Yesterday I read that in the annual St. Patrick’s Day parades in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, float riders toss cabbages and potatoes to the people on the street, a unique twist on the Mardi Gras practice of throwing strings of beads to revelers.
Although a flurry of cabbages would be entertaining, I’ll have to aim some other things at your head on this Paddy’s Day — spiky obsidian things dipped in poison or hallucinogens, some red with heat and some freezing.
Of course, I felt compelled to lead with music from a couple of Irish bands before crossing the waters east and west.
P.S. This column is late-appearing because I can’t hold my Saturday night Jameson shots and Guinness back like I used to. and my spouse and friends kept me up way past my bedtime.
VIRCOLAC (Ireland)
Almost exactly five years on from their debut album Masque, this Dublin band (whose name is Romanian for werewolf) returned in late February with a second full-length, again released by Dark Descent and Sepulchral Voice. Entitled Veneration, it delves into the history and lore of their homeland, where “veneration is an essential part of the daily life of its people, and the past very much a place where the dead join the living”:
“Thematically, the lyrics reflect on the many deathly topics infused in our ancient cultural lore. From the bloodshed that has fed the land for generations, to the gods and goddesses still invoked to this day and the fallen martyrs whose idealism never came to pass. And so, as in life, all comes to pass and as we fade, nothing shall remain.”
As for the music, Vircolac proclaim that the album “is unquestionably a Death Metal album from beginning to end”, but when you hear it (as you damned well should), you’ll understand why I nevertheless included it in this column.
The songs within Veneration often hit with punishing weight and hostile assaulting power, Vircolac establishing their death metal bona fides with plundering drumwork, earth-quaking bass lines, savage growls, strangulated gagging, eviscerating riffage, and diabolical soloing.
But as on Masque and even more so here, they also freely leap far over conventional death metal fence lines in service of the album’s conceptual themes, beginning with the beautiful but viscerally haunting a cappella singing of Sarah McQuillan on the album’s opening track and including seething and searing blackened riffing and furious demon howls; blast-beat infernos as well as bouncing, skipping, and hard-rocking beats; brazen and blaring chords that sound infernally grand; scratchy wailing arpeggios that conjure chilling apparitional visions, and notes that slowly glint and glimmer like ghost-lights in dreary bogs at night. There are even moments when you might think of Thin Lizzy (as I did).
Moreover, the songs constantly twist and turn in other ways. Vircolac push and pull the pace and the intensity, bringing in fretwork both serpentine and feverishly convulsive, as well as melodies that menacingly beckon like a film-noir soundtrack and others that resemble hellish fanfares, and letting the drumming create one riotous adventure after another as well as putting the hammer on the listener’s neck.
By the time you get to “Our Burden of Stone on Bone” and “All Comes to Pass, Nothing Shall Remain”, it’s no reach to brand the music as “avant-garde extreme metal”, and the conviction strengthens from there.
Granted, that’s an extremely amorphous term, but appropriately suggestive of just how unpredictable and frequently mind-bending Vircolac‘s musical permutations become, straight through to the eerie screaming whistles and simmering strings that open the closing triptych-song, which becomes a mad musical carnival and then a grim catastrophe, the bass clanging like a brutal bell — a song that’s a great summing up of a fantastic and far out-of-the-ordinary album-length achievement.
Do not miss this. That’s an order!
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/veneration
https://vircolac.bandcamp.com/album/veneration
https://www.facebook.com/vircolacdeathmetal
IARMHAIRT (Northern Ireland)
We’re told that the name of this Belfast band (Iarmhairt) “loosely translates from Irish to ‘consequence’”, and that the music was “inspired by humanity’s self destructive environmental neglect”. Iarmhairt‘s first offering is a four-song demo released at the beginning of this month, accompanied by this further description at Bandcamp:
“Featuring members of Sacred Noose & Unyielding Love, this is for fans of atmospheric black metal in the vein of Altar of Plagues & Panopticon, as well as nature’s eventual resurgence amidst our inevitable decline”.
These four songs, unlike Vircolac‘s adventures, are more obvious candidates for this Sunday column. They bring to the fore the scarring iciness of high, whirring riffage and the assaulting surge of battering percussion, as well as tumultuous bass upheavals and tormented goblin-shrieks that reverberate off crypt walls, overlaid with keys that sweep and tower like winter storms.
Yet Iamhairt also deliver unexpected twists and turns, including sudden shifts in momentum, gleaming guitar harmonies, mysterious ambient interludes, and head-moving or gut-punching rhythmic grooves, as well as interesting and elaborate channel-separated interplays among the stringed instruments.
But most of all, the shifts move the mood in different directions, from periods of dismal suffering and frantic distress to episodes of dire peril or romantic yearning, in which the shrill trill of the layered guitars may put your heart in your throat even as it breaks.
And so while this very impressive first demo makes its nods toward traditional second-wave black metal and strands of depressive black metal, it’s very much a modern expression, and a multi-faceted one. Very impressive, especially for a band’s first steps, and it already sets a high bar for whatever they decide to do next.
The demo was released digitally by the band and on tape by Fiadh Productions, itself an Irish name (pronounced “Fee-ah”, it means “grace and wildness”, according to this article).
https://fiadh.bandcamp.com/album/demo-mmxxiii
https://iarmhairt.bandcamp.com/album/demo-mmxxiii
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61555938487617
TORTURERS’ LOBBY (U.S.)
