Scarcity — photo by Caroline Harrison
Today’s selection of black and blackened metal was partly the result of coincidence and partly by design. Coincidentally, out of all the worthy songs I listened to in searching for selections, many of them were by bands whose names begin with “S”. By design, I limited this column to those bands. Chalk it up to some need for order out of chaos.
Also coincidentally, two of these songs were accompanied by videos that are among the best I’ve seen this year in any genre, and by arranging this column alphabetically by band name, they come first.
SCARCITY (U.S.)
Doug Moore wrote the lyrics for The Promise of Rain, the forthcoming second album by Scarcity. They were inspired by a trip he took to the high deserts of southern Utah in 2023. He explains: “To thrive in the desert is an act of abnegation – you do right by the land and receive its gifts, or it does away with you.”
That inspiration lives in the video directed by Derrick Belcham for the song “In The Basin Of Alkaline Grief“. It’s beautifully filmed and edited, and the choice to do it in black and white was smart. The landscape is stark and daunting, vast and intimate, isolating and dangerous, but with welcoming waters hidden within it. Watching Rebecca Margolick move in slow motion against that landscape and touch its features is mesmerizing, but the way she moves and the expressions on her face are unsettling.
What really makes the video so striking is the union of what we see and what we hear. I won’t be able to think of one without thinking of the other; the sights and the sounds are stuck together in my head, each one of them making the other much less likely to be forgotten in time.
A huge part of what makes the union so unforgettable is how wildly different the two parts are. The visuals are haunting and spellbinding; the sounds are freakish and fracturing.
Based on movies I’ve seen (because I’m not well-traveled except through film), there are countries in Europe where the sirens on police and emergency vehicles have a weird, warbling pulse, unlike the rising and falling wail of such vehicles in the U.S. That shrill pulse is one of the central brain-spearing features of the song, along with other sensations that sound like someone has figured out how to torture those sirens and make them weep.
And that’s just the tip of an iceberg, one that’s being blown to smithereens with sharp shards flying every which way (to use a metaphor that’s starkly different from the one represented by this song and album). Drums maniacally clatter; the bass bubbles like magma and slithers like a python; Doug Moore screams like he’s self-immolating or turning himself inside-out with knives; some other instrument moans in agony. Moore‘s final scream is as terrifying as anything else you’re likely to hear this year.
One more point about the song: people who are familiar with Doug Moore‘s other musical endeavors know that he’s a great lyricist. They are great here, too. I’m going to include them:
Weightless in the arid wind
I plummet, wild and livid
Towards your sere terrain
Cruel and perfect
It burns, unconquered
Scarred and crenelated
Where the waters went extinct
Echoes from epochs of violence
That left its bones flayed
And though I am afraid
I rush towards your embrace
Here, in the basin of alkaline grief
Loom the wounds in your soul, arrayed
Beneath the heavens’ desiccant gaze
I will make this waste our home
Beloved, you will never be alone
The current line-up of Scarcity is: founder and guitarist Brendon Randall-Myers, co-founder and vocalist Doug Moore (Glorious Depravity, Pyrrhon, Seputus, Weeping Sores), drummer Lev Weinstein (Krallice, Anicon, etc.), guitarist Dylan DiLella (Pyrrhon), and bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause (Sigur Ros, Steve Reich, LEYA).
Put that much talent in a room together and it’s not surprising that you get something as unconventional as this record.
The Promise of Rain is set for release by The Flenser on July 12th.
https://scarcity-nyc.bandcamp.com/album/the-promise-of-rain
https://nowflensing.com/
https://www.facebook.com/scarcity.noise
SIDUS ATRUM (Ukraine)
The next video is another I predict will not be soon forgotten by anyone who sees and hears it. A big reason is the face, the makeup, the hair, and the clothing of Yulia Lykhotvor, who has done everything in the Ukrainian band Sidus Atrum until being joined by her husband, guitarist Serhii Lykhotvor, for the latest album Розірване Небо (Torn Sky).
Her appearance would be striking regardless of the nature of the music, but it’s even more startling when hearing what comes out of her larynx in this next song, “Коли Земля Кричала” (When The Earth Was Screaming). It’s not a typical look for an extreme metal performer, especially one who screams and shrieks with such shattering intensity.
But it’s not just the contrast between look and sound that makes her performance in the video gripping. It’s also the harrowing effect of watching her body wracked with emotional torment against the backdrop of urban ruin, or crouched in grief, cradling skulls in wasteland dirt.
There’s more in the video — scenes of a young girl (maybe a ghost) slowly going about normal daily activities in what might have been her home, an apartment block shorn away and gutted by munitions, a ruin no longer capable of being a home to anyone except in memory.
The Ukrainian lyrics of the song, translated at Bandcamp, channel anguish, outrage, and fury — reactions to the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing devastation and death it continues to inflict more than two years later. Those sensations come through powerfully in the song, not only in the wrenching screams and bitter roars but also in the turmoil and tragic grandeur of the instrumentation.
The music is sweeping, but pain pours out of it like a searing flood. When the drums stagger the grief pours out too. Even when Yulia sings in high crystalline tones and the chords groan, there’s no mistaking the magnitude of the loss — and what she does with her voice after that rivals what Doug Moore does at the end of Scarcity‘s song above.
