Posts Tagged ‘Goat’

Hellripper – Coronach

Posted: 3 May 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Century Media – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Pentagram-shaped goat heads adorn Hellripper’s website and Bandcamp. “All hail the goat” is a band slogan of sorts, and is emblazoned on the body of the compact disc, which depicts a goat in an approximation of a lion rampant stance, thus combining James McBain’s strongly Scottish identity (the album comes in ‘Wild Thistle’ pink, ‘Saltaire’ blue, ;’Highland Mist’ grey and ‘Black Cuillin’ vinyl editions’ and Baphomet, adopted as something of a mascot within the black metal community since the dawn of the genre with Venom’s Black Metal in 1982, and Bathory’s genre-defining eponymous debut in ’84. there’s a giant goat forged from mist and cloud on the moody, mountainous cover art, too.

The ‘one-man black/speed metal band formed by Scottish musician James McBain in 2014’ has been crowned ‘Scotland’s King of the arcane mosh’ by Metal Hammer magazine, with a style which is very much rooted in 80s black metal, and, as the Hellripper website states, ‘heavily inspired by witchcraft and the supernatural, Hellripper is also deeply rooted in its Scottish origins, using the landscape and historical events as a backdrop for its lyrics and imagery’.

Coronach is Hellripper’s fourth full-length album, and features eight riff-ripping songs with a total run time of forty-four solo-centric minutes. The instant ‘Hunderprest’ powers in at a hundred miles an hour, McBain is straight in with the flamboyant fretwork, and some of it is just wildly excessive. ‘Less is more’ is not a motto Hellripper abide by. But the riffs themselves are killer, and she snarling, rasping vocals may be of the genre, but add to the gnarliness of the dark whirlwinds which blast through each and every song. The pace is relentlessly fast and furious and the style cohesive throughout.

That said, as much as I say that this is ‘of the genre’, Coronach does show ambition and awareness when it comes to composition and arrangement: ‘The Art of Resurrection’ starts with a delicate, atmospheric piano passage, while the title track includes Sir Walter Scott’s poem of the same title (Scott was Scottish) and bagpipes (of course).

‘Baobhan Sith (Waltz of the Damned)’, the first of the album’s two bona fide epics, with a span of six and a half minutes, rounds of the first half, and with the fancy fretwork reined in (a bit, at least) in favour of driving riffery, it’s a powerful, pounding beast of a tune, while the title track, which draws the curtain on the album, is a towering, monumental nine-minute monster which goes all-out anthemic and which flies the flag of tartan black metal with pride.

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Watch: ‘GOAT’ by No Terror in The Bang

Posted: 6 April 2026 in Singles and EPs, Recommended Streams and Videos
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French cinematic progressive metal collective No Terror In The Bang return with a brand new video for ‘GOAT,’ taken from their new EP Existence, released April 3rd via Klonosphere Records.
Directed by Les Maan, who previously worked on the band’s earlier videos, ‘GOAT’ was filmed at La Fabrique des Savoirs in Elbeuf, a unique museum space filled with animal figures and striking scenography that perfectly complements the project’s aesthetic. The video also incorporates elements of contemporary dance, shadow play, and experimental visual techniques, enhancing its immersive and organic atmosphere.

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Forging a sound defined by tension and contrast, No Terror in The Bang move between fragility and fury with striking precision. Expansive atmospheres collide with sudden eruptions, creating music that feels both intimate and catastrophic. At the core stands Sofia Bortoluzzi, whose shape-shifting vocal performance anchors the band’s identity, seamlessly weaving ethereal clean melodies with visceral, gut-level screams.

Conceptually, Existence explores humanity’s downfall across multiple dimensions: cosmic, physical, social, environmental, and mortal. Each track exposes a different layer of collapse, questioning destiny, purpose, and our deeply rooted self-destructive instincts. A dark, immersive release that pushes the band into heavier, more oppressive territory, without sacrificing emotional impact.

Following the acclaimed albums Eclosion (2021) and HEAL (2024), Existence marks a decisive step forward for No Terror in The Bang, a release that confronts discomfort head-on and transforms it into something cinematic, intense, and deeply human.

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Monocube – The Rituals

Posted: 12 January 2017 in Albums
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Malignant Records

Christopher Nosnibor

You know this is going to be not so much dark, as positively black, right? Look at the cover art: there’s a fucking goat on it. Nothing say terrifyingly, inhumanly bleak, satanic metal noise rage like a horned goat on an album’s sleeve. Ever since Bathory’s gut-churningly nasty, backer-than-back, dredged from the bowels of hell debut, the goat has been the signifier.

Monocube know all about dark atmospherics: the album begins with ominous fear tones hanging in a shroud of creeping mist. They’re master of the slow-build, too: the album’s first track, ‘Visiones III’ is nine minutes in length, the whispering ambience and contrails of darkness hovering in the air as the listener is led through uncertain, uncharted territory as the nebulous sonic cloud lowly turns in space. This isn’t nearly as gnarly as the cover art suggests though. What’s going on?

‘Drowned Sun’ lunges into the subterranean realms of dark ambience and burrows its way toward a chthonic unpleasantness. With a heaving (heat) beat and yawning undulating drones it’s wholly uncomfortable listening. ‘Downward’ follows the same dark ambient path, inching into the bowel-trembling depths of Sunn O))) and Earth in their dronetastic first iteration. The low-end frequencies hurt, while the shifting higher levels disorientate and unsettle.

It’s becoming apparent that this is no thrashy, guitar-based black metal effort – although it is seriously fucking dark. The weight of the endless, grating drones which swirl and eddy menacingly is monumentally oppressive.

Perhaps you, like me, have deduced that the goat was a lie at least on a superficial level. Monocube aren’t a band you’ll find lurking in the woods, daubed in corpse paint. They aren’t about making heavy guitar noise and snarling like extras from ‘The Walking Dead’. Perhaps because of this, rather than in spite of it, they’re a whole lot scarier.

 

Monocube - The Rituals