Pestilential Shadows
(written by Islander)
I’ve been distracted by the tragic flooding in Central Texas, where I grew up. I still have a brother and sister-in-law in that area. Their property has been hit hard, but they are alive and whole, unlike a lot of other people. The rains continue, and so will the death count.
Nothing much I can do about this up here in the Pacific Northwest other than worry and grieve. The music provides a temporary distraction, and even some moments of catharsis. I hope what I picked today will do you some good too. The collection includes five individual songs, an EP, and an album.
PESTILENTIAL SHADOWS (Australia)
We start with a song from Wretch, the forthcoming eighth album by Australia’s Pestilential Shadows. This one is “Where Sunlight Goes to Die,” and it includes guest choral vocals from Dis Pater of Midnight Odyssey.
The music immediately (and magnificently) storms, combining sounds both harsh and vividly glittering, creating a stratospheric amalgam of harrowing moods, made even more harrowing by the blistering intensity of the screamed vocals. The band also charge the song with a muscular propulsion that magnifies its visceral appeal.
The riffing flows in powerful waves, engulfing the listener in their floods of distress. When those choral vocals arise, they add haunting solemnity to the intensity, and there’s also something solemn about the soul-shattering wails of the guitar solo that arrives in the song’s penultimate phase.
This is the kind of song whose splendor will get hearts beating harder, but whose tragic afflictions will also break them.
Wretch will be co-released by Northern Silence and Brilliant Emperor on September 5th.
https://pestilentialshadows.bandcamp.com/track/where-sunlight-goes-to-die
https://www.facebook.com/pestilentialshadowsofficial
SEA MOSQUITO (UK)
Last week I, Voidhanger Records began the launch of four more new albums, all of them due for release on August 1st, and disclosed single songs from each of them. I included one of those (from Amphisbaena) in yesterday’s roundup, and up next today is another one.
In reviewing Sea Mosquito‘s 2023 debut album Igitur, my comrade Andy Synn described the music as combining “throbbing Industrial undertones and agoraphobic ambience reminiscent of the likes of Lustmord and Treha Sektori with the sort of abrasively off-kilter Black Metal that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from the likes of Blut Aus Nord or the sadly-defunct Dodecahedron.” He also called the band “lunatics”.
Sea Mosquito now return with their second album, Majestas, and the song from it that I, Voidhanger let loose a few days ago is the album opener “Organs Dissolved in Lacquer“. This may be the song inspired (as disclosed at Bandcamp) by, among other things, “the obscure and much debated Japanese Buddhist practice of self-mummification known as Sokushinbutsu and by the doctrine of tribulation and spiritual power through self-discipline.”
It’s a startling piece of music, vast and celestial in some respects (like a sea of fire in the heavens), though pierced by unhinged screams, gravel-toned snarls, and booming and battering drums, but it’s also severely anguished and distressingly turbulent.
The music twists and turns, changes tempo, injects dismal chords, and creates harmonies of peril and pain. At one point the reverberating guitars, both scratchy and fairly clean, moan and wail without drums, and that leads into a final phase of daunting catastrophe, swallowing up the listener again.
Deep choral chants near the end strengthen the idea that the music may represent, as in the frightening practice of Sokushinbutsu, an attempt through fatal asceticism to attain spiritual enlightenment.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/majestas
https://www.facebook.com/seamosquitoband/
PROFANE ELEGY (U.S.)
In 2023 the Pennsylvania duo Profane Elegy released their debut EP When All Is Nothing. Apparently now expanded to a full quartet (based on the Bandcamp credits), they’ve recently released the first single from their forthcoming debut album Herezjarcha.
The band’s EP took a lot of inspiration from black metal of the early ’90 and ’00s, but also dabbled in doom and prog. This new single, “Exeunt omnes“, is also a genre hybrid, and a gripping one.
Its gritty opening riff roils with fiendish and feral energy around galloping beats and a pulsing double-bass. With a shattering scream as prelude, the music then convulses in a paroxysm of blasting drums and maniacally writhing fretwork.
