(written by Islander)
Life outside the doors of NCS reminded me again that there is life outside the doors of NCS. Which is to say that unforeseen occurrences pushed back the time I wanted to spend listening to and writing about new metal for this roundup, so I’m late finishing it. No need to go into detail but, well, a baseball playoff game last night and needing to get my wife to an early ferry boat this morning had something to do with it.
There’s no baseball playoff games today and my spouse is now out of town, just me and the cats holding down the homestead, so there’s a decent chance I’ll have a more on-time roundup of black(ish) metal ready for tomorrow. As for today’s selections, I think they’ll keep you off-balance as you move through them.
WILD BEYOND (U.S.)
I want to begin with Black Sites In Lower Chambers, an ominously named EP from the Philadelphia trio Wild Beyond that they and Fiadh Productions released just yesterday. Over the course of five songs (one of which we premiered here), they demonstrate a fine aptitude for both savagery and sonority.
The savagery sometimes manifests through thrashing speed, fretwork that maniacally roils, throbs, gnashes, and contorts, vicious snarls, scalding screams, and knee-capping beats, but also through big booming percussive rumbles, bass lines that are sometimes maliciously bone-gnawing and sometimes lustful, and riffing that channels demonic malignancy.
The sonority emerges through heaving and haunting organ chords, ghostly wailing keys, and glittering guitar arpeggios that sound like beckoning spells of sound, but even the corrosively toned riffing carries melodies, melodies that are sinister and slithering as well as gloriously brazen and deliriously high-flying.
As I wrote in that earlier song premiere, Wild Beyond also manage to overlay both the savagery and the sonority with an aura of the supernatural, mostly hellish but occasionally haunting. Speaking of hellish, they close the EP with a cover of Dimmu Borgir‘s “Spellbound (By The Devil)”, and it’s fucking fantastic. The credit goes to:
Edward Gonet III: Vocals, guitars, lyrics
Evan Madden: Drums
Jimmy Viola: Bass, keyboards, additional guitars
https://wildbeyond.bandcamp.com/album/black-sites-in-lower-chambers
https://fiadh.bandcamp.com/album/black-sites-in-lower-chambers
FELL RUIN (U.S.)
The last release (so far) of Michigan-based Fell Ruin was their 2022 album Cast in Oil The Dressed Wrought, which we premiered here along with Andy Synn‘s introductory review in November of that year. Perhaps as a reminder that they’re still around (and perhaps as a hint that they’re working on something new), they recently released a new video for that album’s title track.
The black-and-white video, beautifully made by The C.O.I.N., is a frightening and fascinating concoction, imaginatively conceived and chillingly rendered, including the imagery of the band performing.
The song itself is also frightening and fascinating. Often propelled by a hammering gallop or frenzied percussive bursts, it discharges squirming and sizzling riffage, screeching pick slides, rabid screams, and ugly incantations, but also dismally groaning and miserably wailing slogs of oppression and hopelessness, as well as black-hearted stomps and poisonously writhing anti-melodies.
The pacing is in constant flux, and things really slow down in a mid-song instrumental interlude that’s mystical, mysterious, and ultimately a fashioning of beckoning splendor, albeit without forsaking the song’s principal melodic through-lines. And the song’s following phase is the most fascinating of all the song’s twisting and turning progressions, and a big showcase for the impressive talents of Fell Ruin‘s rhythm section.
https://fellruin.bandcamp.com/album/cast-in-oil-the-dressed-wrought
http://fellruin.com/
https://www.facebook.com/fellruin
https://www.instagram.com/fellruin
OF WOLVES (U.S.)
The genre-bending Chicago band Of Wolves, long a favorite of mine, released an astonishingly intense new single last week, the first one written and sung by their bassist Ivan. It’s called “Drinking Again“, and while I don’t know for sure, I have a feeling that some combination of rage and disgust over current fascistic events here in the U.S. prompted that reaching for the bottle. (Or maybe I should just speak for myself.)
The song begins one way and then changes, and changes again and again. Initially, feedback squeals like a siren, droning frequencies emanate from below, and a dismal melody miserably unfolds above ritualized tribal beats and below shrill sonic frenzies of despair.
Just as raging caustic vocals arrive, however, the song crashes and throbs, drenching the senses in a swarm of acid-strength chords and fast-pulsing notes. Near-sung words also mesh with those furious harsh vocals; tremolo’d fretwork furiously drills; and the drums kick up storms; but that heavy, doleful melody also returns to drag hearts down, even as the vocals still spit fire.
https://ofwolves.bandcamp.com/track/drinking-again
https://linktr.ee/ofwolves
https://www.facebook.com/ofWOLVES
TENEBRIS (Poland)
I did venture the opinion that today’s collection would keep you off-balance. I had in mind not only how the music would change from selection to selection, but also how this next song would do that within its own confines (as the cover art itself suggests).
