(written by Islander)
For the second time this week I found myself with enough spare time to pull together a week-day roundup of recommended new music and videos, getting a head-start on the usual Saturday collection.
Like the one I sorted out for Wednesday, today’s collection includes some very well-known names but also foists upon you a couple of comparative obscurities to help even things out (and by my lights the most interesting song — and the strangest one — in today’s group comes from one of those lesser lights).
Photo by Terhi Ylimäinen
OMNIUM GATHERUM (Finland)
About six weeks ago Omnium Gatherum hit everyone with a video for the first single (“The Last Hero”) from their new album May The Bridges We Burn Light The Way, and today (literally about 10 minutes ago) they premiered a video for the second one, “My Pain“.
I had a back-up ready to go as the opening song for today’s collection in case “My Pain” left me dulled, but the song is not a dull or dulling one at all. It speaks of pain, but vocalist Jukka Pelkonen rages, the guitars and keys gloriously flash and fly, and the drums leave dust in their wake. Guitarist Markus Vanhala heroically lifts his voice in song, and the music soars too.
The music’s hard-charging energy comes in vivid bursts and neck-snapping beats, and it’s not until nearly the end when enormous percussive booms detonate that the riffing begins to sound forlorn. Yet soon enough a fantastic guitar solo jubilantly lifts the heart again. And those soaring clean vocals in the choruses do the same.
Despite the name, and despite tinges of sadness within it, the song is a magnificent anthem, not only about pain but about conquering the adversity that brings it.
The new album will be released by Century Media on the distant date of November 7th. Neither pre-orders nor the album cover seem to be up yet.
https://omniumgatherum.org
https://www.facebook.com/omniumgatherumband/
BELPHEGOR (Austria)
Earlier this week Reigning Phoenix Music released a new single by Belphegor named “Sanctus Diaboli Confidimus“, accompanied by a video which makes clear the song’s objective: It is a dramatic hymn to the glory of the goat-headed Baphomet, or as Helmuth describes it, “a glorification of the Devil”.
The classically influenced music sounds like a black metal funeral mass. It creates a solemn, hallowed, and mournful atmosphere — and a glorifying one — through riffing that’s both soaring and despairing, augmented by celestial ringing tones. The music is majestic, expansive, and worshipful, but also dark and desolate (this is devil worship, after all).
Even though the main vocals are ferocious, they become a chorus of ferocity, and eventually clean choral voices rise up in reverence and join together with the vicious snarls. The music also considerably softens through the introduction of elegant acoustic guitars before it swells again in grandeur, only to close with ethereal angelic voices.
https://belphegor.rpm.link/sdcYT
https://www.belphegor.at/
https://www.facebook.com/belphegor
https://www.instagram.com/belphegor_official
WRETCHED (U.S.)
Well, it’s been awhile since North Carolina’s Wretched appeared in our pages. Once upon a time, circa 2010-2014, we wrote about them A LOT, giving extensive attention to their second, third, and fourth albums (Beyond the Gate, Son of Perdition, and Cannibal). DGR even did one of his rare interviews, devoted to a discussion with Wretched guitarist Steven Funderburk.
But after Cannibal Wretched dropped out of sight for a decade, at least in terms of recordings, but now they are back on track with a new album named Decay (set for release by Metal Blade on October 17th). Interestingly, it is described as a prequel to 2010’s Beyond The Gate. From vocalist Billy Powers:
“Decay is 100% a concept album. Beyond The Gate had an element this record shares, the talisman. I always knew there was more story there and was very excited to join up with the guys again to put that in motion. The first track I wrote was ‘The Golden Tide.’ I had no idea where I was going to take the story connection to Beyond The Gate until I typed the first line of the song. ‘They began in the dark.’ After that, the lyrics poured out of my mind and by the end of it I realized that this story takes place many years before the content of Beyond The Gate.”
The new album’s first single, presented yesterday with a video, is the title song. I thought it would make a good follow-on from that Belphegor song because it too creates a dark and despairing mood, albeit in different ways — though it’s even more grief-stricken.
The pacing is steady but the vocals are absolutely lacerating in their screaming intensity. The guitars sorrowfully slash, clang, and pulse, backed by heavy bass-throbs, and they seem to wail in agony too.
The riffing becomes more feverish, the vocals even more scalding (but also roaring), and a convulsive guitar solo breaks out, but the music twists again, seeming to dismally moan. A further guitar solo, fluid and soaring and soulful, creates a deeply grieving mood and burrows ever-deeper into a listener’s head as it goes, anchored by a very heavy rhythmic groove.
(The artwork and layout are the work of Travis Smith.)
https://www.metalblade.com/wretched/
https://www.wretchedmusic.com
https://www.instagram.com/wretchednc
https://www.facebook.com/wretchednc
AUTHOR AND PUNISHER (U.S.)
