Gaahls WYRD – photo by Jørn Veberg
(written by Islander)
It’s good to have friends. Friends can give you useful advice. Sometimes friends can also give you advice that makes you think, “I wish they hadn’t said that.” Case in point:
Since the middle of last week my wife has been 1,100 miles from where we live visiting her favorite sister. Home alone, I spent way more than the usual amount of time yesterday getting ready for this column. I listened to bits and pieces of 30 new releases, most of them singles and some of them EPs or albums. I picked 10 of them for today that I thought provided a good amount of variety. I even arranged them in a way I thought made sense.
I was so happy that I shared the list with my old friends Andy and DGR. Between the two of them they then pointed out 4 more new songs that I’d missed, all from known culprits we all like. Fuck me, what to do?
Even before that I was taking a risk running out there with 10 releases. People might see that and think, “I don’t have time for this,” and then not listen to any of it. But packing in 14? That would be like running into freeway traffic. What to do?
I could ignore my friends. I could shove those 4 into the bottom end of what I’d arranged, 14 in all. Or I could divide this roundup into two parts. So you see the decision I made. I made one more decision: Rather than putting those 4 additional songs at the end of Part 2, I made them bookends, with 2 of them preceding the 3 remaining songs I’d already selected and 2 at the end.
I haven’t written Part 2 at this point, so I won’t guarantee you’ll see it today. But I’m going to try, because I’ve also made choices for tomorrow’s Shades of Black that I want to get to. I’m not going to tell my friends what those are.
GAAHLS WYRD (Norway)
Gaahl has a fascinating singing voice, capable of a great range of tonal and emotional expressions. It’s relatively subdued in “Time and Timeless Timeline“, the newest song from Gaahls WYRD, most often like a ghostly and gritty wail. In the good accompanying video, you can sense him summoning inner pain.
It’s not the major thing that makes the song so killer. That’s down to the frantic, hook-laden riffing, the exhilarating drumwork, the way the music sears as well as gets the pulse pumping fast, the way it creates sinister grandeur when shrill cascades emerge in the upper reaches.
So many things happen in the song, every damned one of them fantastic, including the way Gaahl‘s voice creates a contrast with all the addictive propulsiveness around it. Heavy metal gold….
The song is off the new Gaahls WYRD album Braiding the Stories, which comes out June 6th on Season of Mist.
https://orcd.co/gaahlswyrdbraidinggthestories
https://www.facebook.com/gaahlswyrd/
IMPERISHABLE (Sweden)
Imperishable‘s new album Swallowing the World came out yesterday on Hammerheart Records. I meant to listen to all of it, but just ran out of time. What I did see and hear was their video for the album’s opening song “Bells“. If the rest of the album is as good as this one, I will be rapturous.
The song’s bass-led, synth-backed overture is intriguing, and the slow opening riff is a sad, doom-saturated thing. When the song picks up that melody and runs with it, fingers flying and drums galloping, it’s electrifying.
Raw snarls and further variations in the melody dig the hooks in deeper as the band straddle an emotional line between frenzied desperation and soul-plundering grief. And at the 2:30 mark the guitars start darting and swirling, digging in another big heart-pounding hook. The vocals go wilder, the song reaches a burning finale, and it leaves this listener hungry for more.
Hammerheart describes the album as one that dives into the sonic territory carved out by pioneers like Necrophobic, Death, At the Gates, and Dissection (among others), and you can pick up some of those influences in “Bells“.
https://hammerheart.bandcamp.com/album/swallowing-the-world
https://www.facebook.com/imperishableband/
MY DEMENTIA (Portugal)
Next up is a longer and more lugubrious song than the first two in today’s collection. I didn’t read the following statement about the album that includes it until after I succumbed to “Gloom’s Light“, but I think it’s worth sharing before you listen:
This record has some quite of a story behind. Tragically, the frontman Miguel has passed away during the mixing sessions and never got his work finished. The production of the album was finished later on by the rest of the band members, including his younger brother Vasco. This album now stands as a tribute to his life and work, immortalizing his voice and artistry. Miguel’s spirit will live on forever in this work — in every note and in every lived and unlived memory: “In the deep of the abyss / The past of an unlived life / A future that hurts even more / Nothing to live for / A soul rotting / In a pending life”.
