Metal Tape 145 Items

Founded 1988 in Stockholm/Sweden, Dismember were among those responsible for Death Metal's big break through. The debut album, Like An Ever Flowing Stream from 1991, clearly showed that Dismember are an uncompromising band which resulted in their rise to cult status and within a short period of time the album took the scene by storm. Extensive touring with bands like Death, Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse showed that Dismember are a live force to be reckoned with and the number of fans grew steadily. The band then released the 5-track EP, "Pieces", and went out on tour again with Napalm Death and Obituary. They played for thousands of fans throughout Europe thus reinforcing their status as one of the best live bands on earth. "Dismember" is the ultimate death metal album from one of the finest Swedish bands. Dismember have lost nothing in terms of intensity. The sheer pace and passion of the songs are blistering and the vocal sounds as pissed off as ever. Powerful riffs that are not in short demand, plenty of lead works and amazingly melodic harmonies are what the metal scene needed and Dismember have them in huge spades. This is definitely one of the best death metal releases in many, many years.

The Promise Of Rain, the sophomore album of the experimental black metal band Scarcity, is an embodiment of the hard-to-believe truth that burdens are easier to bear when distributed, a realization Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble) grappled with extensively while writing this record. This is a sweat-drenched album about dispersion, about spreading, about the collective relieving of burdens through shared experience: one doesn’t have to go through everything alone.

When Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut was written in early 2020, Randall-Myers and vocalist Doug Moore (Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) never expected to be able to play their songs live. The cathartic experience of playing something that came from a place of isolation out to people in a live setting is the root of the intensity in The Promise Of Rain. The Promise Of Rain begins where the craziest climaxes of Aveilut end, and is the first Scarcity record to include Tristan Kasten-Krause (Sigur Ros, Steve Reich, Leya) on bass, Dylan Dilella (Pyrrhon) on guitar and Lev Weinstein (Krallice) on drums. Rather than building density with the quasi-orchestral layering on Aveilut, Scarcity challenged themselves to document what five people in a room could do, recording most of The Promise Of Rain in one or two takes, capturing the physical effort and urgency of a live performance.

Scarcity forges a completely fresh sound in The Promise Of Rain with their alarming guitar work and melodic arpeggiating, shedding dead skin and breaking ground with sheer vulnerability. The lyrics for The Promise Of Rain were inspired by a trip Moore took to the high deserts of southern Utah in 2023. “To thrive in the desert is an act of abnegation—” he observes, “you do right by the land and receive its gifts, or it does away with you.” The necessity of adaptation is as evident in the desert as it is to the landscape of the human experience. The transformation of ideas and beliefs, the grief of losing relationships that had to end, and the fear involved in forming new ones under the grip of mental illness is conjured over and over again on this panoramic album.

Perpetually out of print, much sought after and universally worshipped amongst those in the know, Winter's "Into Darkness" was a game-changing classic.

Formed in New York circa 1988, Winter played slow, deep and hard nuclear doom with a crust punk rawness, that came across like Hellhammer jamming with Amebix. Their penchant for mammoth sized and funeral-paced, wasteland droning has become a touchstone reference for bands across the whole spectrum of underground metal.

Their pre-internet infamy led to Winter demos being tape- traded in hallowed adoration by fans and bands alike, gaining notable fans such as Fenriz from Darkthrone. Deserving of their special place in the pantheon of one-off classic albums, the Swans-like noise and down-tuned Earth-like riffs of "Into Darkness" went on to spawn countless doom and sludge bands, being an influence for an entire doomed generation.

The Winter come-back show at Roadburn Festival in 2011 was massively anticipated and held a captivated audience. Packing out one of The Netherlands largest stages, that particular Winter show, after many years in obscurity is a rare event that is still highly regarded today. The band is a rare jewel amongst collectors, and audiences alike.

"Into Darkness" was a gateway drug to the dark depths of sludge metal, and now awaits a whole new throng of acolytes who bow down before the throne of heavy doom. Svart Records is proud to re-release it once more, putting the album back in print for a new generation of listeners. Eternal Winter awaits!

Another pure masterwork only this time with even more symphonic elements, i.e. flutes, violines, chellos, harpsicords, etc. Another element that adds to the appeal is the outstanding opera vocals of Sue Bock, who has an amazing voice. This particular album is a concept album based on a book, also titled "Within the Ancient Forest" written by bassist/vocalist Andrew Tompkins. The story is of a young man in search of truth in a land where immortals, dragons, magic, and the powers of darkness prevail. I have never read the book, but the music is fabulous, even without the storyline. Available on limited edition cassette - only 100 units - for the first time ever!

