Metal Reviews

Yeah the Triptykon albums are great. I hope they do more.

They truly are. It has been a very long time since the release of the last album. Let's hope it happens sometime in the foreseeable future.

The riffing on this recording is not cutting through the stone. Still by DM standards, rather great, but by Ulcerate measurements, sub-standard. Oh well, it is an acceptable release, but it is just that they had done much better before this release and even better after it, too. It can't all be brilliant, surely.

Exuvia was my favorite album of 2017, and an ever so slight return to form after Blood Vaults, which is an album Goat and I mildly disagreed over (I liked it more).


I underrated this one for years because I felt Sacramentum-Far Away from the Sun never got enough credit. They are both great.

North, I don't think I have the same passion for Ruins' music as you do, but I do like him quite a lot, perhaps not to the same intensity as yours. Exuvia was certainly not my favourite of that very year, as I was listening to other things. I don't listen to music casually but Ruins did not get any significant playing time from me several years back. I would very much like to change that now, as we speak today.

On Dissection and Sacramentum: two of my all-time favourites.

RIP Jon Kennedy

May he rest in peace.


Continuation of Soen's discography, for us in the land of the living.

Edit: I will say that this recording is so wonderfully touching that I have to admit that I was brought to tears on quite a few tracks. Truly humanistic and remarkably artistically conceived.

Tom is touring Triumph of Death at the moment, so there will likely be a wait on new music from Triptykon. On the bright side, the ToD project will be dropping a new release sometime in early to mid November. As I recall, it will be a live record culled from three different shows of the band performing classic Hellhammer tracks. Warrior's recent slate of mournful, esoteric heaviness has been solid but it's also good to go back to the old school primitive shit from time to time. Hoping he'll also release live music from the Celtic Frost sets the band toured this past year.

Now that's one marvelous recording!

Thanks for the knowledge-sharing, Joshua. And to be quite frank with you, I'd rather have more Tryptikon-type music than any thing closer to the primitivism that you'd desire. Perhaps somewhere in between, would be best.

I know Immortal is one of Husker's favourites as I have seen him play Sons of Northern Darkness numerous times. This is in your honor, buddy. I have spent hundreds of hours with Immortal, most particularly with this recording and also the aforementioned album. It is time for righteous battle.

I enjoy Warrior mixing it up from the different seasons of his musical career. His back catalogue is so massively influential yet uniquely eclectic to the genre that he really stands apart amongst the old guard. You really never know what you're going to get with ol' Tom, which is a great testament to his creative will. While I prefer the hellish crust of yesteryear, his newer stuff has grown on me in recent years. Like a great many others, Monotheist went right over my head when it came out. It was such a left turn from what people expected from Frost. With time, and a few Triptykon albums to refine the formula, I've come to appreciate the musical vision he laid with that record. I have to be in the mood for it, but dark, hopeless melancholy laden with those elephant shit heavy riffs really hits the spot sometimes.

I will certainly agree with you that Monotheist was quite immense and rather unsettling, and yes, I'd have to be in a right mood to enjoy it. In all honesty, I have not listened to a whole lot of metal, generally speaking, in the past two half years or so, perhaps about 25%-30% of my music listening was ever truly devoted solely to heavy music, and that was much more on the classic bands of the tradition ilk, rather than the extreme side, with perhaps every twenty albums, 2 or at a maximum 3/4 were purely extreme.

I have always enjoyed extreme music quite immensely but with much more passion for jazz and progressive rock and classical rock, extreme music was completely fading away. But I never desired that to happen, as I was a very enthusiastic extreme music lover for so many years, and had attended many many concerts and had spent a great majority of my early to mid-twenties in concert halls and meeting and spending time with musicians.

So, a great part of my past could not be forgotten, ever. I would never want to forget my past's history. And so, I would say that Triptykon is a very unique band, and as you say quite accurately, and that there is really no one like Mr. Warrior, to be found in metal. I can earnestly say, that my passion for extreme music is very much in tact and in my warmest embrace.

This recording was played in abundance by me for quite sometime upon its original release. Still a phenomenal album, and which I loved very much indeed. I think some of the guitar work on this particular recording are unusually brilliant for metal, specially, some of the leads and the many of sub-structures included.

I do think the music itself as a purely intellectual enterprise on this recording is at times very inconsistent with the overall persona which they have attempted to craft. However, it is only in the strict formalism of "form" in classical music and in even in that genre only in certain periods contains academic formalization, which I am not always an advocate, although on occasion, it does work towards its favor. And perhaps, some more formalism witnessed on this recording could have been followed through more thoroughly. Just a thought.

Not to long-speech, I do think that overall this recording is fantastic in a number ways, and in my personal music listening time it has certainly has had its due.