(written by Islander)
As I’ve said before, this list isn’t intended to honor complete records like most year-end lists. Instead, it focuses on songs that got stuck in my head (and the heads of other listeners), songs which might be, but often are not, from widely heralded records.
Yet sometimes I’ve been moved by the need to honor great albums in this list, and that desire was a factor in today’s three choices.
YELLOW EYES
Most of my album reviews at NCS accompany our premieres of full album streams. I rarely have time to write them on a stand-alone basis. But I made an exception in the case of Yellow Eyes’ Confusion Gate, and held onto the review until the day of its release by Gilead Music. I spilled a lot of words about the music, because it’s quite a special record, and you can read them here if you so desire. I’ll excerpt some of them below, by way of introducing the song from Confusion Gate that I’m now adding to this list.
The songs on the album are transportive, and they also seem to have one foot lodged in olden times. Such is the effect of violin strings and woodwind instruments that appear here and there. Sometimes the music becomes panoramic and almost pastoral, even when the drums are hurtling and the vocals are screaming and snarling. But the music can also seem witchy, sinister, weirdly fiendish, and fiendishly delirious.
All of that happens in “The Thought of Death“, which also features a lot of creatively varied bass-and-drum work (certainly not the only song where that’s notable), and another mysterious, acoustic-led denouement, complete with gasping horrors.
I thought it was no coincidence that the album was released on Samhain (or Halloween if you prefer), because the music itself sounds liminal, like the parting of veils between the living and the dead (or the human and the hellish), when spirits from the great beyond are free to visit us, to revel and to torment as much as the time allows. These musical visitations are also scary, and perpetually head-spinning. They seem to occupy an otherworldly dream state — vivid waking dreams, to be sure.
Confusion Gate might well be, probably is, the pinnacle of this great band’s career so far, and “The Thought of Death” is one proof of that.
https://gileadmedia.bandcamp.com/album/confusion-gate
https://linktr.ee/yelloweyesband
https://www.instagram.com/yelloweyesband/
TRIVAX
Trivax named their latest album The Great Satan, creating a twist that turned around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 epithet against the U.S. and pointed it at Iran’s own tyrannical mullahs who have oppressed the country during the last 46 years. The album was released last May, but over the past month its condemnations have resounded even more powerfully as Iranian armed forces have killed thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, of protestors and arrested many more.
The album drew attention because of its stance against the Islamic extremists who hold power in Iran (and elsewhere), and the personal risks that Iranian emigre Shayan incurred in making it, but it drew even more attention because of the power of the music, which landed it on many year-end lists both at our site and elsewhere.
We actually published two reviews here, one by Andy Synn who called it the best Trivax album yet, and one by Rafi Yovell who named it “one of the best extreme metal records I’ve every heard.”
One of the most memorable songs on The Great Satan, among many that are hard to forget, is its penultimate track, “Operation Ramadan“, which my friend Andy called “easily one of the best things they’ve ever written”. Its horrifying subject matter is explained in the words that appear in the video below.
The music is an intertwining of bleak sorrow and burning rage. The guitars mourn and wail as they ring, but also frantically writhe and roil in tones that sear, channeling both anguish and fury. As the bass murmurs the drums blast, Shayan ejects the words in cutting snarls and blazing howls, greatly enhancing the song’s tremendous emotional intensity, and the vividly rippling riffs also become more expansive, capturing the staggering vastness of the deaths that Operation Ramadan produced.
Even if you didn’t know what inspired the song and were blind to its lyrics, the music would still be powerfully gripping, and the changing and beautifully layered riffs are piercing and memorable. It easily earned its place on this list.
https://trivax.bandcamp.com/album/the-great-satan
https://www.facebook.com/trivaxband
TEITANBLOOD
To my surprise, no one here (including me!) reviewed Teitanblood’s new album The Visceral Abyss last year. However, it did make lots of year-end lists from our writers and friends — in fact, five of them that we published — as well as year-end awards elsewhere, as evidenced by its appearance on the “List of Lists” calculated and compiled by To the Teeth (which we re-published here). The closest we came to a review was the write-up in Daniel Barkasi’s list, which had The Visceral Abyss at the No. 3 spot and included this closing passage:
To simplify, if you want disturbing, murky, dragging in the filth death/black metal, Teitanblood remains vital and rarely rivaled. From the Visceral Abyss is a record that’ll be incessantly difficult to move on from, not that you’d want to, for it’s a beacon of how gripping and furious this style of music can be while being infinitely deep with juicy, blistering detail.
I share those reactions. Despite the fact that I didn’t manage a review, and also inexplicably failed to spotlight individual songs in any of our weekend roundups, I was nonetheless blown away by the album. I felt compelled to put a song from it on this list, and the one I chose is “And Darkness Was All” — which is the opposite of murky and dragging.
I picked this song because of how utterly wild it is, a wildness that few bands other than Teitanblood are capable of creating with such unbounded and exhilarating ferocity. I’m sure that anyone witnessing the performance of this song on stage would be rocketing off other people in the pit like pinballs, or at least staggered back on their heels and stunned, with the whites of their eyes showing all ’round. It’s not the soundtrack to any human endeavor but more like the soundtrack to a blood-spraying bacchanal from mythic times.
Just wild… from the scorching screams, beastly roars, and pungent grunts to the boiling and abrasive churn of the riffage, from the shrill lead-guitar freakouts to the jet-fueled percussive mania. But it’s a blood-pumping song in other ways too, thanks to imperiously booming detonations, feral punk rhythms, and humongous stomping chords.
But man, those wailing and feverishly berserk guitar-leads, which feel like a combination of needles and fire, they’re especially hard to forget.
https://teitanblood.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-visceral-abyss
https://www.facebook.com/ttnbld.official/