(written by Islander)
Like yesterday, today I had enough time to include a lot of new music and to spill a great volume of words about almost all of it.
For reasons I’ll explain, I’m beginning with a new album that’s well outside the usual parameters of this column, but then launching straight into a sequence of black metal songs (in varying shades of course) that are fantastically thrilling, and sometimes unexpectedly sublime.
夢遊病者 (SLEEPWALKER) (Int’l)
It would have made more sense to discuss the new album from 夢遊病者 (sleepwalker) in yesterday’s new-music roundup, where anything goes in genre terms, than in this column, which focuses on black(ish) metal. But as of yesterday I didn’t feel I’d spent enough time with the album to write anything coherent about it (or even typically incoherent).
A day later, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, but if I wait longer I’ll quickly be rushed along in the daily Monday-Friday turbulence of writing premieres and the other tasks I do around here and who knows when I could get back to РЛБ30011922 (the perplexing name of 夢遊病者’s new album)?
Yesterday would have made more sense because “anything goes” is 夢遊病者’s mantra. They have already demonstrated, and do so again on this new album, that they’re brimming with wide-ranging musical ideas and have the talent to materialize them successfully.
(I’m an American of a certain age, but many visitors here are not, so I should mention that the phrase “anything goes” always occurs to me with musical accompaniment, specifically an often-covered Cole Porter song of that name from the 1930s musical of that name.)
РЛБ30011922 is an even 37 minutes long and 夢遊病者 perform and deliver it as a unitary track because they believe it is “best experienced as a single, seamless composition.” They introduce it this way:
“A humble ode and reconstruction of the fragments of a life lived. From tumult to joy, in beckoning anguish and in quiet surrender, surrounded by love and pain and laughter all alike—this album is a talisman to a future hopeful of dignity, understanding and good will towards humankind.”
They also explain that the album examines “a key figure in the 夢遊病者 (sleepwalker) universe, without whom much of this output would not be possible,” and is “[a]kin to a life lived, from the first breath to the last.” At Bandcamp they include a 10-part list of words, written in Cyrillic text, but there’s no discernible break in the music — this really is just one extensive and wholly immersive and enthralling track.
That Cyrillic listing reads like fragments of someone remembering events in their life, beginning with “Krasnyi Luch was the name of the city…” (I see that Krasnyi Luch is today a city in the embattled Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.) Maybe those fragments are parts of what is being spoken here and there as the minutes pass.
In their opening phase 夢遊病者 begin with some of those brief spoken words, a deep droning tone, and a dreamlike collage of shimmering and shivering sounds, soon joined by vividly pounding beats, a scratchy surging riff, and ardent singing. That collage of sounds expands to include a multitude of musing and meandering instruments that collectively create moods of wistfulness and wonder.
From there the drumming becomes more animated and the music more frantic, seeming to both moan below and emit shrill, piercing sonic fevers up above. Yet the atmosphere is still dreamlike, still wondrous, and even more expansive. More words spoken by an aged woman repeatedly surface in the midst of the changing musical multitudes.
As the minutes pass 夢遊病者 push and pull the energy (with the tremendous drumming as a key driver of the changes), creating differing excursions and altering moods in which different instruments (including the bass and glittering keys and lots more) play leading roles, but stitching things together with recurrences of memorable motifs.
The variety of the instrumentation is extravagant, ranging in their tonalities from mandolin to flutes, electric piano, theremin, violin, woodwinds of different kinds, and maybe a bowed upright bass with the distortion turned up. (I don’t pretend to know what 夢遊病者 are using to make those tones — their Bandcamp credits astonishingly identify only three instruments — only trying to describe what they sound like.)
In genre terms you might detect influences of prog rock, jazz of differing varieties across many decades, folk, and classical music. One of the most gripping phases past the midpoint includes an electrifying drum performance which backs up the piercing sounds of a mesmerizing and soulful dual-guitar solo.
I mentioned changing moods, and some of them are dark and sorrowfully wistful, but overall I found РЛБ30011922 to have a recurrent brightness, a resurfacing aura of affection, wonder, and joy (and a mystical feeling of passing over and into the beyond at the very end). It is certainly a joy to listen to the album.
https://vnkv.bandcamp.com/album/30011922
MISOTHEIST (Norway) and DARVAZA (Italy/Norway)
On or about October 10th the Norwegian label Terratur Possessions announced that it had reached an agreement with the German label Amor Fati Productions for the latter to accept orders and process them for all of the former’s future releases. At the same time Terratur released a digital sampler that it summarized as “9 glimpses of what’s to come in the upcoming months.”
One of those glimpses is a song from Misotheist named “Blinded and Revealed” (and thanks go to Rennie from starkweather for reminding me that I needed to give it a listen).
