SEEN AND HEARD: CRYPT SERMON, CULT BURIAL, AMIENSUS, DEFACEMENT, TETRAGRAMMACIDE, BEYOND MORTAL DREAMS, BRUXIST

(written by Islander)

As usual I had a lot to choose from for this Saturday’s roundup. I gravitated to six bands whose music I and/or others at NCS have showered with past praise, but chose to end it with one band’s first release.

Geographically you’ll bounce back and forth across the Atlantic, take a trip to the Indian subcontinent, and then go further west and south to Australia for the final two records. Your head will probably bounce around a lot as you go through the music too.

 

CRYPT SERMON (U.S.)

Capitalizing on their burgeoning success, Crypt Sermon will release an EP named Saturnian Appendices in August through Dark Descent. It’s described as three original songs recorded during The Stygian Rose album sessions, including a track called “Lachrymose” that was released in the Decibel Flexi Series, plus a cover of Mayhem’s “De Mysteriis Doom Sathanas” (also released as part of the Flexi Series back in 2017, with T.T. of Abigor as a guest vocalist).

What surfaced this past week for the first time was a lyric video for another one of the original songs, the EP opener “Only Ash and Dust“. Over nearly 8 minutes the music initially evolves from vaporous and glittering sounds of mysterious eeriness to hard-slugging heaviness and a frantically wailing and deliriously convulsing guitar solo, and from there to elevations of infernal grandeur.

It’s a hell of a way to begin, and becomes even more hellish when demonic vocals arrive, straddling a high line between devilish screeching and extravagant singing. The music viscerally rumbles and jolts but also ominously towers, and the scintillating lead-guitar performances continue flashing like lightning.

And there’s more! The band punch the accelerator, drums hammering and the soloing reaching new heights of fret-burning glory, but they also suddenly decelerate in order to bring forward visions of hulking horror, and then rise up for a finale of daunting, breathtaking magnificence. In a word, the song is stunning (including the lyrics).

The EP is being offered in different formats by both Dark Descent and Decibel (check the links below for more info).

https://www.darkdescentrecords.com/shop/
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/saturnian-appendices
https://store.decibelmagazine.com/products/crypt-sermon-saturnian-appendices
https://www.facebook.com/CryptSermon/

 

CULT BURIAL (UK)

The still criminally underrated Cult Burial duo of Simon Langford and César Moreira will be releasing a new album on September 5th named Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust. It follows their 2020 self-titled debut full-length and their 2023 album Reverie of the Malignant, both of which are still well worth your time. It sure sounds like the new one will be worth the time too. I base that on the new album’s first single, “Collapse“.

It quickly creates a mood of despondency and then turns the music into a manifestation of menace and despair through the contrasting union of enormous low-frequency undulations and shrill quivering radiations, coupled with skull-popping beats. This is all prelude to a savage, jolting, blood-pumping attack, which in turn is prelude to fretwork that dismally moans and feverishly skitters, fronted by malicious roars and rabid screams.

Eerie wailing tones continue to spiral through the music’s upper reaches, and the song’s expanse overall becomes more vast, even as the drums and the guitars continue veering among sequences of madness, mauling, and morbid misery. The vocals also reach further zeniths of terrifying intensity, right along with riffage that again delivers furiously jolting grooves and bursts of circle-saw evisceration.

Cult Burial pack a hell of a lot into this elaborate jaw-dropper of a song, everything sharply executed. I also want to quote the song’s lyrics, which are poetic but harrowing:

In the serene dusk of collapsing ambitions,
The burden of scars left by demise still lingers.
Wandering through shattered realms of reflection,
Where dreams dissolve, and silence swallows all desire.

In the roots of confinement, the collapse prevails,
Embraced by depletion as every hope derails.
Breathe in, exhale, repeat—collapse.

The hourglass strains to grasp the shape of fading time,
A pendulum swings violently between almost and never.
Wandering through shattered realms of reflection,
Where dreams dissolve, and silence swallows all desire.

In the roots of confinement, the collapse prevails,
Embraced by depletion as every hope derails.

Within the cadence of despair, the soul finds its refrain.
The walls of desolation bear the scars of suffering,
Carved by the relentless march of eternal obscurity.
In the murmurs of catastrophe, silence screams its fate.

Breathe in, exhale, repeat—collapse.

Beneath a bleeding sky of fractured dread,
A restless ache consumes each fleeting breath.

I’ll also share this evocative description of the album from a press release: “Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust is a record about erosion — of structures, of certainty, of meaning. Across eight tracks, Cult Burial tears through the frameworks we cling to, carving out something that sits between aggression and despair, weight and absence. The music is dense and layered, yet unafraid of space; at times claustrophobic, at others stripped to bare wire and exposed edge.”

https://cultburial.bandcamp.com/album/collapse-of-pattern-reverence-of-dust
https://www.facebook.com/cultburial

 

AMIENSUS (U.S.)

