The 3rd and the Mortal. Norway has never had a shortage of highly experimental metal bands and The 3rd and the Mortal were no different. Their debut album “Tears Laid in Earth” pushed about all the boundaries you could think of at the time. The album wasn’t afraid to tenderly explore all corners of melancholy and held no limits to the amount sparse effected clean guitar and meandering leads as they saw fit. To top it all off, The 3rd and the Mortal were one of the first bands in the European scene with a female vocalist (many bands including The Gathering claim them as an influence). While the bands early material was often described as ‘doom metal,’ it’s clear their approach was more from the Pink Floyd direction than any classic metal bands.

Swedish Death Metal has been one of the most successful genres of metal within the past 15 years. Some of the most influential bands in the recent history of metal are part of this genre and released numerous classic albums in the mid 90s. Early In Flames and At the Gates, among many others, helped define this genre. Eventually, most of these bands either became defunct, or diverged into unwelcome musical territory (at least in my eyes).

Sometimes you just want the most aggressive, in your face, “fuck the world” music to compliment your mood. When that mood strikes, nobody delivers quite as well as Sweden’s thrash/death metal kings of misanthropy, Carnal Forge. Sure, there are plenty of testosterone fueled metal bands out there, but few combine the brilliant technical thrashy riffs, razor performance and hate-fueled lyrics with absolutely no subtlety like these guys.

During my bands recent North American tour, certain songs were always played prior to sound checks to “test” the clubs PA system. I became very familiar with these songs, as I heard them at full blast for a full month. One song was by a female singer-songwriter I had never heard before, but I was [...]

In a perfect world, Denmark’s Saturnus would be well recognized within the metal community as a band contributing some of the best romantically-tinged metal of our time. Of course, it’s not a perfect world and Saturnus has never remotely had the attention they’ve deserved. To read about my fantastic introduction to this band back in 1997, check out my previous post (one of the first few posts ever on dark dose).

When you Google for ‘dark music blog,’ this is the first result. We’re also on the first page of results for ‘dark music’. With this in mind, I would be doing a grave injustice to the purpose of this blog without talking about one of the darkest albums of 2006. Not to mention one of the most talked about in musician circles.

I previously wrote about Sonores and expressed my newfound fondness for their extremely minimalistic music. They released a self-titled EP in early 2006 which is now available in it’s entirety for free from the wonderful It’s a Trap blog. I highly recommend you give it a listen.