The riffage sounds deranged and macabre, and even more so as the music mutates further, with the fretwork crazily warping and frenetically darting. It becomes a thoroughly head-spinning and bamboozling experience — but in line with the band’s previously revealed inclinations it also suddenly changes.
The screaming vanishes, replaced by extravagant wordless singing (though the goblin screams and snarls also return). The bass trudges instead of hammers. The guitars sear, but they are sounds of searing anguish.
The song is a damn good come-on for the album to come. Profane Elegy say that Herezjarcha will be released in early 2026.
https://profaneelegy.bandcamp.com/track/exeunt-omnes
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092367915270
CRUENTATION (U.S.)
My next choice is the title song from Damned Fallen Angels, the debut album by a New England black/death trio who call themselves Cruentation.
Prepare for a vicious assault of furiously battering percussion, heavily undulating bass lines, caustically churning riffage, and grotesque vocal abominations, piercingly accented by a lead guitar’s berserk screams.
The song does slow, becoming a big stalking menace that’s dismally oppressive in its mood, but the riffing also heats up again, like inflamed carnivorous insects rapidly surging into flesh. These fashionings of frenzy and morbid gloom trade places until the end, a ghastly tandem for sure.
Damned Fallen Angels (the album) will be released by Iron Bonehead Productions on September 26th.
https://cruentation1.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/people/Cruentation/100083550304988/
https://www.facebook.com/IronBoneheadProductions
BEANNACHD LEIBH (Canada)
Next up is the first song off Walking in His Works, a debut album from Beannachd Leibh (formerly CRUX), the solo project of Toronto-based Alec McKay (who’s also a member of Mirror Neuron).
At Bandcamp, the album is described as “Epic, furious black metal with frequent dives into brutality and progressive experimentation.” Those background materials also include references to the influences of Blut Aus Nord, Kayo Dot, and Time of Orchids, and to “technically dense arrangements that constantly keep you guessing”.
The album’s opening song “Allegiance to Theia” sets aside 9 1/2 minutes of space for one display of how these disparate influences and inspirations work together. Launched in ravishing fashion, the music includes ingredients of symphonic grandeur and classically inclined elegance but also scalding screams, blasting drums, and near-hallucinatory melodicism.
The music is plainly confected to keep listeners off-balance. The pacing abruptly and relentlessly changes. Vividly rippling piano keys co-exist with brute-force pounding. Vivaciously darting classical strings trade places with futuristic synths, bounded by mechanistic low-frequency vibrations.
The music spirals high and heavily groans and provides sonic visions of celestial splendor and gothic cathedral glory, but also generates sensations of rampant madness, assaulting violence, and bone-gnawing hunger. At one point it even sounds like choral voices lifted in praise.
The album is set for release on July 24th. It includes seven more songs. One wonders what those seven will offer, with a spectacle such as “Allegiance to Theia” standing fright up front at the entry gate. (The name Beannachd Leibh, by the way, seems to be Scottish Gaelic for “goodbye”.)
https://beannachdleibh.bandcamp.com/album/walking-in-his-works
MORTE TRIUNFANTE (Portugal/U.S.)
And now for the EP I mentioned at the outset. Entitled Voragem Que Tudo Consome, it’s the debut demo of Morte Triunfante, which unites the talents of U.S. instrumentalist Terror Purulento (aka Chris Ulsh, whose resume includes stints with Innumerable Forms, Mammoth Grinder, and Power Trip), and Portuguese vocalist Vazio Abissal.
Tempted as I am to comment about each of the five songs on the EP (a persistent temptation every time I write about a full release), time won’t allow that today. What I’ll say instead is that the Bandcamp text is accurate — that the music is for “worshippers of Archgoat, Demoncy, and Profanatica.”
