Darkcrystal trading

Om 'BBC Radio 1' 2x10"

2024-05-12T19:29:53+01:00

Vendor: PIAS / Cinram
Type: Psych / Prog
Price: 25.99

Darkcrystal trading ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2019 #63

Green and black split vinyl.

Recorded live at BBC Radio 1, Maida Vale, May 3rd, 2019. The songs continue to evolve; two each from the classic OM releases Advaitic Songs and God Is Good, encompassingly recorded and mixed with the pristine quality that BBC engineers (and OM) bring to recorded sound.

Catalogue number: DC761

Condition: New

Label: Drag CIty

Black Sabbath 'Paranoid' LP

2024-05-12T19:29:52+01:00

	Vendor: Warner Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom Price: 21.49
180 gram reissue. Condition: New Label: BMG

Black Sabbath 'Black Sabbath' LP

2024-05-12T19:29:52+01:00

	Vendor: Universal Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom Price: 21.49
Reissue of classic debut album from Black Sabbath. Catalogue number: 5414939920783 Condition: New Label: BMG

Fu Manchu 'Signs of Infinite Power' LP

2024-05-11T14:09:08+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 20.99

Kerry King 'From Hell I Rise' LP

2024-05-11T14:07:22+01:00

	Vendor: Essential Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom Price: 28.99
Pre-order. Due 17th May. Available on black and dark red marble vinyl or dark red and orange marble vinyl. Hotly anticipated debut studio album from the legendary Slayer guitarist, Kerry King along with Phil Demmel (Machine Head, Vio-Lence), Mark Osegueda (Death Angel), and Kyle Sanders (Hellyeah). Condition: New Label: Reigning Phoenix Music

Chelsea Wolfe 'Birth of Violence' LP

2024-05-11T11:50:37+01:00

Vendor: Cargo
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 27.49

Pre-order. Due 17th May.

Lavendar eco mix vinyl.

Chelsea Wolfe’s highly anticipated 7th full length. Chelsea Wolfe has always been a conduit for a powerful energy, and while she has demonstrated a capacity to channel that somber beauty into a variety of forms, her gift as a songwriter is never more apparent than when she strips her songs down to a few key components. As a result, her solemn majesty and ominous elegance are more potent than ever on Birth of Violence.

There is a core element to Chelsea Wolfe’s music—a kind of urgent spin on America’s desolation blues—that’s existed throughout the entirety of her career. At the center, there has always been Wolfe’s woeful longing and beguiling gravity, though the framework for compositions has continuously evolved based on whatever resources were available. Her austere beginnings were gradually bolstered by electronics and filled out with full-band arrangements. The music became increasingly dense and more centered around live performances. Her latest album, Birth of Violence, is a return to the reclusive nature of her earlier recordings

“I’ve been in a state of constant motion for the past eight years or so; touring, moving, playing new stages, exploring new places and meeting new people—an incredible time of learning and growing as a musician and performer,” Wolfe says of the era leading up to Birth of Violence. “But after awhile, I was beginning to lose a part of myself. I needed to take some time away from the road to get my head straight, to learn to take better care of myself, and to write and record as much as I can while I have ‘Mercury in my hands,’ as a wise friend put it.“ Birth of Violence is the result of this step out of the limelight. The songs stem from humble beginnings—little more than Wolfe’s voice and her Taylor acoustic guitar. Her longtime musical collaborator Ben Chisholm recorded the songs on a makeshift studio and helped fill them out with his modern production treatments and the occasional auxiliary flourish from ongoing contributors Jess Gowrie (drums) and Ezra Buchla (viola).

The album opens with The Mother Road, a harrowing ode to Route 66 that immediately addresses Wolfe’s metaphoric white line fever. It explains the nature of the record—the impact of countless miles and perpetual exhaustion—and the desire to find the road back home, back to one’s roots. Songs like Deranged for Rock and Roll and Highway offers parallel examinations on the trials and tribulations of her journeys while the ghostly When Anger Turns to Honey serves as a rebuttal to self-appointed judges.

