#cirithungol — Public Fediverse posts

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Cirith Ungol:
🎵 All the Shadows

#CirithUngol
#newRelease 🆕 single

https://cirithungolofficial.bandcamp.com/track/all-the-shadows

https://open.spotify.com/track/3miRVv7wDkqEhz0Md2tvk2

🎶 show playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1uZ3GLf6lDtDqJSQrY0lMU

🎶 KEXP playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VNALrOa3gWbk794YuIrwg

I did a hard thing today. I ignored a DM (image).

"This is my 🪓 There are many like it but this one is mine. My 🪓is my best friend, it is my life. I must wield it before I am struck down. I will"

@[email protected] #middleearth #orcs #CirithUngol

Dwelling Below – Wearisome Guardians Review

By Spicie Forrest

The boys in Dwelling Below get a lot of facetime here at AMG. We’ve reviewed Hierarchies’ debut (Jared Moran, Anthony Wheeler, Nicolas Turner), all three albums by Acausal Intrusion (Moran, Turner), one by Filtheater (Moran), and we’ve done a filter piece on Feral Lord (Moran, Turner). It’s no wonder, as we tend to enjoy the angry, dissonant stuff they put out. I’ve been jonesing for something in that ballpark, so when I learned that Dwelling Below’s debut unnerved Thus Spoke enough to waive seniority, I quickly snagged their follow-up. Hoping it might hit the spot, I eagerly dug my grubby lil nubbins into Wearisome Guardians.

Dwelling Below was a filthy slab of long-form deathened doom, and Wearisome Guardians offers much of the same. Look at that cover art. It sounds exactly how you’d expect: like bathing in stagnant catacomb water. Cavernous, mad, and malevolent, Moran echoes through abandoned tombs, disturbing centuries of eight-legged architecture. On the skins, he nearly wakes the dead with frenetic onslaughts of double bass and unsettling cymbals. Turner’s guitar stillbirths an unholy union of Saint Vitus and Autopsy. Warped and abrasive riffs lumber forward, inexorable and lethal as a cave-in, while tormented leads scream psychosis from a neighboring cell (“Terminal Experiments,” “Sacraments”). Ever-so-slightly discordant basslines weave and coil around your ankles as Wheeler encourages a reexamination of your sanity. Like meeting a skinwalker, you know something’s off, but it’s hard to describe, and it’s fucking terrifying.

It’s a little oxymoronic to call 1.) dissonant 2.) death/doom 3.) metal accessible, but Wearisome Guardians is perhaps Moran’s most approachable offering yet. His aforementioned acts all shove their base genres through the same twisted, dissonant lens, but compared to Hierarchies or Acausal Intrusion, Dwelling Below is almost melodic. Between chaotic, atonal passages and vicious whammy abuse, Turner employs more traditional riffcraft learned long ago at Candlemass (“Wearisome Guardians,” “Terminal Experiments”). Leads in “Unfolding Universe” and “The Altar” reveal traces of Brocas Helm and Cirith Ungol, while “Sacraments” reaches further back, unearthing the legendary B.B. King for a solo, soulful, bright, and blue. These ancestral trappings are strung with care and shine brilliantly against Dwelling Below’s murky core. Wearisome Guardians offers these moments of reprieve from its oppressive violence, like guiding lights coaxing you deeper into the dark.

At 51 minutes, Wearisome Guardians isn’t terribly long for the genre, but with an average track length of ten minutes, it certainly isn’t a casual listen. Luckily, songcraft is not a weakness Dwelling Below suffers. Far from sedentary, Wearisome Guardians is in constant motion. Most riffs only linger a few moments before evolving into something new or reverting to a main throughline. Even when a riff tarries longer, the bass, drums, or vocals twist and shift, keeping things fresh and engaging throughout. More than this, each song seems built around clearly defined movements. Even on a first listen, I could guess my place in a song fairly well. There’s an intuitive logic to each track’s pace, allowing Wearisome Guardians to feel lean and efficient with no real fat to trim. Even the 90-second “Interlude” belongs. What initially feels like a respite reveals itself to be just as unsettling as the rest of the album. Bright and metallic, this moment’s tainted rest doesn’t let you forget what’s on the other side.

