(written by Islander)
Sad to say, this Sunday’s column is much shorter than usual. I got a late start on it, but the bigger explanation is that early tomorrow I’m flying to my former stomping grounds in Texas to be at a Tuesday memorial service for a close friend and vital mentor, with an even earlier flight back to Seattle the next day. That means I need to get a head-start today on premieres I had agreed to host over the next three days before my old friend’s passing following a long illness.
STYGIAN (Italy)
Metal-Archives lists 10 bands from around the world with the name Stygian, which isn’t surprising, given the meaning of that name. I’m sure some of them are defunct, though I didn’t try to find out how many.
The Stygian I’ve chosen to begin today’s small collection is an Italian group whose debut album Dreadlands is set for release by Time To Kill Records on July 4th. M-A classifies their music as “Groove/Death Metal/Crust,” though that’s not what I’m hearing in the video for their song “Spirit in the Mist“. What I’m hearing is closer to an amalgam of crust and black metal.
The song discharges slashing and vividly swirling guitars that are simultaneously furious and tormented, backed by piston-like drum hammering and fronted by scalding screams that amplify the music’s stressful emotional intensity.
The tremolo’d swirl of the lead guitar is bright, clear, and electrifying, but the riffing also shifts into a more punk-like direction, and the vocals shift too — into singing with a bit of a dark post-punk resonance.
The music continues changing. It significantly softens, yielding the floor to a gentle and somber solo guitar melody and harsh gasping snarls, but then Stygian ramp up the intensity again, hammering and swarming but also causing the music to become both more expansive and more wretched.
Here’s Stygian‘s explanation of the song and video:
“Spirit in the Mist” tells the story of a torment that never fades.
The narrator — the killer of the figure evoked in the song — is haunted by the presence of the woman’s spirit. Shrouded in mist, she returns without leaving a trace, yet she leaves deep wounds within him.
Torn between denial and remorse, he tries to bury the past, forcing himself not to remember, not to return, not to look. But guilt lives on, and the spirit keeps walking.
No forgiveness. No peace. Only the voice of the wind… and a presence that refuses to be forgotten.Because in the end, you cannot escape what you’ve done. The real punishment doesn’t come from outside — it comes from your own conscience.
https://timetokillrecords.com/en-us/collections/stygian-dreadlands
https://stygian-official.bandcamp.com/album/dreadlands
https://www.facebook.com/stygianbhc
https://www.instagram.com/stygianbhc
OSMIUM (Int’l)
The press materials we received for Osmium‘s self-titled debut album are extensive, to put it mildly. Much of them are devoted to the musical backgrounds of the four international performers and the numerous accolades they’ve received. I wasn’t familiar with any of them, and I’m not sure how many died-in-the-wool metalheads would be, but their resumes did make me feel like I ought to check out what they’ve done together, even though I wasn’t expecting the music would fit what we tend to focus on here.
I won’t repeat everything I’ve read about Osmium‘s members. Here’s the short version:
Oscar-winning Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, who plays the “halldorophone,” described as “a unique cello-like electroacoustic instrument” designed by Halldór Úlfarsson “that allows the performer to harness unstable feedback loops.”
James Ginzburg (of emptyset and Subtext) “producing booming tambura-like sonorities from a device he developed himself based on the monocord, an ancient single-stringed resonator.”
Grammy-winning producer and sound designer Sam Slater, generating rhythms “using a self-oscillating drum he custom designed with KOMA Elektronik.”
Indonesian vocalist Rully Shabara (Senyawa), “one of South Asia’s most recognizable underground artists”, whose “exhaustively rehearsed extended techniques are so distinctive that he’s been studied by scientists back home in Indonesia.”
So, perhaps now you understand why I was curious about the music. What I’ve heard so far are the two tracks now available for streaming at Bandcamp.
The longer of the two, “Osmium 1“, is in some ways primitive and ritualistic and in other respects futuristic and alien. The music powerfully pounds and strangely warps. What I assume is the bowing of the halldorophone sounds close to the rhythmic throb of a jaw harp. Other tonalities emerge and recede like knives scraping on sheet metal or the harsh breathing of wraiths or the twisting and turbulence of something very heavy that wasn’t meant to bend.
The vocals are the most alien (and frightening) aspect of the music. They range from extravagant chant-like wails to harrowing gasps, possessed screams, and bursts of howls abruptly cut off. But honestly, its often hard to know what’s what here — what are the vocals and what are the instruments. They often blend together, arms locked in their strange and sometimes violent expulsions.
