artwork by the legend Frank Frazetta
(written by Islander)
I hope those of you who celebrated Halloween got through it with all your fingers intact. Oh wait, that’s a different holiday. But the wish still holds, even if the risks of losing digits might not have been as great. It all depends on where you put them and what you hold and whether some masked goon is firing rubber bullets at your raised fists.
I got through Halloween with all my digits intact, and the three I use for typing have been busily pecking away at this Saturday collection. It comes later than usual because I got a late start and was really confounded in deciding what to pick.
I was pretty thorough in saving links and files this week, which meant there were a fuckload of them staring at me this morning, and I had only sampled a small number of them during the week. I would say that more than half of them were of the black metal persuasion, so I shoved off a lot of those candidates (but not all of them) for tomorrow, which is also therefore guaranteed to be confounding. And there’s a bit of a curveball at the end, of course.
On we go….
MUERTO (Mexico)
A couple of days ago Transcending Obscurity Records announced the signing of the Mexican band Muerto for the release in early 2026 of an album named Eclipsed Realms. Coincident with that they released a song called “Serpentine Echoes“, my first offering today.
The song’s opening riff is the kind of dissonant thing that puts teeth on edge. It simultaneously moans and mewls, heaves and quivers — and then madly contorts like a siren gone insane. The drumming is also unpredictable, though it will feed any hunger for blasts and double-bass turbulence, while the reverberating vocals furiously bray and proclaim the words in tones lined with fangs.
The music is authentically unnerving and poisonous but fascinating, a twisted and near-hallucinatory exposition of black metal that isn’t the kind of thing you run into every day, and it’s all the better for that.
Muerto is the trio of Penelope Matamoros (vocalist and bassist), Juan Mondragon (guitarist), and Eddel Jared (drummer).
https://tometal.com
https://www.facebook.com/muertoband/
LEPRETHERE (Belarus)
My next selection is a 16-minute single by the Belarusian prog/death-metal band Leprethere that was released two days ago. Here’s how they introduce it:
“Our new record, ‘NO FUTURE‘ marks a new stage in our approach to creativity in terms of compositional thinking and experimentation. 16 minutes of immersion into a doomed world without hope.”
It is a truly mind-warping experience, full of exhilarating and unpredictable twists and turns. To realize their elaborate vision, the principal duo of vocalist Anton Bandarenka and guitarist Anton Berezovskiy enlisted the aid of five other participants who contributed bass, drums, saxophone, synths, and backing vocals.
Rather than trying to methodically map its course from start to finish, a map which might look verbally like the intertwined tails of a rat king or the jumble of twigs in a bird’s nest, I’ll instead sketch some of the song’s sensations.
They include: bell-like ringing; futuristic synths; tribal beats; weirdly quivering strings; explosive bouts of bombastic belligerence; hair-on-fire howls; screamo yells; bursts of blaring dissonance; funky and jazzy bass lines; drums unpredictably firing like automatic weapons; barbaric roars; blackened snarls; weirdly darting guitars; spastic battering-ram blows; fluidly twirling jazz-fusion-like fretwork; a beautiful tenor (or alto?) saxophone solo; lots of swift stops and starts; and lots more — all of it carefully assembled and well-calculated to give heads a centrifugal spin, and leave some bones broken.
I have no good idea what to call this in genre terms. It would involve too many hyphens and I’d probably still mistakenly leave some things out. Let’s just call it an unusual adventure.
https://leprethere.bandcamp.com/album/no-future
https://www.facebook.com/leprethere
ROTTEN SOUND (Finland)
Speaking of masked goons firing rubber bullets at raised fists, there’s probably some of that going on in Rotten Sound‘s video for the first single off their new EP Mass Extinction, along with other forms of mayhem and visions of Big Brother style authoritarianism (the song’s name is “Brave New World“).
You pretty much know what you’re going to get from Rotten Sound, and you get it here: roughly a minute and a half of hard-charging grit-edged mind-mauling grindcore violence, with utterly crazed vocals where fury threatens to rip them apart at the seams. From where I sit, I feel like this on a daily basis when reading the news. So I suppose the right word for it is… catharsis.
Mass Extinction comes out December 12 on Season of Mist.
https://orcd.co/rottensoundmassextinction
https://rottensound.bandcamp.com/album/mass-extinction
https://www.facebook.com/rottensoundofficial
HEXJAKT (Sweden)
I put this next pick here to give you a chance to catch your breath, but it will haunt your head too — and then crush it like a surging steamroller.
Its opening phase is where the haunting begins, with a slow guitar harmony that rings and echoes and pulls the heart down. But then the surge begins, with a heavily throbbing bass, hammering beats, and feverishly roiling guitars with a sandpaper tone.
Just in time for scarring vocals to explode from the speakers and lacerate the listener, the music also heavily heaves, dismally drags, and wretchedly moans, marked by skull-splitting drum-cracks. As the band continue to flex the tempos and their musical means of ruination the vocals remain right out on the bleeding edge of red-throated intensity.
The song (paired with a lyric video) is “The Act of Dying“. It’s the second single from the luxuriously bearded Swedish trio’s debut album Blessing of the Damned, which will be out on December 1st.
https://hexjaktband.com/
https://hexjakt.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/hexjaktband
PËRL (France)
Now for a sharp turn in today’s musical path, and an exception to our (mostly) tongue-in-cheek rule about singing.
I’ve mentioned before, but not recently, that Sólstafir’s “Fjara” from Svartir sandar is one of my favorite songs of the last 15 years. And so when I saw the news that the French post-metal band Përl had released a video for their cover of the song, I was compelled to check it out.
