(written by Islander)
I started last weekend with a miserable cold, and I’m starting this one with a miserable hangover. Neither affliction is ideal for the usual NCS roundups of new music that I’m responsible for. Unlike the cold, I know who’s to blame for the hangover — me, of course, and secondarily the five other people I was with yesterday.
It was all entirely foreseeable, since my wife and I and the other two couples have been getting together on the last Friday before Christmas for roughly a decade, and the day after is always terrible. Every year we convene at a venerable Italian restaurant in the vicinity of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, moving in at lunchtime and staying until they begin dinner service. Even well after we’re the last customers in the place and they’re in full swing getting ready for dinner, they’ve never asked us to leave or even politely suggested that we move on. Never.
The fact that we were still ordering wine four hours after being seated and long after the dessert plates had been cleared away (this happens every year) probably has a little something to do with the restaurant’s indulgence of us. I won’t tell you how many bottles the six of us consumed before we finally stopped, only that the number is outrageous. So is this hangover.
The only reason I’m going into this is because when I can’t put together a roundup of the size I prefer, I feel like I owe an explanation. So there it is. (I doubt anyone else feels I owe an explanation but no one else gets a vote — although I’ll accept your good wishes for the nap I will soon be taking in an inglorious retreat from consciousness.)
SERPENT COLUMN (U.S.)
I will say right off the bat that although my selections for today are less numerous than I would have wished, they will keep you on your toes as you move through them. Hell, this first selection will do that all by itself.
Actually, there are three selections here, three songs that have been divulged so far from a new album by Serpent Column, whose music we’ve written about repeatedly since 2017. All three of them are head-spinners.
The opener “Phenomenology of the Assault” is a changing amalgam of thunderous heaviness, a powerfully penetrating and immediately seductive melody that evolves in different ways, lightning-flash guitar-leads, quick bursts of thrashy riffage, electrifying drumwork, and madhouse vocals.
“Descent Without Nadir” will keep your head spinning, though its moods seem more dismal. Some of its piercing refrains come across as more dissonant and disturbing, but the instrumental work also displays a lot of progressive flare, and the emerging melodic through-line sounds exotic and elegant (I thought at times of classical flamenco guitars weaving a lament).
“Flight of the Last Gods” also has a dark aura that links it to “Descent…” but it also quickly accelerates and becomes an extravagant revel, yet another remarkable whirligig of sound, and again with some ethnic folk influence in the guitars, but maybe not Spanish this time (I’m too un-schooled to place it, but maybe Greek?). It includes fantastic tonal variations, lights-out drumming, uber-nimble bass-work, and maybe a bit of singing along with the crazed screams?
I really can’t think of anyone else who is making music like this.
The name of Serpent Column’s new album is Aion of Strife. It has a release date of January 16th.
https://serpentcolumn.bandcamp.com/album/aion-of-strife
ENSHINE (Sweden/France)
Speaking of bands we’ve written about A LOT, here’s another one — the Enshine vehicle of Jari Lindholm (Sweden) and Sebastien Pierre (France). They have a new album on the way named Elevation, on which they’re joined by guests Giannis Koskinas (Ocean of Grief) on bass and Marcelo Aires on drums. A few weeks ago I spilled some words about the album’s first single, “Shimmering“, and now they’ve released a second one — “Heartbliss“, which arrived with a lyric video.
Gentle, elegant, and beautiful at first, the song picks up the opening melody and makes it both heavier and darker. The lead guitar and the keyboards sparkle (though maybe it’s not keys at all, but a guitar tuned to sound like pipes), but there is a deeply throbbing undercurrent, and the vocals are ravaging, even when they verge into singing.
There’s a folk-metal aspect to the song, in the flute-like and pipe-like melodies, which have a melancholy cast despite the vibrancy of the sound. The feeling of melancholy grows deeper when the music softens again, and further still when deep, solemn, but gritty spoken words follow on. The beautiful guitar solo that arrives next and helps usher the song to its ethereal end is mystical and marvelous.
