SEEN AND HEARD ON A WEDNESDAY: HOODED MENACE, MORS PRINCIPIUM EST, GORYCZ, ORBIT CULTURE, LOWBAU, ASHEN

Hooded Menace photo by Pasi Nevalaita

(written by Islander)

Today is another rare day when we have no premieres on our daily calendar, and we only had one on Monday and one on Tuesday. This seems to be just a brief ebb. Next week we have either two track premieres or an album premiere slated for every day. Other premieres are already scattered across the calendar through the rest of August and into September.

But in light of this week’s ebb, I used the free time to pull together the following mid-week roundup of recommended new songs and videos. This one might lean into a greater share of bigger names than usual, but I have also sling-shot a few into the mix that will even out the notoriety scale.

 

HOODED MENACE (Finland)

These doomy and deathly Finns have been a favorite menace around these parts for a long time, witness the 21 times we’ve published articles about their music beginning in 2012 — and I scratch my head about why we didn’t start during the three years of our existence before then. And so, news of a new Hooded Menace album always brings distended arousal.

This week the news is that Season of Mist will release the band’s seventh album, Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration, on October 3rd. Coincident with that announcement, they released a video for the album’s first single, “Portrait Without a Face“.

SoM describes the new album as one that continues the band’s recent embrace of ’80s heavy metal, emphasizing that with a FFO reference to Paradise Lost and Merciful Fate (as well as Autopsy). They also mention that the album includes a cover of Duran Duran‘s “Save A Prayer” (this might be tempting fate, but we’ll see).

The crystalline glitter of the guitars that open “Portrait Without a Face” certainly diverge from conventional death/doom, and as the music slugs and swells, that ethereal shininess persists. Things do get nastier as Harri Kuokkanen expels his savage snarls and furious screams, and gloriously blazing chords lead the song into more sinister and dismal phases.

The song is a big head-mover too, thanks to burly bass lines and gripping percussive grooves (which to my ears even include some post-punk rhythms). Rapidly darting riffage, sweeping musical vapors, and delirious soloing also give the music a fiendish aspect as well.

Quite a multi-faceted song, it brings heavy metal grandeur, aspects of classic doom, punchy grooves, monstrous vocals, and more (heavy metal isn’t the only ’80s wellspring from which Hooded Menace seem to be drawing). The cover art, by the way, is the work of Wes Benscoter.

https://orcd.co/hoodedmenacelachrymosemonumentsofobscuration
https://hoodedmenace.bandcamp.com/album/lachrymose-monuments-of-obscuration
https://www.facebook.com/hoodedmenaceofficial/

 

MORS PRINCIPIUM EST (Finland)

Staying within Finland but changing the directional needle to melodic death metal, my next pick is from the ninth studio album of Mors Principium Est, Darkness Invisible, which will be released on September 26th by Perception, an imprint of Reigning Phoenix Music.

Like hordes of other people, I came to the many-branching paths of extreme metal through the gate of melodic death metal, though I was relatively late in doing so, after the ’90s had already turned into the aughts. This band was part of that gate. If I’m being honest, therefore, a nostalgia factor was at work as I listened to “Summoning the Dark“, the new album’s third single and the one that’s the subject of the following video.

Would I have liked it as much if it didn’t re-kindle fond memories? Who knows? Maybe the appeal of head-long gallops, jolting and rapidly darting riffage, brightly swirling keys, finger-tapped soloing swirls, and Ville Viljanen’s murderous vocals (both high and low) would still be just as great.

The song’s sweeping symphonic aspects add a supernatural, and even celestial, aspect to the music’s visceral blood-rush, and the band use those same embellishments to give the music a haunting aspect as well. The video directed by JP Kaukonen is also a hell of a spectacle to watch.

https://mpe.rpm.link/darknessinvisiblePR
https://www.facebook.com/MPEofficial

 

GORYCZ (Poland)

Here’s the first sling-shot, a song and video from an avant-garde Polish black metal band I’ve written about a couple times before, but not since 2022 when I provided a brief review of their album Kamienie. They’ve been working since then, because now they have a new album named Zasypia that’s due for release on October 3rd by Piranha Music. It’s the closing chapter of a trilogy that began with Piach (discussed in part here) and continued with Kamienie.

Not long ago Gorycz released a mysterious B&W video for one of the new songs, “Tańczy“. Grimly resorting to Google translate, I see that the title means “Dances” — as in he, she, or it dances. After you watch the video, you won’t be surprised that I wanted to discover the rest of the words. Running the Polish lyrics through the same algorithm, I got this:

Troffeo
Punch out my eyes from seeing
Let my defenseless ego go blind

Then, barefoot,
I will dance to death for you

The most perfect suicidal thought
Dance

While you live
Shine
While you dance
You live

I haven’t figured out what that first word is intended to mean.

Even from the beginning, with only one woman dancing, the video is slightly strange, slightly haunting. It becomes stranger still as more women join this moving tableau of… possession?… and then the visuals grow more sinister. They all fall down, until a man in black summons them to their feet again. As the video progresses, Gorycz gradually twist the music’s intensity dial toward higher numbers until it becomes truly frightening.

One thing you can usually count on from this band is that they’ll get your muscles moving. They do that here with big funky bass grooves and head-nodding beats. In contrast to that, brightly pinging notes way up high create an aura of intrigue, and rapidly quivering radiations bring hints of menace.

The vocals are also loaded with contrasts, providing an amalgam of goblin-like snarls, gloomy near-singing, strident yells, strangled screeches, and horrid roars.

As the song progresses, those ethereally ringing notes begin to sound more disconcerting and even desperate. After the ladies fall the song re-sets and re-starts, providing even greater menace to the mood and then torquing the tension to a finale of extreme distress. As they dance again, the ladies don’t look happy; they look like prisoners of pain.

