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#ragnarok

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Angry Metal Guy

Fumes – Skeletal Wings Threshold Review

By Alekhines Gun

As we slide from the snow-filled January to the rainy and fog-laced February, the mission remains the same: Checking out young hopefuls and their debut releases. This time on the roulette wheel of analysis is Fumes, a Mexican black metal band founded a mere three years ago. With sole EP Stellar Murders Upwards under their bullet belts,1 they’ve wasted no time in preparing their first full-length Skeletal Wings Domain. Is this the album to finally give Mexico a defined sound on the global scene, or do these wings need more meat on their bones?

Rejecting the stereotypical frosty Norwegian sound, Fumes present the listener with an album with a degree of weight to the compositions. Guitarists Henri and Alanis slather the album in meaty tones more adjacent to modern Ragnarok or Hades, with much more emphasis on bottom-end boom than trebly terrorizing. This gives a bounce and bite to the punky riffs, with songs constantly switching from obligatory melodic trems to Immortalized walk-in-place marching tempos. Moments like the outro of “Suppuration Tunnels” conjure up a genuinely evil mood, and solos litter the album with melodic flair while drummer Minos reliably blasts away in place. The sound is pleasing, immediate, and relatively accessible, with Alanis’s vocals echoing menacingly across the space with an expressive, enunciated bellow.

Where Skeletal Wings Threshold fails is in its memorability, and it fails in grand style. Things start well enough, true; “Stellar Ascension Infernal” wastes no time in going straight for the listener’s throat, but all too quickly Fumes suffer a startling dip in quality and album pacing. “Carrier of Venenifyer” doesn’t have enough interesting riffs to justify its six-minute run time, and multiple songs begin to fade into each other from bloat and pacing. Fumes try their best to offset this with heaps of solos, many of which are excellent (“Dead Morning Star” being a real highlight), but the end of such virtuosity leads right back to okay-tier riffing. Attempts at expected tempo assaults invariably give way to tired, slower passages, sounding less like tonal diversity and more like an album that refuses to commit to a mood. This inconstancy undermines the more impactful moments, reducing a full listen to far less than the sum of its parts.

Compounding this issue is the back half of the album, where Fumes saw fit to place no less than three interludes. These interludes are meandering, with no sense of flow or beauty, and seem to only pad out the album’s length. One of them is re-recorded from Stellar Murders Upwards, and still another ends the album in an outlandish attempt at post-auditory assault calm. There’s no need for three separate pauses in the music, and there’s certainly no need to stack them all in the back half of the album one after another. On top of that, the “real songs” from the EP were also re-recorded, stripping them of the raw charm the original production offered. Removing the re-recordings and two new interludes leaves us with five songs of descent to disposable black metal, and suggests the material would have best been served as a second EP. As it stands, songs replete with boilerplate hooks and bizarre track listing order give a sense of overwrought listening to an otherwise reasonable 38-minute runtime.

This is frustrating because I think Fumes can be a good band. Returning to “Suppuration Tunnels” in particular shows creative riffing, some deliciously dark-sounding moments, and a sudden grasp of good composition. But when taken as a whole body of work, Skeletal Wings Threshold doesn’t have the immediacy to stand next to its peers, let alone in the shadow of its influences. With their old material used up in re-recording, the real test will come at their next release. An extra tablespoon of blackened brutality, more immediate riffing, less interludes, and keeping those solos will do well in helping them carve a more memorable identity. For now, this is easy-listening black metal, from a threshold entirely disposable.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Personal Records
Websites: Album Bandcamp | Official Facebook Page
Releases Worldwide: February 7th, 2025

#20 #2025 #BlackMetal #Feb25 #Fumes #Hades #Immortal #MexicanMetal #PersonalRecords #Ragnarok #Review #Reviews #SkeletalWingsThreshold

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DoomsdaysCW

Human use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning: Welcome to the #Pyrocene

by Stephen Pyne, The Conversation, January 22, 2025

"#LosAngeles is burning, but it isn't alone. In recent years, fires have blasted through cities in #Colorado, the southern #Appalachians and the island of #Maui, along with #Canada, #Australia, #Portugal and #Greece. What wasn't burned was smoked in.

"Is this another case of a future not only dire but strange, without a narrative to join past to present or an analog for what is to come?

"I'm a historian of fire, and my reply is that we have both a narrative and an analog. The narrative is the unbroken saga of humanity and fire, a companionship that extends through all our existence as a species. The analog is that humanity's fire practices have become so vast, especially in recent centuries, that we are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age."

[...]

Welcome to the Pyrocene

"Widen the aperture a bit, and we can envision Earth entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lakes, periglacial outwash plains, mass extinctions and sea-level changes. It's an epoch in which fire is both prime mover and principal expression.

"Humanity's firepower underpins the #Anthropocene, which is the outcome not just of #anthropogenic meddling but of a particular kind of meddling, made possible by humans' species monopoly over fire. Even climate history has become a subset of fire history.

"Fires in living landscapes, fires burning lithic landscapes—the interaction of these two realms of fire has not been much studied. It's been enough of a stretch to fully include human fire practices within traditional ecology. Yet humans—the keystone species for fire on Earth—are merging the two arenas of earthly burning with a give and take that is reshaping the planet in what resembles a slow-motion #Ragnarok.

