Published: April 29, 2018

It's been a while since we heard anything from Saskatchewan's Altars Of Grief: summer of 2015, or thereabouts, with a split release that - in digital version at least - faded out with a superbly raw and bruised cover of Akira Yamaoka's 'Room Of Angel' (taken from the Silent Hill 4 videogame soundtrack). It's a track that utterly blew me away playing the game back in '04, and though the Altars... version didn't originally hit quite so h...

Published: April 18, 2018

Iris is not the most progressive album on this list. Nor is it the most melodic. Nor is it the most energised. Nor is it the heaviest. But it soars to unparalleled success as an emotive work of art that elicits feelings from me that no other entry on this list could even come close to recreating.

Providing almost an hour of ethereal, blackened doom, Altars of Grief’s second full-length is the deeply sorrow...

Published: April 18, 2018

When a music album emboldens such vivid visuals - it unfolds as a cinematographic masterpiece, in the mind of the listener.

And as in a silver screen award contender drama, this album begins it’s timeline in retrospective. Ex post facto we find the protagonist, alone, “in solitude and twisted steel” - a tragic ending in itself, to an escape journey. A casualty on a road to nowhere. Tormented by regrets, yet “finally at peace...

Published: April 12, 2018 

Hailing from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Blackened Doom/Death Metal band ALTARS OF GRIEF formed in 2013. The story behind the second full-length album “Iris,” is rooted in their prairie surroundings and deals with the struggles of addiction, sickness, and religion. A father finds himself unable to connect with and care for this young daughter, Iris, who has fallen seriously ill. Spiraling deeper and deeper into his vices, and feel...

Published: April 9, 2018

I canadesi Altars Of Grief sono nati nel 2013, fondamentalmente come progetto estemporaneo per Evan Paulson e i suo compagni, per poi diventare di fatto per tutti loro la band principale nella quale convogliare ogni sforzo.

Se già il full length d’esordio forniva segnali incoraggianti sul potenziale del gruppo ed il successivo split con i Nachtterror rafforzava non poco tali impressioni, è con il meraviglioso Iris che i ragazzi de...

Published: April 7, 2018 

Zastav své kroky člověče! Roztáhni ruce a pohleď k nebi do korun stromů. Rozjímej, přemýšlej a nech na chvíli ten šílený svět daleko za sebou. Sleduji zvířata v pohybu, závidím těm, co mohou létat. Nasávám chladný vzduch. Krása, mráz, smrt. Znovuzrození. Pláč osamocených, tvář schoulená v náručí. Jednou tvé kamenné srdce pukne, uvidíš! Chce to jen čas.

Dostala se mi do ruky nová deska depresivců...

Published: April 4, 2018 

The province of Saskatchewan sits cleanly in the centre of Canada. As such, along with the other two prairie provinces of Alberta and Manitoba, Saskatchewan is totally landlocked. Possessed of astounding natural beauty, boasting lush flora and fauna to the north (and a few ice roads in winter) and an abundance of canola, potash, and suicidal deer to the south, Saskatchewan is a land of contrasts. It is at once a desolate barely habitable tundra ...

Published: April 1, 2018

-Schopenhauer

Prairie doom. Something about that designation seems incredibly fitting; on the plains, as often as not only the wind is to be heard, only a stunted tree here and there to be seen, and the surroundings are identified more by absence than presence. Doom’s inherent vastness, then, may be the perfect accompaniment to this environment. It...