Black Sabbath, 1970, photo by Chris Walter
(written by Islander)
Post Fourth of July, I hope you all still have 10 fingers and are non-concussed. Way up here on the northern rim where the day takes its sweet time slipping away, I didn’t stay awake long enough for the sky to turn and finally become a black backdrop for fireworks. But I did do a modest amount of carousing with friends and family before punching out, so it’s another late start for this Saturday roundup.
I’m beginning with a big dose of nostalgia and then shifting into more current generational directions. In thinking about how I’m beginning and what follows that, the words of Isaac Newton come to mind: “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” (Though in this context what the successors are seeing is in further darkness.)
JUDAS PRIEST (UK)
Ozzy Osbourne is 76 years old. He has Parkinson’s, which has progressed to the point when he can no longer walk, but his wife says his voice is still fine. Today in his hometown of Birmingham he will play what’s being billed as his last-ever concert. He will perform solo and with his original Black Sabbath bandmates – guitarist Tony Iommi; bassist “Geezer” Butler; and drummer Bill Ward.
The lineup for the event also includes Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, and Tool. The musical director is Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. I assume the other bands will cover some of Ozzy‘s and Sabbath‘s songs, some of the ones he won’t be performing himself. The event is being broadcast now as I write this.
Judas Priest was invited to be on the lineup but a conflict prevented that. Rob Halford was one of five metal and rock luminaries who were interviewed for a feature about the show in The New York Times. Among other things, he said:
“I always remain focused on Ozzy, the singer. I think he’s got an amazing voice, and I’ve always felt that Ozzy was a little bit overlooked in that area because of all the other stuff. So as a musician, as a singer in the songs and the albums, he is remarkable and one of a kind…. When he walks onstage, your eyes never leave him. There’s very few frontmen that can do that. He wraps his arms around 20,000 people in an arena, and he touches every single person.”
As the kids would say, “game knows game.”
Priest couldn’t perform in Birmingham but they did record and video a cover of Sabbath‘s “War Pigs“, one of the most famous anti-war songs in metal and one of Sabbath‘s best-ever songs. Somewhere in a storage unit I still have a vinyl copy of Paranoid, the album that included it, which came out when the Vietnam war was still raging. I wore out that record playing it so much, not being as careful as I would be today. My copy would probably sound like popcorn popping now. Unfortunately, the song is still highly relevant.
I hope Ozzy gets through the show. I hope he doesn’t look or sound too decrepit. I hope the event will be recorded and made available for on-demand streaming, or made into a movie. I hope the other bands do him and Sabbath justice when they perform covers. Halford and Priest sure as hell did.
https://www.facebook.com/OfficialJudasPriest/
AMPHISBAENA (Canada)
This past week I, Voidhanger Records loosed four new songs upon the world, one each from four albums that the label will simultaneously release on August 1st. Tempted though I was to include all four in this roundup, I picked only one so I could spread our love around to a few more labels today. The one I picked is “Scaled Ekpyrotic Splinters” from Rift, the debut album by Amphisbaena and their first record since a self-titled EP nearly a decade ago.
It appears that the lineup has remained intact, a roster that includes current or former members of Rites of Thy Degringolade, Antediluvian, Weapon, and Revenge. The label describes the album as a genre-bending affair that builds upon the band’s “baseline of obscure blackened death metal” to generate an “idiosyncratic fusion” that includes “doom metal, ambient, and even prog”: “Not for genre purists, Rift spirals from cavernous murk to hyper-blasting chaos to atonal ambiance and back again.”
“Idiosyncratic” is a useful term for “Scaled Ekpyrotic Splinters“. Other useful terms are “supernatural”, “scary”, “ravenous”, and “riotous”. A slow build, the music is both psychedelic and psychotic, fronted by possessed vocals (strangled and screaming) that might be the song’s scariest feature.
It features viciously drilling riffage, magma-strength bass-lines, and rapidly veering drum progressions, but also surreal bursts of mind-scraping and brain-warping dissonance, reptilian soloing that’s as mesmerizing as it is threatening, and thunderous double-bass rolls. It’s the kind of song that leaves the whites of a listener’s eyes showing all around.
I had to look up the word “ekpyrotic.” Based on my modest reading, it refers to a cosmological model of the early universe that has been incorporated into a “cyclic universe” theory in which “the Big Bang was actually a big bounce, a transition from a previous epoch of contraction to the present epoch of expansion.”
Though the song’s lyrics (available at Bandcamp) are obscure — and nightmarish — I think you’ll detect the connection, but the cosmological term may be metaphorical here.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/rift
https://amphisbaena.bandcamp.com/album/amphisbaena-e-p
https://www.facebook.com/mphsbn/
FAUNA (U.S.)
This past week also brought the very welcome news that the Cascadian black metal duo Fauna (Vines and Echtra) are returning with a new album named Ochre & Ash, their first in more than a dozen years. It’s described by the label Lupus Lounge as “a shamanic underworld journey, a process of ritual death, harrowing passage through unknown realms, and rebirth into new form.”
Coincident with that announcement the label revealed a four-minute YouTube excerpt from a long song entitled “Nature & Madness“. Thankfully, the complete song, all 14 minutes of it, surfaced on Bandcamp, and that’s the stream I’ve embedded below.
