Review from Angry Metal Guy

December 11, 2019
From: Angry Metal Guy
Published: December 8, 2019

Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go: I trvly don’t give a fuck about you, never have and never will. When I share something wonderful here, it’s because awesome Muppet is awesome, not because I want to improve your miserable lives; you deserve nothing and I hope you get less, yo. Accordingly, I write these TYMHM pieces not because *you* might have missed any gems I cover, but because *I* missed *my* chance to properly babble about them during the year. Now that the holidays are upon us and Steel‘s too nog’d out of his noggin to keep me in check, it’s high time I waxed reviewical on Damp Chill of Life, the best DSBM release ov ’19 that I never got to sling any words for.

Describing the music of NONE as DSBM is like calling my ego Rogga Johansson‘s discography a tad sizeable. The enigmatic Oregonian act creates songs to bed the cold earth to, harvesting the corroded essence of a world dead and grey and manifesting the damp chill of life into something fittingly bleak, damp and dead. Warn your warmth to turn away, NONE will make your cold soul suffer and wither until you feel that life has gone on long enough, leaving you to desperately desiderate death and its sweet, hypoxic release. If such stark and somber stuff sounds too strong to sit through, then congrats, you did a good thing by missing this one. If you AREn’t a little bitch a fan of this super sad scene and somehow slept on this, then congratulations to you, as well: you’re fucking up your whole life, yo.

As the album title, artwork and band name all suggest, Damp Chill of Life is utterly fvcking bleak. While artists like Déhà or Clouds create depressive music which embodies the dark, melancholic aspect of depression, NONE sonically encapsulates the sense of sheer cold lifelessness that becomes the world when you’re walking through it as a ghost. As is often the case with DSBM, there is an opportunity for catharsis within these icy tracks, and yet so is there the potential for danger. Where other acts often strive to embody the feeling of depression itself, Damp Chill of Life instead captures the essence of the world around the affected individual. It doesn’t so much summon the sentiment as it does the sound of the scenery seen through super sad stare-sockets, effectively bringing light and life around the listener to an end by painting an immersive sonic scene of all-encompassing bleakness: this thing doesn’t merely sound like misery, it sounds like fucking freezing to death.I can’t make someone who doesn’t understand depression understand why those of us that do often seek out such potentially weaponized fare as Damp Chill of Life, but I can make someone who understands atmoblack understand why it’s worth investigating.1 Aside from wielding top-notch and utterly convincing shrieks, NONE have a grasp on mournful riffs and rhythms that completely chokes the life out of their contemporaries. Their visual, visceral vvork values variety and (somewhat ironically) vitality, and things are never allowed to wallow in one spot for too long. Mind you, this is DSBM, so there’s plenty of tremolo waffling and a little obligatory lurching, but trvst me, if you’re into dark atmospheric black metal and aren’t afraid of the cold, you have no excuse for sleeping on Damp Chill of Life so long. Fix your life by fucking it right up, yo, let the existential misery of NONE put a smile on your face and a hole in your heart.

Reviewed by: Master of Muppets

 

Review from ZWareMetalen

October 1, 2019
From: ZWareMetalen
Published: September 29, 2019

Hypnotic Dirge Records volg ik al sinds 2009 en het verheugt me om te zien dat ze nog steeds bezig zijn op dezelfde leest met het uitbrengen van middelgrote bekendheidsband en daarmee een steevast solide kwaliteitsniveau bereiken. Eén van de bands die daar nu zijn derde album uitbrengt is het Amerikaanse None (ook wel NONE genoemd hier en daar). Het debuutalbum None vond ik overtuigend genremateriaal, de opvolger Life Has Gone On Lo...