Those connections aren’t immediate because the opening orchestral track sounds like a classically inspired funeral mass — cold, haunting, and a bit scary. But after that Morte Triunfante discharge a range of both vicious and crushing black metal assaults, with a few more unexpected musical accents.
Backed by a lot of low-end thunder and malicious pounding (and a few megaton detonations), the drilling and sizzling riffage burrows into listeners’ heads with striking power and fiendish hookiness, so dominant (and rightly so) that the ear-lacerating manifestations of vocal insanity almost pale in comparison.
In the middle song Morte Triunfante do leaven their hellishly rabid attacks with ethereal keys, but not long enough to let your lungs fill or your head to settle. It’s not until the final song, another slow-flowing symphonic episode, that you can do that. But it’s so nightmarish that it’s not entirely a reprieve either.
Voragem Que Tudo Consome was released last week by Electric Assault Records.
https://electricassaultrecords.bandcamp.com/album/voragem-que-tudo-consome
ROUGAROU (U.S.)
And finally we come to a full-length album, one released in June by Realm and Ritual on tape and digitally by Memory Terminal Records. At Bandcamp it’s described as follows:
A work of native Cajun folk art recorded to tape within the swamps of south Louisiana near the parish border of Bayou Vermillion using traditional and nontraditional Cajun instrumentation.
Rougarou’s debut self-titled release is an amalgam of raw black metal and Cajun folk art; thirteen tracks of abrasive tremolo guitars and unbridled shrieks combined with triangle and washboard percussion amidst other traditional Cajun instruments (diatonic accordion, piano, acoustic guitar, and fiddle). Thematically, Rougarou is a frantic descent into madness, a departure from civilization to live in the swamp and transform into the titular cursed werewolf of Creole and Cajun folklore.
I have significant ancestral connections to Louisiana cajun country and, independently of that, I’ve been a fan of cajun folk music, though I don’t dabble in it nearly as much these days as I used to when younger. So for those reasons I was very eager to hear what Rougarou had done.
Much of the music (but not all of it) is unmistakably black metal, but also unmistakably a very shape-shifted form of it, much like the cursed werewolf legend from which the band took its name. And lest you assume this is the kind of thing that usually attracts the “folk metal” label, perish the thought.
The shifting shapes take many forms. At times the riffing is raw and ruinous, flesh-flensing and flesh-melting, and the vocals are a screaming nightmare, unhinged and sadistically distorted. Yet even then you can occasionally hear the washboard percussion, and the riffing also ripples and whirls like wild dances in swamp country (though it might be devils who are dancing), especially the band’s cover of “La Chanson de Mardi Gras“.
At other times the music strips away the black metal entirely (and the vocals) — but not the album’s atmosphere of hell come to the swamps. Some of those interludes are seductively folkish and heavily reverb-ed guitar or piano or accordion instrumentals, and some are mainly just cacophonous; the opening of “Mosquitos” sounds exactly like what you’d expect from the title (we’re talking thick bayou swarms, not the wispy timid little things that come out in the summers where I now live), and “Clawing” is basically a washboard solo.
At still other times the riffing boils the mind in oil while other forms of vocal monstrosity well up from stinking abysses or cry out from the midst of flames or channel werewolf howls. (Rougarou obviously put a lot of thought into how to make the vocals as terrifying as possible.)
The album as a whole has a free-wheeling, experimental, and sometimes even improvisational, quality. There’s no flow to the tracks, and no way of predicting from one of them what will happen in the next one. The band often seem bent on pushing things as far as they can, and pushing their listeners’ tolerances too, though it’s fair to say that all of these often rude and ruinous assaults are unified by an overarching supernatural atmosphere of hellish terror and/or abject wretchedness.
Definitely not for everyone, but what is? Definitely more suited for adventurous listeners in search of something unlike anything they’ve heard before — but adventurers willing to gird their loins and armor up their minds and to get filthy before embarking.
https://realmandritual.bandcamp.com/album/rougarou
https://memoryterminal.bandcamp.com/album/rougarou