While the record touches upon tradition, it also exists in the present, addressing modern tragedies such as school shootings in the minor-key lullaby Little Grave and the poisoning of the planet on the dark wind-swept ballad Erde. But the record is at its most poignant when Wolfe withdraws into her own world of enigmatic and elusive autobiography. Much like Alan Ginsberg’s hallucinatory long-form poem Howl, the tracks Dirt Universe and Birth of Violence weave together specific references from her past into an esoteric overview of the state of mankind. Though the lyrical minutiae remain secret, the overall power of the language and delivery is bound to haunt the listener with both its grace and tension.

“These songs came to me in a whirlwind and I knew I needed to record them soon, and also really needed a break from the road,” Wolfe says. “I’ve spent the past few years looking for the feeling of home; looking for places that felt like home. The result of that humble approach yields Wolfe’s most devastating work to date.

Catalogue number: SH217LPLE

Celtic Frost 'To Mega Therion' 2xLP

2024-05-10T12:38:01+01:00

Vendor: Warner
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 29.99

Various 'Ghana Special 2: Electronic Highlife and Afro Sounds in the Diaspora, 1980-93' 3xLP

2024-05-08T13:28:26+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 28.99

Soundway presents a collection of 18 burger highlife, electronic Afrobeat and reggae tracks, gatefold 3LP includes extended liner notes, original covers and never-before-seen photos. Features rarities from legends including Pat Thomas, Rex Gyamf and Gyedu-Blay Ambolley and deep cuts from lesser known artists like Abdul Raheem, Starlite and The Godfathers.

Highlighting a time when the burgeoning Ghanaian diaspora across Europe and North America was utilising new music technology and recording techniques. A period of movement, emigration and innovation.

The dawn of the 80s saw an increase in emigration following a period of political upheaval at home, with many Ghanaians moving to Europe - especially Germany - to find work. Musicians recording both at home and abroad began to blend highlife with outside influences, taking inspiration from US disco and boogie, European new wave and Caribbean zouk and soca, reflecting new surroundings and cementing musical connections forged in London, Hamburg, Toronto and New York.

Ghana Special celebrates this key period of musical innovation and cultural exchange that redefined the parameters of Ghanaian music and accelerated the cultural exchange between West Africa and Europe.

While She Sleeps 'Brainwashed' LP

2024-05-07T10:51:41+01:00

Vendor: Sony
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 24.99

Second album from While She Sleeps.

Exhumed 'Slaughtercult' LP

2024-05-06T11:30:07+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 18.99

Reissue of second album originally released in 2000.

Exhumed 'Anatomy Is Destiny' LP

2024-05-06T11:28:28+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 18.99

Incorporating metal's classic elements with the paramount components of modern extreme death metal, EXHUMED has delivered the ultimate death sentence with Anatomy Is Destiny. More involved and intricate than past efforts - with slower and heavier sections blended into the band's patented gore metal - EXHUMED proves to be the masters of their trade. Death-defying production by Neil Kernon (Judas Priest, Cannibal Corpse, Nevermore).

Bossk '.4' 2xLP

2024-05-06T11:26:29+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 28.99

Exhumed 'All Guts, No Glory' LP

2024-04-29T14:26:45+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 18.99

Goregrinding metal gods EXHUMED have awakened from their slumber and delivered unto us All Guts, No Glory, their first new record in almost eight years. All Guts, No Glory's 11 choice cuts of grinding death metal combine the raw ferocity of their legendary Slaughtercult album with the wild ambition of 2003's Anatomy Is Destiny. As crimson concertos such as "Dis-assembly Line", "As Hammer To Anvil", and "Funereality" illustrate, All Guts, No Glory is EXHUMED's finest moment yet!

Exhumed 'Necrocracy' LP

2024-04-29T14:25:46+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 18.99

With over two decades of gruesome grinding under the belts, you might think that EXHUMED would be ready to slow down. You'd be DEATHLY wrong. Necrocacy is EXHUMED's political manifesto for a new dark day---no democracy, no equal rights, no freedom of choice---bow down to your one true master---THE SAW. Nine sickening new tracks of prime Exhumed gore---blazing guitars, filthy vocals and obscene blasting drums. Quite possibly their finest hour, as the years roll by EXHUMED refuse to mellow. This is a band that stinks like the rotting flesh of a nation waiting for revolution: vote Necrocracy Party 2013!