It’s Pride weekend, and this year it arrives in a socio-political environment that’s increasingly hostile to what Pride stands for, both here in Trumpist America and in other places round the world dominated by divisive, hate-fueled, right-wing regimes. In this deplorable context Minneapolis-based Amiensus just released a new single called “We Still Bloom“, and songwriter James Benson provided this introduction:

This one is special, and we’re not afraid to show where our support is. I shouldn’t have to explain how in today’s political landscape, standing with Pride is more important than ever. With LGBTQ+ rights under threat in our country, showing up with love, support, and acceptance helps push back against hate and remind people they’re not alone.

More to come yet this year, but we hope you’re enjoying our two singles this far!

And yes, this is the second Amiensus single released so far this year, the first one being “Fields of Emerald Fire” (discussed here). This new one shows a very different side of Amiensus than the year’s first single (but they’ve always had many sides to show).

Where that first one delivered a scathing black metal storm of torment and despair, leavened with passages of melancholy and heart-break, the new one deploys acoustic instruments, shining piano keys, a simple thumped drum, a moodily murmuring bass, and gently gasped words to create a more uplifting experience, an experience of wonder, though still poignantly tinged with melancholy.

The song also brings in deep bowing tones (like those of a cello or upright bass), heartfelt singing of hopeful words, and busily shimmering frequencies that cause the music to swell and to become even more mesmerizing. I suppose you could label this one “neo-folk”, or simply “beautiful”.

https://amiensus.bandcamp.com/track/we-still-bloom
https://www.facebook.com/Amiensus/

 

DEFACEMENT (Int’l)

WARNING: Moving from that last song to this next one may induce mental whiplash.

My friend Mr. Synn described the music on Defacement‘s 2024 album Duality as “duplicitous, dichotomous, and devastating.” I called it “shapeshifting” and “brain-boggling,” a display of “extravagant and intricate insanity.” Letting no grass grow beneath their busy feet, Defacement have already made another album named Doomed that will be released this coming August and, very hot off the presses, the first advance track erupted this morning.

All those words quoted above apply again to “Worthless“. Wasting no time, it explodes into an extraordinary cavalcade of wildly veering fretwork, sharply executed but exuberantly cavorting drums, and beastly vocals. The guitars jubilantly scream, skitter like ants in flames, maniacally swirl, and dart like swallows in flight (among other things).

The tempo changes without warning, and as it slows, the music becomes more flowing, more seductive, unearthly in a different way, but still scary, thanks in part to a startling, shrieking guitar solo. Somehow the vocals manage to stay in harness with the extraordinary madness of the music, which is to say that while they’re relentlessly nightmarish, they manifest different ways of inflicting terror.

Calling this sonic spectacle “kaleidoscopic” understates the case, yet much like a rapidly turning kaleidoscope, the many moving parts fall into place often enough, and close enough to the same places, to create cohesion. This is one of those songs that’s mainly just head-spinning and eye-popping the first time through, and requires a great deal more run-throughs to really appreciate what these ingeniously unorthodox people have accomplished.

Doomed will be released on August 22nd by Avantgarde Music’s death metal division Unorthodox Emanations. It was re-amped, mixed and mastered by Brendan Sloan (Convulsing), with additional engineering work by Gabriele Gramaglia (Cosmic Putrefaction), both of whom know a thing or two about musical insanity.

https://avantgardemusic.bandcamp.com/album/doomed
https://www.facebook.com/officialdefacement

 

TETRAGRAMMACIDE (India)

On September 26th Iron Bonehead Productions will release a new EP from Tetragrammacide, though like the Crypt Sermon EP at the top of this roundup it consists of songs recorded a while back. In this case, the songs were recorded in 2017 and 2018, in the temporal vicinity of the band’s 2017 debut album, Primal Incinerators of Moral Matrix, “as part of a new paramilitant theosophic movement within the cloaked order of Kalikshetra Raktachakra, the hidden nexus of Kolkata Inner Order” (so the band say).

Tetragrammacide do love to play with words, lots of them, to render peculiar titles of obscure meaning. The new EP’s name, for example, is Cyber-Tantric Paradigm of Radical Sri-Vidya. And here are the EP’s song titles:

1. Multi-Armed Bellicosity Of Babalon-Durga Riding On The Xeno-Beast Of Grand Apocalypse To Trigger The Outbreak Of A Pan-Dimensional Holy Pogrom

2. Techno-Tehomic Invocation Of Malignant Shadow Shakti On The World.Wide.Web. Of Internet

3. Astro-Theological Gomaya Initiation With The Sacred Excretion Of Hawking Radiation Emitting From The Universe’s Anus

What we got this week was a stream of the first of those three tracks. It begins with fanatical spoken-word declamations backed by shrill sizzling sensations, a vocal sample of unknown origin to me. This goes on for about a minute 45, and then with zero warning Tetragrammacide go off like a blast front, drums firing with inhuman speed, the bass thundering, the guitars furiously slashing and boiling, the vocals roaring and ravaging.

