(written by Islander)
In June of last year Gilead Media announced that it would be releasing a collaborative album by Mizmor and Hell (Alluvion, which hit the streets in April 2025) — and explained that it would be one of three final new releases leading up to the label’s closure. Whenever that day comes, it will leave behind for me, and for many, many others, a host of great memories assembled over the course of dozens of records wonderfully curated and provided by Gilead over an almost 20-year period, as well as some equally indelible memories of Gilead Fest.
One more powerful memory is about to be added to all the others.
Today, October 31st, Gilead Media is making a surprise release of the second of those three final albums, Confusion Gate by New York’s Yellow Eyes. It marks a continuation of a relationship between the band and the label that led to Gilead‘s release of Sick With Bloom (2015), Immersion Trench Reverie (2017), and Rare Field Ceiling (2019), as well as vinyl editions for Hammer of Night (2013). I’ve been fortunate to hear Confusion Gate before today, and have some thoughts to share.
In less than a month we’ll celebrate the 16th birthday of this site. In all those years I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve reviewed an album when no music from it was yet publicly available. In fact, I’d say most of my album reviews have accompanied our premieres of full-album streams. I confess this is probably due to an insecurity about my writing; when people can hear the music for themselves, it takes some of the pressure off.
But even though I’ve spent some time with this album, I didn’t have to bend my usual conventions. Gilead didn’t want anyone to spoil the surprise, and so I’ve delayed my verbiage until now — when you can hear all the music for yourselves. I mainly want to encourage you to do that, and to buy it if you enjoy it as much as I have.
******
In addition to the music of Confusion Gate I was also able to read and ponder Sam Skarstad’s lyrics for the songs. I did that both before and after listening. They are poetic, occasionally rhyming, and wholly absorbing. If I were a serious student of poetry I might be able to more formally characterize the style. But I’m not, so I’ll just say they are strange and surreal — shifting and chilling collages of imagery and events, much more mysterious and evocative of the imagination than plainly literal in any sense, but they also have the ability to trigger emotional reactions (most of them disturbing), for reasons that are difficult to explain.
Having said that, they do narrate experiences — a winter journey of a protagonist wakened from slumber, beckoned by a floating finger and a siren’s call, trekking from the “pine-filth” of lowlands to an eerie meadow at a mountain’s crest, and other strange journeys and visions as well. Some of the lyrical poetry reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe, in his renderings of haunting and sometimes terrifying tales.
These lyrical tales also seem set in older centuries, nearer the time of Poe than our modern age, and in rural places, huddled homes, and wilderness climes. Animals and insects figure in the lyrics, as do apparitional figures from outside the world of flesh and blood.
To give you a mere hint of all this, I could randomly grab any grouping of lines from any of the songs, but here’s the one selection I chose, the opening lines from the album’s opening song “Brush the Frozen Horse“:
I fear that we have stopped too long
The rabbit hill grows white and lost
Forget the gas lamp hissing song
We will not need it in the frost
The fingernail is floating
Toward the siren flows the course
Strange the locust
Strange the fire
Brush the frozen horse
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That opening song is the second-longest of the album’s 10, narrowly exceeded by the title song on the other end of this hour-long record. Its opening passage accords with the lyrics — ethereal and haunting, isolated and old. But the music also explodes in detonations and furious blasting, surrounded by strange chiming and siren-like wailing tones. The music also generates a miasma of swarming and heaving riffage, still infiltrated by shrill, strange, and dissonant notes that whir and writhe as well as ring.
Will Skarstad expels the lyrics in tormented, jagged-edge screams (heavy on the reverb), which enhance the song’s unsettling moods. Slowly moaning and deeply throbbing bass notes, groaning chords, and drums that rumble and tumble find their way in, along with a saxophone and flying fretwork fevers that seem to channel fear and desperation. The music also gentles near the end, making space for eerily ringing notes, eerily shimmering keys, and doleful acoustic strumming.
It’s a thrilling song that’s both calamitous and hallucinatory, in many ways just as surreal as the lyrical poetry, though even more viscerally frightening. For some reason, I started thinking about such things as Washington Irving’s stories from the early 19th century, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” as well as Poe, albeit narrated with a furious black metal backing. Which I suppose is one way of saying that the music is transportive.
