out. Rather, on this record, Zeal & Ardor became something so pedestrian that any number of post-rock bands could’ve written it and, probably, done a better job. I may have overrated it.
Songs o’ the Year
- Julie Christmas – “The Lighthouse”
- Kanonenfieber – “Der Maulwurf”
- Selbst – “The Stench of a Dead Spirit”
- Panzerfaust – “The Damascene Conversions”
- Kanonenfieber – “Gott mit der Kavallerie”
- Devenial Verdict – “Garden of Eyes”
- Spectral Wound – “Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal”
- Silhouette – “Les Dires de l’Âme”
- Blue Heron – “Everything Fades”
- Zeal & Ardor – “Hide in Shade”
- Glare of the Sun – “Rain”
Cherd
Twenty-twenty-four was certainly a year that followed previous years and will precede still others. When I look back, I’ll likely remember it as the year I discovered the wonders of ADHD medication after decades of non-treatment, the difficult transition my poor Cherdlet experienced from kindergarten to first grade, and the incredible bucket list trip my wife and I took to Toronto to watch our favorite TV franchise filming new content courtesy of my very important Hollywood connections. No, not Robert Downey Jr. Much more important and better-looking. Hmm? Margot Robbie? She wishes. I also had the pleasure of meeting several of my fellow writers in person, and they are all much homelier than they let on with the exception of Madam X, who is a goddamned ray of sunshine.
On the musical front, I was able to check two bands off my “need to see live” list in Judas Priest and Archspire, whereby I discovered that Halford does exactly zero audience banter, and Archspire do nothing but. Fun shows, both. I didn’t listen to as much new music by volume this year than I have in previous years when I’d log between 200 and 400 releases, and that was largely due to my kid’s age and the level of interaction he needs. I have a feeling, however, that 2025 will see an uptick thanks to the new Heavys headphones I got for Christmas this year. As always, I want to thank the editors, particularly Steel Druhm and Doc Grier, for not sending me a mailbomb after all the late reviews I turned in (I’ll work on that in 2025), and the man himself, AMG, for building this community and for agreeing that Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek show.4
(ish) Chat Pile // Cool World – This is what it sounds like when Chat Pile make a “mature” record. As I noted in my October review, some of the most glaring weirdness and black humor the band is known for is missing in Cool World, which is why it’s here on my list instead of matching the lofty heights of my 2022 AOTY God’s Country. That said, this is consistently bleak in a way I like, and it boasts what are in my opinion the two best–if not most memorable–songs the band have written to date in “New World” and “Masc.” I’m a sucker for these Oklahomans and look forward to how their sound evolves from here.
#10. Glacial Tomb // Lightless Expanse – I’ve had an up and down journey with Glacial Tomb’s sophomore record, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still view this as one of the best things I’ve listened to this year. To consider a record this closely means you have to listen to it a lot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I logged more hours with Lightless Expanse than with any other album. I’ve made a big deal about the one-three punch of “Voidwomb/Enshrined in Concrete/Abyssal Host”, but it bears repeating since it’s my favorite consecutive stretch of death metal in 2024.
#9. Replicant // Infinite Mortality – If you peel back the veneer of disso-death and blackened blasts on Infinite Mortality, you’ll find a pounding hardcore heart comprised of equal parts beatdown and Converge. As technical as this music gets, and there is a lot going on here, Replicant never forget their primary duty as a metal band: snapping necks. On their third album, they’ve exquisitely composed a missive to unbridled aggression. I completely missed their previous albums, so I’m glad our Kenfren wouldn’t shut his excitable yap about this one.
#8. Spectral Voice // Sparagmos – “Alright skaters! This is the end of our free skate period. We’d like to once again thank you for spending your Saturday with us here at Family Fun Roller Rink and Arcade. It’s time to slow things down, down, way down, and you know what that means. That’s right, it’s couples’ skate. So, find that special someone you want to be interred on a cold stone slab with, gaze into each other’s empty eye sockets, and make your way around the rink as wave after wave of Spectral Voice’s death/funeral doom forcefully separates you from any light, hope, or happiness this wretched world might have accidentally given you. Remember, those who survive the next 45 minutes of tectonic plates colliding will get the chance to compete in roller limbo!”
