SHADES OF BLACK: DØDSFERD, DARKEND, LIMINAL SHROUD

I don’t have as many different things to share with you in this week’s edition of SHADES OF BLACK as I usually do, mainly because I’ve devoted most of my time to expressing detailed thoughts about a forthcoming record which I’ve found to be one of the most gripping black metal albums I’ve encountered so far this year.

After that, I’ve included a couple of recent singles that I also hope you’ll enjoy, both of which are fore-runners to eagerly anticipated albums that I haven’t yet heard in full.

DØDSFERD (Greece)

We’ll begin with the first two songs you can now hear from Wrath, the forthcoming 12th album by Dødsferd. The album’s title shares the name of the band’s founder and also describes the emotional energy that fuels much of the music.

“Restoration of Justice” opens the album in a blaze — layered guitars deliriously whirling, the bass thundering, the vocals scalding, and the drums delivering a furious barrage. It’s like being caught up in a vast whirlwind of flame, levitating the listener high into the air and sweeping us toward the horizon.

The raw and raging fury of the vocals is shattering, and the relentlessly dynamic riffing also segues from glorious delirium into darker and more despairing moods, though without diminishing the sizzling, rippling, and incendiary intensity of the guitars, which is relentlessly all-consuming. The drumming also repeatedly morphs — with rhythms that stalk, hammer, gallop, and blister.

It’s a breathtaking way to introduce the album. The other song you can hear now, “Spiritual Lethargy“, jumps ahead as the fourth track in the running order. Again, the guitars create a maelstrom of exhilarating intensity, coupled at first with an electrifying drum progression that booms.

The music whirls like a dance, elaborate and even elegant despite the scathing and scorching brazenness of the sound. And once again, although the serrated-edge vocals are never less than rabidly vicious and blood-spraying, unchained and unhinged, the emotional timbre of the music descends as well as ascends, channeling torment and turmoil as well as wild, spinning abandon.

How do these two songs fit within the album as a whole? What else happens around them? On the one hand, they represent the main line of the album as a whole, which could be considered a return to Dødsferd‘s roots. That main line is a variant of raw black metal that’s explosive, furious, and ravaging, but with a far greater role for emotionally evocative and vibrantly trilling melodies that drill themselves into the listener’s mind and heart.

The songs frequently spawn musical visions of glory and grandeur as well as visions of jubilant peasant dances and whirling dervishes surrendering sanity to their passions, all of it anchored by low-end thunder and propelled by viscerally powerful percussion, which sometimes sounds like an earthquake in progress.

On the other hand, as previously noted, the music also seamlessly shifts in its tonal qualities and paints vivid portraits of distress and agony.

There seems no other way, for example, to interpret the piercing ring of a melody that surfaces and repeatedly seizes attention within the storming assault of “Decay of Sanity“, easily one of the most gripping songs on the album for that very reason, or the wrenching impact of the abrasive drilling and the bereft chiming notes of the guitars in “Raging Lust of Creation“, which is both near-apocalyptic in its bleakness and feral in its lustful savagery (it’s also home to seriously shattering cries of terrible, spine-tingling passion and some heavy rocking grooves).

Those two songs provide emotional and musical contrasts in between the two songs you can hear now. The two songs that follow “Spiritual Lethargy” — “Heaven Drops with Human Filth” and “Failure Ablaze in Your Existence” — carry forward experiences of conflagration and calamity, sheer savagery and fracturing desolation, but interspersed with the livid pulse of gripping heavy metal chords (especially in the second of those songs, which closes the regular edition of the album).

The vinyl edition of Wrath includes an exclusive seventh song — “Back to My Homeland… A Beast in Calm“. Unlike the six preceding songs, in which Wrath was accompanied by long-time partner Neptunus on bass and N.D. on drums, this one is a collaboration between Wrath and m.Sarvok (sound design, bass, violin, and drum programming), both of whom collaborated before in 2023’s Asphyxiating Late Night Sessions.