I wished for some grimy, cavernous filth, and I got it. Wearisome Guardians is a menace to experience. I honestly thought it hyperbole when Thus Spoke said their debut induced fear, but exaggeration it was not. Even with bright moments that fractionally lessen the tension, Dwelling Below is still deeply unnerving. These casket campers know what they’re doing, and they’re good at it. Wearisome Guardians is a strong success on both atmospheric and compositional fronts. Dwelling Below doesn’t just want to show you the dark. They want to leave you there without a torch and seal the tomb. This sophomore effort is claustrophobic, sepulchral, and evil. Wearisome Guardians is viscerally unsafe, and it’s here to break you if you’ve got the nerve to let it.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 10 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Transcending Obscurity Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: October 31st, 2025

#2025 #35 #AcausalIntrusion #AmericanMetal #Autopsy #BBKing #BrocasHelm #Candlemass #CirithUngol #DeathDoom #DeathMetal #DoomMetal #DwellingBelow #FeralLord #Filtheater #Hierarchies #Oct25 #Review #Reviews #SaintVitus #TranscendingObscurityRecords #WearisomeGuardians

Frost and Fire, Part 2 – Heavy Metal Edition

This past SpaceAce Sunday, we looked at the first of two albums we have on The List that have the same, rather holiday-relevant title of Frost and Fire. While The Watersons’ album actually has a few Xmas/Xmas-adjacent songs, the same cannot be said of the album we are looking at today. But, it’s December 24, and so anything you listen to can be an Xmas album if you want it to be. Or, as they[1] say, “yippie kayak, other buckets!”

Cirith Ungol – Frost and Fire (1981, US)

And so, today we take a listen to number 892 on The List, submitted by Almoehi.

I know that many metalheads are absolutely fanatic about this band, but listening to this album the other day was actually the first I had ever heard of theirs! With the band named after the mountain pass in Tolkien’s Middle-earth that goes through the Ephel Dúath (you know, the one near Minas Morgul in Mordor…), one might expect a lot of LoTR-themed lyrics on this, the band’s debut album. But, perhaps hinted at by the fact that the band name is to be pronounced “sirith ungol” rather than the more accurate “kirith ungol”, the name seems more of a statement of the lyrics being in the fantasy realm, with a loose association to the LoTR books rather than them being an overarching theme. At any rate, I don’t recognize any of the lyrics on this album as being LoTR-themed, so I believe it isn’t until their next album, King of the Dead (1984), that we get to totally nerd out in that respect.

But! Let’s nerd out about the cover! This is the third album we’ve looked at so far on The List with a cover painted by the incredible Michael Whelan (on Mastodon: @MichaelWhelan).[2] The Frost and Fire cover is a crop of Whelan’s 1977 painting titled “Stormbringer”, and was used on the cover of Michael Moorcock’s book of the same name, from his Elric of Melniboné saga. Whelan in fact would go on to provide the art for every single Cirith Ungol album, with all of the paintings also pulling double duty on a Moorcock/Elric of Melniboné book!

Even just based on those credits alone, it’s perhaps no surprise that music journalist and musician Sarah Kitteringham – of the epic doom metal band Smoulder[3] and of BangerTV – is a giant Cirith Ungol fan. Sarah can dance circles around anyone in talking about this band (and, well, probably any doom/heavy metal metal band), and in fact wrote the liner notes for the 40th anniversary reissue of Frost and Fire! So, rather than me regaling you with any Wikipedia-level facts, I would suggest we head on over to Discogs and read through those liner notes together (click to images 2 and 3). If you’re a fan, perhaps also check out these demos and extras that were part of that anniversary reissue.

And so concludes our mini spotlight theme. Stay frosty and/or firey, all. 🤘

• Bandcamp: Cirith Ungol – Frost and Fire
• Discogs: Cirith Ungol – Frost and Fire

[1]Well, Charles Boyle at least says this.
[2]The others being Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell II and Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains.
[3]Fun fact: All of Smoulder’s album covers are also done by Whelan, and both of their LPs either reference or feature Moorcock.

#1001OtherAlbums #1980s #CirithUngol #heavyMetal #ListenToThis #metal #MichaelWhelan #music #musicDiscovery #Musodon #powerMetal #protoDoom #protoDoomMetal