Khanate 'Clean Hands Go Foul' LP

2024-04-29T14:14:14+01:00

Vendor: ROM
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 24.99

Clean Hands Go Foul (2009) generously offers more of everything: voluminous drones, clashing dissonance, mysterious subharmonic swells, escalating terror, and environments drenched in heavy anticipatory dread. The final hour of the band’s first decade sees Khanate, as always, making “music that, even in the realm of extreme music, is dark and distorted” (Pitchfork). Clean Hands Go Foul would be followed by the ultimate minimalism, as the Khanate entity sat shrouded in silence until the release of 2023’s To Be Cruel.

Khanate 'Capture and Release' LP

2024-04-29T14:13:18+01:00

Vendor: ROM
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 24.99

Largely recognized as their breakthrough album, Khanate was confident enough by the two-song, forty-minute Capture and Release (2005) to peel back its layers of thick mossy droneand reveal the minimalist underpinnings, a change either interpreted as maturity or an implied threat. “It’s a grim, avant-garde exercise in tension and paranoia. Dense, leaden drones fill up the spaces between O’Malley’s sparse, deeply sustained guitar chords. Vocalist Alan Dubin’s anguished vocals seem to convey the tortures of the damned as if there were not a shred of hope left for existence in this world. Capture & Release is not dissimilar to black metal in how it so violently conveys such a bleak and ultra-nihilistic world outlook. But while the standard tempo on a black metal album typically strays into the triple digits in terms of beats per minute, Khanate’s plodding pace keeps the BPM soundly within the singledigit range.” (Tiny Mix Tapes).

Slipknot '.5: The Gray Chapter' 2xLP

2024-04-28T18:51:27+01:00

Vendor: Warner
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 23.99

Chat Pile 'This Dungeon Earth' Cassette

2024-04-22T13:51:13+01:00

Vendor: Cargo
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 15.99

In the summer of 2019, a newly formed, Oklahoma Citybased rock band called Chat Pile would release its debut four-track EP, This Dungeon Earth. Little did anyone know at the time, but this initial taste of grotesque, confronting, and visceral noise rock courtesy of four slacker Okies would kick off the story of what would soon be one of the most widely lauded underground acts in years. Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, Chat Pile’s body of work is emblematic of a distinctly midwestern flavor of American dread, with This Dungeon Earth being no exception to the rule. While raw in presentation, Chat Pile’s debut EP comes across as anything but a rough draft. Much of the band’s hallmark traits, spanning the unhinged vocals of frontman Raygun Busch, the grotesquely contorted guitar riffage, and the industrial smack of heavily processed percussion, appear as far back as this earliest chapter. If anything, the raw, DIY-rooted origins of these uncompromising thirteen minutes of sludged-out carnage make This Dungeon Earth all the more impactful. Between its biting social commentary and gratuitous grindhouse insanity, the unfiltered brutality of Chat Pile’s debut recording has seen tracks like “Rainbow Meat”, “Face”, and “Ratboy” become mainstays in its notorious live shows. Although it depicts the band’s monstrous amalgamation of noise rock, sludge metal, hardcore, and more as it is just beginning to congeal, This Dungeon Earth comes off as the furthest thing from a simple intro and more of an essential first chapter in Chat Pile’s story.

Chat Pile 'Remove Your Skin Please' Cassette

2024-04-22T13:30:43+01:00

Vendor: Cargo
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 15.99

Released only a handful of months following the band’s breakthrough debut EP, Remove Your Skin Please signaled that whatever Chat Pile was doing wasn't just a one-off novelty of Midwest metal nihilism. While the band’s foundational sound of caustic and cacophonous noise rock crystallized with its debut, the release of Remove Your Skin Please signposted the vast extent to which Chat Pile could stylistically tinker and conceptually iterate atop it. Heard in the gothy post-punk dirge of “Mask” and the dissonant extreme metal fervor of “Davis'', the more experimental ideas present on Remove Your Skin Please come off less like a selection of the band’s conceptual prototypes and more like fully realized reflections of its member's own tastes and preferences. That doesn’t mean Chat Pile’s noise rock foundation is diluted in the slightest as EP bookends “Dallas Beltway” and “Garbage Man” push its twisted take on the genre to new aural extremes in its instrumentation and subject matter spanning grisly serial murders to the slow festering death of the environment at the hands of mankind. For as ugly and unhinged as Chat Pile’s tales of 21st-century American dread are, Remove Your Skin Please asserts something that is somehow subtly even more terrifying: If a quartet of otherwise ordinary Okies can convey such apocalyptically bleak yet resonate messages in its music, that may mean we feel that same nihilism, too.

