(written by Islander)
Like yesterday, I got a late start on today’s column, due to festivities with spouse and some new friends last night. Like yesterday’s column, this one includes more full-length releases than normal (alternating with some single songs), and I only have time enough to offer some impressionistic thoughts about them rather than carefully thought-out reviews.
My overarching impression is that most of what you’re about to hear sounds… possessed.
PSICOSFERA (Argentina)
I was quite taken with Psicosfera’s second album, 2018’s Beta, and tried to explain why in this column back then. In 2023 I received notifications from Lavadome Productions that the band’s third album, Summa Negativa, was on the way, and I had a chance to listen to it — but didn’t. Just got randomly caught up in other things, which is usually what happens when I overlook something I shouldn’t overlook.
And then, I recently received an automatic notification that Psicosfera had put the album up on their own Bandcamp page as a digital download, which served as a reminder that I’d not paid attention two years ago. This time I paid attention, and I’m now using the album to lead off today’s roundup, despite the fact that it’s not “hot off the presses”, because it’s… astonishing.
That Beta album was entirely instrumental. Summa Negativa includes vocals by Julián Reggi, and they are a chief reason why the album makes me think of a band possessed. It’s as if Pandora’s box has been thrown open and all the torments and terrors are flying into the world from his throat.
The music manifests insanity as well, in part because some of its ingredients sound like screaming and careening madness on a grand scale but also because the band constantly shift both their speed and the nature of those ingredients. It’s the kind of constantly morphing music that merits the term kaleidoscopic.
From moment to moment the music might manifest as bludgeoning, as psychedelic, as proggy, or as violently berserk. It might put your teeth on edge in passages of weirdly wandering or abusively deranged dissonance, but suddenly become mysteriously harmonious and hallucinatory, like the seductions of spells, or brutishly slug its listeners, or drag them moaning into a pit of congealing viscera.
For this kind of bizarre musical genius, the production is perfect because it permits appreciation of every intricate moving part in the music — every wild tangent easily detectable, every decoherence and every sudden integration on display. And make no mistake, although the songs incorporate many unpredictable twists and turns, the performers are all obviously very talented and surgically sharp in the way they interact.
This comes highly recommended for fans of avant-garde black metal, or really anyone who’s after a head-spinning adventure that’s off the usual beaten tracks.
In addition to the digital download, it looks like Lavadome still has CDs of the album available via their own Bandcamp page and online store.
https://lavadome.bandcamp.com/album/summa-negativa
https://store.lavadome.org
https://psicosfera.bandcamp.com/album/summa-negativa
https://www.facebook.com/psicosfera.arg
VARMIA (Poland)
We’ve paid attention to Varmia in the past, including our publication of a fascinating interview with the band’s vocalist and guitarist vocalist Lasota four years ago. Our latest reason for paying attention again is the recent release of a video for the first single from Varmia’s next album, which will be released sometime next spring by M-Theory Audio.
The name of the song is “Zwykli Zmarli” (translated as “ordinary dead”), described by Lasota as “a song to honor those who are no longer a part of our flesh-realm, but still wander amongst us…. On November 1st we connect with the world beyond, trying to find the thread that would help us to join with the departed. This song is our vocal attempt to create that link.” I’ll also share his comment about the video:
“The video contains glimpses of the album recordings that took place in Zamek Kapituły Warmińskiej in the town of Pieniężno. We recorded this one live as well, amongst these historic ruins. They are an essential part of our identity.”
The video is captivating, in part because it provides glimpses of the array of folk instrumentation that Varmia incorporate into their music and in part because it shows how emotionally devoted the band are to what they’re doing.
As for what they’re doing musically, it’s exhilarating — borderline unhinged in its intensity and in the speed of its instrumental interplay. The vocals are blistering in their savagery, and the riffing often is too. The rhythm section sometimes sound like a rock-crushing excavation machine powered by jet fuel, with pistons furiously pumping.
On the other hand, even as the drumming reaches zeniths of turbocharged fury the vocals convert into reverent singing, like the slow wailing of ancient chants, and the fretwork speedily veers and contorts, brazenly blazes and ecstatically whirls. Yes, the music has its violent aspects, but to these ears it mainly sounds jubilant (and possessed).
https://varmiaband.bandcamp.com/track/zwykli-zmarli
https://www.facebook.com/varmiaband
https://www.instagram.com/varmiaband
KREYLL (Netherlands/UK)
In quick succession I received messages about this next album (Ontzielingsrituelen) from Rennie (starkweather) and from the Dutch label Zwaertgevegt, which has released the album on tape.
Thoughts of possession again come to mind in listening to this duo’s debut full-length. Before I explain why, here’s the band’s description of what inspired them:
Ontzielingsrituelen stands for the human struggle against oblivion: to create something monumental; something lasting, eternal; but with it comes the inherent existential dread of realisation that inevitably everything falls into ruin and nothing lasts.
Perhaps contradictory, this existential dread is the main driver of our social, moral, cultural and human evolution, ephemerality breeds purpose, curiosity and progression. Immortality and the promise of eternal life only leads to stagnancy, regression and the destruction of the human spirit and the erosion and eventual downfall of human civilisation.
Thoughts of possession come to the fore in listening to this album, thoughts spawned by berserk screams and gargantuan roars, by light-speed blasting and lightning-strike riffing, by high-flown wailing and churning fretwork cruelty, by moments of dismally groaning oppressiveness and bursts of feverish dissonance and the brittle ring of lonely strings.
And all of those sensations are among those braided together in just the album’s first long song, “Somnambulist“. I would add that, in line with the song’s name, the music also segues into a slow phase of chilling and creepy hallucination, sinister and paranormal in its atmosphere, almost mesmerizing — but not quite because the music sounds so surreal, so menacing, and so miserable.