I ended my brief review of Misotheist’s last album (2024’s Vessels by which The Devil is Made Flesh) this way: “With each release Misotheist raise the bar for themselves and for many other bands, and now have done it again. This stupendous new album makes me wonder how the hell they could top it, but I sure hope they will try.” “Blinded and Revealed” is a sign my wish has been granted.
In this song Misotheist quickly put a chill on the skin and then violently explode in a torrent of rapidly battering drums, tumultuous bass notes, wildly roiling and siren-like guitars, and utterly unhinged howls, roars, and screams. It’s violent, deranged, utterly electrifying, near-overpowering, and the piercing pulsations of the guitars feel like terrible warnings of impending catastrophe.
But Misotheist are well-known and well-regarded for the twists and turns in their songwriting, and so they also shift, causing the music to heave and thrust while simultaneously searing the listener and throwing in exhilarating drum-fills.
The snare also snaps like jaws; the music rolls in deleterious waves; those shining guitars again wail like sirens; the bass miserably moans; and the drumming fires with inhuman speed. Eyes will pop wide, jaws will drop, lungs will be left breathless.
Among the other 8 glimpses of future Terratur releases is a song from a forthcoming second album by the Italian/Norwegian duo Darvaza. The title of Darvaza’s new album is We are Him, and it’s set for release on December 5th. The song on the sampler is “Blood of No-One“.
This one powerfully surges from the first moment, both boiling and seeming to groan, maniacally flickering and furiously hammering. Extravagant, serrated-edge howls rise up in the midst of brilliantly whirring guitars that crest, fall, and exotically writhe.
The music sounds furious, both possessed and predatory, but like Misotheist’s song above, this one also changes. The music blares like a glorious fanfare, or the pulse of a haughty heart, while the voice continues venting madness and the drums tumble like acrobats before blasting away again. It’s a spectacular thrill to hear the song’s second phase — not to take anything away from the first phase, which is also thrilling.
I picked out the foregoing two songs as a way of trying to spread the word about the Terratur compendium. I could keep going through the others, because they are also worth close attention, but I would like to include some items from other releases before closing today’s column, so I’ll tear myself away from this sampler for now — even though you shouldn’t.
https://terraturpossessions.bandcamp.com/album/terratur-compendium-mmxxv
https://www.facebook.com/TerraturPossessions
https://www.facebook.com/Darvaza.blackmetal
MARTRÖÐ (Iceland/U.S.)
Debemur Morti Productions seems determined to end the year with a BANG!, filling up late November and December with new albums from Blut Aus Nord, Lychgate, and now Martröð, whose core duo consists of Alex Poole (Skáphe, and more) and H.V. Lyngdal (Wormlust, and more).
Martröð’s album (their full-length debut) is Draumsýnir eldsins. DMP vividly describes it as “four transcendent, maniacal tracks that revel in organised chaos and infernal surrealism, as swarming Black Metal bludgeon meets avant-Classical and psychotropic noise.” Based on the album’s recently revealed opening track “Sköpunin” that seems like a very fair description.
The song conjures visions of hurricanes and firestorms. It howls and blazes, maniacally veers and vaults, thunders at high speed, and discharges blurring feverishness, everything calculated to suck the wind from a listener’s pumping lungs. Not to be outdone, the vocals are equally berserk.
But the song is a multi-faceted experience. Glinting notes ping; the drums rumble like boulders coming down; the music miserably simmers, menacingly groans, and renders broad panoramas of glorious devastation. It also becomes hallucinatory as strange tones shimmer, shiver, and echo. But it’s a menacing dream, made even more menacing by a big clanging bass and those terrorizing snarls and screams.
Yet violence and madness are never far away in this song, and those sensations return, yet this time accompanied by sounds of classical choirs and orchestral magnificence. And it’s those solemn choral voices, joined by a violin lament, that close the track.
Here is the band’s comment about the song:
“‘Sköpunin‘ speaks from within the noosphere, the dream of all minds entwined. In that shared sleep, worlds are shaped and unmade, and the breath of God becomes an echo in the dark. What is dreamt here does not awaken; it devours the dreamer.”
Draumsýnir eldsins is set for release on December 12th.
https://martrod.bandcamp.com/album/draums-nir-eldsins
https://www.facebook.com/Martrodband/
JZOVCE (France)
Frequent visitors to this column have repeatedly seen the name Jzovce, and see it again now, because the music always manages to dazzle, scare me, and move me in other ways as well. The occasion this time is a long new song named “Ante Silvae” (“before the forests” in English). Jzovce describes it: “An 11 minutes song of despair, anger & primitive beauty, to announce the second part of the trilogy started with La Ténèbre.” (La Ténèbre is an album released in January of this year and available for listening here.)