The Winter Solstice is tomorrow, and this song struck me as very well-timed for that.
https://enshine.bandcamp.com/track/heartbliss-single
https://www.facebook.com/enshine.band
SOUTH OF HELL (France)
In part because of what’s coming at you in today’s final two selections, both of which are off our usual beaten tracks, I decided I should try to please visitors with more barbarous tastes before we get to them. To do that I chose the first two songs released so far from a new album by the French death metal band South of Hell.
The first one, “Discedere” (see the lyric video below), seizes attention very damned fast with a swirling, electrifying riff, ruthlessly hammering drums, growling bass-lines, and an amalgam of monstrous roars and caustic screams. The band start switching up the riffage and the drum rhythms and continue doing so as the song evolves.
The band viciously jab and thrash, they swirl and swarm, but they also bring in a beautifully constructed bass-and-guitar duet (backed by excellent drumming) that’s bright and exotic in its mood. At the end the music seems to jerk like a dancing puppet on a string above head-moving beats.
The second song, “Voice of War“, sounds very much like what you would expect from its title. The music seems to fire like weaponry and to wail like stricken combatants, coupled with commanding growls like the voice of a war god. Changing the pacing, the song also lurches and staggers, but the piercing riffage also boils in frenzies and savagely jolts (with a bass drop in the mix for good measure). The closing guitar solo, which calls back to the song’s wailed opening melody and is accompanied by battering-ram brutality, sounds bereft and stricken.
The name of the album is Hellfernum. It will be released on January 31st by Great Dane Records, who recommend it for fans of death metal in the vein of Hypocrisy and Deicide.
https://greatdanerecords.bandcamp.com/album/hellfernum
https://www.facebook.com/p/South-%C3%98f-Hell-Officiel-61565556252037/
https://www.instagram.com/southofhellband
ZU (Italy)
The Italian instrumental trio ZU have 17 albums to their name (including collaborations with people like Mike Patton and Buzz Osborne), or they will when No. 17 gets released in January, and yet I’ve confirmed that we have never mentioned them at NCS before now. I suppose that’s partly because their music is a bit outside our usual purviews. But hell, there’s a first time for everything.
This first time is a track from their new album called “Kether“, which was presented last week though a beautifully illustrated video. The instrumentation on the album includes electric bass, 12-string guitar, baritone saxophone, synths and keyboards, drums, and other forms of acoustic and synth percussion.
This particular song incorporates what I think of as tribal percussion (with an African influence), augmented in its grooves by the bass (and/or the sax) and guitar. And having put that jumping groove forward, ZU start spinning all sorts of variations around it and bringing in numerous tonal embellishments, some shrieking and some squalling, some strangely blurting and others ethereally wailing.
At times the bass growls like a monster or pounds like an excavating machine, or the sax sounds drugged. The beats are full of hooks, and so are the deft fretwork arpeggios, which themselves sound trippy. Even on a first listen, and even with so many different diabolical ingredients trading places with each other, the motifs that stitch the song together are apparent. It’s even more fun to listen to it the second and third times.
The name of ZU’s new album (an 80-minute double album!) is Ferrum Sidereum. It’s set for release on on January 9th by House of Mythology. I’ll share this comment about “Kether” by ZU guitarist and bassist, Massimo Pupillo:
“In the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, ‘Kether’ is the crown, the halo, the nimbus, the corona. Since it has been symbolically attacked, we symbolically take it back. The golden crown became the sign of kings, but it is a much older and deeper symbol, and it is at anyone’s reach to reactivate the crown.”
https://spkr.store/collections/zu
https://www.zuism.net
https://www.facebook.com/vajrazu
TRUTHSEEKER (U.S.)
Brendan James Hayter is probably best known as the vocalist/guitarist of Obsidian Tongue, and he’s also a member of Thrawsunblat (whom I hope we hear from again sometime). But he also has a solo project named Truthseeker, although its releases have been so few and far between that it’s probably not very well-known.