The frontcover artwork for the album is also revealed and shows a mask that Miguel was using for his treatments.
“Gloom’s Light” is a soul-stricken fashioning of slow-moving doom that’s immensely heavy and equally jolting, but it also revs up into a thundering and plundering assault marked by mauling riffage, hammering beats, and Miguel‘s humongous and harrowing grit-caked growls.
As the song further unfolds, the pacing repeatedly shifts. A haunting melody slowly wails like lost spirits above deep thudding rhythmic blows, and Miguel sings his grief and gloom in deep and equally haunting tones. As the music heaves and crawls, My Dementia also bring in eerily drifting spectral melodies and and gruesome gurgling growls, but they again slug hard and the vocals wretchedly howl. They’ve created an earth-shaker and a ghost-invoker.
“Gloom’s Light” owes a clear debt to the early Peaceville Three, but it’s a debt the band repay with interest. It’s the first single from My Dementia‘s debut studio album Premonição: só me arrependo do que não vivi. It will be released by Caverna Abismal on May 8th.
https://cavernaabismal.bandcamp.com/album/my-dementia-premoni-o-s-me-arrependo-do-que-n-o-vivi
https://www.facebook.com/mydementiaband/
ORTHODOX (U.S.)
I inserted this next song here for the contrast it creates with the one before it. With naught but a shrill and siren-like string-squeal as prelude, it delivers a merciless pounding, a rhythmically compulsive, bunker-busting bludgeoning.
And that is mainly what the song does from beginning to end: It delivers heavy-grooved atonal sonic piledrivers. As accompaniment, Orthodox deliver raw and wrathful snarls, maddened cries, grim pronouncements, additional bursts of weirdly squealing and freakishly swarming fretwork, and vivid percussive outbursts.
Sometimes you need a ruthlessly brutish bludgeoning for your angry catharsis. “Sacred Place” did it for me today. It’s from this Nashville metallic hardcore band’s album A Door Left Open, which will be released on June 6th by Century Media.
https://orthodox.lnk.to/ADoorLeftOpen-AlbumPR
https://www.facebook.com/orthodoxtn
A FLOCK NAMED MURDER (Canada)
This Toronto band’s forthcoming second album Incendiary Sanctum, which will arrive about 6 1/2 years after their full-length debut (An Appointed Time), is one I’ve been meaning to devote full attention to, but I’ve only managed to catch up to the two songs publicly released so far.
But those two songs also require (and command) a significant amount of attention. The latest one, “To Drown In Obsidian Tides“, premiered at Decibel last week. It’s 17 1/2 minutes long. The first one, “Pierced Flesh Catharsis“, requires about 13 minutes of your time.
Both of them are viscerally powerful mood-makers and mood-changers, and so they can be called “atmospheric”, but equally they are heart-pounders and relentless stylistic pattern-shifters, and they’re constructed around riffs that pierce and lodge like those Hellraiser hooks.
The music flows and sweeps, charges and jolts, feverishly sears and poignantly (and gloomily) softens, and even seems to ring like astral chimes. The riffing derives from a spectrum of black metal, death metal, and post-metal, with backwoods folk accents in the mix. The drumming is both volatile and measured, and its continual changes would seize all the attention if everything else weren’t so gripping. The vocals roar and scream, violently cry out and seem to be strangling.
As both songs ebb and flow, they become increasingly immersive. Imagery of rivers comes to mind, waters that wind along a course that leads them to crash through frightening rapids, drift beneath the dense overhang of willows, expand in daunting grandeur between widened shores, and descend beneath stone arches into subterranean depths.
As mentioned, the moods are equally variable, mostly stricken in different ways but also expressive of yearning, peaceful reflection, resilience, and damned-if-I-do, damned-if-I-don’t, defiance.
The entire album is an hour long. The opener “Garden of Embers” lasts for more than 14 1/2 minutes. The third song “The Eulogy Fields” is just shy of 19 minutes. I will have to find the right space of time, free of distractions, to experience those. I expect they’ll be just as stunning as the two you can hear now.