#7. Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose – Despite being one of the biggest doom apologists on this site, Crypt Sermon failed to grab me with their highly acclaimed debut nearly ten years ago. I chalk this up to my unfamiliarity with the traditional doom style at the time. In recent years, I’ve binged large amounts of Candlemass, Saint Vitus, Cathedral, Solitude Aeturnus et al., so I finally have the frame of reference to see just how well Crypt Sermon’s third LP captures the swagger, majesty, and grit of a style few contemporary bands seem interested in playing. After the growing pains displayed on The Ruins of Fading Light, these Philly natives have worked out the kinks and delivered an air-tight slab of doomy goodness.
#6. Full of Hell // Coagulated Bliss – I regret waiving my seniority claim to Full of Hell releases, thus allowing Dolph to snap up review duties for Coagulated Bliss. It’s not that he did a bad job of reviewing the prolific experimental grind outfit’s latest. He did great, and he awarded it a deserved 4.0. But then he had the cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity, and the gumption to incorrectly lower his score. To make matters worse, it appeared nowhere on his year-end list. Not even a goll dern honorable mention. I’ve told him to his cetacean face that he’s wrong and I’m likely to do so again because this is Full of Hell’s best work since Trumpeting Ecstasy. In fact, it might be better.
#5. Ulcerate // Cutting the Throat of God – For most of their existence, Ulcerate was a highly acclaimed band that I just couldn’t get into. That changed four years ago with the release of Stare into Death and Be Still. Little changed in their intricate approach to dissonant death metal, but there was something warmer and more human to what I had previously considered a rather detached style. That trend continues with Cutting the Throat of God. I find this record best when taken as a whole, letting the experience unfold over the full runtime, like dream-walking through a hedge maze or being trapped in a velvet sack and discovering it’s much larger on the inside.5
#4. Thou // Umbilical – I waited a long time for a chance to review a new record by Thou, and when it finally came, they did not disappoint. As I said in my June review, “Like their chimerical American metal brethren Inter Arma, it doesn’t matter how many influences the band stuff into one album. They are all unified in sound under Thou’s banner. Bryan Funck’s acid-bit vocals are unmistakable and apparently unchangeable after 20 throat-shredding years. Also unchangeable? Thou’s ability to craft the most metallic-sounding guitar tone out there. As the standard bearer for…hell, as the entire sum of the second generation of Louisiana sludge, the sound they’ve forged isn’t the kind of sloppy muck you may associate with the term. It’s certainly thick, but it has a quality like two enormous steel I-beams violently striking each other.” If that doesn’t sell Umbilical for you, then here is where our paths diverge.
#3. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – I didn’t listen to Blessing of Despair for several weeks after it came out in October despite the fact Devenial Verdict’s previous record, Ash Blind, made my year-end list in 2022. When I finally got around to it earlier in December, it threatened to blow the doors right off my still nebulous list, climbing fast and high until ultimately landing here at number three. There is more immediacy than on Ash Blind, which took me a while to warm up to. That doesn’t mean the band skimps on the kind of thoughtful transitions and atmospherics they’ve come to be known for. It’s just that Blessing of Despair HAZ THE RIFFS, including my favorite death metal riff of the year in “Solus.”
#2. Void Witch // Horripilating Presence – When I revisited Horripilating Presence with the purpose of sorting out this list’s pecking order, I expected death-doomers Void Witch to fall mid-to-late top 10. Obviously, the opposite happened. For the life of me I don’t understand how this album didn’t gain more traction amongst the other writers and you, the unwashed commentariat. As I said back in July, “…the material on Horripilating Presence is Mohamed Ali levels of confident. The editing of ideas in each song and across the album’s taut 39 minutes is masterful, especially for a debut. No song hews too closely to any of the others, but all are of a piece, locking comfortably into place like an intricate puzzle box, and Void Witch have such sights to show you.”