The other songs are also transportive, and they also seem to have one foot lodged in olden times. Such is the effect of violin strings and woodwind instruments that appear here and there. Sometimes the music becomes panoramic and almost pastoral, even when the drums are hurtling and the vocals are screaming and snarling. But the music can also seem witchy, sinister, weirdly fiendish, and fiendishly delirious.
All of that happens in “The Thought of Death“, which also features a lot of creatively varied bass-and-drum work (certainly not the only song where that’s notable), and another mysterious, acoustic-led denouement, complete with gasping horrors.
I think it’s no coincidence this album is being released on Samhain (or Halloween if you prefer), because the music itself sounds liminal, like the parting of veils between the living and the dead (or the human and the hellish), when spirits from the great beyond are free to visit us, to revel and to torment as much as the time allows. These musical visitations are also scary, and perpetually head-spinning. They seem to occupy an otherworldly dream state — vivid waking dreams, to be sure.
“Suspension Mood” proves to be both menacing and mad (the vocals are undeniably insane) but also seems to beckon and to dance. Like every full song it’s remarkably elaborate and richly layered (and of course, surreal). The following acoustic interlude “i. Nocturne” sounds like a spooky backwoods lament, a ghostly breath before “A Forgotten Corridor“, which blazes and convulses, creating an experience both electrifying and unnerving in its derangements. But it also flows in elegant waves of melancholy and includes an elegant, classically inclined acoustic-guitar harmony.
Folk-ish acoustic guitars initially trace the haunted melody of “I Fear the Master’s Murmurs” (joined once more by gasping words), a melody which then meanders in confusion, menacingly surges, and sprawls in grandeur through other unfolding adaptations, accompanied by variations of speed and intensity. It’s followed by another interlude piece, “ii. Beyond“, one that’s haunting and un-real of course, but this time fashioned with cosmic synths (and maybe scratchy fiddling?).
“The Scent of Black Metal” is very much in line with the other full songs before it, but perhaps more discordant, distressing, and nightmare-spawning than those others, and then another interlude (“iii. The Entrance“) quickly follows, which combines theremin-like quivering melody and acoustic guitars that are both folky and refined.
And finally, “Confusion Gate” concludes this remarkable opus with a truly daunting musical adventure. Slow and expansive at first, dreamlike and vast, it gradually ramps up and torques the tension, but also seems to waltz, to levitate (propelled in part by mesmerizing massed flutes or pipes), and to attack with red eyes and flashing claws.
After all that, I’m not sure a summing up is needed or even possible, but here goes: Confusion Gate is fantastic. It uncannily delivers a wide-ranging and thoroughly integrated amalgam of folk music, classical music (both orchestral and of the medieval, chamber music variety), raging black metal, unconventional psychedelia, dissonance, and harmoniousness, and deploys those ingredients to create a paranormal pageant of black metal Americana, as if tailor-made for a Halloween night.
(Obviously, just my interpretation as a listener. You might have another. Only one way to find out!)
******
Here are the performers:
Vocals and Guitar: Will Skarstad
Guitar and Additional Instrumentation: Sam Skarstad
Bass: Alex DeMaria
Drums: Michael Rekevics
Lyrics by Sam Skarstad
Saxophone on tracks 1, 2, & 10 by Patrick Shiroishi
Additional Vocals by Natasha Vasilyeva and Ralph Schmidt (Ultha)
Mixed and mastered by Sam Skarstad in Beacon, NY
And, well, here’s one more excerpt of the lyrical poetry, this one from the closing title track:
A shadow crossed my luck
My time of sunlight
The shape on the old wall changed
The unknown hour strange
But struck
Stranger now that
From the hillside’s
Rippled crown
Odd twilight travels down
A milk white hand is waving
I forgot the golden rule
That my time was not worth saving
Find the album here, and listen below:
https://gileadmedia.bandcamp.com/album/confusion-gate
https://gileadmedia.net/
https://yelloweyes.bandcamp.com/album/confusion-gate
YELLOW EYES:
https://linktr.ee/yelloweyesband
https://www.instagram.com/yelloweyesband/