Last week, for example, Hayter released the first Truthseeker song in 12 years, the follow-up to 2013’s Blue Oblivion album. Before that was a 2011 EP named Weightless At Dawn. I didn’t know what to expect from the new song, “Where You Belong“, but I decided to find out based on Hayter’s extensive statement about it, which struck a few chords, including its references to a beloved and now-deceased cat. I think I’ll copy/paste the entire statement after the song stream below.
The song itself, like the one before it in today’s collection, is off our usual beaten tracks. Its opening notes brightly ring and glitter in a way that may cause you to think back about the way Enshine began their song above, though there’s a haunting aspect to what goes on behind them. As those shining notes continue to mesmerize, Truthseeker gradually builds upon them with rocking beats and bass maneuvers that are kind of proggy and kind of jazzy, and then picks up the melody and extravagantly expands it, so that the music crashes and blazes.
The intensity of the song continually ebbs and flows, and as well as that, the melody undergoes variations, including one delivered at high tide by a guitar that seems to squall as well as gleam as it pierces the mind, and another that’s ethereally shining and sublime. Those crescendos in the song are fervent and heartfelt, and they really nail the song into a listener’s head.
“Where You Belong” is a standalone track, but I’ve read that it’s being released in anticipation of a forthcoming Truthseeeker album named The Reflection Fields. I’ll further mention that the song was mastered by Aaron Charles at The Cathedral of Psychic Death, because you’ll be reading more about him in tomorrow’s Shades of Black column.
https://truthseeker1.bandcamp.com/track/where-you-belong
https://thehiddendawn.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.facebook.com/obsidiantongueband
And now here’s the statement about the song from Brendan Hayter that I promised:
“The significance of the title is multi-faceted. On a universal level, this song pays tribute to the lifelong search for a sense of destiny and harmony that one thinks they can find in some special place on Earth. Some people never feel the sense of Home in their heart and they research and wonder forever about place after place, waiting for a sign from within that points to a certain town, state, or country as the place where the heart will find peace and life will find meaning. It’s a restless and somewhat tormenting obsession, and at the same time, the unending wonder of it all, the essence of Wanderlust, can be strangely beautiful.”
“On a personal level, this song is a tribute to the earliest days of my marriage. The riffs and melodies that comprise “Where You Belong” came from 2 long looper-pedal improvisations done on the second night after I relocated to my then girlfriend, now wife’s homeland…Very far away from my own, in another country, and very different. As a long distance / international couple there was a much more urgent and directly shared search for a sense of belonging and destiny in either one person’s world or the other’s. Those ambient guitar improvisations that I managed to capture, really resonate the thoughts and feelings of moving far away and finding a sense of belonging through someone, not somewhere. We’ve moved back and forth together, and to this day we still wonder where it is we should live out our days. On a deeper level though, somewhere in the early days, that burning search peacefully reduced itself to embers, when the sky itself became home. My lady’s company was home. Our cat sitting in my lap was home…”
“I made it a critical goal to finish this recording in time for our 10th anniversary to celebrate this entire journey, and to honor our very recently departed cat who was truly the center of our home no matter which house or apartment we were living in. When she got sick and I was tending to her or bringing her to the vet yet again, for some reason the melodies of “Where You Belong” started circling in my head through the whole experience. For both the warming and painful aspects of recent months, this song needed to be the one I finished first and restart Truthseeker with.”
“It’s been many years, but I never stopped working on new Truthseeker music and defining what exactly the band is or isn’t supposed to be. I continued to improve my drumming to be able to adequately support the new songs I was writing, plus I got a good grasp on tone and recording the types of sounds I wanted to hear, on drums and otherwise. I have my own minimal equipment now but that minimalism is a true passion of mine. I don’t believe in modern music production at all. I used 4 mics on the drums, and the mix of the song is just setting the volume of the tracks and adding reverb, no post-processing and not even a computer involved in the entire process. I intend to keep it this way for all future releases!”