All in all, it’s an unsettling and hallucinatory piece, but although it’s disorienting it practices a strange kind of captivating hypnosis on the listener.
“Osmium 4“, the shorter of the two, is perhaps even more hallucinatory, or at least more nightmarish. It does have a ticking rhythm in it, but not the big primal grooves of the earlier piece. Again, it’s hard to separate vocals from instrumentation. Everything sounds like we’ve crossed some inter-dimensional barrier and are now in the midst of tormented spectres and hungry shapeless black things that hover just at the edge of our feeble lantern.
Well, these two tracks alone revel in unorthodoxy, and even though you can’t call this black metal, or maybe even any kind of metal, maybe you’ll understand why I thought it was a fitting addition to SHADES OF BLACK.
Osmium will be released on June 20th by Invada Records UK.
https://osmiumosmium.bandcamp.com/album/osmium
DEATHWINDS (Canada)
I felt like I ought to include at least one complete new record before leaving you today. I was sitting on a lot of new albums that I could choose from, accumulated over recent weeks, so of course I picked one I hadn’t heard about until yesterday — yet another sign that I have poor impulse control. Here’s the pitch from Headsplit Records that impelled me to dive in:
Deathwinds return with TOWARDS DOOM, their first full-length assault of ripping black death! Eleven tracks of nihilistic metal loaded with violent riffing, obliterating drums and scathing vocals, drawn from the most poisonous bloodlines of black death, pestilent thrash and rabid punk. Towards Doom is a hateful attack from members of Ceremonial Bloodbath, Radioactive Vomit, Temple of Abandonment, and Grave Infestation. Black fucking knifing metal, til the bloody death!
Indulging a bit of self-psychoanalysis, I know why that description hooked me: Because most of what I’ve seen while doom-scrolling my various news feeds in recent days has left me feeling enraged, even after feeling pumped up by seeing how many people took to the streets in nationwide protests yesterday. For better or worse, Towards Doom has been cathartic.
I knew something about the band’s music before indulging this debut album. I listened to their debut EP Endless Wastelands back in 2014, which prompted this verbal outpouring:
There’s so much grime in these gears, so much raw wretched howling in the vocals, so much bone-crunching doom in the slow parts, and so much ravenous meat-cleaving animosity in the rockin’ parts. Vancouver is already one of the ground-zero places in the world for blackened death metal infection, and it has just become even more virulent.
That was a long time ago, of course, and a long time passed before their second release, the well-named Ripping Annihilation EP in 2023. Thankfully, they have followed up pretty quickly.
The paragraphs above provide pointers to what’s in store for you — but give no clue to the ethereal and mesmerizing way the album begins. The clues are more on-point once Deathwinds get beyond that short intro piece and start serving up the bloody red meat of the matter.
They deploy riffage slathered with sonic filth, pierced by more clear-toned guitar-shrieking or squalling and undergirded by prominent and also relatively clear-toned bass permutations. The drumming quickly seizes attention and keeps it seized, veering rapidly among patterns of metal and punk, among bouts of galloping, bounding, somersaulting, and piston-like pumping, and furious blasting.
The riffage is ugly and malicious, but the vocals are uglier and more malicious still, like a pack of snarling, barking, and baying hell-hounds furiously trying to get at our throats while being choked with spiked chains (chains that are about to get pulled out of the wall). There’s also a passage when they sound like the terrible wails of torture victims.
The songs are mostly compact, but include more variations than you might be expecting, both instrumentally and in their moods and visions, which include carnivorous ecstasies, cold sadistic cruelty, blood-congealing miseries, hulking and heaving monstrosities, eruptions of insectile swarming, and the knife-swinging frolics of demon punks.
The music sounds loose and lurid, but the band are pretty locked in as they make their frequent shifts in tempo, rhythms, and riffing. And the frequency of the shifts means that the album doesn’t become monotonous, which tends to be a risk with most bestial back/death. To further avert that outcome, the album also includes some instrumental interludes, one freakish and one almost medieval (or they might be song-intros or outros) and some headbangable stomps.
Towards Doom was mixed and mastered by New Zealander Nathan Hutchinson. It’s out now on CD and cassette tape from Headsplit Records. An LP vinyl edition will be released at some point by Sentient Ruin. (No Bandcamp yet.)
https://headsplitrecords.storenvy.com/
https://www.facebook.com/headsplitrecords/
https://www.instagram.com/deathwinds666/