#1. Inter Arma // New Heaven – Inter Arma never miss. Aside from being one of the best live acts in metal, every album they’ve released going back to 2013’s Sky Burial has been one successful evolution after another. As a very wise reviewer once said, “They’re the same shaggy beast as ever, but beneath that matted, coarse coat is a rippling form mid-shape shift, stretching, pulling, and crossing back on itself constantly over the course of New Heaven’s shockingly concise 42 minutes…If being all over the musical map sounds like a negative, you’ve probably never heard an Inter Arma record before. It seems whatever they throw at the wall sticks, and the listening experience across their (usually much longer) records never feels uneven. This is because they play everything with the same smoldering intensity and volatile mean streak.” What a record.
Honorable Mentions:
- Convulsing // Perdurance – I like this quote from Dear Hollow‘s review, so I’ll let him do the talking: “…Convulsing explores every nook and twist of a rhythm and melody until its inevitable conclusion is happened upon in tragic and fatal fashion.”
- Spectral Wound // Songs of Blood and Mire – Pound for pound, Spectral Wound are probably the most consistent no-frills black metal band currently in operation. Songs of Blood and Mire is another rager that’s as melodic as it is acidic.
- Lord Buffalo // Holus Bolus – This record was one redundant instrumental away from landing higher on this list. Looking forward to where these gothic country rockers go next.
Songs o’ the Year:
In alphabetical order by band:
#2024 #40WattSun #ASwarmOfTheSun #Anciients #BlogPosts #BlueHeron #CarcharodonAndCherdSTopTenIshOf2024 #ChatPile #Convulsing #CryptSermon #DevenialVerdict #FullOfHell #GlareOfTheSun #GrandMagus #InterArma #JulieChristmas #Kanonenfieber #Listurnalia #LordBuffalo #MotherOfGraves #Necrowretch #Nyktophobia #Opeth #Panzerfaust #PillarOfLight #Replicant #Selbst #Seth #Silhouette #SpectralVoice #SpectralWound #Sumac #TheVisionBleak #Thou #Ulcerate #VoidWitch #Vorga #ZealArdor
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Carcharodon and Cherd’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024
By Carcharodon
Carcharodon
I’ve been writing here since 2018. This has been the hardest year to date. I feel like I say this every year right around this time but, for whatever reason, I’ve really struggled this year to find the motivation and inspiration to write. Indeed, I’ve often felt that I lacked the passion for the music. Rather than exploring the murkier depths of Bandcamp, I was often to be found in the company of old, non-metal friends like Nick Cave, 16 Horsepower and Tom Waits.
Despite my disappointment with the world, most of which is on literal or metaphorical fire, and my disillusionment with people, whose choices have caused most of that, there were bright glimmers. The phenomenal response to our Gondor-esque call for aid, when Kenstrosity‘s life was ripped apart by Hurricane Helene, reassured me there are still a few good people out there, a good number of whom read this blog.
Still, I managed to turn out a few reviews this year, including my first ever 5.0—more of which below—which was worth it for the Steel Ire it evoked alone. And there was the Fifteenalia, a celebration the like of which we will not see again (for obvious reasons), which I had the honour of steering from questionable inception to creaky delivery.
Ironically, despite my struggles on the writing front, This Place has played a significant part in keeping me sane. It’s been tolerable to welcome a few new staffers—some even raised up from the awful Place Below—to our serried ranks, while the older hands feel almost like family at this point, with everything that that entails. As ever, particular thanks go to Steel Druhm for his tireless intimidation, which just about keeps us honest, while Dolph, Dear Hollow, El Cuervo, Grier, Maddog, Sentynel and Thus Spoke, among others, have proved adequate companions for banter and gigs.
