Unsigned and Unholy: Cetacean, Apothesary, Blaine Rohmer

Former Black Sheep Wall vocalist Trae Malone resurfaces with Cetacean, a progressive / post-metal metal act from Los Angeles. Oddly enough given their marine-inspired name, Cetacean remind me a whole lot of The Ocean in the way they use a wide array of dynamics to explore the progressive side of the post-metal landscape. Stream the three-track opus “Outpour” below via Invisible Oranges from the Breach | Submerge EP, which comes out January 29th on Apes Who Looked Up Records and can be ordered on Bandcamp.

Apothesary call themselves “The Def Leppard of Death Metal,” which isn’t a classification I entirely understand; the implication, I suppose, is that they write anthems that are so catchy they’re worthy of being performed in arenas. While I can’t really imagine these guys on a hundred-foot wide stage with pyro and lasers (as badass as that’d be!), I can easily picture a room full of a hundred or so longhairs headbanging furiously to Apothesary’s fine blend of death metal and trash, on display on their new album 1976. Stream it below.

Blaine Rohmer is an atmospheric black/dark metal one-man project from Minsk, Belarus. It’s the “atmospheric” and “dark” elements of his music that I connect to the most; there’s a haunting, almost enchanting sense about the melodies, with an orchestral flair dominating the basic black metal template. Things stay doomy and morose throughout Death’s Halls, never venturing into the well-trodden territory you might expect when orchestras and black metal mix (Dimmu Borgir, Cradle of Filth, etc). Stream it below.