New Zealand Music Month: Black Boned Angel

**It’s New Zealand Music Month this May. **New Zealand’s **annual celebration of homegrown music. Generally, that involves a lot of mainstream media highlighting a lot of mainstream acts. So I’m here to try and redress the balance a bit.  **I’ll be posting a link to some rowdy New Zealand music for you to check out every day over the next month. Some bands will no doubt be familiar; others I hope will be fresh to your ears.

Black Boned Angel

Black Boned Angel is dead. Although, some things are easier to bury than others.

The band might have ceased to exist in 2013, following their aptly titled final album, The End. But the kind of massive and monolithic fusion of drone and doom metal that Black Boned Angel made is not so easily silenced.

In fact, there’s never been a heavier New Zealand band than Black Boned Angel. And the band’s legacy in that regard remains unchallenged to this day. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of New Zealand bands that are more metal than Black Boned Angel. But like Sunn O))), Earth, and Corrupted have done in the past, Black Boned Angel stripped sound down to a few core essentials, and those remaining elements were overwhelming in their tectonic totality.

Black Boned Angel was founded in 2003 by Campbell Kneale, a famed musician from New Zealand’s experimental and outsider music scene, and as time went on, James Kirk and Jules Desmond joined the band’s ranks too. Black Boned Angel has a lengthy discography to choose from, and all of the band’s releases mix extreme volume and traumatic frequencies on bare-boned soundscapes. Black Boned Angel is highly recommended if you’re a fan of maximum/minimalist noise. One of my absolute favourite New Zealand bands. Dead or alive.