And with that, I wish you all the happiest of Listurnalias.
#ish. Pillar of Light // Caldera – A very late entry to this list, Pillar of Light should be a cautionary tale to bands and labels: release your shit earlier! With more time, the stunning Amenra-meets-Cult of Luna post-misery of Caldera could easily have placed in the top half of this list. While I know this is an album I will come to love and fully expect to regret not placing it higher here, the reality is that other entries have had longer to sink their hooks into me. I will just say that, for me, the apparently divisive vocals are a perfect fit for Pillar of Light’s style.
#10. Seth // La France des Maudits – Way back when,1 French black metallers Seth snuck onto my list of Honorable Mentions with La Morsure du Christ, a fantastic return to form after a lengthy absence. After a short gap, they’re back and this year’s La France des Maudits has cracked the list proper. Melodic, bordering on symphonic with the keys and choral arrangements, but also visceral and feral, Seth dropped an absolute banger. It doesn’t hurt that, as Thus Spoke pointed out in her review, it’s “downright impressive how rich and dynamic this sounds.”
#9. The Vision Bleak // Weird Tales – The Vision Bleak is not, to paraphrase Dr Grier, a band that has ever ‘got’ me. Or perhaps, I’ve never got them. But Weird Tales resonated with me enormously. And perhaps that’s because it’s not really like anything The Vision Bleak has done before. Structuring their gothic black metal (or should that be blackened goth metal?) into a single, flowing song (albeit one broken into parts) got my attention. But they held my attention because they actually managed to pull off this very-hard-to-execute vision. Weird Tales’ Type O Negative / Moonspell-inspired blackened sound clicked into place almost instantly for me and now I need to go back to TVB’s discography with newly-opened eyes.
#8. Necrowretch // Swords of Dajjal – The first 4.0 I delivered in an alarmingly high-scoring year, Necrowretch’s black-death fusion is something that I have returned to again. Hiding beneath the vicious, downright nasty surface of Swords of Dajjal, is a surprisingly subtle and well-crafted concept album. As I said in my review, there is zero bloat or filler on this record, which blazes with intensity, driven as much by the scything, razor-sharp riffs as the rasping, sepulchral vocals. The range of influences cited, both by me and by impressed commenters, shows how many different aspects there are to this killer record.
#7. Panzerfaust // The Suns of Perdition – Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion – After Chapter III: The Astral Drain, I was worried that Panzerfaust were running out of steam and inspiration to close out The Suns of Perdition saga. Thankfully, my concerns were misplaced. To Shadow Zion reeks of doom and destiny. Huge, brooding and intense, it is a captivating listen, with the stunning “The Damascene Conversions” sitting at its heart. From the sulfuric vocals to the masterful drumming, this was a worthy final chapter for The Suns of Perdition, which must go down as one of the best executed, most consistent multi-album concept pieces in metal.
#6. Spectral Wound // Songs of Blood and Mire – Spectral Wound just can’t miss. For a band that, superficially at least, plays fairly old school black metal, songwriting chops paired with brilliant execution mean these guys are anything but derivative. My favourite album of theirs to date, Songs of Blood and Mire is just tons of wicked, nasty fun. It’s hard to say exactly why, but I feel like everything Spectral Wound does has a slight knowing wink to it, which suggests that the band doesn’t take itself too seriously. For me, this is a huge positive, as a lot of black metal is so tediously earnest, where this is unflinchingly harsh, surprisingly melodic and drowning in swaggering groove. Great stuff.
#5. Mother of Graves // The Periapt of Absence – I’m a sucker for death doom. And The Periapt of Absence is some fucking great death doom. Mother of Graves were unknown to me before I stumbled across this album but their blending of old school Opeth (think somewhere between Morningrise and Orchid) with early Katatonia and Paradise Lost, plus a sprinkling of Clouds is stunning. All wrapped up in a pleasingly tight package, Mother of Graves smother the listener in unflinching, heartwrenching misery. And I love every minute of it. It’s that Peaceville Three sound we love, but feeling fresh, vibrant and vital.