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Review from Ave Noctum

July 15, 2019
From: Ave Noctum
Published: July 15, 2019

Although I’m writing about this in the summertime the Damp Chill Of Life is never far away waiting to cast its arthritic pall on proceedings. Masters of depressive and atmospheric doomed blackness, USA based shadowy entities None are back with their 3rd album. Thanks to label Hypnotic Dirge they have been casting their cold misery on me since 1st self-titled album in 2017 and with ‘Life Has Gone On Long Enough’ following in 2018 it se...

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Review from The Headbanging Moose

July 13, 2019
From: The Headbanging Moose
Published: July 11, 2019

Since their introduction in the spring of 2017, the enigmatic and anonymous Atmospheric/Depressive Black Metal unity NONE, from Portland, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest, has crafted disturbing and emotionally devastating music that have garnered the attention of many listeners of the genre. After having released their self-titled debut opus on April 11, 2017, a thick shroud of piercing guitar interwoven with haunting synth and ...

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Review from Metal Addicts

July 13, 2019
From: Metal Addicts
Published: July 3, 2019

What would happen if Pink Floyd and Slayer musically meet? I really don’t know but None with “Damp Chill of Life” may be considered the lost link between them in an enormous variety of ways. None show us that the sweet and tender may be affected by the acid and hard in order to make a very different kind of music that disturbs the laymen. It disturbs because the main idea is to write sweet melodies in the most common facet to then s...

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Review from Aristocrazia Webzine

July 1, 2019
From: Aristocrazia Webzine
Published: June 30, 2019

Se per la maggioranza di noi l’11 aprile non ricopre un significato particolare, così non deve essere per gli anonimi musicisti dietro al progetto None. Negli ultimi tre anni, puntuali come un orologio, hanno infatti scelto questa data per pubblicare il nuovo materiale, che nel 2019 è stato raccolto sotto il titolo Damp Chill Of Life. Nessun tipo di informazione traspare dalla consultazione del libretto, niente testi o foto ch...

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Review from Metal Temple

May 20, 2019
From: Metal Temple
Published: May 17, 2019 

If the readers watched “Lords of Chaos”, you all can understand that many standard features of Black Metal scene were born from a fundamentalist insight in music and in the way a Metalhead must be. Today, many of those ways aren’t used anymore, but from time to time, someone resurrects something from the past. And NONE did it on “Damp Chill of Life”. The band members didn’t show their names, signing just as “anonymous” (th...

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Review from Grizzly Butts

May 12, 2019
From: Grizzly Butts
Published: May 3, 2019

Too often popular music treats depression as if it were a strike of lightning, or an extra-sensorial event, entirely separate from whatever normative state unaffected folks feign on a daily basis. The bend of a string, a weeping vocal affect, or a descent into downtempo swooning offer a simplified and fetishistic treatment of sorrow that is altogether inhumane in its core assumption. As if a leaking anesthetic gas tamed by an open window t...

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Review from In Your Eyes Zine

May 2, 2019
From: In Your Eyes Webzine
Published: May 1, 2019

LNone è il nome di un progetto atmospheric black del quale poco si sa, se non il fatto che la sua provenienza è la sempre fertile per queste sonorità terra statunitense.

Damp Chill of Life è il terzo full length che, come quelli usciti nel 2017 e nel 2018, è stato pubblicato puntualmente l’11 aprile, data che evidentemente riveste un significato preciso per questo musicista (probabile infatti che si tratti di un solo project)....

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Review from Metal.it

April 29, 2019
From: Metal.it
Published: April 26, 2019 

Scrivere questa recensione mi risulta particolarmente difficile.
Difficile, se non impossibile, tramutare in parole il pesantissimo carico di emozioni che un disco come "Damp Chill of Life" è in grado di suscitare in modo così straziante.
I "solchi" di questo album hanno poco a che fare con la semplice musica ed il loro contenuto travalica qualsiasi genere per arrivare a toccare l'animo di tutti coloro i quali si nutrono di dolore, tristezz...

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 Released: April 11, 2019
1000 Copies
Genre: Atmospheric / Depressive Black Metal

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