If you were to ditch the corpsepaint, goofy poses, and gimmicks, but keep the razor-tight riffs, uhallowed Immortalisms, and jaw-dropping musicianship, you’d have Rimfrost. Jokes about their totally homoerotic name aside, this band is beyond competent at combining black metal’s rawness with Immortal’s, well immortal ability to write almighty riffs.

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Last year, I got way too busy with this thing called life and ignored this other thing called metal. As a result, I missed out on a lot of quality music as was evidenced by my paltry contribution to the year-end MetalSucks Best Of 2009 lists.

I am here to rectify the error of my ways, month by month.

Here are the January 2010 releases that got under my skin, burrowed their way into my brain, made my ears bleed, or simply tickled my unmentionables:

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More often than not we’re making of fun of black metal on MetalSucks, but that’s because black metal this good don’t come ’round these parts too often. Ya see, when a press release came across my e-desk announcing that Swedish black metallers Rimfrost had signed with Season of Mist Records I just had to click through the link to listen, if only because pretty much everything Season of Mist has released in the past year has been top fucking notch (see: Cynic + all of these bands). Since that fateful click-through decision I’ve literally been listening to the 5 songs Rimfrost have on their MySpace page on repeat all week.

Without getting too involved in micro-genre labeling or band comparisons, Rimfrost’s sound can be described thusly: they’d make fine touring partners with Enslaved, Keep of Kalessin and Nachtmystium. Do with that information what you will; ridiculous photo and sub-zero butt-hole-licking band name aside, Rimfrost are really fucking good.

-VN

[Rimfrost on MySpace]