#4. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – Me and death metal don’t always see eye to eye, and the last Devenial Verdict left only a passing impression. But Thus Spoke‘s tireless tongue-bathing promotion of Blessing of Despair convinced me to give it a chance. While I enjoy the stomping thuggery of Devenial Verdict’s dissonant death well enough, it’s the sudden mood swings into what TS described as “lethally graceful restraint” that really hooked me. Although worlds apart stylistically, on Blessing of Despair DV achieved what Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean did on Obsession Destruction: knowing precisely how far to push the suffocating, claustrophobic heaviness, before taking their foot off your throat for a minute. Then stamping on it again.
#3. Julie Christmas // Ridiculous and Full of Blood – Maddog predicted that I would lambast him as an underrating bastard for the 3.5 he deigned to award Ms Christmas. And he was quite correct. He’s a charlatan of the highest order. However, even I’m surprised by how high Ridiculous and Full of Blood has landed here. But, as someone not given to overly emotional reactions to music, I’m continually stunned by the reactions Julie—Can I call you Julie? No? Ok—extracts from me. I’m often on the edge of tears by the end of “The Lighthouse,” just like that cad Maddog, while the likes of “Not Enough” and “End of the World” (the latter with CoL’s Johannes Persson) have a scary edge to them, with Christmas at her maniacal, crooning, possessed, unpredictable best.
#2. A Swarm of the Sun // An Empire – Speaking of emotional responses, A Swarm of the Sun’s stripped back melancholy is right up there. If I say that An Empire is brighter and more uplifting than previous efforts The Rifts and The Woods, understand that this is a very relative statement. An Empire is drowning in sorrow and misery, and yet there is just a hint of brightness that shimmers and hovers around the edges, like a lunar halo. Slow and deliberate, haunting and cathartic, A Swarm of the Sun’s latest outing is just beautiful. End of. No discussion.2
#1. Kanonenfieber // Die Urkatastrophe – Y’all know I dropped a 5.0 on Die Urkatastophe, so it’s no surprise to find it here, sitting pretty, atop my list. There’s not much more praise that I can heap on Kanonenfieber’s sophomore record than I already did in my review. For me, it has everything and is more than I dared hope for as a follow up to my beloved Menschenmühle (my album of the year for 2021). It is brutal and vicious (“Panzerhenker” and “Ausblutingsschlacht”), anthemic (“Der Maulwurf” and “Menschenmühle”) and more. Crafted—and yes, that is the correct word—with huge skill and attention to detail, it is the storytelling, based on original source materials, that elevates this record to the next level for me. And if you don’t speak German, or are simply not into narrative in your metal, just go bang your fucking head to “Gott mit der Kavallerie”!
Honorable mentions In alphabetical order by band:
- 40 Watt Sun // Little Weight – Little Weight actually carries a lot of emotional weight. Melancholic, beautiful post-doom and shoegaze, rife with a rough honesty.
- Anciients // Beyond the Reach of the Sun – Long-form (arguably too-long-form in some respects) progressive death, which is wonderfully ambitious and overblown in its scale and delivery.
- Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose – Fantastic trad doom, channeling heavy doses of Candlemass. Early in the year, I thought this was top-5 material but it’s uneven, with the back half much stronger than the front, and I’ve cooled on it a touch.
- Nyktophobia // To the Stars – Just great, stomping melodeath. As I said in my review, it’s not massively original but it’s tight and well written, and easy to just kick back to. Sometimes, I don’t need more.
- Silhouette // Les Dires de l’Âme – This fantastic post-black album had a place on the list proper until Pillar of Light bulldozed its way in there very late in the day. Haunting, harrowing and beautiful, Silhouette’s debut is Great!
- Sumac // The Healer – Nothing about The Healer makes it an easy listen but Sumac’s fifth record is curiously beautiful for all its wandering, free-form abrasiveness.