Harvestman 'Triptych : Part One' LP

2024-04-22T13:07:13+01:00

Vendor: SRD
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 23.49

Inter Arma 'New Heaven' LP

2024-04-22T12:41:03+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 18.99

Electric blue vinyl.

New Heaven, INTER ARMA’s latest album, is a compelling testament to perseverance, top to bottom. Its thicket of ever-dense layers of doom, death, and black metal occasionally let bits of light slip in, fleeting reminders to keep going amid the tumult. New Heaven marks a sharp turn for the band, showcasing some of the most extreme and angular songwriting INTER ARMA has ever laid bare. Known for their cinematic take on sludgy, extremely cavernous, and borderline psychedelic Metal, the Richmond band broadens their dynamics by seesawing between piledriving momentum and swirling oblivion. New Heaven crushers and conquers, and illustrates what INTER ARMA can truly be. Take the title track, with its hair-raising lead riff stemming from drummer/songwriter TJ Childers’ challenge to himself to write a nonsensically dissonant part that he ended up loving. The song spirals upward into a punishing Death-Metal march, Meanwhile, vocalist Mike Paparo’s stentorian bellows the bludgeon, above an impossibly complicated web of riffs and rhythms. From the get go, New Heaven and the opening title track eschews any restraint - INTER ARMA is completely unchained. Paparo’s keen and empathetic lyrics about innocent victims of war, addiction, and social apathy affirm that feeling, as a survivor grimaces at the carnage behind him and presses ahead best he can. “You stared into the brutish jaws of strife’s heartless device,” he growls into a chthonic blitz during “The Children the Bombs Overlooked,” a late-album powerhouse. “And you turned your back to hell.” That forward march out of madness is New Heaven in an armor-plated nutshell. Though this is indeed another INTER ARMA triumph, it is not a triumphant album, meant to offer some glib or naïve assurance that everything will be fine. What evidence is there for that, really, either on a record where friends are forced into submission, addiction, suicide, or retreat to a world where suffering remains the lingua franca? No, INTER ARMA and New Heaven are too realistic and experienced for that. This is, instead, a record about enduring brambles and curses and lasting long enough to make something profound, honest, and even affirming about it all every now and again—exactly as INTER ARMA has on New Heaven. FFO: Amenra, Neurosis, Full of Hell, Cult of Luna, Yob, Primitive Man, Thou, Ulcerate, Mastodon, The Body, Panopticon

Catalogue number: RR75601

Deicide 'Banished By Sin' LP

2024-04-22T12:39:02+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 31.49

Full Of Hell 'Coagulated Bliss' LP

2024-04-22T12:10:03+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 18.99

Clear with splatter vinyl.