"Add up all the effects, direct and indirect: the ice driven off by fire, the areas burning, the biogeographical #migrations as biotas move to accommodate changed conditions, the collateral impacts with damaged #watersheds and #airsheds, the unraveling of #ecosystems, the pervasive power of #ClimateChange, #RisingSeaLevels, a #MassExtinction, the disruption of human life and habitats. The result is a #pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire. You have a maturing Pyrocene.

"If you doubt it, just ask California."

Full article (it's a good read):
phys.org/news/2025-01-human-er
#Wildfires #UncontrolledFires #HistoryOfFire #PyroceneEra #ControlledBurning #ClimateCrisis

Phys.org · Human use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning: Welcome to the PyroceneBy Stephen Pyne
Public
Robert Thinks You’re Great

Just finished #GodofWar: #Ragnarok and really enjoyed it. However, I recently learned I should not enjoy it because it is woke. So I am warning you, dear reader, in case you could accidentally enjoy it too.

1. It has historically inaccurate dark-skinned characters. This is in contrast to the historically accurate magical weapons, giant creatures, winged characters, and totally historical main character.

(Cont)

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VIKINGS vs SAMURAI

Loki’s scheming, Fenrir’s biting, and Yggdrasil’s barely holding it all together. When Ragnarök drops, it’s chaos, flames, and a whole new world rising. Norse mythology isn’t just stories; it’s fate, fire, and fury. vikingsvssamurai.com/frost-fir #NorseMythology #Ragnarok

VIKINGS vs SAMURAI · Frost, Fire, and Fury: The World of Norse MythologyJörmungandr coils the world, Loki plots, Fenrir howls, and Ragnarok waits to burn it all down. Epic, right?
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Luricaun the Smol

So this song is something. I immediately fell in love and I probably have heard this song before because I watched the TV series #Lucifer. Some of you might have seen #Dark the German Netflix series. Anyhow enjoy.

Chris Avantgarde feat. Red Rosamond - Inside
inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=1M8gr3J

YT link:
youtube.com/watch?v=1M8gr3JIro

Chris Avantgarde | InvidiousDARK Season 3, Lucifer Season 5, Ragnarok Season 2 | Chris Avantgarde feat. Red Rosamond - InsideChris Avantgarde feat. Red Rosamond - Inside as featured on DARK Season 3 Episode 3, in Lucifer Season 5 Episode 7 and in Ragnarok Season 2 Episode 1 on Netflix. OUT NOW: https://fanlink.to/inside-dark Thank you all for your nice words on this song. We're proud that it made it into these shows and we feel blessed with the response! Much love, Chris 🏴CONNECT WITH ME: INSTAGRAM: https://goo.gl/m6miWo SPOTIFY: https://goo.gl/6wyEYt TWITTER: https://goo.gl/pdH8b7 FACEBOOK: https://goo.gl/49aB6z SOUNDCLOUD: https://goo.gl/Y6ZwGJ Lyrics: If I was you I’d run If I was you I’d hide If I was you I’d be afraid Afraid of what’s inside If I was you I’d run If I was you I’d hide If I was you I’d be afraid Afraid of what’s inside Afraid of what’s inside I can hear your voice I can feel you cry No matter what you do now Don’t dare to close your eyes The end is drawing near I’ll tell them that you tried Shed a single tear now Time to say goodbye Time to say goodbye
#Music#ChrisAvantgarde#RedRosamund
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Joan of Cat (she/her) 😼

I haven't caught anyone here up on what's been going on in my #FFXIVRP in a while, and maybe I ought to do that.

It's so much! We just wrapped up Season 1 of our Machine War saga two months ago, and we're on the second episode of Season 2 now. We've introduced #Accord, who we discovered was stuck inside of the Fruit of the Protector in the Rak'tika Greatwood since the First Machine War thousands of years ago.

In our Season 1 finale, my son--who went by #Lily but now goes by his new middle name #Maxx--transitioned and also finally graduated from the #Studium as an #Archon! He chose to have his archon tattoo placed on his right cheek, just like his favorite professor #Urianger (for those who don't know, Maxx is from the future, so the Urianger we know and love has only recently met him). Maxx lovingly calls him Prof Uri, and yes, he can speak like Urianger does, even though he only does it for the lulz.

#Noah--the heart of the primal #Metatron and Maxx's twin from his own timeline--came to ours for the final episodes of Season 1 too, and he nearly destroyed the star and claimed our #Lifestream for his own. But at the last moment, we were able to stop him with the help of #Golbez, #Zero, Urianger, and #Thancred. We kinda broke the #Ragnarok doing it. Sorry about that. But don't worry. They'll have it fixed by the time 7.1 comes out.

When Metatron died, #Joan soaked up much of his aether and became insanely overpowered. Mostly, so far, it's been little more than an annoyance. Especially since it's begun to make her and her family/friends a primary target for the Watchers, who have now arrived on the Source and are causing trouble. Right now, our biggest problem is the Watcher named #Zophiel, who seems very determined to take us out.

And while that's a lot of information, it barely scratches the surface of all that's happened. So I'll come back more often and let you all know how things are going.

Enjoy the #GPoses below of Accord, Maxx, Noah/Metatron, and Joan in her special supersuit! 💙

Accord checking out this timeline's New Gridania and exploring while the Heralds frantically look for her.
Maxx in his punk dark knight gear.
Noah/Metatron snapping his fingers to alter reality.
A superpowered Joan in her supersuit inspired by DC's Superman.
#FFXIV#Stormwolf#MachineWar
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