- Vorga // Beyond the Palest Star – While it’s hard to disagree with Kenstrosity‘s criticism of the production on Beyond the Palest Star, what can I say? I still love it. It’s chunky, well written, well paced and powerful.
Surprises o’ the Year Ordered by most astounding first:
- Opeth // The Last Will and Testament – It’s been a long time since I was last genuinely interested in an Opeth album (2005’s Ghost Reveries, in case you were wondering). But, wouldn’t you just know it, Mikael Åkerfeldt and co are back (roars and all). I’m not ready to commit to a score for The Last Will (though I think El Cuervo‘s was possibly a smidge high) as I’ve not been able to spend enough time with it. But the fact I want to spend more time with it is, after 19 years of having no interest in Opeth’s output, a surprise. And a welcome one.
- Grand Magus // Sunraven – Another Swedish favourite of old, which I’d all but given up on, Grand Magus roared back this year with Sunraven. As an equally surprised Steel Druhm said in his review, this was the album he “feverishly hoped to get from Grand Magus … a grand return to prime form with the fire firmly back in the Balrog … the best Magus outing since 2012’s The Hunt”.
Disappointment o’ the Year Limited to a single musical disappointment, to avoid submitting a lengthy thesis:
- Zeal & Ardor // GREIF – I’m not angry, or even very surprised, just disappointed.3 While I accept that this is the album of a band in transition, there’s no getting away from the fact that it was a hugely disappointing album from a band that has abandoned the sound that made it what it was. And for what? They have not transitioned to something new and exciting, but with kinks to be worked out. Rather, on this record, Zeal & Ardor became something so pedestrian that any number of post-rock bands could’ve written it and, probably, done a better job. I may have overrated it.
Songs o’ the Year
- Julie Christmas – “The Lighthouse”
- Kanonenfieber – “Der Maulwurf”
- Selbst – “The Stench of a Dead Spirit”
- Panzerfaust – “The Damascene Conversions”
- Kanonenfieber – “Gott mit der Kavallerie”
- Devenial Verdict – “Garden of Eyes”
- Spectral Wound – “Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal”
- Silhouette – “Les Dires de l’Âme”
- Blue Heron – “Everything Fades”
- Zeal & Ardor – “Hide in Shade”
- Glare of the Sun – “Rain”
Cherd
Twenty-twenty-four was certainly a year that followed previous years and will precede still others. When I look back, I’ll likely remember it as the year I discovered the wonders of ADHD medication after decades of non-treatment, the difficult transition my poor Cherdlet experienced from kindergarten to first grade, and the incredible bucket list trip my wife and I took to Toronto to watch our favorite TV franchise filming new content courtesy of my very important Hollywood connections. No, not Robert Downey Jr. Much more important and better-looking. Hmm? Margot Robbie? She wishes. I also had the pleasure of meeting several of my fellow writers in person, and they are all much homelier than they let on with the exception of Madam X, who is a goddamned ray of sunshine.
On the musical front, I was able to check two bands off my “need to see live” list in Judas Priest and Archspire, whereby I discovered that Halford does exactly zero audience banter, and Archspire do nothing but. Fun shows, both. I didn’t listen to as much new music by volume this year than I have in previous years when I’d log between 200 and 400 releases, and that was largely due to my kid’s age and the level of interaction he needs. I have a feeling, however, that 2025 will see an uptick thanks to the new Heavys headphones I got for Christmas this year. As always, I want to thank the editors, particularly Steel Druhm and Doc Grier, for not sending me a mailbomb after all the late reviews I turned in (I’ll work on that in 2025), and the man himself, AMG, for building this community and for agreeing that Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek show.4
(ish) Chat Pile // Cool World – This is what it sounds like when Chat Pile make a “mature” record. As I noted in my October review, some of the most glaring weirdness and black humor the band is known for is missing in Cool World, which is why it’s here on my list instead of matching the lofty heights of my 2022 AOTY God’s Country. That said, this is consistently bleak in a way I like, and it boasts what are in my opinion the two best–if not most memorable–songs the band have written to date in “New World” and “Masc.” I’m a sucker for these Oklahomans and look forward to how their sound evolves from here.
