SHADES OF BLACK: MISERY SPELL, FLUKT, REVA, SATANIC WITCH

This is one of those Sundays when I didn’t have any inkling of what I might choose before beginning to choose. I had so little inkling that I spent some time searching out where the word inkling came from since I didn’t know. (The answer is at the end of this post. Hint: it has not a drop to do with ink.)

Lacking any preconceived ideas I just started wandering through very recent releases, to see what might take hold. Hopefully what I chose will take hold of some of you too.

MISERY SPELL (Russia)

It took all of about two minutes for me to feel completely drenched by the music on this Saint Petersburg band’s new album Абсолютная тьма (“Absolute Darkness”), which was released just yesterday.

Those first minutes of the opening title song submerge the senses in a dense wash of sound that manages to blend tonal rawness and brilliance, and moods of shattering grief and fervent yearning. The melodic waves slowly rise and fall above the reverberating crack and boom of a percussive funeral march, and within them shrill tones ecstatically flicker.

The vocals are definitely from the realm of raw DSBM, the kind of unhinged screaming wretchedness that lacerates ears, and if that’s off-putting, be aware that although sparsely used, they never change, other than to gag as if in the final moment of strangulation. But the music does change.

That opening song, like the two that follow it, is a long one. As it moves into a different phase, the drums vanish and brittle notes eerily echo as others moan, dropping the temperature and the mood below freezing. When the volume swells again to drench the senses once more, with a double-kick rumble in company, the desolate mood persists and the atmosphere simultaneously grows more frightening.

The song continues to ebb and flow in a harrowing cycle that earns the band its name, yet near the end that yearning, beseeching melody returns in near-pastoral splendor, and the final synth segment is mesmerizing.

As noted, the other two songs are also long — the last one is almost 22 minutes long. The second one also lays down musical motifs and then cycles through them, with changing drum and bass patterns accompanying the shifts.

Picking out all the discrete instrumental ingredients is a challenge. I can’t separate guitars from synths in the great moving walls of magnificent and desolate sound that cascade across the heights of the songs, if there are guitars in there at all, though the shrill darting and flickering tones that continually surface sound almost like a harpsichord.

The synths sometimes sound orchestral as well as astral. The arpeggios that clearly come from a guitar have a sound that’s both gleaming and scratched. At the end of “Раны” (“Wounds”), extravagant wailing tones sound like a soaring voice, but might not be; either way, it’s riveting.

Because the first two songs rely so heavily on repetition I suppose someone might call them a raw and generally depressive formulation of blackgaze, or maybe a blackened version of synthwave. On the other hand, the third one, “Пустые грёзы” (“Empty Dreams”), is a horse of a different color.

Its opening phase (like all other phases) is largely ambient, with a few gently strummed chords in the mix. It creates a soft, shimmering, and sublime spell, which gradually expands as the minutes pass. Everything is ethereal. Everything shimmers and rings, creating a feeling of placid wonder — until you’re 12 minutes in.

Then, the dismal, slightly abrasive moan of a guitar (probably a guitar) makes the experience more intense, more haunting, though the borealis-like glimmerings in the sonic collage maintain a wondrously extraterrestrial atmosphere and then take over, becoming the kind of thing that sounds like the soundtrack for a lone occupant of a spacecraft endlessly sailing far out into the cosmos, with life on Earth merely a distant memory.

(My thanks to Rennie for sharing the link to this one.)

https://miseryspell.bandcamp.com/album/–5

 

 

FLUKT (Norway)

I hope you made your way all the way through that Misery Spell album. If you did, you might need something to awaken you from its closing dream. Or maybe you weren’t in the mood for a dreamscape and jumped right down in search of something different. Either way, I thought Flukt‘s new album Omen ov Darkness would be a welcome change of pace.

At a high level, the album combines (as the band’s label correctly portrays) “the violence and the rawness of Mayhem and Gorgoroth, but also an evident attention to dark melodies of acts such as Setherial and the never forgotten Dissection.”

Those homages to two schools of Scandinavian black metal don’t alternate from song to song, but become intertwined in differing ways within each song. In the album opener “Blodveien” Flukt lean into the violence — drums riotously hammering, bass feverishly bubbling, a voice screaming with a serrated edge, and the high distorted riffing whirling like a devastated dervish. But even there, the music is icily and forlornly melodic.

Flukt also make a shift in the song, delivering vibrantly jolting grooves and brazen, braying chords, both militaristic and defiant, and then another shift, doubling down on the song’s grieving mood at the end, to the point of hopelessness and despair.

photo by Paul Tsigakis

That song effectively sets out the band’s blueprint for the rest of the album. They continue to dynamically push and pull the energy, creating desperate and exultant frenzies, militaristic marches, funereal trudges, and haunting collapses.

