SHADES OF BLACK: VALLETTA, OFERMOD, KAECK, ILDARUNI, MULM, HYPNOSINOSIS

(written by Islander)

In this week’s edition of SHADES OF BLACK I’ve called attention to recent songs excerpted from forthcoming albums by four bands. After that I’ve highlighted two recently released albums that really made an impact on my addled head and heart. And “highlighted” is the right word, because I just haven’t had enough time to give either of them the more comprehensive review they deserve. But as I always tell myself on days like this, something is surely better than nothing.

I’m not sure I have a coherent way of trying to sketch out how the musical experiences change from one selected band to the next. They’re all diabolical in their own ways, but you might get a couple of instances of whiplash as musical shifts occur.

 

VALLETTA (U.S.)

Fall has begun here in the northern tier of the world, and I’m beginning to think about all we typically do in our year-end rituals here, including my one contribution to it, a list of the year’s “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs”. I’ve been compiling a list of candidates based on my own listening since last December. It took me about 10 seconds to put this first song on there, which didn’t shock me given how damned infectious the songs were on this North Carolina quartet’s 2024 debut album Summer.

I really don’t think the trick that Valletta pull off on “Cold Death” is an easy achievement, and “trick” is therefore probably the wrong word. What they’ve managed to do is write a song that has hard-rocking and reflexively muscle-moving grooves, hook-laden riffs that vividly throb, and a screaming, sky-flying guitar solo — but at the same time they’ve made the experience menacing and even hellish.

The fiendishness of the music derives from the song’s insidiously squirming guitar-leads, the beastliness of Keenan Carroll‘s rabid screams, voracious serrated-edge howls, and noxious gagging — and that solo too. And a song that makes you want to yell “Cold Death!” right along with the vocalist isn’t really all that safe.

“Cold Death” is from a new Valletta EP named Bitter Lucid Truth, which will be released on October 24th.

https://vallettanc.bandcamp.com/album/bitter-lucid-truth
https://www.instagram.com/vallettanc
https://www.facebook.com/vallettanc

 

OFERMOD (Sweden)

Steered by Belfagor aka Mika Hakola since 1996, Ofermod have had an influential but also notorious career – notorious primarily because of Belfagor‘s non-musical troubles and escapades, which have included stints in prison. You can get a sense of all that in this excerpt of the very self-aware and unpretentious interview answers of Belfagor at Bardo Methodology.

However, I’m really not here to re-hash the notoriety but to focus on the marvels of two songs from Ofermod‘s new album Drakosophia that are streaming. at Bandcamp.

The first of those, “The Painful Movers“, is the one that brings the album to a close. It leaps into the fray immediately with furiously battering beats, deliriously writhing riffage with a gnarled yet also gilded edge, and a tandem of cut-throat howls and gritty near-chanted pronouncements.

It’s absolutely exhilarating to hear, from there straight through all rhythmic and riffing variations that will get heads moving. By turns the music is jubilant and near-chaotic, and it overflows with fleet-fingered fretwork and electrifying drumwork.

The other song you can now hear is the album’s second track, “Vineyards of Gomorrah“. It’s also a wild and electrifying extravagance. The piercing riffage both vividly pulsates and violently swarms, and the guitar leads are exultant and exhilarating, but also diabolically menacing and even bleak, while the drums once again combine jaw-dropping speed and nimble fills.

The vocals are again authentically demonic, but this time they also include the spiritual reverence of soaring choral voices, even as the music seems to wail in pain. In a nutshell, both songs are breathtaking.

