OrionSpur: Blogs in Durbanville, Western Cape

I’ve heard Deathspell Omega before, and wasn’t as impressed as perhaps I should have been.  But Paracletus is a different story.  This is a furious work of art.  A perfect combination of teeth-grinding apocalypse and sad musicality. This is what makes black metal so different, to my ears, to other metal subgenres.  There is honest [...]

You know, if you listen to Darkestrah there is little evidence that their lead singer is female.  Admittedly, this is easier with black metal than with death metal, as the growling in the black variety is higher-pitched anyway: like the growl of a small panther rather than the roar of the Lion King.  But there [...]

Imagine travelling in a jet-black, filigreed gondola down the River Styx. Everything is dark, except for the a faint oily sheen on the water and the ultraviolet inner-mouth glare of your gondolier, as he scream-sings to you with aching soulfulness of the fate awaiting you in Hades. Urfaust are something new, in my opinion. There [...]

Years ago you would have put a "heavy" in front of it, but today it’s more accurate simply to call this breed of music "metal". After all, it has forked into so many subgenres since the halcyon days of Black Sabbath – those crusty pioneers may have been the original heavy metallers, but today you [...]