Mind you, I was unfamiliar with the music of Përl, and so I didn’t know what to expect. In their cover, they put their own spin on the song, which is what cover songs should do rather than playing copycat, and I was thoroughly enthralled by it.
One difference is that Përl’s vocalist Aline Boussaroque sings the lyrics in French rather than Icelandic (entirely understandable). Another is the interesting contralto timbre of her voice and the different kind of passion, both subdued and soulful and also soaring, that she brings to the singing (plus spoken parts that are rap-like and also near-whispered). Her harmony with a second vocalist gives the extra emotional power needed for the song’s closing crescendo.
(By the way, this is only a sample of what Aline can do with her voice. There is, for example, what she does in her guest appearance that I discussed here with the post-rock collective Lorsque les volcans dorment on their song “La Chute du Pélican” — and I’m sure what she does elsewhere on the album that includes “Fjara“.
But there are other differences between the cover and the original — distorted futuristic reverberations in the low end, somewhere between a groan and a growl; brightly pinging notes that sparkle and others that sizzle; big booming beats; jagged raking chords; moments of grimness and moments of floating alto (or soprano?) saxophone brightness. And, as mentioned the closing crescendo might put your heart in your throat; the saxophone solo there is a big factor in that. (The saxophone performer is Yannick.)
In short, Përl’s cover is distinctly different from Sólstafir’s original, but not so much that it loses touch with the original inspiration.
In addition to being a huge fan of “Fjara“, I’m also a huge fan of this video capturing Sólstafir’s performance of it on October 19, 2011, in the studio of the Icelandic national television channel RÚV. As icing on the musical cake that Përl have delivered, their video is also excellent. Watching the ardent faces provides most of the allure.
The “Fjara” cover appears in the third position on Përl’s new album Architecture du Vertige, which was released on October 24th. I haven’t heard it, only read a mostly promising review at AMG, but I’m so captivated by this cover song I want to give the rest of them a chance.
https://perl.bandcamp.com/album/architecture-du-vertige
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Përl/139542592747991
MASSA NERA (U.S.)
To finish off this Saturday’s collection I chose Massa Nera’s album The Emptiness of All Things, which was released just yesterday via Persistent Vision Records.
By way of background, the album is the result of a commission given to this New Jersey group (through bassist Aeryn Jade Santillan) by the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, as part of its Composing Earth series, to write music that addresses the climate crisis. In devoting themselves to that subject, Massa Nera wound up changing their previous musical and vocal stylings. As in the case of Përl above, I didn’t know what to expect, but came away fascinated, and with my head spun several times around and still spinning.
The rhythms in the songs, and to be precise I mean the work of the rhythm section, are a dominating feature of the music, and they create a magnetic attraction from the very first two eye-popping songs (“A Body” and its close companion “Pèlerin“).
They often give the music muscular heftiness and vigorous punchiness. They rock and they bounce and they rumble and clatter, but the drummer also occasionally erupts in blast-beat fusillades. The tom-heavy tribal grooves (and not just the same tribe from the same continent) are viscerally compulsive, but the drummer also digresses into electrifying fills, sometimes prog-minded in inclination. The bass muses and gets funky too. As much as anything else, they usually give the music a feeling of blood-pounding urgency, in line with the album’s thematic subjects.
The vocals are also divergent. I gather Massa Nera was previously known mainly as a screamo band, and screamo vocals are in the mix, often reaching pinnacles of larynx-shredding intensity, but so are enraged hardcore howls, near-sung histrionics, actual singing (which brings the pain in “Death Shall Flee From Them” and a smoky soulfulness in “New Animism“), and ardent chanting.
The other musical ingredients also span a wide range from song to song and within songs (the songs often flow from one into the next). They include moments of: groaning and crashing discordance; brittle and sorrowful fragility; screeching dissonance; evanescing ethereality; boiling and abrasive derangement; jazzy delirium; clanging confusion; pulverizing pile-driving punishment; and feverishly pulsating menace.
Sometimes acoustic instruments play important roles. Sometimes the music carries a kind of post-punk ring and pulse, or a noise-rock wildness (see “The Best Is Over” as an example of both, though it goes other places too). It sounds like there’s a subdued banjo at the beginning of “Mechanical Sunrise“, before the song starts to bounce (and bounce off the walls) and blast. And maybe a bluesy bottle-neck guitar opens the long final song, “New Animism“, which is a subdued, dark, and near-dreamlike acoustic-led ballad, and a beautifully sorrowful thing.
“Lavender” might be both the most thoroughly catastrophic and the most demented and hallucinatory song; it includes a guest appearance from Tony Castrati of Crippling Alcoholism, and a gripping saxophone solo (which then plays a role at the beginning of the next song “Death Shall Flee From Them“). But there are full-blown riots in other songs too, as well as lots of sleeves wearing hearts on them.
I’m sure this album won’t be metal enough for most people who stumble through our doors. I’m also sure I’ll be buying it (though it’s free to download at Bandcamp).
I’ll close by sharing Massa Nera’s dedication from the album’s Bandcamp page:
Thanks to the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music for granting us the commission that became this album. To our friends, family, and loved ones. To all the people who keep the DIY community alive. To anyone who has seen us play, let us sleep on their floor, or otherwise supported us. To everyone waging the war against fascism, capitalism, and all forms of systematized oppression. To those who embrace community and sustainability, even as we sprint towards environmental collapse. Growth will not save us. Tribalism will not save us. Nations will not save us. All we have is each other. We must dare to invent the future.
https://persistentvisionrecords.com/products/massa-nera-the-emptiness-of-all-things
https://massanera.bandcamp.com/album/the-emptiness-of-all-things
https://www.facebook.com/MASSANERANJ/