Drakosophia will be released by Shadow Records (distributed and marketed by Regain) on October 3rd. For this new album, Ofermod‘s fifth, Belfagor is joined by North American vocalist “Adeptus“, Austrian session drummer “Florian Musil“, and bassist “Devo” (ex-Marduk). Ofermod describes the album as “a vessel for the Draconian current, bound and initiated to the traditions and teachings of the dark magical order Dragon Rouge – Ordo Draconis et Atri Adamantis.”

https://regainrecords.bandcamp.com/album/drakosophia
https://www.facebook.com/OfermodOfficial/

 

KAECK (Netherlands)

Two weeks ago I hailed the first single from Kaeck‘s new album Gruwelijk Onthaal, an experience named “Paterhexolimaat” that proved to be a savagely insane but also profoundly bleak and frightening experience. And now we have a second single and accompanying video, this one named “Bloedend Verraad Met Ontvleesde Hand Gesmeten“.

The song’s lyrics are in Dutch, but it became clear after running them through an online translation tool that they are a furious and violent condemnation of an un-named traitorous and thieving king.

The raging hatefulness of the words comes through in the gnashing ugliness of the vocals, but at first the vibrant trill and sizzle of the guitars seems to channel a different and more bleak mood, a mood of distress and sorrow, while the drums deliver measured beats.

Yet the song changes and begins to sound more like the soundtrack to retribution — the rhythm brutally stomps, the swarming guitars sound much more vicious and cold, and the vocals explode in agonized screams. The darkness and cruelty in the music become palpable. Even when the riffing rises in range, it sounds haughty and malicious.

The song includes a vibratory organ interlude, which carries the music back in time and into a realm of wraiths, and afterward the music becomes deeply sinister and even more frighteningly black-hearted, even with the organ keys continuing to quiver high above.

Gruwelijk Onthaal will be released on September 18th by Folter Records. It features cover art by Dylan Humphries in a handmade woodcut style and “shows Kaeck arriving on Earth, stepping on the broken souls and corpses of humanity”. As the band’s Jan Kruitwagen has stated, “All of the tracks describe different ways Kaeck enters the souls of mankind, choking all the life out of us.”

https://folterrecords.bandcamp.com/album/gruwelijk-onthaal
https://www.facebook.com/Kaeckhorde

 

ILDARUNI (Armenia)

The cover art for Ildaruni‘s new album Divinum Sanguinem is astonishing, and it suits the music too, as you’re about to discover if you check out the lyric video for “Of Nomos and Flaming Flint Stone“.

It’s very tempting to sum up the song as “grandiose”, but without meaning to imply that it’s flamboyant or excessive. The music is elaborate and symphonically enhanced. It flies high and far, and swirls with richly embellished fretwork and keyboard filigrees. It sounds gloriously delirious — but also grand and also venomous.

Meanwhile, the rabidly snarling vocals sound authentically evil, and the drumming veers from herculean blasting to rumbling booms, accompanied but gut-throbbing bass-lines. And the song also includes a captivating guitar solo, almost flute-like in its sound, that adds an element of pagan folk to the affair — before it spins up into shining exultation, aided by a second guitar.

Divinum Sanguinem will be released on November 7th by Black Lion Records.

https://lnk.to/Ildaruni-DivinumSanguinem
https://ildaruniblacklion.bandcamp.com/album/divinum-sanguinem
https://www.com/facebook.com/ildaruni
https://www.instagram.com/ildaruni

 

MULM (Norway)

Now we come to the first of the two albums I mentioned in the introduction. This one, Utyske, is the full-length debut of Mulm, who describe their music as “Black Metal infused with Nordic nature and raw, primeval angst.”

The album’s opening song “Gandr” was so compelling that it convinced me to listen to everything else, and everything else compelled me to buy it. That opening song made such a strong impression because of the utter bleakness of the opening guitar harmonies and the staggering heaviness of the drums — and the urgency with which the song then charged ahead, driven by jumping, punk-like beats, madly pulsating guitars, and crazed vocals (a combination of murderous snarls and wild yells).

Even in its fast-rushing phase, even in the midst of hornet-swarm riffing and blast-beat drums, a trilling lead guitar still makes the music feel distraught, and the song’s miserably wailing final phase is every bit as anguished as the opening, if not more so. And holy hell, the final gagging scream is a terror.