The balance of the songs include two more that are also in the vicinity of 10 minutes, and two others that are also of substantial length, but not as long as those. They also reflect the elaborate nature of Kreyll‘s songwriting and the intrinsically frightening nature of the band’s musical mission.
Dissonant guitars continue playing key roles; the vocals are still mainly insane; the low end will still heave the earth and rumble a listener’s guts, and the drumming will rattle skulls and rapidly stitch bullet wounds too. The band also bring in spine-shivering ambient frequencies, moments of spectral guitar-and-vocal eeriness, phases of cacophonous demonism, and tirades of crazed violence.
In more prosaic terms, Kreyll weave together elements of black metal, doom, death metal, and noise, to create elaborate nightmares. Unlike most nightmares, however, these may pull you back into their dangerous embrace more than once (as they have me).
https://www.zwaertgevegt.nl/product/kreyll-ontzielingsrituelen/
https://kreyll.bandcamp.com/album/ontzielingsrituelen-2
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100077574402791
FLOWERS OF RUST (U.S.)
Continuing to alternate individual songs and complete records, I’ll now turn to one of the new offerings by the UK label Centipede Abyss. This next song is the first advance track from an album named Crude Exhibitions of the Soul, which is the second full-length from Cleveland-based Flowers of Rust.
I would have listened to this song anyway, because I tend to embrace just about everything Centipede Abyss puts out, but I had an extra reason due to the label’s description of the music as reminiscent of Leviathan mixed with Ellende and Sunken.
“Sour Mercy” is the song’s name. Big booming drums, slashing chords with a gilded tone, and strangely quivering high-pitched notes draw the listener in, soon joined by enormous bass movements, wretched yells, unhinged screams, vividly clattering drum-fills, and riffage that churns and burns.
The music sounds vast and it punches, but it’s also richly filigreed. It also changes – slowing, blaring, and throbbing, creating unnerving dissonance and bringing in equally unnerving yells, all tethers to sanity having been severed. The guitars also seem to wail and to crash, with a dose of murderous rhythmic pile-driving in the mix too.
Once again, the word “possessed” comes to mind.
Crude Exhibitions of the Soul is set for release on November 29th.
https://centipedeabyss.bandcamp.com/album/crude-exhibitions-of-the-soul
https://www.facebook.com/Flowersofrustofficial
VACUA (Italy)
Now for another complete album, this one the debut full-length by the Roman black metal band Vacua, released on November 7th by the Japanese label Hidden Marly Production. The album’s title is Mater, and the band have described its significance:
The album reconnects us with Mother Earth and our essence as ephemeral beings, while also confronting the mistakes of our species. Constant violation of Mother Earth and Her consequential desperate self-destruction is the main theme, sung in Italian. It is also a tribute to those who worshipped Nature by glorifying It and offering themselves as earthly tribute—like the “Janare”, the typical witches of Southern Italy.
As demonstrated on this debut album, one of Vacua‘s key strengths is in creating music that often flows like vast engulfing waves, which, through riffing that’s halfway caustic and halfway shining, channel an array of dark emotions — moods of beleaguerment and sorrow, of desperation and defiance — as well as occasions of freewheeling jubilation and heart-felt reverence.
Repeated cycling of the whirring riffs is a signal aspect of the songs, using memorable melodies with emotional power as the baseline and then driving them deeper and deeper, but Vacua also introduce variations on the key themes, for example, causing the music to heave or throb instead of cascade. They also embellish the music with brightly ringing arpeggios (often tremolo’d and sometimes doubled and harmonized), which provide different manifestations of the daunting moods channeled by those engulfing musical waves and fierce surges.
While Vacua ride those musical waves (and whirlpools) the drums methodically switch among speedy blast-beat fusillades, mid-paced bounding gallops, and lurching stomps, not fancy but effective. The guitars are so dominating in the music that you may not always notice the bass, but if you pay attention, it’s there — also not fancy, but necessary to give the songs some low-end weight beneath all the guitar extravagance and larynx-ripping vocals.
One more aspect of note: Here and there in the songs, and especially in the Interlude track, Vacua bring in old folk melodies that I suspect have meaning in the places from whence the band draw their inspirations, and probably account for the “medieval black metal” tag on their Bandcamp page. And in “Trasmigrazione” they bring in melancholy strings and glinting acoustic notes before expanding the song to panoramic dimensions (and delivering some punchy jolts).
If you’re in the mood for mood-moving melodic black metal fueled by passion, and don’t mind Vacua’s tendency to hammer their motifs into listeners without a lot of variation, this makes for an enjoyable debut.
https://vacuabm.bandcamp.com/album/mater
https://zerodimensionalrecords.bigcartel.com/product/hmpcd
https://www.facebook.com/people/VACUA-Band/61554966924958/
HAKLA (Poland)
To conclude, here’s one more individual song from a forthcoming album
In “Ave Nihil” Hakla spend less than three minutes trying to destroy listeners. They use thunderous rhythms propelled with turbocharged speed, viciously roiling riffage, and howls that are authentically rabid but come out like august pronouncements.
They also throw in fast, martial drum patterns that will really fire up your pulse-rate; quickly jabbing chugs; strangled screeching; and stratospheric riffing that sears. If the objective was to suck the wind out of listeners’ lungs, I’d say: mission accomplished.
The song is off Hakla’s debut album Pieśni Końca (“Songs of the End”). It will be released on November 28th, in digital format and on CD, by Via Nocturna.
https://vianocturna.bandcamp.com/album/pie-ni-ko-ca
https://www.facebook.com/haklaband