I first learned about this new song and video from Rennie before noticing a press release. I suspect he will have something to say about it in the next compilation at his starkweather Substack, and I’ll be curious to see what comparative references bubble up in his encyclopedic musical mind.

https://www.piranha-music.com/
https://E-muzyka.link/GoryczTanczy
https://www.facebook.com/togoryczidzie
https://www.instagram.com/to_gorycz_idzie

 

ORBIT CULTURE (Sweden)

When I wrote (here) about the title song to Orbit Culture‘s new album Death Above Life, I explained that I beat myself up a bit as I listened to it. “I felt like it was making a calculated primitive appeal to my baser instincts and that I should turn my nose up at it, but I fell for it anyway. I’ll probably even put it on my Most Infectious Song list at the end of the year.”

Well, I might not put it on that list after all. Instead, I might put the latest single on there. Its name is “Hydra” and it arrived packaged with a very cool video, one that drew influence from the Dune movies and was filmed in a California desert.

Once again, Orbit Culture bring Meshuggah-like groove, heavy enough to split stone, and they surround that head-hooking core with scorching howls, sinister singing, and fretwork that’s eerily darting and dismally snarling.

They also erupt in hammering blasts and infiltrate the music with the wail of a low-tuned cello, leading the song toward a near-stop that sounds plagued — with one last dose of skull-crusher blows to come, augmented with feverishly skittering electronics.

Death Above Life will be released by Century Media on October 3rd.

https://orbitcultureband.lnk.to/DeathAboveLife-Album
https://orbitculture.bandcamp.com/album/death-above-life-24-bit-hd-audio
https://www.facebook.com/OrbitCulture/

 

LOWBAU (Austria)

Here’s another sling-shot launched at your forehead from a band whose music I’ve managed to overlook until yesterday.

We get hundreds of e-mails every day about new releases, and try as I might, I don’t always get to all of them. The one we received about Lowbau‘s new EP I did get to, but I don’t know why I decided to begin listening. It may have had something to do with this description of the three songs’ lyrical themes at Bandcamp:

“Opening with ‘Holy Drones,’ a sermon twisting sacred language into an anthem of blind obedience, to ‘Cosmic Cowboy,’ a hellish Western where gods draw guns, and closing on ‘Symphony of Diversity,’ dealing with hollow unity, social conditioning, and the branding of dissent.”

Well, regardless of the reasons why I delved into the EP, that opening song hooked me. A big part of what hooked me were the tremendous vocals, which made me think of a cross between Lemmy and Primordial‘s Alan Averill. They’re gritty, raw, and raging, delivered with high-toned furnace heat, the kind of singing that isn’t clean enough to invoke an exception to our Rule. They’re not the only thing appealing about “Holy Drones” either.

That opening song also brings enormous booming beats and big yowling riffage that gets its hooks in the head right damned fast. The music sounds primitive and swampy, sinister as well as stomping, and even more sinister when the riffing begins to sizzle and the soloing trippily wails.

The other two songs are just as fiendishly addictive as the first one, and like the opener they hit hard enough to leave you a few inches shorter than when you started. But “Cosmic Cowboy” sounds more like a raucous southern roadhouse brawl, faster and more violently crazed than the opener, but still with supernatural ingredients, including a wild guitar solo. Thoughts of the movie Sinners came to mind, this juke joint under a vampire attack.

“Symphony of Diversity“, the longest of the three, downshifts into a mid-paced slugfest, but the wailing and worrisome riffing sounds even more evil than in the opener, and at times it also sounds like carnivorous feeding frenzies and drugged visions. Lowbau also jam their heavy boots down on the gas pedal and start racing and rumbling, but they shroud that outburst with ominous fretwork — just before setting everything on fire with a delirious solo.

The breakdown that follows, by the way, is the most pulverizing and neck-wrecking experience on the EP — which is saying something. It provides the undercarriage for an extended guitar solo that’s psychedelically paranormal.

And holy fuck, those vocals! I can’t overstate how phenomenal they are.

The name of the EP is The Great Zero. It was released by Electric Fire Records on July 4th.

https://lowbau.bandcamp.com/album/the-great-zero
https://www.facebook.com/LOWBAU/
https://lowbau.bandcamp.com/

 

ASHEN (Australia)

My friend Mr. Synn kicked off 2023 with a review of Ashen‘s debut album Ritual of Ash. He called it “the first truly great Death Metal record of 2023″ (emphasis in original). Twelve months later it had held its appeal, because he named it to his year-end list of 2023’s “Great Albums”. I quite liked it myself too!

Later this month we will get a second Ashen album, Leave the Flesh Behind. My final choice for today’s roundup is an excellent video for the album’s latest single, “Devourer“.

Launched with an ominous symphonic prelude, the song soon enough inflicts boiling tremolo-picked madness and dismally groaning arpeggios, backed by neck-chopping and spine-shaking beats and fronted by gruesome roars and ghastly screams.

The music blends corrosive and less corrosive guitars to create pernicious sensations of terror and rot. The closing guitar solo is in the less-corrosive realm — it sounds like an apparitional figment of misery, slow and wailing, creating a contrast with the song’s thuggish, neck-bending grooves.

Leave the Flesh Behind will be released on August 22nd by Redefining Darkness Records. They recommend it FFO Bolt Thrower, Baest, Frozen Soul, Bloodbath, and Dismember.

In related news, earlier this year Redefining Darkness re-released Ashen‘s debut album Ritual of Ash for a world wide release, on vinyl, CDs, and with other new merch, available now through the label and the band.

https://linktr.ee/Ashendeath
https://ashendeath.bandcamp.com/album/leave-the-flesh-behind
https://www.facebook.com/ashendeath/
https://www.instagram.com/ashen_death