(written by Islander)
This morning I read an unexpectedly engrossing essay written by a woman who unexpectedly became an obsessive fan of a Broadway musical named Operation Mincemeat. She makes very clear that fanatical fandom isn’t typically part of her personality — far from it. She spends the entire essay thinking out loud, trying to understand why she has seen the musical at least 12 times, interspersed with evidence of her obsession and stories about how the musical came to be and what it’s about.
Eventually the writer comes close to an answer, which is that the musical is an exception to the “desert drought of originality and ideas” that surrounds us. She writes:
It is as wild as a show can be and still be coherent. It’s as moving and poignant as a musical can be without being sappy and sentimental. It is tonally deranged. It is utterly original. It’s not just the best musical I’ve ever seen; it’s the most rewarding theatrical experience I’ve ever had.
….
I leave the Golden Theater, and around me there is nothing but stagnation, but dearth, but a corporation’s version of creativity. We consume the same story over and over, acted out by the same five or six popular, high-performing actors who look exactly the same as they did in the last thing they were in, all of it seemingly designed to remind you of something you already liked, which I guess is good business, an algorithm daring you to do nothing but have a repeat benign experience. The audience’s sophistication has peaked at the exact time that an algorithmic “mid” culture rose up and asked what is the least amount of work it could do to keep a person rolling through its offerings. I leave room for falling into the cliché of every person who ever turned 50 and wrote an essay about how terrible the culture has become, but that doesn’t diminish where I am, which is that I’m so bored I want to die.
….
The tension I hold isn’t between my professionalism and the joys of fandom; it’s between the deadness of the culture and the surprise and joy of genuine originality. There is still a vestige of my brain that is fighting to save me, to defeat the doldrums of passive consumption by dragging me to fight for active passion. I can defeat those doldrums: Any day but Monday, I can stand right up from my desk and walk right over a few blocks and sit right down in a single seat and stare at the theater’s cadmium yellow curtain, trying not to face down the ridiculous crisis I have found myself in — which is that when I’m in this theater, I am happy and engaged, and when I’m not, I feel that I am useless and living in a world that seems intent on smothering the light that keeps out the dark.
On several occasions the writer goes to the theater with a friend’s child (“B”), who is also addicted to the show. More than once she asks B, “Why do we love this? Why are we still here?”
And B said again, with some annoyance at my badgering, “Because the songs are really good and exciting.” I asked for still more, and B said: “It makes me so happy. I love the quick changes. I just love the songs.”
I wrote it down again, but this time I wondered if maybe it really was that simple. Maybe the answer is that B is 8 and I am 50, and what B doesn’t know is that as they get older, there will be fewer things to love like this. That it will come along when it does, if it does, but it will feel more and more muted every time, so that by the time you find yourself feeling it again, by the time you realize that it is great to mellow with age but that before the process is complete you will panic, because you can feel what you’re missing and know that one day missing it won’t even bother you anymore. And right now I am in the gloaming of all that — in the perimenopause of all my passions, a time when I still remember what it is to want, but from the shoreline. This might never happen again to me, I want to tell B. It’s a surprise it happened at all. Hasn’t anyone told you yet, B? It becomes rarer and rarer to be struck in the heart by something that consumes you, and one day you forget that it used to happen at all.
The whole essay rang a chord with me, especially the parts quoted above. But unlike the writer, I get struck like this on a daily basis, struck by music that defies the algorithmically programmed culture which surrounds us, even when it’s not as wild and surprising as the musical that has repeatedly lifted this essayist out of her doldrums. It’s what keeps me going with this blog. It’s probably what keeps you coming here, or finding music like what we focus on in other ways.
Here’s what struck me today:
COSCRADH (Ireland)
“Even ears and minds that have been hardened by extensive exposure to the most extreme ravages of blackened death metal are still capable of being stunned by the music of the Irish band Coscradh.” That’s how we began introducing our premiere of a song from Coscradh’s debut album Nahanagan Stadial in the summer of 2022. What was true then is still true, as you’re about to discover.
On February 20th 20 Buck Spin will release a new Coscradh album named Carving The Causeway To The Otherworld. PR materials describe it (in part) this way:
A communion of druidic science and blood, ritual aggression, and linguistic resurrection, Carving The Causeway To The Otherworld compels a celestial reckoning where fate itself is flung upon the altar. Like gods that ride the firmament, COSCRADH’s cold, cruel radiance falls upon all who hear it. The record is a cosmic execution, binding together the bygone causeways, war gods, stone idols, and star-born forces that the druids sought to harness. A vision of the night sky as a living battlement of omens, for those who would hark to the old wrathful spirits.
The song below, “Caesar’s Revelation (Hibernia L. VI V. XIV ad XVI et XXIV)“, is the album’s stunning first advance track. It’s utterly ferocious, and ferociously unhinged — part firestorm and part munitions display, coupled with abundant fretwork freakouts and crazed vocal savagery — but at times it’s also haughty and shamanistic. If you ever feel like you’re in the doldrums, come back to this song and it will blast them away.
https://20buckspin.bandcamp.com/album/carving-the-causeway-to-the-otherworld
https://www.instagram.com/coscradh
https://www.facebook.com/Coscradh
ENDSPACE (Canada)
Yesterday I picked one song to discuss from a sampler just released by Transcending Obscurity Records to highlight records they plan to release this year. The next song I want to recommend today is also from that sampler, the first of 26 tracks you’ll find there. It’s by a Canadian band or project named Endspace, and the song must be from their forthcoming debut release.