They continue layering together the whir and claw of channel-separated guitars to create high-low harmonies that weave changing tapestries of dark moods — moods of confusion, self-destructive delirium, abject misery, and soul-plundering grief, accompanied by nuanced bass work. And they’re also capable of sounding feral and swaggering, but with episodes of daunting grandeur in the tapestries too. Briefly, they also introduce changes from the vampyric snarls and lacerating screams, providing ardent yells and muttered words.

Of all the band references mentioned above, I’d say Dissection and Setherial are the influences that stand out most strongly, which of course are very good influences to draw upon, and Flukt do so to create a well-written and well-executed album of sonic fire and ice that’s both viscerally exhilarating and emotionally evocative. It’s much more of an homage to halcyon days than a progression into the future, but who the hell cares when it’s this good?

Omen ov Darkness was released about a month ago on the Dusktone label.

https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/omen-ov-darkness
https://www.facebook.com/fluktofficial

 

 

REVA (Italy)

Back in April of this year I acclaimed a song called “I’ve Never Been Here” from a then-forthcoming debut EP (Far Away From All of This) by the one-person Roman project Reva. I was so impressed by the EP that I jumped at the chance to hear a new Reva single that came out two days ago. It turned out to fit well with that Flukt album up above, but as with their previous EP Reva take the song in surprising directions.

At the outset, and again later, “Unspoken Fragments Slow Burn” goes on the attack, with drums furiously hammering, a tortured voice voice screaming, a bass manically bubbling, and dense, fuzzed riffs convulsing. The riffing writhes, deliriously cavorts, and gloriously swirls, mad yet melodic, eventually pierced by a brilliantly glittering lead.

And then things start to change. The music begins to stagger as if lost, and a ragged voice passionately sings. When Reva punches the gas pedal again, you’ll encounter more of that vibrant bass work and an array of piercing guitar-leads, eventually doubled, that are captivating — and then turbulence, turmoil, and terrors reign supreme.

“Unspoken Fragments Slow Burn” is the first single from Reva‘s upcoming new album Urban Madrigals. Reva explains: “The song is about time that passes while we drown in the apathy of our days. Memories become ghosts of the past and we begin to fade into them”.

https://realmofreva.bandcamp.com/track/unspoken-fragments-slow-burn
https://realmofreva.bandcamp.com/album/part-i-far-away-from-all-this
https://www.facebook.com/realmofreva

 

 

SATANIC WITCH (Int’l)

To close out today’s column I chose a new song by Satanic Witch that emerged two days ago. I think it straddles a lot of the lines presented in the first three selections above, and adds some new lines as well.

On the one hand, “For None” sends blazing waves of dense riffage and keys, infiltrated by sparkling leads, over vibrantly clattering and slowly cantering beats, and accompanied by fierce demonic growls. The melody is both supernaturally enticing and bereft.

On the other hand, haunting feminine voices rise up like pale wraiths beckoning above the growls, creating a bewitching gothic spell in the midst of the soaring cascades, the earthy undertones, and the vocal beastliness with which they form a strange harmony.

On the third hand, the song levitates even higher, blazing even brighter as the drums race… and then it gets very creepy indeed at the end.

Satanic Witch is a project formed in 2022 by Shaun Van Calster (Length of Time), Michel Kirby (Wolvennest), and Isa and Selina from E-L-R. The song is from their debut album 4:44, which is set for release on December 5th by Ván Records. There’s another album track out in the world — “Mirror Hour” — and I’ve included a stream of that one for you as well.

https://van-records.com/Satanic-Witch-4-44-12-LP_1
https://van-records.com/Satanic-Witch-4-44-digiCD_1
https://www.facebook.com/satanicwitch.444/

 

INKLING

Where did the word come from? Here’s an answer from this source:

‘This may come as a surprise, but inkling has not a drop to do with ink, whether of squid, tattoo, or any other variety. Originating in English in the early 16th century, inkling comes instead from Middle English yngkiling, meaning “whisper or mention,” and perhaps further back from the verb inclen, meaning “to hint at.” An early sense of the word meant “a faint perceptible sound or undertone” or “rumor,” but now people usually use the word to refer to a vague notion someone has (“had an inkling they would be there”), or to a hint of something present (“a conversation with not even an inkling of anger”). One related word you might not have heard of is the rare verb inkle, a back-formation of inkling that in some British English dialects can mean “to utter or communicate in an undertone or whisper, to hint, give a hint of” or “to have an idea or notion of.” (Inkle is also a noun referring to “a colored linen tape or braid woven on a very narrow loom and used for trimming” but etymologists don’t have an inkling of where that inkle came from.)’