While the focus on songwriting already makes Coagulated Bliss the most grounded album in Full of Hell’s catalog, it’s also the first Full of Hell record that tries in earnest to reflect the world around it—not in some broad, monotony-of-evil way, but the everyday horrors of life in small town America. Three of the four members of the band were raised in Ocean City. Hazard and Bland still live there, while Walker is located in central Pennsylvania and bassist Samuel DiGristine relocated to Philadelphia. “The American dream is small towns,” Hazard says. “But anyone that’s grown up in a small town realizes it’s just as fucked up in a small town as it is in a big city—if not more, because it’s more condensed.” Walker’s lyrics have always framed their suffering with what he calls “fantastical, metaphorical shit,” but on Coagulated Bliss his writing is clear and direct. The album’s title is meant partly to reflect the idea of the over-pursuit of happiness leading to misery—whether in addiction, greed, or anything else. “Your happiness is just out of reach and you don’t know why,” he says. “Too much of this bliss, you think you’ve found your endpoint, but it’s really just this small, tiny, little thing that’s going to ruin your fucking life. And that could be anything.” Much of the album is rooted in the band’s own experiences. “A hundred dead ends, a thousand dead friends,” Walker screams on “Doors to Mental Agony.” “I hear their howling, I hear them weeping.” There are corpses slicked with morning dew, “false balms for deep wounds,” numb failures, thieves in the night and killers in the dark. There are many trackmarks; there are many dirty needles. The album’s viciousness and Walker’s clear reading of the world around him might scan as misanthropy—“humanity to blame,” he concludes after running through the ways the earth is “riddled with sores” in “Gasping Dust”—but it comes from a place of disappointment that’s driven by a deep love for people and life and the world. “There’s not a lot of anger, to be honest,” he says. “I’ve never felt anger when we’re playing, ever. It feels like electricity that’s built up in my body that has to get out. But I feel more profoundly sorrowful than I ever do anger.” The world may be in a constant state of bitter flux, but Full of Hell have never sounded more at home in it.“We’ve shed any kind of ‘do we belong in this space, what do people expect of us,’” Walker says. “The joy is in the pursuit.” The loosening of their grip on the direction of their music has made it feel paradoxically closer to the bone. “People tend to burrow themselves so deeply into things they love,” Walker says. “It’s too much of a good thing, and it almost cheapens it.” By paring back their sound, Full of Hell aren’t just finding a new way forward: They’re proving that a little bit less of a good thing can add up to so much more.

Catalogue number: CLCR130V

My Dying Bride 'A Mortal Binding' 2xLP

2024-04-15T13:40:59+01:00

Vendor: Warner
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 31.49

Dvne 'Voidkind' 2xLP

2024-04-13T14:06:11+01:00

Vendor: Essential
Type: Heavy Metal / Extreme Metal / Doom
Price: 22.99

Formed in Edinburgh in 2013 by displaced Frenchman Victor Vicart and native Scot Dudley Tait, post-metal prog-sludge artisans Dvne have been building a powerful head of steam since their second album, 2021’s kaleidoscopically mesmerising Etemen Ænka. Their first release for the legendary Metal Blade Records label, the LP was a concerted hike up the greasy pole for this enigmatic outfit, enabling Dvne to embark on UK and European headline tours and win spots at such discerning festivals as Hellfest, ArcTanGent, Desertfest, Damnation and Resurrection. A live EP of reimagined album tunes, 2022’s Cycles Of Asphodel, kept up their profile while satiating demand from a rapidly mushrooming fanbase, and now in 2024, stunning third album Voidkind looks set to propel this expanded five-piece line-up (welcoming Maxime Keller on keyboards) to the top of their game. Certainly Voidkind succeeds in finding new modes of expression for Dvne. The songs are more pointed, direct and memorable, but the soundscape still a radiant, evolving, hypnotic flow, the effect achieved with fewer layers of sonic ornamentation, consciously urging closer to Dvne’s incendiary live sound. And despite the addition of a full-time keyboardist, Victor has no doubt about the album’s defining feature: “We wanted very distinct left and right guitars, and punchier drums and bass, which would transcribe better live. And the synths needed to be clearer; it’s very easy to put five guitars on each side, loads of different vocals and keys, but then you end up watching a band with an album you really like, and the songs sound nothing like the record. That’s what we wanted to avoid. As soon as the song starts, we want people to immediately recognise the riff.” Conceptually, the lyrics continue the band’s overarching narrative - “following a religious group through the generation line from the beginning to its end” - while Voidkind’s extraordinary sleeve art depicts the main theme of this chapter: "A godlike entity seducing & luring followers through their dreams and these followers' multigenerational journey to reach their god dimension." Victor reveals one book has been particularly impactful on the band's thought process: 1989 novel Hyperion by Dan Simmonds. “It’s a very dark sci-fi book with loads of interesting parts, so you can go really prog with it, but you can also go more violent and animalistic.” Further inspirational touchstones include FromSoftware video game Dark Souls, and the Japanese manga series that inspired it, Berserk: “It’s a very cool, violent, psychedelic, mediaeval dark fantasy,” explains Victor. “We wanted to have these kinds of visuals and aesthetics on this album, in this mix- up of things. Even without the vocals we wanted to evoke something, different places and spaces, and take the listener on a journey.”

Catalogue number: 160861