Dissonant and demented notes slowly and dismally slither through the violent turbulence; fretwork fevers also break out; both the bass and the drums veer off in their own crazed directions but can be relied on to get things back on course (or different courses). The riffage remains pure madness — spectacularly fleet-fingered, spectacularly riotous, delivered as if possessed.

Someone might have to remind you to close your mouth when this thing ends.

https://ironbonehead.de/
https://tetragrammacide.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/tetragrammacide

 

BEYOND MORTAL DREAMS (Australia)

“Bestial,” “bulldozing,” “thunderously dense, “megaton energy” — those are among the descriptions offered by Lavadome Productions for the just-released new EP Devastation Hymns by Australia’s Beyond Mortal Dreams. That’s all truth in advertising, but it doesn’t completely capture everything the music provides.

For one thing, the guitar-work is intricate and technically eye-popping, as are the rhythm section’s performances, and the vocals (both guttural and shrieking) are berserk. The music is frequently head-exploding to hear, perhaps especially when a guitar solo flares up and screams like a flame-thrower that’s become sentient and then lost its mind.

The music’s violent savagery is just about off the charts, but the songs are also packed to the brim with riffing permutations, drumming variations, dazzling wisps of diabolical melody, and brazen fanfares of infernal majesty.

Really, everything about the music is dazzling, including the band’s success in keeping these slaughtering high-speed centrifuges from completely flying off their bearings, thanks to repeating fretwork motifs and bone-shaking grooves.

The one thing the band don’t provide is any fair chance for a listener to catch their breath. But the thing is, the music is so extraordinarily mind-bending, so unhinged yet machine-precise in its exuberance, that it manages not to wear out its welcome or to induce exhaustion in the listener (or at least not this one), despite the fact that on a first listen it’s difficult to quickly distinguish one song from the next.

Having said that, “Bred for Possession” does stand out for me, in part because there’s something in it that resembles wraithlike, spine-tingling singing, and in part because it’s home to one of the record’s most jaw-dropping guitar solos and a fiendishly skittering and enticingly exotic riff that gets its hooks in the head.

One final note: The EP ends with Beyond Mortal Dream‘s cover of “Forbidden Evil” by Forbidden, which features very different vocals from everything else (really good vocals!), and represents a change in other respects too as the band shift into thrashing mode – but still managing to spin heads with their soloing. It’s a killer cover of a killer song.

(The EP includes the contributions of session drummer Henry Inglis, who needs to be specifically named because his performance is so stellar.)

https://lavadome.bandcamp.com/album/devastation-hymns
https://facebook.com/beyondmortaldreams

 

BRUXIST (Australia)

I got this e-mail from David at Viral Propaganda (with a P.S. that said “Sorry in advance to your neighbors”):

Bruxist is the unholy alliance of Aussie underground lifers Terry Vainoras, Dan Nahum, and Dav Byrne and their debut album is a filthy, crusty, d-beat-soaked, Stockholm death rock’n’roll monster built to wreck speakers and good moods alike. It’s short, fast, raw, and kind of smells like blood and petrol. In other words: we thought of you.

Aww, it’s nice to be thought of, especially in the context of music such as this. And of course, with a come-on like that I eagerly listened to Bruxist‘s self-titled debut. It was digitally released by the band in April but will get a tape release by Gutter Prince Cabal on July 19th.

Finding myself short of time, I’m not able to add a great deal to what I’ve already quoted above. What I will add is this:

These songs have explosive energy, razor-sharp drumming, subterranean bass turbulence, madhouse vocal intensity, and riffing that’s scathing enough to sandblast the paint off concrete walls. The songs pack a visceral punch; they’re real brawlers; but they incorporate variations in both beats and riffage, as well as mood (for a strong example of that, check out what happens in “Six Feet Headfirst”), and Bruxist know how to embed their songs with hooks too.

It’s also accurate that the music tastes strongly of punk and crust as well as metal of death. And while it’s true that the music is slathered in grit and grime, you can also quite easily make out the contributions of every instrument as they’re drilling into your head, knee-capping you, stomping your prone body, and using circle-saws to open up your guts. The whirling and slithering melodic guitar leads and occasional solos in particular spear out in electrifying fashion.

Well, I’d like to say more but the sands have run out of my hourglass, so I’ll just close by saying, Listen to this!

https://bruxistau.bandcamp.com/album/bruxist
https://www.facebook.com/people/Bruxist/100084624596684/