(written by Islander)
It’s unlikely I will be able to write a SHADES OF BLACK column for tomorrow, due to conflicting weekend plans with my wife. So I’ve made this Saturday roundup a big one, and I’ve included a greater-than-usual number of black metal bands.
I decided to put a shiny bauble at the top of the group, hoping that it might lure some people to dig deeper into the pile before realizing they’ll get cut up by all the sharp objects underneath. Which is to say, there’s really nothing like Amorphis waiting for you later on.
AMORPHIS (Finland)
The latest single from Amorphis‘ new album Borderland really is a shiny bauble, very close to a heavy metal pop song, and a danceable one at that. But it’s not as if “Dancing Shadow” represents a dramatic shift; some of its hallmarks have been hallmarks of this band’s music for a long time. And although it’s not as “extreme” as other examples that could be chosen from across the band’s history, I still found it irresistible.
Tomi Joutsen‘s distinctive singing is a key feature of the song, though he does throw in some subdued growls here and there (he possesses such a tremendous growl that I was hoping he’d really cut loose with it, but I’ll take what I can get). Behind him, the rhythms vibrantly bounce and the music ethereally rings with clean guitars and dual dancing keyboards, though it does have some heavy undercurrents.
Joutsen also pulls out the tried and true trick of shifting the register of his voice into a higher octave for extra emotional uplift, and the guitar solo beautifully ripples as well.
In addition to these luring musical features, the video for the song shows us what great showmen the band are when performing.
Borderland features cover art by Dutch artist Marald Van Haasteren. It will be released on September 26th by Reigning Phoenix Music.
https://amorphis.rpm.link/borderlandPR
https://www.facebook.com/amorphis/
PROGENY OF SUN (Finland)
For those of you who’ve been lured in by Amorphis and would like to follow it with even more shiny melodious objects, you’re about to be very disappointed. On the other hand, if you’re hungry for harsher and more harrowing things, you’ll be well-fed from here on, beginning with this next song from Progeny of Sun‘s forthcoming second album, Prophets of the Void, which functions as something of a bridge from that Amorphis song.
“Forsaken Brigade” is the third and final single from the album released to date, and it arrived with a video of the band performing it. It sets up a rocking groove and swirling/slashing riffage that casts dark melodic shadows. It then adds equally dark and morose singing — but also scorching screams and monstrous growls as the song’s intensity mounts.
The riffing boils, the burly bass throbs and slugs, and the drums begin battering, but the roaring and howling vocals might be the most intense feature. Yet the swirling guitar-leads keep their melancholy melodic hooks in listeners’ heads throughout.
Prophets of the Void will be released by Inverse Records on September 5th.
https://progenyofsun.bandcamp.com/album/prophets-of-the-void
https://www.facebook.com/progenyofsun
TEMPEST (Mexico)
Now we land on the other side of that Progeny of the Sun bridge.
At some point in the not too distant future the esteemed Chaos Records will release a new three-song EP, Obscure Hallucinations, by the Mexican death metal band Tempest. The label describes the music as “brutal” and “twisted”, “savage” and “hallucinatory”.
The first advance track is the title song. It justifies those label descriptions. It’s a racing and blazing tirade, drums going wild and the vocals wild too, with blasts of brazen fretwork and mercurially contorting leads adding to the exhilarating madness.
When the crazed but razor-sharp drumming briefly settles down, the music still sounds demented, and even more so as the song progresses. It’s a jubilant bedlam from start to finish, perhaps especially when a brilliantly insane solo leaps out — though the vocals really are perpetually insane too.
Every instrumental performer demonstrates top-shelf technical skill while also demonstrating a songwriting proclivity for head-spinning and heart-pumping escapades of derangement.
https://tempestmx.bandcamp.com/album/obscure-hallucinations-promo
https://www.facebook.com/TempestDM
LAANG 冷 (Taiwan)
Next up is the Taiwanese solo project Laang 冷, whose debut album I very briefly reviewed here back in 2019. The project has a harrowing back-story, a terrible near-death experience you can read about in that short review.
Two more albums have followed that one, and I just didn’t manage to get around to them. I did get around to Laang‘s new single, “寂寥 Jiliao“. The lyrics are available in translation at Bandcamp. They’re poetic but they’re harrowing too.
The song is heavy as hell, both in the low-end decibels and in the music’s pitch-black emotional quotient. The guitars are piercing, whether despondently crying out, yielding to vibrating frenzies, or brilliantly swirling. The drumming is relentlessly dynamic. The vocals are tremendously intense, combining tormented screams and enormous roars.
The music also builds toward sweeping and soaring elevations, creating displays of frightening wonder laced with frantic, fire-bright leads, and all that (and more) makes a breathtaking spectacle of a song even more breathtaking.
https://laang.bandcamp.com/track/jiliao
https://www.facebook.com/LaangOfficial
DARK WATCHER (U.S.)
Dark Watcher wrote us about their debut LP The Law of Bone and Sinew, which they described as “an ouroboric epic laid across the bloodsoaked canvas of the American frontier” — “Eight new tracks of mythic spaghetti western and americana infused black metal destined to crucify the legacy of America.” That got me interested enough to listen to the album’s first single, “War Is God“.
It turns out to be a brutal but also eye-popping experience. The layered guitar harmony that opens the song sounds both dismal and sinister, and together with the increasingly frantic drumming it sounded like Dark Watcher were building toward something possibly panoramic, but what it builds toward is on-the-boil riffing that channels violent madness and searing pain, with an intensification of the tension rather than relief from it.