T.O. labels the music of Endspace as “Sci-fi Black Metal”. I don’t know anything else about them other than what I can hear in this song — “Sixth Transmission” — but the song alone makes a striking impression.
The guitar tone of the opening riff makes a striking impression all by itself, and the way it vividly rings and ripples sounds like the exotic accompaniment for a whirling dervish (it sounds more Sumerian than futuristic). The deep ugliness of the vocals and the vibrant dynamism of the drumming also make a hell of an impression.
As the song evolves, the exotic melody sometimes slows and mysteriously flows, even while the drums are blazing, and it does begin to sound more futuristic and unearthly. Endspace also embellishes the song with the rapid clatter of chime-like percussive tones, eerie chant-like singing, yowling frequencies that pulse like a siren, and shrill frequencies that seem to wail in despair.
Unorthodox and fascinating music….
https://transcendingobscurity.bandcamp.com/album/2026-label-sampler
https://www.facebook.com/endspaceband
MERCULISTARYA (Hungary)
Merculistarya is the one-man project of Árpád Szenti, best known for his drumming work with bands such as Thy Catafalque, Ahriman, Athame, and Damnation. Áradó fájdalom a tűnődés medrében is the project’s debut full-length, described as “a concept album, each song connected, each meaning intertwined, forming a single immersive narrative.” An online translation tool renders the Hungarian album name in English as “A flood of pain in the bed of contemplation”.
The first song made available for listening is “Rémálomköd“, which includes guest vocals by Ivett Dudás. The same online tool translates the song name as “Nightmare Nebula”.
In its opening phase the music elegantly shines and shimmers in a way that does sound celestial, but as those high-flying and heavenly synths continue flowing, the drums erupt in a blasting fury, the riffing generates a dense and abrasive churn, and the vocals vent bestial snarls and wild howls.
The song also shifts gears, moving into a mid-paced rocking groove as a guitar begins generating a dismally throbbing melody, the bass moodily wanders, and the vocals explode in shattering screams.
Many more changes lie ahead, in both the rhythm section’s nuanced variations and in the remarkably multi-faceted nature of the guitar work, as well as in the song’s morphing moods. The singing of Ivett Dudás and sorrowful symphonic strings add further intriguing facets as the song nears its end. It’s the kind of song that rewards repeat listening because it’s so varied and interesting.
Áradó fájdalom a tűnődés medrében will be co-released on February 20th by Pest Records and Metal Ör Die Records.
https://pestrecords.bandcamp.com/album/merculistarya-rad-f-jdalom-a-t-n-d-s-medr-ben
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61586009559697
https://www.facebook.com/pestrecords
https://www.facebook.com/metalordierec
CAGED BASTARD (Tunisia)
Caged Bastard, an experimental Tunisian solo endeavor whose music I’ve written about frequently, released a new album last week. Titled Cold, Cruel, it’s a single composition of more than 36 minutes in length that follows a very disturbing narrative arc. As is usually true of ultra-long songs like this one, and always true of Caged Bastard’s records, it encompasses many twists and turns.
The song’s opening segment is a real attention-grabber, partly because of the gripping drum progressions and the burliness of the growling bass, and partly because of the shivering and reverberating ring of whatever instrument is holding sway in the music’s upper reaches. Those latter reverberations are piercing and strange, while the vocals are beastly and fanatical.
Without warning, Caged Bastard occasionally ejects quick and astonishingly violent seizures of sound. Those quivering frequencies also morph, and they begin to sound more distraught and confused. The song also grows considerably more frightening. A distorted voice slowly utters words, as if the transmission is being slowed and stretched out, backed by a miasma of shivering, glittering, and slowly moaning tones.
Even the return of those wonderful bass and drum contributions don’t dispel the music’s chilling atmosphere, and a repeating cycle of ragged and ruined riffing (along with a blurting voice) just makes things even scarier. Eventually, the bass resembles detonations, a miserable siren seems to call out a too-late warning, over and over, and macabre, near-gasping snarls intrude as well.
By this point the song has become decidedly disorienting and dystopian, if not downright apocalyptic, but at the midpoint things change again as an electronic throb emerges, Blade Runner-esque in its effects. The drums come back to get their hooks in your muscles, and the surrounding music brilliantly swirls, shines, and vibrantly bounces, like we’ve stumbled into a rave at the world’s end.
However, that music expands to become nearly all-consuming in its intensity, torquing the tension and the fear. When the tension breaks, it just breaks into a different kind of futuristic tension and fear, a collage of electronics that eventually begins to subside but never falls silent and never stops being scary.
In that nightmarishly hallucinatory phase, which extends to the song’s end and is eventually joined by an ominously vibrating drone, the drums and bass have vanished, and the chillingly distorted vocals sound like a crocodile that has learned to slowly speak.
I wouldn’t recommend you listen to this album just before bedtime, lest your dreams be haunted and you awake in a cold sweat. I do recommend that before you embark on this journey you read the song’s narrative description at Bandcamp.
https://cagedbastard.bandcamp.com/album/cold-cruel
https://www.facebook.com/cagedbastard