Seven more songs follow “Gandr“. Without touching on all of them individually (only because my time is too short), they provide a fairly wide range of musical sensations and moods, sometimes interestingly augmented by keys.

At low ebb, the music is forlorn and haunting; at high tide it sweeps expansively, engulfing the listener in rip-tides of frantic fretwork and thunderous percussion. The riffing is a dependably potent emotional carrier and often quite melodically memorable, creating moods that vary but are usually distressing in different ways — moods of desperation, confusion, grief, and anger — though the heart-hammering opening phase of the absolutely riveting “Evil Svoepe” might be interpreted as jubilant, before it becomes both more tormented and more tragically grand, and “Kiebeaander” unexpectedly has a stately medieval resonance and a waltzing old elegance that’s very appealing.

While the snarling and baying vocals are generally as nasty as in “Gandr” there are unexpected moments when they soar in spine-tingling song, sometimes clean and sometimes coated in grit, or scream in extremity.

At times the keyboard augmentations are also interestingly far away from black metal — see, for example, the opening of the musically lush “Disefall“, which itself as a whole is distant from conventional second-wave styles, and in part provides a gloriously bright digression from the album’s more usual dour moods. The closing song “Det Moerkner Av Utysker” includes another of those moments at the outset, in tandem with an acoustic guitar.

I wish I could say more, but will truncate my thoughts by offering that this album displays very impressive songwriting and performance skills (including some great bass-work), including strong melodies that wear their hearts on their sleeves, coupled with ferocious intensity and expansive sweep, and quite often it will carry listeners far away from many of the usual black metal orthodoxies. Well worth having.

Credits: Mulm is a duo consisting of Kvalvaag (Kvalvaag, Astaroth++) and Atyr (Nattverd++). Guest musicians include Magnus Hagen, Raatten, Andreas Wærholm, and Steinar Aven, while the cover art was created by French illustrator David Thiérrée (Behemoth, Gorgoroth, Enslaved).

Utyske was released on August 28th by the Khaoszophy label.

https://khaoszophy.bandcamp.com/album/utyske
https://www.facebook.com/p/mulm-61553727972526/

 

HYPNOSINOSIS (Chile)

And to close, I want to recommend Μετάνοια, the debut album by the Chilean band Hypnosinosis. They explain that the album’s title translates from Greek as “change of perception or beyond the rational consciousness,” and their label Ascension Records characterizes the lyrics as “centered on the inverted Christian myth and the archetypes of the left-hand path.”

It’s a long album with a running time of approximately 60 minutes. The first song set to play at Bandcamp is the second track “Cenotaph of Hundreds Eyes“. Within seconds, my jaw might have been hanging open as I listened to it. The drilling lead riff is a piercing but dire phenomenon, and becomes even more dire when a second guitar enhances its expanse. The immensity of the low end is staggering, though the bass proves to be just as fast as the guitars. The drums feel like weaponry opening up or honed axes felling tall trees. The vocals are extravagantly unhinged.

It’s the kind of song that makes you feel like you’ve been swallowed whole by a leviathan and swept off your feet by a tornado of fire. When the pace slows, the song feels downright apocalyptic, oppressively crushing and crushingly hopeless. My main question after hearing it, and left gasping by it, was whether I could mentally survive six more songs of near-equal length or longer.

Fortunately (or not), the other songs aren’t all of equivalent intensity and towering, world-ending scale — but most of them get there, even when they include more haunting or more staggering or more head-moving diversions either at the beginning or elsewhere along the way. Even “Mercurius Vivus“, which for quite a while sounds much more melancholy and subdued than any other song, eventually becomes a blast front of devastation. The skill and variability of the rhythm section are another reason why the album holds attention.

Hypnosinosis clearly relish the rendering of fear and devouring catastrophe in their music, in the most breathtaking ways they can manage. They happen to be so damned good at it that the album doesn’t wear out its welcome.

https://music-ascensionrecords.bandcamp.com/album/–2
https://www.facebook.com/p/Hypnosinosis-100049091807509/