Once again I had enough free time this weekend to make today’s collection from the black spheres a large one. I picked two recently released albums, preceded by one new video and songs from three more full-lengths that are on the way.
As you’ll discover, there’s considerable variation in the music today, but there is a through-line as I perceive it, a pervasive eeriness, a feeling that we’ve left this world and are communing with dangerous, daunting, and deceptive entities in the chilling and incendiary realms they call home.
INCONCESSUS LUX LUCIS (UK)
A painfully long seven years have staggered by since the last album from Inconcessus Lux Lucis, so long that the news of a new album was startling, but a very welcome development for sure.
The new album, Temples Colliding In Fire, is one of three set for release on June 7th that I, Voidhanger Records announced in one fell swoop last week (I wrote about another one, the debut of Thanatotherion, yesterday). And along with the announcement, I, Voidhanger published the album’s title track.
As the title suggests, this first song spawns visions of beings made of fire and thriving within fire. The riffing and soloing are wild and shrill, roiling and darting and incandescent, and the nimble bass-work and neck-cracking drums are equally exultant. The vocals are also inflamed, but venomous and gritty too.
It’s a hell of a delirious and diabolical thrill-ride that never lets up, and it’s one that pulls heavily from ingredients of “classic heavy metal” and thrash, and maybe even power metal (though I’m certainly no expert in that area). Things do get sinister and menacing, but by and large this song is just fucking glorious.
The new album is again the work of William Jackson (Drums, Guitars, Vocals) and Alexander James (Bass Guitar, Guitars, Vocals (Track 5)), this time also joined by Guillaume Martin (Guitars & Additional Sonic Effects). David Glomba painted the attention-grabbing cover art.
(Thanks to our old friend eiterorm for alerting me to this.)
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/temples-colliding-in-fire
https://metalodyssey.8merch.com/
https://metalodyssey.8merch.us/
https://inconcessusluxlucis.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/inconcessusluxlucis358
LIFVSLEDA (Sweden)
Now we have a horse of a very different color, a very different dimension from the song that started today’s collection.
In the case of “Sönderfall“, what Lifvsleda bring us are chilling terrors galore — waves of riffage that are searing but sound despairing; woozy and wailing guitar-leads; musing and moaning bass-lines (which also become vivacious); stalking but also explosive drumming; and wretched screams that harrow the senses.
It’s a discomforting experience, hallucinatory and dreamlike, steeped in poison and drenched in misery, and utterly alien. The vocals become even more deranged, almost like a dialogue among demons and their victims. At the end, as gritty guitars shiver and shimmer alone, a baritone voice utters pronouncements, like words from the deepest lord of Hell.
This song is from Lifvsleda‘s third album Evangelii härold, which is set for release on April 30th by Norma Evangelium Diaboli.
https://lifvsleda.bandcamp.com/album/evangelii-h-rold
https://www.facebook.com/lifvsleda
BLACNK (Australia)
Next up is a song named “Destroy The Storm Destroy The Absence” from an Australian solo endeavor previously unknown to me despite an incredibly prolific output, as documented at Metal-Archives. I finally paid attention because the song is on an album that will be released by The Centipede Abyss, which like its namesake has released other records that tend to wriggle under my skin.
The music here is raw and abrasive, a dense and sweeping swarm of riffing that feels like a hybrid of acid and sandpaper yet somehow also glitters. It’s fronted by vicious and vitriolic screams and ardent singing, and backed by fairly simple but powerfully captivating drum-beats and a hefty bass pulse.
In its moods, the waves of caustic but captivating guitars sound vicious but also stricken, defiant but also beaten-down and clawing to survive. And as I’ve written above in this column’s intro, it also sounds otherworldly.
This song is from an album named Sleeping Under Clouds of Gripping Anguish. It will be released by Centipede Abyss on May 30th. It’s recommended FFO Oranssi Pazazu, Dissolve Patterns, Immortal.
https://centipedeabyss.bandcamp.com/album/sleeping-under-clouds-of-gripping-anguish
https://www.facebook.com/theblacnk/
LILLA VENEDA (Poland)
Late February saw the release of this Polish band’s third full-length, Primordial Movements. It’s one of many releases during the first four months of this year that I just haven’t had time to delve into, though it was on my list. What I did have time to delve into is a video released last week for the new album’s final song, “Pytasz co w moim Życiu“.
I can’t say this song is representative of the album as a whole, since I haven’t yet heard the album as a whole, but I found it fascinating. In its opening phase the snarling and screaming savagery of the vocals firmly roots them in the earth of black and death metal, but the airy ring of the guitars and keys, the big throb of the bass, and the mid-paced rocking cadence of the drums uproots the song from those grounds.
The music is mysterious and engaging, dreamlike and almost romantic, though with a kind of icy chill in its air that tingles the spine. However, the vocals become more tormented, and also bring in frightening gasps and dismal muttering, and tendrils of sorrow weave through the music as well. Eventually, the drums start hammering, and the melodic instruments, though they still glitter, channel unsettling turmoil.