As forecast, and as we might have expected, the song does create a shamanic aura through big booming beats, eerily wailing flute-like tones, and corrosive but ritualized riffing. But the song also breaks open, driven to great intensity by hurtling drums, a furiously rumbling bass, savagely slashing chords, and wild, ragged cries.
Part flood, part sandstorm, the racing and ravaging music is also pierced by discordant chime-like tones, writhing and rising tremolo’d leads, and wisps of miserably moaning and grievously wailing guitar-and-keyboard melody.
Eventually, the storm subsides, those primitive drums re-emerge, and the music becomes both incandescent and distraught. It pulls the heart into a severely downcast trajectory, though sonic sparks of life begin to vividly glitter, striving until the music starts rushing and raging again. Fauna begin creating what sounds like a brilliant closing calamity to engulf the listener, and yet eventually the exuberance of the beats and the flaring of the guitars and bass seem to signify resistance and resilience.
All in all, the song will take your breath away. Ochre & Ash is set for release on September 26th.
http://lnk.spkr.media/fauna-ochre-ash
https://fauna.bandcamp.com/album/ochre-ash
https://oneirios.wordpress.com/fauna/
SUNKEN MONOLITH (Finland)
Sunken Monolith is a new formation consisting of G.E.F. from Thecodontion and Clactonian, and A.M. from Abadir, Kasus Belli, and Vacuo. Like G.E.F.‘s other bands, the music of this new one also delves into prehistoric themes, in this case a rendering of black/death/doom metal about the Neolithic Age. But G.E.F. explains that Sunken Monolith “is not merely a ‘lesser sibling’ of Thecodontion and Clactonian: it carries its own weight and its own sacred burden. And I believe in it.”
Sunken Monolith‘s three-song debut demo was released just yesterday by Prehistoric Sounds and Unholy Dungeon Tapes. It begins with “Black Obsidian“, an abrasive amalgam of slowly clanging and poisonously quivering sensations backed by slowly rumbling beats and fronted by caustic roars. As the song evolves, it becomes both more acidic and more steeped in anguish. Delivered in gritty, scouring tones, the riffing boils, burns, and miserably moans while the bass bubbles and the vocals fanatically snarl like some hellish, horned malignancy.
At one level, the music is indeed primitive, and it remorselessly scours a listener’s skull, indeed like having it scraped from the inside out with jagged obsidian shards, but beyond that it also manages to be a mood-changer, dragging us into the black.
“Fertile Crescent” isn’t any more gentle on the ears but it’s more ravaging — faster and more berserk in its assaults, more jolting and more vicious. It gets the heart pounding, invoking a fight or flight response. Even when the hell-for-leather hammering and swarming riffage pull back, the music sounds cruel and cold, but the slower-moving, heavy-grit riffing also manifests as agony. As before, the vocals manifest as a demonic bestiary.
And finally, Sunken Monolith bring us “Pillars of Eternity“. In its momentum the song heaves and stomps but periodically spins up toward gallops and greater violence. The grit-caked riffing creates a miasma of sizzling and swarming malice but it also moans again, again intertwining feelings of berserk fury and dismal oppressiveness as its intensity ebbs and flows.
As they say in the trade, this demo ain’t for the faint of heart or the tender of ear, but it’s immersive as well as brutal, and you might even find it unexpectedly hypnotic.
https://prehistoricsounds.bandcamp.com/album/demo
https://unholydungeontapes.bandcamp.com/album/demo
https://sunkenmonolith.bandcamp.com/album/demo
MALPHAS (U.S.)
Who doesn’t love a good gothic organ melody? This next song opens with one, and then runs it through increasingly elaborate and energetic variations, embroidering it with grand guitar chords, glittering keys, soulfully slithering arpeggios, and drums that vividly hammer and furiously blast, accompanied by scalding screams and guttural roars.
The song marries elegance and savagery, baroque opulence and visceral jolts, jubilant fretwork exuberance (including a magical solo) and brightly strummed acoustic guitars, a warmly musing bass melody and vividly rippling keys. Despite the vicious vehemence of the vocals, I think the song will leave most people smiling broadly (as it did me).
“The Conjuring” is a re-written, re-arranged, and re-recorded version of the title song from the first EP by Philly-based Malphas, released a decade ago. It’s out now as a single on M-Theory Audio, and a third album from Malphas is also in the works.
https://lnk.to/malphas
https://www.facebook.com/therealmalphas1
https://www.instagram.com/therealmalphas
ABRAHAM (Switzerland)
Like that Malphas song, this final choice for today’s roundup opens with a keyboard melody that the band then pick up and run with. But this opening melody is woozy and mysterious, almost theremin-like as it hums and sparkles. As Abraham begin their own variations they bring in murmuring bass notes and vivid drum-beats, bestial snarls and eerily ringing notes.
The intensity ebbs and flows, creating passages that include possibly hostile hallucinations (augmented by even more fanatical vocals), boiling derangement, viscerally potent rumbling, brain-raking slashes, and astral drifts (backed by heartbeat drums).
An incessantly fascinating and frequently frightening song, it’s accompanied by a terrific video that gives us a birds-eye view of Abraham‘s lineup throwing themselves into the music.
“Naked in a Naked Sky” is the first single from Abraham‘s new album IDSUNGWÜSSÄ. It will be out on September 26th via Pelagic Records.
https://orcd.co/abraham-idsungwussa
https://www.facebook.com/abrahamtheband
https://www.instagram.com/abrahamband