Sidus Atrum‘s new album Розірване Небо will be released on May 10 by Kvlt und Kaos Productions.
https://sidusatrum.bandcamp.com/album/torn-sky
https://kvltundkaosproductions.bigcartel.com/product/sidus-atrum-torn-sky
https://www.facebook.com/sidusatrumpage
STRYCHNOS (Denmark)
Next, I’ve chosen the first single from Armageddon Patronage, the second album by the Danish band Strychnos, this time with a video that focuses on the album’s artwork.
Coincidentally (again), the opening notes of the song also sound like one of those warbling emergency sirens, though it’s a despairing sound here, like they’re cracking apart. When the music begins to heavily heave and the drums snap, the feeling of despair sinks even lower, a doomed descent accompanied by monstrous roars and crackling screams.
Upheavals begin in the lower end and the vibratory riffing begins to burn and writhe, and to burrow like drills. The guitars also wail like beseeching apparitions in the midst of percussive bombardments, adding to the song’s manifold expressions of terror and hopelessness.
Armageddon Patronage will be released on May 17th by Dark Descent.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/armageddon-patronage
https://www.facebook.com/strychnosterror
SVDESTADA (Spain)
Unlike the first three selections in today’s column, what comes next is a complete album, the third full-length released by the Spanish band Svdestada.
I’ve taken my sweet time writing about Candela, even though I found out about it soon after its release in early January (thanks in part to a write-up by Rennie Resmini in his starkweather Substack). I meant to do so sooner than today, but one plus-side of the delay is that I can say the album still tugs hard at me even after almost three months.
Here’s Rennie‘s pithy description:
Blackened neo crust brutes Svdestada unleashed Candela early in the year. Short sharp shocks that are rip roaring off to the races with a feral vocalist exhorting his bandmates to frenzied heights. Terrific tones across the board with the bass and drums adding thump behind the razor slicing guitar work.
My review is also a rarity, because we’ve already published a review by Dan Barkasi (here), and we almost never double-up on reviews, but I wanted to add my own praise to his.
Throughout the 7 songs Svdestada repeatedly show they know how to mount ravaging assaults, with guitars blazing and whipping, the bass hurtling like a wild stallion, and the drums galloping hell-for-leather too, with a screaming madman on the back.
But Svdestada also load up even the most head-long races with sharp changes in drum patterns and evocative riffing, not just brazen and boisterous but also distressing and disturbing, even when the music is punching you in the chest. And coincidentally (one more time), siren-like pulses also shine within many of these songs, along with truly jaw-dropping drumwork and blood-spray vocal intensity.
Here and there, the pulsating fretwork-sirens in the music, which come in bursts, have a swinging, almost-folkish air, or begin to seem hallucinatory, or ring in displays of sweeping grandeur. But the dominant effect is one of heart-stopping exhilaration.
While the songs are elaborate and the band revel in seeing just how much instrumental extravagance they can pack into these relatively concise tracks (along with hammering punk chords and bounding beats), they never down-shift very much, preferring to keep the throttle mostly wide open — though the fascinating, prog-minded elaborations in “Effímero” also stand out, making it perhaps the best song on an eye-popping album.
Well, not all the tracks are concise. The closing title track extends to almost 12 minutes. By the time you get there, breathing hard, you should be eagerly anticipating just what a genre-bending band like this, with this much instrumental talent, songwriting ingenuity, and chest-bursting passion, can do in a track that long.
You won’t be disappointed, because they use the time to create a spectacular musical kaleidoscope, shape-shifting at high speed while keeping the listener’s blood racing — albeit with one dramatic diversion in which the bass murmurs seductively, the strummed guitars brightly ring, and the drums snap and pop in an infectious groove (while also vigorously rattling). From there, the layered tremolo’d chords soar in splendor as the band inflict the kind of pounding that feels like girders used as mallets.
More changes ensue, some soft, some riotous and incendiary, and it’s the blaze and the blasting that carries the music to its gradual fading away into a somber string conclusion… when Svdestada finally let you breathe again.
https://svdestada.bandcamp.com/album/candela
https://www.facebook.com/svdestada.band
SVRM (Ukraine)
To close out today’s column I turned to yet another Ukrainian band, and it’s one I’ve followed pretty closely and written about often since discovering their music in late 2018. svrm‘s newest release is a two-track EP that came out six days ago. Its name is Є тільки смерть, є тільки тьма (There is only death, there is only darkness).
The first song, which gives the EP its title, shimmers at first, though the shimmers seem sorrowful. From there, the guitars build tension as the drums slowly pound — and then the music expands, becoming grievously panoramic. The vocals are raw and ragged, like the raging of a broken soul, and the music, though sweeping, also sounds broken and shattered as it flows above a steady marching cadence.
It’s hard not to feel the tremendous tragedy in that title song, and to be shaken by it. The second song, “Зловісне” (Ominous), is distressing in a different way, more broiling in its piercing tones, more throbbing and hammering in its percussive pulse. Its pain is more fresh, its wounds more raw, like being stretched to the breaking point.
However, there’s a segue into something else, one previewed by mysterious pinging and eerily wailing tones. The something else is music of broad sweep and broken spirit again, though the high trill and spiraling brilliance of the guitars also begins to sound beautiful and resilient, like a sunburst which hints that all may not be lost in the clouds after all. One can only hope this will be so.