#10. Glacial Tomb // Lightless Expanse – I’ve had an up and down journey with Glacial Tomb’s sophomore record, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still view this as one of the best things I’ve listened to this year. To consider a record this closely means you have to listen to it a lot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I logged more hours with Lightless Expanse than with any other album. I’ve made a big deal about the one-three punch of “Voidwomb/Enshrined in Concrete/Abyssal Host”, but it bears repeating since it’s my favorite consecutive stretch of death metal in 2024.
#9. Replicant // Infinite Mortality – If you peel back the veneer of disso-death and blackened blasts on Infinite Mortality, you’ll find a pounding hardcore heart comprised of equal parts beatdown and Converge. As technical as this music gets, and there is a lot going on here, Replicant never forget their primary duty as a metal band: snapping necks. On their third album, they’ve exquisitely composed a missive to unbridled aggression. I completely missed their previous albums, so I’m glad our Kenfren wouldn’t shut his excitable yap about this one.
#8. Spectral Voice // Sparagmos – “Alright skaters! This is the end of our free skate period. We’d like to once again thank you for spending your Saturday with us here at Family Fun Roller Rink and Arcade. It’s time to slow things down, down, way down, and you know what that means. That’s right, it’s couples’ skate. So, find that special someone you want to be interred on a cold stone slab with, gaze into each other’s empty eye sockets, and make your way around the rink as wave after wave of Spectral Voice’s death/funeral doom forcefully separates you from any light, hope, or happiness this wretched world might have accidentally given you. Remember, those who survive the next 45 minutes of tectonic plates colliding will get the chance to compete in roller limbo!”
#7. Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose – Despite being one of the biggest doom apologists on this site, Crypt Sermon failed to grab me with their highly acclaimed debut nearly ten years ago. I chalk this up to my unfamiliarity with the traditional doom style at the time. In recent years, I’ve binged large amounts of Candlemass, Saint Vitus, Cathedral, Solitude Aeturnus et al., so I finally have the frame of reference to see just how well Crypt Sermon’s third LP captures the swagger, majesty, and grit of a style few contemporary bands seem interested in playing. After the growing pains displayed on The Ruins of Fading Light, these Philly natives have worked out the kinks and delivered an air-tight slab of doomy goodness.
#6. Full of Hell // Coagulated Bliss – I regret waiving my seniority claim to Full of Hell releases, thus allowing Dolph to snap up review duties for Coagulated Bliss. It’s not that he did a bad job of reviewing the prolific experimental grind outfit’s latest. He did great, and he awarded it a deserved 4.0. But then he had the cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity, and the gumption to incorrectly lower his score. To make matters worse, it appeared nowhere on his year-end list. Not even a goll dern honorable mention. I’ve told him to his cetacean face that he’s wrong and I’m likely to do so again because this is Full of Hell’s best work since Trumpeting Ecstasy. In fact, it might be better.
#5. Ulcerate // Cutting the Throat of God – For most of their existence, Ulcerate was a highly acclaimed band that I just couldn’t get into. That changed four years ago with the release of Stare into Death and Be Still. Little changed in their intricate approach to dissonant death metal, but there was something warmer and more human to what I had previously considered a rather detached style. That trend continues with Cutting the Throat of God. I find this record best when taken as a whole, letting the experience unfold over the full runtime, like dream-walking through a hedge maze or being trapped in a velvet sack and discovering it’s much larger on the inside.5
#4. Thou // Umbilical – I waited a long time for a chance to review a new record by Thou, and when it finally came, they did not disappoint. As I said in my June review, “Like their chimerical American metal brethren Inter Arma, it doesn’t matter how many influences the band stuff into one album. They are all unified in sound under Thou’s banner. Bryan Funck’s acid-bit vocals are unmistakable and apparently unchangeable after 20 throat-shredding years. Also unchangeable? Thou’s ability to craft the most metallic-sounding guitar tone out there. As the standard bearer for…hell, as the entire sum of the second generation of Louisiana sludge, the sound they’ve forged isn’t the kind of sloppy muck you may associate with the term. It’s certainly thick, but it has a quality like two enormous steel I-beams violently striking each other.” If that doesn’t sell Umbilical for you, then here is where our paths diverge.
