Style: Black metal, experimental black metal (Harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Mayhem, Trhä, Venom
Country: Australia
Release date: 1 January 2026

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Fridays are a mini holiday for me every week. I wake up full of verve and instantly add a dozen new albums to try. Like my dad says “even the worst day of fishing is better than the best day at the office,” I say “even the worst new music day is better than the best not new music release day.” Fridays are the day music comes out—it’s glorious and a natural fact of life. Some artists are quirky, though, and like to release on their own accord to be special. Every year, a slew of new releases come out on January 1st and Halloween (assuming the 6/7ths of the time they aren’t on a Friday). Good for you, you’ve made yourself just a little cooler than waiting until Friday, January 2nd. Celestial Shadows, solo project of Perth black metal scene veteran Benjamin Penfold-Marwick, released their eighth album, The Wheel and the Fire, on January 1st. How original.

Despite labeling himself as “experimental” on Bandcamp, Celestial Shadows’s track structures and riffs are wholly unoriginal, taking every cue straight from second wave black metal; I’m not offended by boring, overabused riffs, but I am taken aback by the insult to my intelligence. Did Penfold-Marwick think I wouldn’t notice that this wasn’t experimental? The guitars play blandly tremolo’d lines in 4/4 time, shifting chords up and down in various triads and lots of tritones. Although The Wheel and the Fire is largely played in moody minor keys like thousands of black metal albums before it, “Glorious Squalor” throws in a synth and a bit of a major progression—quite the exciting divergence! The following track, “Darklight,” has one of the only passably good riffs on the album, but even that is only going down a scale four notes at a time, twice in a row. Occasionally, Celestial Shadows transition from bland black metal to bland slightly blackened death metal (“Cape Arid,” “Warped Mind”), but it’s only noticeable if you haven’t yet lost your mind from the banality of it all. And while the riffs are okay, the rest of the package is amateur as hell; in particular, the track endings are janky. Intro “The Wheel” has a nonsensical half second fadeout before disappearing and starting the next song; and the album ends with superfluous ambient into a false ending, and then a soundclip of a crackling campfire.

However, I should address the elephant in the room: The Wheel and the Fire may have the worst vocals of any metal album ever. I could probably enlist a scientist or priest to help prove this sentiment scientifically, but lacking the resources to hire them, you’ll have to take my word for it. They’re sibilant yet take up all the room in your skull; they sound like they were recorded next door; they are electronically inhuman, full of endless reverb. The lyrics are apparently sci-fi inspired, but they’re so obscured by the vocals as to be unintelligible. The hideous noises that Penfold-Marwick tries to pass off as a human voice are more headache-inducingly terrible than any harsh noise record, and perhaps Stalaggh might reform to have Penfold-Marwick record with the screaming asylum patients. Or maybe the vocals are the experiment Celestial Shadows advertised—I’ve certainly never heard anything like them. I’ll realistically remember nothing from this record three days from now except the miserable awfulness of the vocals—those I’ll remember for a lifetime as among the worst ever.

God may exist since The Wheel and the Fire is blessedly only thirty-eight minutes long, but that mark is also hard to believe. Surviving the excruciatingly awful vocals for more than one verse takes an ungodly amount of patience, and the record may as well be an eternity. I cannot understand how somebody could listen to his vocals and enjoy this album. Solo black metal isn’t usually synonymous with quality (of course, there are exceptions), but Celestial Shadows is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

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Recommended tracks: Glorious Squalor, Darklight, Water’s Edge and the Fire
You may also like: Void of Nothingness, Enopolis, Gonemage, Stalaggh
Final verdict: 2/10

Related links: Bandcamp

Label: Rassilon Records

Celestial Shadows is:
– Benjamin Penfold-Marwick (everything)
With guests:
– Daniel Coombs (drums)