The crown jewel of Finnish Death Metal, reissued in a band-approved new 30th anniversary edition. Features a new vinyl master from the original source by Noise for Fiction, plus a booklet with a lengthy feature by Hippo Taatila and some visual memorabilia. As an added vinyl bonus there's a large poster by the original cover artist Rob Smits creating a new vision of the album cover for the new millennium.

Together with bands like Demilich, Abhorrence, Disgrace, Xysma and Sentenced, Demigod from the wastelands of Loimaa, southern Finland, put Finland on the map in the global death metal scene in the late 80's and early 90's. Having risen to underground fame with their demo Unholy Domain, Slumber of Sullen Eyes was a hugely expected debut album. When it was finally released in 1992 after a complicated creation process at Tico-Tico Studios in northern Finland, it was received with open arms and drooling excitement by the then very active underground death metal scene.

That scene was, however, short lived,and by 1994 pretty much every band had switched from death metal to something else entirely. What was left after the bands had left the building was a number of classic albums that constitute the legacy of Finnish Death Metal. Among them, Slumber of Sullen Eyes is one of the most original and ferocious. There was nobody like Demigod.

Svart Records are proud to reissue this remarkable and quite hard to find album on CD, vinyl and tape.

Witchfinder General formed in 1979 and were part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWoBHM) movement during the early 1980s. They are strongly influenced by Black Sabbath, and are widely recognised today as one of the pioneers of the doom metal style.

Sweden’s Gehennah is back to stink up the scene once again, with their fourth full length album Too Loud To Live, Too Drunk To Die. This marks the bands album-debut on Metal Blade Records, and the first full length album by Gehennah since 1997's Decibel Rebel. The album contains 13 tracks of dirty and raw street-metal, destined to please the hardcore filth hounds of the scene, and annoy the ponytailed internet-snobs who prefer their metal clean and polished.

D-beat defenders Disfear strike back with its full-length Live The Storm. The legendary Swedes, led by Tomas Lindberg's infamous vocal howl, power through 10 burners with new-found ferocity and intensity captured by engineer Kurt Ballou (converge, Coliseum, Doomriders, Animosity). As "Get It Off", "The Furnace", "Deadweight" and their ilk prove, Disfear are the undisputed kings of crust-core.

The Scandinavian hardcore assault of Disfear utilizes blistering distortion, nihilistic rage and a scorching metallic powerload to bleed the Earth and burn its skies. On Misanthropic Generation, detonating power chords collide with raging rhythms, while the merciless vocals of Tomas Lindberg (At the Gates) explode through the heart of the band's sonic architecture.

‘Exul’ personifies Ne Obliviscaris’ distinctive, boundary-pushing ethos. The band’s trademark blend of emotion and beauty is as towering as ever, if not even more compelling, particularly how the haunting violin lines carefully weave their way around the riffs. The duality of Charles’ clean vocals and Xenoyr’s growls remains the narrative anchor, elevating songs that emanate sophistication and are a masterclass in composition.

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.

Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

Svart Records presents a legitimate tape reissue of this cult Finnish death metal demo tape from 1990 in a facsimile edition limited to 200 copies.

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists SCARCITY’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote Aveilut while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early Covid peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience—living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s Covid epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is this grief-stricken release, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare—with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and lyrical focus on the greatness of the void breed raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things outside one’s control, as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. Though born of Randall-Myers and Moore’s intense intimacy with absence, Aveilut is an attempt to present a harrowing universal representation of death’s true form.

