Hammerheart

Visceral Evisceration: Incessant Desire for... [Vinyl LP]

Trouble’s absolute classic: the legendary album from 1990 and the pinnacle of Trouble’s impressive career. Heavy Metal was never better than this! Includes a live bonus CD recorded in Dallas, Texas (USA). Trouble’s debut album did great things for Metal and remains one of the darkest, thrashiest Doom albums to date. A lot of things can change in six years, especially when you’re talking Metal and the dates are 1984 and 1990. The decade may have changed them, but not in a way that suggests decay or a decline in the quality of their resolve or their skill as musicians and performers. On the contrary, Trouble’s 1990 self-titled release is arguably their most mature, boasting a fleshed out sound with unparalleled songwriting, a great production, and the time-crafted vocals of Eric Wagner which had improved major in the years since their previous efforts. All of this culminates in what is my mind the most “complete” thing Trouble ever created. 

Evoken’s Funeral Doom/Death Metal debut EP remastered and reissued! Raw, bleak and essential! Doom Metal, perhaps the most varied of all the metal genres, has been crossing over with plenty of other genres, and surprisingly often, the crossbreeding has been fertile. While the “funeral” brand of Doom Metal sounds like something that lacks the genetics to successfully breed with other metal genres, its nihilism works surpringly well when blended With slowed down Death Metal. Among the masters of that gruesome fusion are Evoken from the United States. “Shades of Night Descending”is the first recording by Evoken, released in 1994, and for a debut recording, it is a surprisingly mature creation. The later works of Evoken have a thicker wall of sound and plenty of production tricks in them, but the deviations from the basic formula introduced here have been essentially more polishing that actual rethinking of the format.