You may have to focus extra hard on the music because the screamed vocals are so incredibly unhinged that they come close to stealing all the attention away. But if you do focus, you can make out a very nimble bass and lots of brilliantly berserk guitar work.
The song retrenches to the way it began but quickly goes wild again — even more wild, thanks to a piercing and jubilantly whirling guitar solo that strengthens the music’s claim to being black metal americana (it might make you think of fiddles flying in an alcohol-fueled barn dance or a saloon romp).
I also read the song’s lyrics at Bandcamp. They’re as brutal as the music, a damning indictment of gun slaughter and its reflection of “The darkness of man, driven only by hatred and envy / By excess, bigotry and violence”.
The Law of Bone and Sinew is set for release on September 12th.
https://darkwatcher.bandcamp.com/album/the-law-of-bone-and-sinew-2
https://www.facebook.com/darkwatcherofficial/
ZLOBNIK (Croatia)
I owe Rennie (from starkweather) for the tip on this next song and video. Named “Sukuba“, it’s from the Croatian band Zlobnik‘s second album Pjev prokletnika.
The very well-made video is freakish and fascinating to watch, and I won’t give away any spoilers about its strange supernatural narrative. The music also has its own strange aspects, as you’ll quickly discover from the glittering opening notes and the yowling and warping riffage that follows.
You’ll also discover that the bass is an enormous presence, that the drums can resemble earthquakes (as well as gunshots), that the vocals are scalding in their insanity, and that the layered guitars psychotically twist and turn. Full of tempo changes, changing drum-and-bass patterns, thoroughly demented and dissonant guitar machinations, and including even some strident singing, the song as a whole is psychotic — but relentlessly riveting.
Pjev prokletnika was released on August 5th. I haven’t listened to all of it yet, just the song that’s in the video. But listening to all of it does seem like a good use of time now, doesn’t it?
https://zlobnik.bandcamp.com/album/pjev-prokletnika
https://www.facebook.com/zlobnikband/
CRUSTY OLD TOAD (U.S.)
Maybe you’ve come across Crusty Old Toad in other roundups at our site previous to this one. If you have, you’ll already know what I’m about to tell you, which is that you shouldn’t underestimate the music of Toaderus Crusticus based on this Oregonian project’s humorous name and froggy appearance. You also shouldn’t pass by this next song just because its name is “Bedroom Black Metal“.
If you skip it you’ll miss out on a really good and rapidly gear-shifting song. On the one hand the drums ruthlessly hammer and the riffing discharges roaring blizzards of sound. On the other hand, the drums compulsively thump and the riffing creates a vibrant bursting pulse that together make for a big hook that’s stylistically uncommon for black metal.
The vocals are viscerally savage, a deep gnashing menace that sounds like it would like nothing better than to get your jugular in its teeth (though there comes a point when it almost sounds like singing while viciously gnawing).
The song also continues changing as it goes, creating moods both dismal and fiercely feral, and it includes an arena-ready guitar solo that’s a glorious thing to behold (and more Thin Lizzy in its aspect than anything from black metal’s second wave).
So although you may assume from surface appearances that Crusty Old Toad doesn’t take itself seriously, the songwriting here is seriously good.
https://crustyoldtoad.bandcamp.com/album/bedroom-black-metal-single
https://www.facebook.com/Crusty-Old-Toad-1709981732570063/
DISTRESS (Russia)
To close out today’s large roundup I’ve picked a complete album that Selfmadegod Records released just yesterday. Entitled Under Pressure Of Reality, it’s the third full-length from crust-d-beat act Distress. The label recommends it for fans of Discharge, Varukers, Anti-Cimex, Asocial, Wolfpack, Wolfbrigade, Skitsystem, and Warcollapse.
Before the album came out Distress released a madcap live video for one of the new songs, “Стадо” (The Herd). It’s less than two minutes long, but long enough to reveal crushing riffage that slashes and slugs, gravel-chewing bass-lines, barbaric howls, vividly darting lead-guitars, and of course high-speed d-beats galore — as well as a slower phase that sounds both hallucinatory and sorrowful.
A more fulsome example of what Distress can do is the new album’s opening song, “Tearing the world apart“, which tips the scales at more than five minutes. The dark, folk-like acoustic instrumental that opens the song will probably come as a surprise, as will the fact that the acoustic melody somehow survives the heavily crashing and radioactive detonations that try to destroy it.
As the chords groan and growl, the drums crack like whips and rattle like stones thrown by an avalanche, and then, following a brutally slugging bridge, the band take off in a d-beat-propelled charge of destruction, mauling and heavy, but laced with piercing bits of quivering guitar dementia, and a squalling and wailing solo, as well as those savage bear-like roars.
The song is a decimating but electrifying experience, and perhaps especially decimating at the end when the riffing generates a very dark and dismal mood while the pounding and tumbling drums, explosive in sound, really grab attention.
The album includes 11 more songs, none of them longer than that one and the majority of them closer in length to “Стадо“. If you dig the two songs I’ve highlighted, you’ll enjoy the rest too. They continue to amalgamate brute-force, high-powered crust-punk crush-fests, ferocious grit-caked vocal tirades, and bright bursts of quirky, hallucinogenic lead-guitar melody.
They also continue to pull the pace as well push it, creating episodes of devastating bleakness; in some of those episodes the soloing sounds not only psychedelic but also tremendously stricken, like mutilated wails of grief. And there are other variations in the mix as well, but I’ll leave you to experience those on your own.
It’s tough to stand tall next to those famed bands comparatively referenced by Selfmadegod and identified above, but on this album Distress do it.
https://selfmadegod.bandcamp.com/album/under-pressure-of-reality
https://distressrawshit.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/selfmadegod