Këkht Aräkh is the Ukrainian project founded in 2018 by Dmitry Marchenko. Originally released on the Finnish label Livor Mortis in 2021, Pale Swordsman goes to even greater extents in building a bold and atmospheric sonic palette, and it's now seeing a worldwide reissue via Brooklyn label Sacred Bones.For the sound design of the album, Dmitry was inspired by The Stooges' Raw Power to deliver a more soft sounding album, decisively less "metal". Traditional black metal song structures still persist in songs like "Night Descends" and "In The Garden". However, their rawness and fast tempos is quickly cut through by dark ambient passages in "Amor" and "Intro" and softly played desolate ballads like "Nocturne" and "Lily".The crown jewel is the album closer "Swordsman", a track that displays a superb gothic sensibility, a poem recited over a deeply melancholic piano melody. "The Christian concept of a person ridding themselves of evil to find inner peace or to be able to leave this world safely has become the core inspiration for the song." Dmitry explains "However, this is not the only reading possible. I purposely avoid specifics in my lyrics so that the listener can always give the song their own meaning."The inspiration for the concept of the album also came from David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. "I really enjoy it when an album tells a story about some character so I came up with one." says Dmitry when explaining the origin of the Pale Swordsman. The character is portrayed on the striking album cover art - a figure sitting aloof with a sword and a rose in each hand - and clearly symbolises the romantic juxtaposition of belligerence and fragile beauty that permeates the album's sound and atmosphere.Pale Swordsman delivers a foreboding yet bittersweet melancholy through poetic lyrics, soft interludes, raw and distorted guitars, eerie drums and harsh vocals - a fragile yet potent mix that successfully amplifies the ambience.

Këkht Aräkh is the Ukrainian project founded in 2018 by Dmitry Marchenko. The debut album Night & Love was initially released on the Finnish label Livor Mortis in 2019 and it's now seeing a worldwide reissue via Brooklyn label Sacred Bones.Dmitry's intent to experiment with standard black metal canons previously seen at play in Through the Branches to Eternity EP (2018) solidify further on Night & Love, he mentions "back then I had an idea of combining Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger type of black metal with early Internazionale or Croatian Amor vibe."Described as ambient or atmospheric black metal, this debut presents Këkht Aräkh's signature dichotomy of harsh traditional early Norwegian black metal and the more ethereal and delicate melodies. On the other hand the lyrics are romantic and melancholic, clearly influenced by a stark Gothic imagery, and serve as an extra layer of mystery to the already suggestive body of work. The album beings with a soft acoustic intro in "As the Night Falls_" before descending into the raw and raucous "Elegy for the Memory of Me" and "Den Venstre Hånd På Den Hoyre", both songs that are drenched in the more traditional black metal style of raspy, high-pitched vocals, dense, tremolo- picked riffs and fast paced drums. It is however songs like "Night" and "Love" that really set this album apart. "Night" is a softly spoken word ambient track that with a beautiful piano synth work that permeates throughout it aids in the romantic delivery and conjuring of imagery of the night. "Love" is a spellbinding and melancholic song, equal in its romanticism but one that displays a deeper sorrow and tenderness supported by calming field recordings of trickling water.The intertwining of black metal, dark folk and ambient repeats itself, culminating in a quietly hummed outro "...And Never

Limited tape edition of this Black Metal classic!
Includes patch

This Black Metal masterpiece has now been remastered by Dan Swanö (Edge Of Sanity, Bloodbath, Nightingale etc.).

Brand new album from British heavy metal flagbearers Seven Sisters!! ‘Shadow of A Falling Star Pt.1’ is the follow up to 2016’s ‘The Cauldron and the Cross’, a release which earned rave reviews and saw them tour extensively in Europe with Haunt.

San Francisco, CA - January 25, 2018 - The Wait is over…Actually, it’s back! Nearly three decades after going out of print, Metallica will release a remastered version of The $5.98 EP - Garage Days Re-Revisited as part of thir ongoing remasters series via their own Blackened Recordings label.

Originally released over 30 years ago on August 21, 1987, the collection features the band covering songs by early Metallica influencers such as Diamond Head, Holocaust, Killing Joke, Budgie, and The Misfits. The five songs from the EP were later included as a part of the 1998 multi-platinum release Garage, Inc., but the band felt it was time to bring it back in the original formats!

The $5.98 EP - Garage Days Re-Revisited was remastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood, CA.

Sarcofago’s third album is somewhat of a departure from the band’s previous two outings. A more technical musical approach takes hold as the band builds upon the madness created by INRI and ROTTING. "The Laws of Scourge" offers some classic Sarcofago songs such as "Midnight Queen", and "Screeches from the Silence". This Greyhaze reissue features pristine dynamic mastering. For fans of Mayhem, Beherit, Black Witchery and all Metal. Side A1. THE LAWS OF SCOURGE2. PIERCINGS3. MIDNIGHT QUEENSide B1. THE BLACK VOMIT2. PRELUDE TO A SUICIDE3. SCREECHES FROM THE SILENCE4. SECRETS OF A WINDOW