BEST OF BRITISH: KING WITCH / SEA MOSQUITO / TECHNOLOGIST

(Andy Synn offers up another tasty platter of meaty British Metal for you all to enjoy)

It feels like it’s been ages since I last did one of these “Best of British” articles… though, in truth, it’s only been a couple of months.

But, whatever the reasons behind this slight delay (mostly due to the fact that I’ve been busier than usual recently, although it hasn’t helped that at least one of the albums/artists I was going to cover ended up coming to us for an album premiere, thus taking them out of contention… looking at you here Ba’al) I’m now once again set to present you with three more recent releases from the always verdant, ever versatile British Metal scene.

KING WITCH – III

Look, I’ll admit it, I am well behind the curve when it comes to King Witch, as several other sites have already heaped a lot of well-deserved praise on their new album (the aptly-titled III).

But, to be honest, I don’t really mind if it looks like I’m jumping on the bandwagon a bit… because the band’s particular brand of grungy, doomy Heavy Metal – think Sabbath-meets-Soundgarden if you’re looking for a quick, quippy sound-bite – is one hell of a fun ride, and one I’m glad that I finally have a ticket to!

Rather than trying to reinvent the proverbial wheel (or themselves) on their third album, the group have clearly decided their time would be better spent just refining what already works for them in order to make it even better, as outstanding opener “Suffer in Life” quickly demonstrates.

The guitars are bigger, beefier, but also sharper and hookier (and, trust me, this record is all about the hooks) while the songwriting is even crisper and cleaner, largely eschewing the temptation to indulge in any of the more outlandish artistic diversions or proggy deviations found on their previous albums in favour of a more stripped-down and streamlined, not to mention irresistibly anthemic, formula which results in the closest thing to an “all killer, no filler” record they’ve ever produced.

That’s not to say they don’t still occasionally play around with some of their proggier proclivities – the way that the second half of doom-laden mid-album highlight “Sea of Lies” essentially transforms into almost an entirely different, but equally awesome song (replete with its own set of killer hooks and catchy melodies), is a bold choice, while colossal closer “Last Great Wilderness” pushes the classic quiet/loud dynamic to its most bombastic extreme in a way that simultaneously channels Alice In Chains, Cathedral, and King Crimson – it’s just that the main goal here is clearly to write as many humongously hooky Heavy Metal anthems as possible.

And, of course, none of those anthems would be possible without the phenomenal performance of vocalist Laura Donnelly, whose commanding presence and captivating delivery during the likes of “Deal With the Devil” (whose soaring chorus refrain and brilliantly brooding bridge-section help make it a personal favourite of mine) and the bleak balladry of “Behind the Veil” really helps put this album over the top.

Make no mistake though, King Witch is definitely a team effort – despite the understandable focus on Donnelly’s vocals – as the riveting riffs of “Swarming Flies” (one of the album’s darkest, heaviest tracks) and the unapologetically head-bangin’ “Diggin in the Dirt”, courtesy of guitarist Jamie Gilchrist, are all more than worth the price of admission too!

SEA MOSQUITO – MAJESTAS

Last time I wrote about London’s Sea Mosquito I described them as “weird music made by weird people”… and, after listening to their second album, that opinion hasn’t changed.

The band themselves, however, clearly have changed – at least a little – as Majestas features less of the industrialised ambience which marked their first full-length and more of a focus on dark, frequently disturbing, melody – opener “Organs Dissolved in Laquer” is by turns seething and needling and haunting in equal measure – designed to make your skin crawl and your hair stand on end.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a grimy, pseudo-industrial undercurrent to be found during several of these tracks – the martial, metallic pounding of “Ascension”, for example – but the decision to focus on ambience over ugliness (“Dead to the World”) recalls a similar shift made by the likes of The Axis of Perdition and Blut Aus Nord (especially in their 777 era) over the years.

The second half of the album in particular showcases more of the odd and unorthodox facets of the band which have made them, to a certain coterie of listeners “in the know” about such things, one of the more strangely compelling acts on the British Black Metal scene, with the opening minutes of “In Reverence of Pain” combining mantra-like melodic vocals and ringing, reverb-drenched drums with eerie atmospheric emptiness and scarified snarls, before the track blooms into bleak-yet-beautiful life in a compellingly kaleidoscopic cascade of wicked melody and warped dissonance.

The dark-jazz, post-black, genre-agnostic “Ode to Wine” then goes even further off the deep end, marrying the ambient expressionism of latter-day Oranssi Pazuzu with passages of nerve-jangling discordance reminiscent of Krallice at their nastiest – while also adding its own uniquely weird angle to the resultant concoction – after which the disturbingly-titled “To Look Upon Your Own Skeleton” ups the ante (and the intensity) once more, bombarding the listener with a veritable torrent of scalding distortion and borderline-inhuman percussion, interspersed with sequences of atmosphere-heavy groove and melody-laced ambience.

Let me tell you something… as much as I enjoyed Igitur at the time, it’s not an album I’ve gone back to all that frequently over the last couple of years (though, on those rare occasions that I have, it’s still held up pretty damn well to my initial assessment of it). But by refocussing their sound and exploring the darker and more esoteric side of things that little bit deeper they’ve made something here that I expect to have much more staying power!

TECHNOLOGIST – REBORN

Earlier this year I stumbled across Manchester-based Prog-Metal(core) quintet Technologist live, supporting up-and-coming Scottish song-smiths Tiberius (whose new album is still a firm favourite), where they made enough of an impression that I was eager to check out their debut when it was released at the start of this month.

What did I discover? Well, for one thing, the bold, confident clean-singing of frontman Andy Lavender is clearly the band’s not-so-secret weapon, as it’s his performance on tracks like “Brothers” and “Purge the Earth” (belting out lines like “Up high, where you can do no wrong / But my brothers, it is conscience that you leave behind?” with a sense of conviction which belies the band’s relatively unsung stature) that will most likely make the strongest, and longest-lasting impression (though some of the lead melodies and solos also have a fair chance of achieving proper ear-worm status).

And while some of the “heavier” elements initially fall a little flat – the harsh vocals, early on at least, simply don’t have as much character (or confidence) as the cleans, while some of the more repetitive rhythmic riff patterns of (particularly during “Deception”) have a tendency to go in one ear and out the other – as the album progresses you definitely start to get a better feel for the band’s collective (though not yet fully coherent) vision.

The aforementioned “Brothers”, for example, is where things first really start to coalesce, but it’s not until “Purge the Earth” that the bar really gets raised, combining catchy vocal and guitar melodies with passages of punchier, crunchier aggression (with the harsh vocals, used much more sparingly, feeling much stronger overall), as well as some impressively technical soloing, some brooding, mood-enhancing atmospherics, and some majorly hooky (not to mention heavy) grooves into something which sits somewhere between Evergrey and Allegaeon on the Prog-Metal spectrum.

So while it’s not a perfect album by any means (it takes a little while to properly find its feet and, ultimately, also ends up being a little too short to fully satisfy) it definitely showcases a lot of potential – climactic closer “Embers” in particular suggests both a proggier and/or heavier future for the band, showcasing some of the most intricate and intense guitar work (aided and abetted by some subtly impressive bass work) on the album – and is more than good enough to make me want to keep an even closer eye on Technologist going forward.