You could consider that special song, which reaches 13 1/2 minutes in length, as an experimental piece, intricate and richly textured, elegant but frightening, like a strange hallucination, as if something that might happen if we were inhaling the vapors at ancient Delphi. The bubbling up of distorted spoken words and the ruination of tortured screams add to the atmosphere of a hellish dream, but the piece also includes a cornucopia of mysterious and mesmerizing tones, both electronic and acoustic, and different speakers in the song’s mid-section.

The song is fascinating, both disturbing and entrancing, and only tangentially related to black metal. It would merit a more detailed stand-alone review if released on its own. In other words, unlike many vinyl-only “bonus tracks”, it’s no throw-away or afterthought, but very much a generous gift well worth having.

As for the themes of the songs on Wrath, Dødsferd explains: “Wrath carries in its wake a vigorous indictment of the social and economic consequences of capitalism, political corruption, ecocide, and the largest argument against our civility – warfare”.

Wrath will be released by Hypnotic Dirge Records on May 10th, in variant vinyl formats, on CD, and digitally. A limited tape and digi-CD box-set will be released by the end of the year through Wrath‘s FYC Records. It features artwork by longtime Dødsferd collaborator George Gyzis.

https://hypnoticdirgerecords.bandcamp.com/album/wrath
https://fycrecords.com/distro
https://fycrecords.bandcamp.com/music

 

 

DARKEND (Italy)

To help fill out today’s column I’ve next chosen a lyric video for a new Darkend single named “An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments As Its Throne” (with thanks to DGR for bringing it to my attention).

There’s no time to take a breath before Darkend unleash a high-speed plague of crazed and caustic riffage, mad-goblin screams, and full-bore percussive thunder. The guitars feverishly roil and writhe, diseased and delirious, but also introduce chiming and swirling melodies of heartbreak and misery, as well as a magical guitar solo that wails and spirals high.

The racing momentum eventually slows, giving way to a spoken-word sample and to music that’s even more stricken and haunting — followed by another boiling over of striking intensity.

This song is the first single from the upcoming album Viaticum, which will be released on June 14th by Time To Kill Records.

https://timetokillrecords.com/en-us/collections/darkend
https://darkend.bandcamp.com/album/viaticum
https://www.facebook.com/darkendofficial

 

 

LIMINAL SHROUD (Canada)

For my final selection in today’s collection I picked a new single from a new album by Liminal Shroud from Victoria, BC (whose stunning previous album All Virtues Ablaze I had the pleasure of premiering and reviewing here two years ago).

The glittering and seductive acoustic-guitar instrumental and whispered words that open “Nucleonic Blight” create quite a sharp contrast with the furious assaults launched by Dødsferd and Darkend, but the music begins to build toward a different destination. The thump of the kick drum, the pounding of toms, clanging chords, and acid-drenched snarls create a depressive mood — and then the music crashes like waves of distress.

The riffing shimmers and blazes, fiery and vast, above rapidly changing rhythms and ear-shredding shrieks, but the overarching mood remains one of torment and despair, even when the music seems to tower, and especially when it becomes a frantic seizure of sound around furiously blasting drums and a hurtling bass.

Like warped bells, the guitars also chime and seem to cry out, even more wrenching than before, and then burn again in fevers of pain. More changes come, bringing moods of grief and gloom, yearning and hopelessness, while the rhythm section continue switching up their own contributions.

A remarkably elaborate and ever-changing song, it’s nonetheless constant in its channeling of dark moods — and a great precursor to an eagerly awaited third album from these western Canadians. The music suits the themes, as described by the band:

“Nucleonic Blight” speaks to humanity’s inherent flaws and futility… the inescapable determination to repeat and relive our rapacious desires, the memory of which lies in the soil of the earth, hangs in the firmament above, and runs through our veins, foreordained and inexorable.

The name of the album is Visions Of Collapse. It comes out on July 5th via Willowtip Records. It was mastered by Greg Chandler at Priory Recording Studios in the UK and includes artwork by Misanthropic Art.

https://willowtip.com/bands/details/liminal-shroud.aspx
https://liminalshroud.bandcamp.com/album/visions-of-collapse
https://www.facebook.com/liminalshroudofficial