(written by Islander)
Welcome to Part 5 of this evolving list of infectious metal songs from last year. I’m not sure there’s any kind of organizing principle that explains why I put the following three songs together in this latest installment. They felt right together even though they sound very different, but I don’t know why.
Anyway, I think you will enjoy them. To check out the preceding four Parts and to understand what this list is about, go here.
THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT
With tongues in cheeks but also sticking straight out, we’ve explained our difficulty in being entirely objective about The Monolith Deathcult. As Andy wrote in his review of their latest album, “We’ve been friends, we’ve been enemies… and then there was that unfortunate incident where we all swapped brains… but our love for the band’s music has never waned.”
Or as I wrote upon hearing that album’s title track last February: “With our long history slavishly lapping at the feet of The Monolith Deathcult, you didn’t really think we’d overlook the fact that they have a new album coming out or that they’ve released its title track, did you? Perish the thought!”
TMDC makes it easier to express ourselves in this way because they are themselves humorous and satirically self-deprecating (we see where their tongues are too), but as we’ve repeatedly reminded people, their music should never be missed.
They have a proven way of channeling, in spirit and sound, the big and bombastic glories of metal (as well as its darkness and ferocity) that make connections over many decades of heavy music while also continually popping up with surprising (and sometimes daft) accents that shouldn’t work but still seem to fit right in. The phrase “over the top” always seems to rise to the top, only because we’re too lazy to think of a substitute.
Their new album, The Demon Who Makes Trophies of Men, houses quite a few very infectious tracks (another thing you can also count on TMDC to deliver). I think the title song is the most infectious of those, and an easy choice for this list. Though I’ve already spilled a lot of words getting to the point, I’ll spill some more (now in the mood for excess). Here’s what Andy wrote about the song in that review:
If you haven’t already guessed… yes, it’s about one of the best movies of all time, and yes, it rules.
Sure, the band sometimes go a bit too far with the quotes and samples (the weird “bring the beat back” one in particular is utterly incongruous) but they’re clearly having a lot of fun with this one (who doesn’t love hearing a bunch of burly riffs and bombastic symphonics interspersed with the occasional “Get to the choppa!“?) and the way they actually incorporate some of the original orchestral score (that shift at 02:30 is fantastic) is sure to put a massive grin on your face if you’re a Predator fan (and, if you’re not… what’s wrong with you?).
And here’s my own frothy verbiage about the song:
What we can say from this title song is that you’d better fucking duck and cover.
Cannonades roar from the drumwork, and grooves come down like pile-drivers or air-burst detonations. The riffing discharges deranged darting fevers and gloriously blaring chords, like Hell’s own orchestra driven by the whip, but with exotically swirling and swaying melodies in the mix.
The words well up from guttural depths and explode into wolfish howls or growl like a feeding crocodile. Other tones flicker like firelight, squirm like maggots made of gold, and spasm in frantic bursts. Bombastic, brazen, baroque, and bizarre, the song is waaaay over the top, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
https://monolith-deathcult.bandcamp.com/track/the-demon-who-makes-trophies-of-men
http://www.facebook.com/monolithdeathcult
WARLUST
Every year all of us here and all of you out there fall in love with albums that “fly under the radar,” albums we feel don’t get the kind of attention and acclaim they deserve. In my case, one of those was Warlust‘s new album Sol Invictus in Umbrae Satanae.
I had the good fortune of diving deep into it because I agreed to host its full premiere last September. Even then, without having spent months with it, it had quickly become one of my favorite records of 2024. Forgive me for cribbing from the review I wrote:
…Warlust haven’t jettisoned black/thrash but I’ll be so bold as to say that the black/thrash label doesn’t do them justice anymore, and doesn’t really capture what makes the new album so fantastic. As I’ve read elsewhere, there’s as much classic Dissection and Necrophobic in the music as there is Desaster and Aura Noir, as much “sword and sorcery” as there is devils and hellfire….
What makes the new album so very fucking good is that Warlust keep doing this from one very good song to another, all the way to the end. They go crazy, they inflict brutal beatings, and they come for your jugular like wolves, but they also repeatedly send hearts and claws high with ravishing melodic spectacles….
There really are no weak links in this album, no “throwaway” songs to pad the track list. You could stab any one of them and come away stabbed, right through the head and heart. They might have even saved the best for last in the long closer, “Black Souls“. Though it’s difficult to pick a “best song” in an album-length cavalcade like this one, it might best display all of Warlust‘s formidable capabilities all at once (it also includes the album’s most completely stunning solo, as well as a beautiful (and still mythic) acoustic-guitar finale that comes right after).
That song “Black Souls” is the one from the album that I chose for this list. One of the reasons I picked it is because it includes one of the 2 or 3 best guitar solos I’ve heard on an extreme metal song all year (spoiler alert: there will be two more in Part 6 of this list tomorrow)
And it’s massively head-moving — hell, it massively moves the whole body.
https://dyingvictimsproductions.bandcamp.com/album/sol-invictvs-in-vmbrae-satanae
https://linktr.ee/warlust
https://www.facebook.com/Warlust666
URFEIND
Every time I do this list I get in a quandary about whether to consider songs released in the preceding year from albums that won’t be released until the current year, and I can never remember how I’ve resolved those quandaries in the past, so I have no idea whether I’ve been consistent. And here we are again.
The Urfeind song I want to include in this list was released near mid-December (through our premiere of the song at that time) as an advance track for an album (Dauþalaikaz) that won’t be out until January 10th (Friday of this week). So should I consider it a 2024 song or a 2025 song? You can see how I answered that question this time.
I’m going to again fall back on what I’ve already written:
“Weaving the Abyss” establishes a central melodic theme (a disturbing one) and then elaborates upon it in gripping ways that prove to be mesmerizing as well as continually unsettling. In some ways it’s brutal, in other ways poignant (and dare I say, even elegant). In some ways it’s cold and hopeless, in other ways heartbreaking and wretched, though the vocals are also vicious and vitriolic.
Mid-paced in its momentum, it’s announced by the throb of strummed riffing whose ringing, high/low harmony immediately creates a dark, dismal, and perilous mood, backed by the propulsion of rocking and snapping drums. Vocalist/guitarist Skadwaz also creates a reverberating vocal harmony — a terrorizing one consisting of fanatical screams and tyrannical roars.
A lead guitar periodically cries out, flickering and wailing, adding to the song’s morbid and unearthly atmosphere, which dramatically intensifies as the riffing feverishly rises and double-bass rumbles arrive.
The lead guitar also vibrantly trills and slowly swirls in an extended solo, soulful but also almost desperate in the anguish it channels through the high-flying cycles of riffing, but still connected to the song’s evolving theme.
The intensity builds and builds, driven even further by a throbbing and thrumming bass and a percussive gallop, and never collapses but only fades away. And by then you may realize that the song’s central theme has buried itself in your head so deeply that it keeps going even when there’s nothing more to hear.
https://ninetozero.de/
https://urfeind.bandcamp.com/album/dau-alaikaz
https://www.facebook.com/urfeind