Opening to around two dozen patrons, Bergen’s Sahg sadly pass through Manchester tonight without making a dent of any kind on the city’s metalheads. Sitting somewhere between Mastodon, Down and Black Sabbath, they are magnificently heavy with a deft hand at songwriting, getting what little audience there is moving nicely to the cavernous ‘Godless North’ and the NWOBHM-lite ‘Pyromancer’. Still, the highlight is when the singer finds time to namecheck his fellow countryman and honorary Mancunian, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

Iceland’s Sólstafir take a good ten minutes to get beyond their intro tape and repetitive…

Professing a love of cider that almost surpasses epic Yorkshire grinders The Afternoon Gentleman, Lancashire freshmen Corrupt Moral Altar present seven well-fermented sludge-grind beverages on Luciferian Deathcult. Filled with intense and introspective lyrics that weave a story of addiction and societal alienation, this is a well-thought effort at representing a bleak and chaotic life that has been torn apart by substance abuse.

Opening with the type of mid-tempo grind beloved by Nasum and Pig Destroyer, ‘Play Stupid Games and Win Stupid Prizes’ and ‘Stray Dog’ hit the stomach like methylated spirits…

Blasting on to the international extreme metal scene three years hence with debut full-length Hatred for Mankind, Dragged into Sunlight have committed their second ritual of mass destruction to record, a trio of the heaviest blackened sludge that scars and haunts the ears long after the final strains of feedback cease. Widowmaker contains less overt black metal reference points than Hatred for Mankind, and while there is more focus on sludge, there is little of the hardcore that can be found on the most recent record by DIS’s closest musical relations, Coffinworm.

Widowmaker opens with a single…

Surely now is the time to recognise Anaal Nathrakh’s exercises in controlled sonic devastation as a cherished British institution? The continuing ability of the Birmingham duo to bat a record straight in to the Album of the Year polls at any given moment is frankly unfair, especially considering some of the sacks of vomit that will likely receive gongs at the end of the year from Kerrang, Metal Hammer and, yes, even the once-mighty Terrorizer following a shocking change in editorial direction.

Vanitas is, at the most basic level, a re-affirmation of Anaal Nathrakh’s basic principles of furious…

Focusing all of your stylistic attention on a single subject matter has rarely been to the detriment of any metal band (see Nile and, erm… Ziltoid the Omniscient), and one look at the song titles from a band monikered as bluntly as Nuclear Death Terror will confirm the subject of their thrashing crust-punk to be nothing but purist nihilism and eschatology.

Straight out of a thousand Copenhagen squat parties, NDT are the latest in a continuous line of crust creatures great and small to sign for Greg Anderson’s Southern Lord label, and are amongst such company as…

Flagbearers of the contemporary English black metal scene alongside Fen and Wodensthrone, Winterfylleth’s The Threnody of Triumph is yet another fine ode to English history, culture and nature. Building on the blueprint laid down on The Ghost of Heritage and The Mercian Sphere, this is another outstanding record that overflows with an intense sense of loss, heartache and nostalgia, taking aesthetic influences from eastern European bands such as Drudkh and Negura Bunget, although with a subtler folk influence.

There is no extended atmospheric introduction to set a glib scene, the Winterfylleth boys are assured that their…

This year’s Hellfest saw the festival site expand significantly, nearly doubling in size to a 35,000 capacity, and featuring two extra stages, a larger campsite and an expanded market. The festival’s organisers have made the leap from being a larger small festival to a smaller large one in a remarkably smooth fashion, with the arena, facilities and campsite layout being not just expanded, but also improved on previous years.

After missing Thou and Extinction of Mankind’s early sets, Endstille’s Teutonic artillery column rolls across the Maginot Line and arrives at the Moine valley, firing volley upon volley of…

Seven albums in and nearly fifteen years since their debut full-length release, American death metallers Nile continue their successful mission to establish themselves as an unconquerable institution within their genre. Five years since their first trough, and a shallow one at that in Ithyphallic, after a career of peaks, the Egyptological four-piece present At the Gate of Sethu, and once again stun the metal community and its press, thanks not only to the song titles that are godsend to anyone writing to a word limit, but also because of their equally absurd levels of talent.

Right out…

Following on from a taster single last year, Washington state’s Seven Horns, Seven Eyes release their full-length debut, Throes of Absolution, a refreshingly soulful record in largely robotic and inanimate field. Despite a lofty, almost haughty, press pack from Century Media that stresses the Seattleites’ aversion to trends and genre pigeonholing, the obvious references to Meshuggah, Cynic and Periphery place them firmly in the technical wing of contemporary death metal. Nevertheless, this is an impressive record that is mature beyond 7H7E’s years, and surpasses the legions of metal bands currently jumping aboard the ‘djent’ ship…

You might have to have been living on the north pole of Mars not to have heard that Relapse are putting out the debut EP from antipodean doom/death unit Inverloch, such has been the level of hype and bluster surrounding this release. Inverloch is the brainchild of two guitarists from underground legends Disembowelment, whose Transcendence of the Peripheral is a timeless archetype in doom circles, thus presenting the Australians with hurdle after hurdle to trip, stumble and crash in to on their way to matching that peerless record.

In a somewhat disappointing opening, ‘Within Frozen…