Well, what an enormous and enormously welcome coincidence! Last fall I discovered the fascinating music of the Indonesian duo Kuntari — Tesla Manaf and Rio Abror — and have written about them twice since then, most recently last month. And lo and behold, now I see that Author & Punisher collaborated with Kuntari on a song from the former’s new album Nocturnal Birding, and they made a video together for that song — “Titanis“.
The video was filmed in Bali earlier this summer and features the three performers in a variety of settings, some of them beautiful, but also including the contrasting silliness of A&P’s Tristan Shone getting a well-oiled massage and a mud bath.
As for the song, it includes both Kuntari‘s distinctive Indonesian percussive rhythms and Shone‘s monstrous industrial machinations, both wisps of birdsong and scorching screams, as well as intensely shimmering sonic miasmas (which includes Tesla‘s morphed trumpet) and bits of singing.
The music sounds primitive, futuristic, and mystical — haunting, expansive, and frightening.
The new album’s cover art is by French artist Lucile Lejoly. It will be released on October 3rd by Relapse Records, and includes the collaboration of guitarist Doug Sabolick . Othe guests on the album include Fange and Megan Oztrosits of Couch Slut. As for the significance of the album’s title, here’s Tristan Shone:
“When I sat down to start writing this album, I knew I wanted to make songs based on birdsong. The actual first guitar riff is one of the meadowlark’s songs. When you listen to ‘Rook,’ that melody is the rook’s sound. That track is us mimicking one of the rooks’ many songs. I wrote all my tracks around the rhythms and melodies of birds I researched or heard in the wild.”
https://orcd.co/authorandpunisher
https://authorandpunisher.bandcamp.com/album/nocturnal-birding
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorandPunisher/
GORLEBEN (Germany)
I enjoyed all the songs in this roundup, else they wouldn’t be here. But the next one is the one I mentioned in the introduction that I found most interesting, and strange.
The song is “Menetekel“, the title track from this Dresden group’s second album. That word appears to be a contraction of the phrase “mene mene tekel upharsin”, an ominous warning that appears on a wall in the palace of Belshazzar, the acting king of Babylon, as recounted in The Book of Daniel. It is the origin of the phrase, “the handwriting is on the wall”. It connects to Gorleben‘s album in this way:
Menetekel is a warning about the destruction of our civilization and that the countdown on it is already running. Using time as a central element, GORLEBEN bring the predicted apocalypse into our present and makes it tangible from two temporal dimensions. The four tracks inevitably reflect the path of an uncertain future, marked among other things by the voracity of humanity. GORLEBEN divides, peering from an unknown future into the bleak present – mene tekel upharsin.
In the long title song menacing fuzz-coated riffing lurches and heaves alongside heavy bass moans, cracking beats, and shrill sonic contortions. The song also incorporates sprightly keyboard arpeggios reminiscent of the New Wave era, rhythmic flurries of clawing scratchiness, and maniac vocals that traverse a range between gritty malignant growls and wild, splintering cries.
It’s a seriously head-moving song and a seriously trippy one, augmented by the fluid flow of mysterious and mellifluous ambient melodies as well as double-bass rumbles, doubled roars, and garroted screeches. The drumming is excellent throughout and eventually becomes faster and more vivid; the toms also tumble and the snare rattles as the music and vocals grow more chaotic. But the music also grows more jubilant and vast, and by the end, the song sounds glorious.
As for the video, which makes good use of the album’s weird cover art, prepare for lots of quivering eyeballs.
Menetekel (the album) will be released on October 15th by Darkness Shall Rise.
https://gorlebendarknessshallrise.bandcamp.com/album/menetekel
https://www.facebook.com/GorlebenUran236/
ORBSTRUCT (Ukraine-Poland)
Like Gorleben above, this is my first encounter with the music of Orbstruct (as far as I can recall). I’ve read that the band was originally formed in Kharkiv, Ukraine, but the warfare in their homeland drove them to re-locate to Poland. They have a new album (their third) entitled Ostracism that will be released via Paragon Records on October 3rd.
The vocals in the first single, “Hive“, startled me: They include tandem pairings of both cavernous gutturals and extremely high-pitched screeches. That took some getting used to.
What goes on around them is a destructive mauling. The drums steadily crack the whip and deliver double-bass turbulence while the cold-hearted, heavyweight riffing discharges tremolo’d frenzies of violence.
The music also delivers brutish pavement-cracking jolts, flowing waves of poisonous and dismal melody, bursts of desperate blaring sound, and flares of frenetic and mind-warping soloing. It also simultaneously throbs and becomes sweeping, and before the end the drums cut loose in blasting, as a prelude to a finale that sounds sinister and strange.
https://linktr.ee/orbstruct_official
https://orbstructofficial.bandcamp.com/album/ostracism
https://www.facebook.com/orbstructofficial