New Zealand Music Month: Sabbatic Goat, Winter Deluge, and Skuldom

Black Metal May 26, 2015

**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.

When I woke up this morning it was 4°C, and 12 hours later it’s still freezing fucking cold. Seems like the perfect day to throw some frost-bitten New Zealand black metal at you then, and there are three grim and inhospitable bands to start you off below. If any of these bands appeal, then I recommend you hunt down fellow hateful and homegrown black metal bands such as Anno Domini Mortis and Blood of the Moon. Or why not stop by the old Encyclopaedia Metallum, for a gander at a very long list of New Zealand metal bands that might perk your interest even further.

Sabbatic Goat

Sabbatic Goat featured on two releases from 2014 that are well worth tracking down. The band’s Imprecations of Black Chaos demo mixed black, death and doom metal with plenty of ritualistic war metal fervour. Sabbatic Goat also shared space on a truly gnarly and nasty split release with New Zealand blackened grinders Trepanation.

Winter Deluge

Winter Deluge play raw, merciless, and ice-cold black metal. And the band’s powerful debut full-length, As the Earth Fades into Obscurity, is laden with razor-sharp riffs, malevolent vocals, and breakneck percussion. All is bitter and biting. All is utterly misanthropic.

Skuldom

Shit, blood, and one on-stage near-disembowelment have all played a role in Skuldom’s legendary (and controversial) live presence over the years. The band’s video for “Orgiastic Blasphemy” is certainly, well… let’s just say it’s not for the weak of heart or stomach. The band wields turbo-speed/ultra-distorted bass guitar, relentless percussion, and banshee howls that ceaselessly praise Satan to build a pitch-black and cacophonous wall of noise. My advice would be to seek out Skuldom’s fiendish and filthy full-length, *Kill This Fucking World, *forthwith.