As suggested by that summary, “Ante Silvae” is wide-ranging. It opens with muted tones of orchestral melancholy, only to suddenly tear open that moody veil and shock the listener with furiously hammering drums and engulfing sonic torrents that are both blistering and brilliant, both violent and anguished. The vocals are equally explosive and torn, simultaneously seeming wretched and enraged.
The music is dense and overwhelming, but a lead guitar manages to make its voice heard, seeming to writhe and blurt in confusion and pain. And then, as suggested in Jvoce’s description, the song suddenly changes again, quickly quelling the tempest and replacing it with an acoustic-guitar melody that’s gentle, somber, and (yes) beautiful.
Apparently uninterested in creating “segues”, Jzovce brings another shock. The pacing remains slow, and the acoustic melody doesn’t vanish, but the drums ruthlessly pound and the guitars drench the listener in whirlpools of boiling sonic acid, pierced by feverishly writhing guitar-leads and mad-house vocals.
Minutes remain, and as they pass Jzovce both continues to boil nerves and to bring back the somber acoustics, to slow the pace to the point of expiration, only to return to a closing phase reminiscent of the song’s opening — sounds that might be flowing water, sounds that might be ritual hide drums, maybe the rattle of wagon wheels, and another acoustic-guitar lamentation.
https://distantvoices.bandcamp.com/album/jzovce-ante-silvae
ARCANE MARROW (U.S.)
I managed to overlook Arcane Marrow’s 2021 debut album The Elders Present To Me, but won’t make that mistake in the case of their new one, Rising in the Early Dawn, which is set for release by Moonlight Cypress Archetypes on November 12th. I knew I should have paid attention earlier, and am paying attention now, because this Tennessee band is the work of two members of Primeval Well, guitarist/vocalist Ryan Clackner and drummer Zac Ormerod.
The one song from the new album that’s out in the world now is the long closing track, “I Become My Grandfather Now“. Arcane Marrow sum up their music as “primordial, raw, cave-dwelling black metal from Tennessee,” and this new song (nearly 11 minutes long) is… eventually… raw and raging. But at first, its opening acoustic melody is wistfully beautiful, an opening phase that seems to run out of air and then gets incinerated.
With drums hurtling, bass bubbling, and guitars rough on the ears, the vibratory riffing slowly and miserably undulates and wails while some lycanthropic creature seems to snarl in the distance. There’s something almost elegant about the music despite how abrasive it is, but it’s undeniably heartbreaking, and as it dismally writhes in different moaning directions, cycling through its main motifs over and over again, it becomes even more distraught.
While that happens, the drumming is just lights-out. The riffing is almost spellbinding through repetition, despite how raw it is, but the drumming is a near-nonstop thrill-ride. The music does eventually find different footing and sets up a new repeating pattern, climbing higher up and becoming more expansive, as if courageously scaling toward a mountain top in the midst of a blinding blizzard, with rumbling thunderheads overtop — and the piercing trill of a lead guitar firing the blood in the midst of all the towering and daunting grandeur.
https://arcanemarrow.bandcamp.com/album/rising-in-the-early-dawn
https://www.facebook.com/arcanemarrow
SEDNA (Italy)
Last, but certainly not least, I have “Amarok,” the extraordinary first advance track from a new album named Sila Nuna by the Italian band Sedna. This won’t let you go away from here easy in your mind, because the song is shattering on multiple levels and in many ways.
Let me count the ways: First, the vocals. They change dramatically over the course of the song, ranging from wailing cries of pain, which seem to be splintering into bloody shards, to grief-stricken singing, savage snarls, and beastly roars.
Then the music. It dismally groans and heavily heaves, and seems to crash as it staggers and falls. It also boils and burns, like senses-submerging manifestations of untreatable pain and terrible despair. And it also becomes panoramic, yet melancholy in its expansive beauty, setting the stage for a truly astounding guitar solo that slowly swirls and warbles, then thrillingly ripples and spirals high.
The music also reaches a much softer and even bucolic phase in which a violin and a strummed acoustic guitar lend their mournful voices, and sung vocals solemnly intone a haunting melody.
A grumbling and growling bass and vividly rumbling drums provide the bridge toward greater intensity, where the harsh and harried vocals and vividly whirring riffage and strings return. But in that final phase the music also brutishly pounds and viciously slashes; the singing voice dramatically soars — and so does the music.
Really a powerfully moving song (it features guitars from Gio Kordzakhia from Psychonaut 4). And it’s not the only one you can now hear, because a few days ago the Dusktone label revealed a second advance track, which shares the name of the band, and I’ve included that stream below — though I’ve run out of time, and therefore can’t embellish it with my own verbiage. (But I’ll have a lot more to say about the album as a whole in a couple of weeks.)
Sila Nina will be released by the Dusktone label on November 21st.
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/sila-nuna
https://www.facebook.com/Sedna.O/