SEEN AND HEARD: VASTUM, NAER MATARON, BYYRTH, ANUNCIAÇOM

 

Man, every day brings so much new music. Honestly, it’s overwhelming. But that’s not a new development, is it? It just continues adding to the endless difficulty of trying to sift the wheat from the chaff. I feel confident there’s a lot more new wheat out there I haven’t come to yet, but I did pick these gleaming grains from the harvest of last night’s listening session. (Figure of speech of course, because this is some gnarly and nasty shit I’ve picked out.)

VASTUM

Any year that brings a new Vastum album is a very good year. I mean, other than all the other things in the daily headlines that make every year terrible. To counterbalance the greater-than-usual terribleness of what’s happening in the world during 2019, we will have Orificial Purge, and man, couldn’t we all use some a that?

 

photo by Chris Johnston

The first song off that new album, “Reveries in Autophagia“, is packed with bludgeoning drumwork and a mauling combination of dismal seething chords and skull-busting bursts of jolting and skittering fretwork. Of course, the two-tone vocals are ghastly and ravaging all by themselves. The solo in the song is diseased and queasy, but the cascades of demented guitar that immediately follow shine like a kind of twisted ecstasy.

Orificial Purge will be released on October 25th by 20 Buck Spin, who reports that the album “offers a distinctive blend of sinister atmosphere, punishing brutality, and an unparalleled lyrical and visual imagery that traces connections between perversion, mortification, and ‘an abyssal mysticism of sin,'” with the dual vocals of Dan Butler and Leila Abdul-Rauf combining to deliver “unsettling, dichotomous meditations on ‘abjection as life, life as tragedy, and tragedy as an eviscerating, eroticized rapture through which an evil and useless humanity comes into being.'” Credit for the abstract cover art goes to San Francisco artist Laina Terpstra.

Pre-order info isn’t available yet, but soon will be.

VASTUM:
https://vastum.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Vastum-440192535391/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NAER MATARON

The Greek band Naer Mataron have been around for more than 20 years, producing a discography that includes eight albums, including last year’s Lucitherion “Temple of the Radiant Sun”, which was (at long last) my first introduction to the band’s music. Next month they’ll follow that stupendous album with a new EP named The Fires Of Eisheth Zenunim.

“Le Matin des Magiciens” is the EP’s closing track. The strands of melody that slither, twist, and moan their way through the song’s pounding blows, bullet-spitting blasts, and feverishly skittering fretwork are as poisonous as the plague, as oppressive as an anvil on the chest, and as tragic as a pile of dead children. The guttural vocals are as deep as catacombs, which match the doom-stricken, subterranean terrors of the music.

The Fires Of Eisheth Zenunim will be released on September 25th by Hammer of Damnation.

HAMMER OF DAMNATION:
https://www.hodrecs.com
https://hammerofdamnation.bandcamp.com/album/the-fires-of-eisheth-zenunim

FACEBOOK:
https://www.facebook.com/Naer-Mataron-official-122029807867493/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BYYRTH

The hallucinatory guitar harmony that begins “Parasitic Twin” is so blown-out and piercing in its sound and so arcane, so bleak, and so perilous in its feeling that it seizes attention immediately. It’s the kind of opening that makes you sit up straight, waiting expectantly for what comes next. And what comes next after a brief pause is a harrowing experience, but an intensely head-moving one. The melody evolves, becoming a more delirious sibling of that opening instrumental, and the pounding rhythmic thrust of the song is so powerful you can feel it in your spine.

The vocals are a shrieking nightmare, and the song as a whole grows increasingly desperate and demented in its mood. Perversely, the writhing and whirling guitar leads entwine themselves with the neurons in the brain, becoming seductive and ultimately mesmerizing even though they’re intensely distraught and disturbing. Did I mention that the drumwork has a vertebrae-cracking quality?

This hellishly good and inhumanly chilling track comes from Cold Autumn Shadows, a new EP by the California vampiric black metal band Byyrth. It will be released by Iron Bonehead Productions on October 18th.

IRON BONEHEAD:
http://www.ironbonehead.de
http://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com
http://www.facebook.com/IronBoneheadProductions

BYYRTH:
https://www.facebook.com/byyrth/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANUNCIAÇOM

Antecipaçom da Génese (which might mean “Anticipation of Genesis”) is a two-track debut EP released via Bandcamp on August 26th by the Spanish band Anunciaçom. Beyond the music, I’ve discovered no info about the band in my searches, other than their location (Galiza) and the fact that the band was founded in 2019. I assume the names of the band, the EP, and the songs are in the Galician language, which is related to Portuguese.

The EP’s first track, “Precoce Abcisom da Inocência“, begins in stately and ominous fashion, like a funeral mass. The volume of the sound swells as a flickering lead arrives, and then erupts in a clobbering, ravaging rush. The Morbid Angel influence is apparent, and the savagery of the song is palpable, but something unexpected happens. About two-and-a-half minutes in, the band bring in darting and pulsing bits of electronica, which becomes a surprising interlude before the band start racing again (and also dragging and moaning like a mortally wounded leviathan). The crescendo, when the drums fly at jet speed, is dissonant and destructive — and absolutely electrifying — and the finale, when there’s some singing in place of the barbaric growls, is a hard-rocking head-mover, with a burst of battering mania to cap things off.

Dissonant melody and crazed fretwork play a prominent role in “Insígnias da Perdiçom” as well, and the band again demonstrate their ability to create extravagant, bone-busting and head-spinning mayhem. They accent those full-throttle melees with weird and wondrous flares of melody, and with heavy, gloomy chords as well. The song is a technically impressive riot, and almost overpowering in the maniacal ferocity of its assaults, but also successful in creating a queasy, unsettling, and ultimately unearthly atmosphere. The decision to end the track in a very different way from the main course works very well.

(Thanks very much to Rennie from starkweather, once again, for linking me to this release.)

BANDCAMP:
https://anunciacom.bandcamp.com/releases

FACEBOOK:
https://www.facebook.com/anunciacom/