Incendiary Sanctum will be released by Hypaethral Records on May 2nd. They recommend it for fans of Agalloch, Neurosis, Inter Arma, Ulver, Fen, The Ruins Of Beverast, Ulcerate, and Cult Of Luna. Based on what I’ve heard so far, those are good reference points.
https://hypaethralrecords.bandcamp.com/album/incendiary-sanctum
https://www.facebook.com/AmongTheFlock
https://www.instagram.com/aflocknamedmurder
DISPYT (Finland)
About one month ago I got the very nice surprise of discovering that Dispyt had a new album on the way, and the equally exciting surprise of seeing that they’d released a first single. To quote from what I quickly ejected after hearing it:
“The guitars in this new song of crusty blackened death metal, ‘Livslustens katakomber‘, are tuned to teeth-chattering levels of abrasion, all the better to make the riffing into a ruinous battering ram and a scathing swarm. Mathias Lillmåns‘ snarling vocals are predictably nasty as hell, and the neck-snapping beats provide a vivid drive.
“The song charges in a blood-pumping, head-hooking rampage but also downshifts into a much more doomed and agony-soaked phase, right before a guitar solo that miserably wails after Dispyt give the song the gas again.”
Late last week Dispyt unveiled a video for another song off the album, “Men sist och slutligen handlar ju ändå allting om döden“. Google tells me this means “But in the end, it’s all about death”. Who could argue with that?
And here we have another metal-punk marauder, with scavaging riffing that’s filthied up with chainsawing distortion, bowel-loosening bass undulations, a dismally boiling lead guitar, pumping punk beats, and screaming-bloody-murder vocals.
But let’s not forget the song’s title. As adrenaline-fueling as the song is, it becomes a very bleak affair, with that whirring lead guitar melody taking over and burrowing into listeners’ minds (defenseless to what it’s doing) with deleterious effects.
The name of the new album is Från melankoli till meningslöshet. It will be released through Elitbolaget on April 29th. If you go to Bandcamp you can listen to four digital bonus tracks and one more new song, “Tomhetens madrigal“.
If you don’t know, Dispyt‘s lineup includes Mathias Lillmåns (bass and lead vocals) from …And Oceans and Finntroll (to name just two) and three current or former members of Ondfødt — Owe Inborr (guitars, vocals) and Tommi Tuhkala (drums), plus Juuso Englund in some of the songs (including the one below) on lead guitar.
https://elitbolaget.bandcamp.com/album/fr-n-melankoli-till-meningsl-shet
https://www.facebook.com/DispytBand
FAMILY GARDEN (U.S.)
To close Part 1 of today’s roundup I decided to stay with a blackened metal/crust punch-up, though it’s different from what Dispyt are doing.
By way of background, though it’s not much, I’ve read that Family Garden are a Philadelphia-based trio that features members of YDI, Eat The Turnbuckle, Crackhouse, Woods of Ypres and Woe.
I’ve also seen that Strange Mono Records, which will release their new sophomore album Dreams Beyond Control, is a charity label, and that all their proceeds from this album will go to the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society. That made me more interested to find out what Family Garden are getting up to.
Based on “Blazing Emerald Sky“, the album’s second single that premiered at Decibel last week, what they’re getting up to is massive and head-spinning savagery — a heaving surge of riffage that’s tank-like in its heaviness and scarring in its tone, driven by a percussive engine that’s riotously fast but shifts gears on a dime.
The mauling and the mayhem are coupled with a tandem of raw and rabid vocals that seem on the verge of splintering into bloody shards, as well as bursts of high-fever fretwork, braying chords, and blasting drums — plus strangely warbling bass lines, swaths of wondrous but otherworldly melody, and something like a banjo being strummed in the final seconds. That’s a hell of a lot to happen in just a bit more than 2 minutes.
The first single from the album was “Lost Gods“. You’ll find it below the pre-order link. Perhaps needless to say, it’s just as much of a head-spinning trip as that newer single. I got mental images of a deranged Big Band, of blizzards capable of cutting flesh, of menacing titans rising from the earth, of punks bouncing off each other on grimy concrete, of criminally insane inmates who’ve taken over the asylum.
Strange Mono will release the album on April 25th.
https://strangemono.bandcamp.com/album/dreams-beyond-control