I can’t help but think of the song as a carnival, one situated just around the corner from that place where Cerberus guards the entry. It initially includes theatrical singing that’s kind of menacing and kind of haughty, with touches of vibrato in the mix. Initially, it also includes swirling, swarming, and frantically darting guitars with a demented air and inventive drum patterns and tempos that themselves seem a bit demented.
The song is a twisting and turning extravaganza, and so it also includes rabidly voracious screams, growled near-spoken and near-sung words, episodes of mad fretwork delirium and fluidly wailing melody, and plenty of attention-seizing bass nimbleness and percussive dynamism. Plus, it sounds like there’s a jubilant saxophone solo in there, doesn’t it?
And that’s not all that happens, but I ought to leave some of the surprises for you to discover without providing an advance heads-up.
Tenebris have been around in one manifestation or another since 1991, with one big recording gap along the way. “Popiel” is the first song to premiere from a new Tenebris album named Kochanowski, which will be out on November 7th via Pagan Records.
The album is described as “a musical continuation of their 2018 EP, Legendarna, and delves into the surprising, esoteric side of Polish poet Jan Kochanowski. “Popiel” is described as “an excerpt of Juliusz Słowacki’s epic poem Król Duch,” which means “The Spirit King”.
https://www.pagan-records.com
https://paganrecords.bandcamp.com
https://tenebris-polska.bandcamp.com/album/legendarna
https://www.facebook.com/tenebrisalpha
BELL WITCH & AERIAL RUIN (U.S.)
The musical un-balancing continues (fairly severely) as we move from that devilish Tenebris carnival to a heartbreaking new collaborative piece by Bell Witch (Dylan Desmond, Jesse Shreibman) and Aerial Ruin (Erik Moggridge), two bands I’ve come to know and become very fond of since moving to the Pacific Northwest.
I’ve already called “Waves Became the Sky” heartbreaking, but the music is also mystical, or I might venture to say spiritual. Heartbreak is the effect of luminous but grieving vocal harmonies, slowly wailing melodies, gun-shot snare-cracks, and an immensely heavy low-end stomp that’s stately in its pacing.
The soul-stirring and soul-staggering melodies, which draw on divergent harmonic frequencies, weave their way deeper and deeper as their refrains continue, but the performers also create adaptations of them, sending quivering notes high in different and more intense expressions of loss, but also sending them lower into darker crevasses. The vocals also find a higher range, seeming to cry out for hope.
All in all, this is an incredibly moving 12-minute spell, capable of taking over whether you really want it to or not.
The song is the first one to be revealed from Stygian Bough: Vol 2, the second collaborative album by these bands (we interviewed them about the first one in 2020 here). It will be released by Profound Lore on November 14th. The cover art is the work of Denis Forkas.
https://orcd.co/ek5joa4
https://bellwitch.bandcamp.com/album/stygian-bough-volume-ii
https://www.facebook.com/BellWitchDoom/
https://www.facebook.com/aerialruin
SOULFRACTURE (UK)
One last effort to shove you off your equilibrium, maybe to the point of causing you to mentally fall over and get concussed.
First, a word about the video that presents the song: It’s really well-made, from its lighting (which makes most of the band-members, and especially the vocalist, look pretty ominous) to the varied camera angles and the adept editing.
Now a word about the song, “The Leader Of The Exploited” (well, more than one). On the one hand, it’s got ferocious energy, coming at the listener in bursts of drilling fretwork and clobbering beats which together create a savage pulse. On top of that, the vocals are beastly, both gritty and scalding.
On the other hand, the music also leaps forward in bracing gallops, and the riffing writhes in rapidly quivering tones. On the third hand, the music jolts and thuds, feverishly screams and dismally swarms, frantically darts about and maliciously jackhammers, while the soloing is fluid as well as fast. At no point are the vocals anything less than mercilessly murderous.
A dynamic thriller of a song, and one that I’ve found has gotten stuck in my fractured cranium.
The song is the title track to Soulfracture‘s new EP, their first release in about 17 years. It’s set for release on Bandcamp and across streaming services on November 7th.
https://linktr.ee/soulfracture_
https://soulfracture.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/soulfracture_
https://www.facebook.com/soulfractureofficial