As a way of dividing the Irish full-length releases from the others included in this column, I’ve inserted here the first single from the debut album of the Florida quartet Torturers’ Lobby, a song that absolutely floored me.
What you get first in “Reaper’s Impunity” is a big jumping groove that anchors riffing which pulsates and burns in piercing tones and seems to channel fraught moods of hopelessness and pain. But that’s just the start.
From there, punk beats come out along with haughty growls and demented howls, and then blasting drums and dense waves of searing fretwork, even more frantic and fraught than before.
But wait, there’s still more — delirious soloing that spirals high, wailing like a siren, and bursts of rapidly thrusting groove, capped by a final convulsion of militarized drum eruptions, harrowing vocals, and sweeping, skies-on-fire chords that sound like agony elevated.
The debut album is named Deadened Nerves. It will be released on May 17th by Caligari Records and Ixiol Productions.
https://caligarirecords.bandcamp.com/album/deadened-nerves
JZOVCE (France)
I continue to be fascinated by the music of the French solo project Jzovce, and never more so than in listening to its latest EP Brujas. Consisting of two long tracks, “The Forest” and “The House“, the supernatural music is very much in line with the EP’s title. It’s also both nightmarishly hallucinatory and as incendiary as a forest fire out of control.
The sensations in the songs are as startling as the EP’s cover image — wide-ranging, ingeniously conceived, remarkably elaborate in their execution, and thoroughly unpredictable. The minutes fly by.
Attempting to meticulously trace the songs’ continually dividing pathways would be tedious, especially since you can experience them yourselves, and even more especially because that might spoil some of the many surprises. But here are a few hints:
When the music explodes, it truly blazes — dense, overpoweringly immersive, and both blinding in its brilliance and searing in its heat, propelled by blasting drums that race at breathtaking speed and topped by rabid-wolf howls, wild cries, and madhouse screams, all of them shattering in their effect. Yet even when the music is racing like a sweeping wildfire, the melodic accents and the riffs (which rise, fall, and writhe) have hooks — deleterious ones to be sure, redolent of brutally broken hopes, insufferable loss, and grievous derangement.
When the music isn’t in volcanic mode, that’s when its chilling supernatural manifestations come out more vividly. Dismal arpeggios ring out in abrasive yet skull-piercing tones; the drums boom like a gallows march or the sudden death at the bottom of the drop; strange droning, skittering, and clattering tones intrude (some of them field recordings), along with cold winds, weirdly warbling wails, and mysteriously reverberating strums.
Altogether, the songs create a transfixing and often exhilarating experience, generating visions of chilling menace, awful agony, and frightening splendor. Men tortured, drowned, and burned women as witches, didn’t they?
P.S. Although the striking cover art could be misinterpreted as an old photograph, it’s instead a black and white version of a painting completed in 1911 by Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, entitled “Marguerite au Sabbat”. You can see the original here.
https://distantvoices.bandcamp.com/album/jzovce-brujas
PORONIEC (Poland)
Poland continues to be a hotbed of unorthodox black metal, and the latest flowering I’ve come across is the debut album W Połogu, which was released last week by Putrid Cult. It’s the work of a band named Poroniec, whose name refers to a “mighty Demon raised from the soul of child who died before birth by intentional procedures performed by women to miscarry” (so it says at Metal-Archives).
Poroniec is a duo (multi-instrumentalist Ferment and vocalist Wrzaskun), who are accompanied on this album by session drummer The Fall (Hauntologist, Mgła (live), and more). The album consists of 8 tracks, culminating in the 13-minute “Wątpliwości”.
I’ve already suggested the music is an unorthodox formulation of black metal, and what I principally had in mind was more than the dramatic Slavic singing, theatrical words, ugly snarls, and stricken orchestral instrumentation in the intro track — though that track does create many chills and thrills right from the start.
What I really had in mind is the way Poroniec interweave wild, dissonant riffing with hulking stomps, slowly moaning melodies with imperious infernal fanfares, dervish-like whirls with dramatic timpanic booms, glittering folkish guitars with symphonic electronics, all of it matched with cruel guttural growls, fanatical screams, and cornered-beast howls, and produced with both piercing clarity and titanic power. And that’s just the first full song, “Nieprzystępni”.
The following songs are just as multi-faceted as that one, just as tempo-dynamic and as startling in their twists and turns. If there’s a throughline, it’s the feeling that we’re being led on a tour of Hell, where diabolical wizards cast dangerous spells, demon hordes attack with fangs bared and claws flailing, agonies go on forever, and imperious lords survey the ruination of souls with grim satisfaction and exultant glee.
The changing vocals appreciably add to the feeling that we’re witnessing pageantry in the netherworld, with Wrzaskun — ably aided by guest vocalists Hekte Zaren, Justyna Walczyk, and Harvest — portraying all the roles in this devilish cast with stunning intensity and startling variation.
And that really is the main take-away from the album: It’s very much like an elaborate piece of hellish theater, a pageant unfolding on a grand stage lit by torches and shrouded in fumes of sulphur. Indeed, every song after the Intro individually feels that way, and every one of them is tremendous in that way — but if you want to pick just one to get a sense of what’s in store, I’d recommend “Mądrości”.
https://poroniec.bandcamp.com/album/w-po-ogu
https://www.facebook.com/Poroniecofficial