The imagery in the thoroughly engrossing video makes for an excellent complement for the music. It also spurred me to find out what the song’s name means in my own native tongue, and according to google translate it means “You ask what’s going on in my life”. The answer seems to be loneliness and thoughts of death. (Interestingly, this seems to be the only song from the album at Bandcamp that doesn’t include the lyrics.)
The album’s fascinating cover art was prepared by Polish artist Anna Sobczak, and she also created visuals for a 20-page booklet that accompanies the album.
https://lillaveneda.bandcamp.com/album/primordial-movements
https://www.facebook.com/lillavenedaband
https://www.instagram.com/lilla_veneda/
GLACIAL MASS (Norway)
Now we come to the first of the two albums I picked for today’s column. It’s the creation of a Greek artist (Themistoklis Altintzoglou), who is now located in Tromsø, Norway and uses the pseudonym Θ (theta). I found this page online, which shows a wide range of creative output going back to the mid-’90s. For this album, The Passion, theta named the project Glacial Mass.
I’ll quote first from what appears from the label Gymnocal Industries at the Bandcamp page for the album:
The Passion, the flood, the decision to accept it flow through, is mundane. Not a miracle. Glorified narcissism; not a sign of holy modesty. Mere acceptance of survival instinct is no base for more than 2000 years of colonialist power, oppression and soul enslavement. No Gods, No Masters. No.
Glacial Mass is desolate, arctic, universally distant, and soul-capturing. If you have demons that you haven’t confronted yet, listen to Glacial Mass dressed in your strongest armour. The abyss will look back.
If pressed to sum up what attracts me to The Passion, I would say it’s the sheer immensity and unearthliness of the sounds.
Glacial Mass deploys towering waves of ambient sound, huge heaving undercurrents, cataclysmic percussive detonations, ephemeral swirling and whistling tones like searching tentacles of crystal and vapor, and ghastly gasping words, like the caustic utterances of some monstrous wraith, or strangling snarls and shrieks — all of it to seriously chilling effect.
To steer clear of monotony (though the music is so monumental and frightening, that’s not a huge risk), theta creates ebbs and flows of intensity, greater and lesser degrees of power and fear, and some variations in the speed and liveliness of the drumming, although the pacing usually remains at the speed of the slowest funeral doom.
Other sonic ingredients also emerge, such as daunting blasts that sound like the agonies of massed trombones, frenzied symphonic strings, the pulse and crash of abrasive electronic waves, the tolling of bells, siren-like wails, celestial shimmerings, and primitive ritual beats.
But to be clear, there’s no real relent in the music’s atmosphere of catastrophe and hopelessness. As the quotation above suggests, this is a long slow fall into an endless abyss. It manages to be mesmerizing and horrifying in equal measure.
https://xtxax.bandcamp.com/album/the-passion
CRYPTIC CHORUS (Ukraine)
Have a psychoactive smoke if you smoke, turn out the lights, and have a hand on a glass of strong spirits, or if you’re abstinent, a glass of blood, something you can raise to your lips without opening your eyes. Settle in, still your body, it’s your mind that will wander — through haunted woods, crumbing churches, archaic barren halls, and cemeteries still alive.
That’s my best advice about how to listen to Famines, plagues and wars, a new album by the Ukrainian entity Cryptic Chorus. It is a sublimely elegant and enchanting experience, but also the kind of thing that might make you feel as if you’ve crossed over into a different dimension, where the spirits of those whose lives were taken by the afflictions named in the album’s title still roam, pale and evanescent. They wander, they wonder, they bleed their grief in translucent ichor.
You will also feel as if you’ve encountered Death in all its cold, imperious glory and its many changing shapes, surveying with pride what it has wrought, and you may see dead decayed kings who believe they rule still and rotting queens who still perform minuets in gowns tattered by time.
The music is labeled Dungeon Synth, and I suppose it is. But the instrumentation sounds like the bowing of fiddles and an upright bass, the progressions of pinging chimes, the variations of a cathedral organ across its many keyboards, the belching of a tuba, the moody shivering of an oboe, the ring of bells, the distant rumble of timpani, the clap of a hide drum, maybe even the choral voices of solemn wraiths — and yes, the mystical shimmer of synths. It all sounds ancient, but with glimmers of the far future too.
The dark, medieval grandeur of the music becomes daunting. The moaning and wailing of it is stricken. The brightness of it is ghostly. It can lull you, enfolding you in the caress of a peasant mother who died long ago, all children lost before her but still yearning for an embrace. It can elevate you with the magisterial eminence of its brooding and brandishing atmospheres.
It beckons, like see-through emissaries with hands of mist and glittering eyes, deeper into a forest from which you’ll never return, because these dead want more than your memories, they want company too.
Yes, deeply enchanting and even exalting in a chilling way… but deeply frightening too. So, turn off the lights….
(Thanks to Miloš for pointing me to this remarkable sonic dream.)
https://crypticchorus.bandcamp.com/album/famines-plagues-and-wars