#3. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – I didn’t listen to Blessing of Despair for several weeks after it came out in October despite the fact Devenial Verdict’s previous record, Ash Blind, made my year-end list in 2022. When I finally got around to it earlier in December, it threatened to blow the doors right off my still nebulous list, climbing fast and high until ultimately landing here at number three. There is more immediacy than on Ash Blind, which took me a while to warm up to. That doesn’t mean the band skimps on the kind of thoughtful transitions and atmospherics they’ve come to be known for. It’s just that Blessing of Despair HAZ THE RIFFS, including my favorite death metal riff of the year in “Solus.”
#2. Void Witch // Horripilating Presence – When I revisited Horripilating Presence with the purpose of sorting out this list’s pecking order, I expected death-doomers Void Witch to fall mid-to-late top 10. Obviously, the opposite happened. For the life of me I don’t understand how this album didn’t gain more traction amongst the other writers and you, the unwashed commentariat. As I said back in July, “…the material on Horripilating Presence is Mohamed Ali levels of confident. The editing of ideas in each song and across the album’s taut 39 minutes is masterful, especially for a debut. No song hews too closely to any of the others, but all are of a piece, locking comfortably into place like an intricate puzzle box, and Void Witch have such sights to show you.”
#1. Inter Arma // New Heaven – Inter Arma never miss. Aside from being one of the best live acts in metal, every album they’ve released going back to 2013’s Sky Burial has been one successful evolution after another. As a very wise reviewer once said, “They’re the same shaggy beast as ever, but beneath that matted, coarse coat is a rippling form mid-shape shift, stretching, pulling, and crossing back on itself constantly over the course of New Heaven’s shockingly concise 42 minutes…If being all over the musical map sounds like a negative, you’ve probably never heard an Inter Arma record before. It seems whatever they throw at the wall sticks, and the listening experience across their (usually much longer) records never feels uneven. This is because they play everything with the same smoldering intensity and volatile mean streak.” What a record.
Honorable Mentions:
- Convulsing // Perdurance – I like this quote from Dear Hollow‘s review, so I’ll let him do the talking: “…Convulsing explores every nook and twist of a rhythm and melody until its inevitable conclusion is happened upon in tragic and fatal fashion.”
- Spectral Wound // Songs of Blood and Mire – Pound for pound, Spectral Wound are probably the most consistent no-frills black metal band currently in operation. Songs of Blood and Mire is another rager that’s as melodic as it is acidic.
- Lord Buffalo // Holus Bolus – This record was one redundant instrumental away from landing higher on this list. Looking forward to where these gothic country rockers go next.
Songs o’ the Year:
In alphabetical order by band:
#2024 #40WattSun #ASwarmOfTheSun #Anciients #BlogPosts #BlueHeron #CarcharodonAndCherdSTopTenIshOf2024 #ChatPile #Convulsing #CryptSermon #DevenialVerdict #FullOfHell #GlareOfTheSun #GrandMagus #InterArma #JulieChristmas #Kanonenfieber #Listurnalia #LordBuffalo #MotherOfGraves #Necrowretch #Nyktophobia #Opeth #Panzerfaust #PillarOfLight #Replicant #Selbst #Seth #Silhouette #SpectralVoice #SpectralWound #Sumac #TheVisionBleak #Thou #Ulcerate #VoidWitch #Vorga #ZealArdor