(written by Islander)
Friday nights inexorably flow into Saturday mornings. There is also a cause-and-effect relationship between them. For many of us, Friday nights tend to be a time for “blowing off steam” after the work week, though my history of them has often been more like arson, with my own self as the target. Realizing through painful experience that I am not flame-retardant, I don’t ignite myself on Friday nights as much as I used to. But the cause-and-effect relationship persists.
Late yesterday afternoon my spouse and I began crossing the water to Seattle to attend a celebration of a friend and former colleague’s 10th year of recovery from being struck by a Seattle emergency vehicle through no fault of her own, an event that nearly killed her and inflicted a severe traumatic brain injury. Her long, gradual recovery defied all medical prognoses. She still has deficits compared to who she was before the accident, but looking back over the last 10 years, what she has achieved through pure strength of will has been astonishing.
It was a great gathering of herself, her family, and her friends, not just locally but from around the country. But we forgot about the ferry schedule, missed a 10 pm sailing back to where we live, and waited around the ferry terminal with a bunch of other exhaused and/or wasted people ’til the next one left after midnight. By the time I got home and to bed, the clock was not far away from 2 am.
I managed to turn off my internal alarm clock so I wouldn’t wake up 3 hours later (my usual rising time), but I’m still getting a very late start on the day. I also wasn’t able to accomplish very much advance work on this weekly column yesterday before getting ready for the party and making the over-water trek to Seattle. So, unduly long story short, today’s collection is brief.
FURNACE (Sweden)
Over the past week I assembled a pretty comprehensive list of new songs and videos I might want to check out. Unlike on last Saturday, I didn’t count them today. What are the odds they would again hit the magic number of 69? I doubt even I would have believed such a coincidence was possible, so I didn’t use my sparse time on a count. But scrolling down the list, it’s still a lot. With not enough time to make my way through very many of them, I started off by defaulting to an old favorite — Furnace.
As you probably know, this is one of the multitude of Rogga Johansson’s solo projects and bands. In this one he teams up with Peter Svensson. Drummer Lars Demoké is also back with them again on their newest album, Echoes of a Distant Future. This one is another concept album, described as follows:
Picking up directly from its predecessor, the story follows a protagonist escaping Hell through a mysterious machine, only to awaken in a distant, dystopian future where alien forces secretly dominate humanity. As he is drawn into a resistance movement, the album explores themes of survival, identity, and the enduring question of whether mankind can reclaim its fate.
For the music of Furnace, Edge of Sanity and Paradise Lost have become the principal reference points of influence. On the new album’s first single, “Refracted City Lights“, a wailing guitar solo leads the way on a somber march, and you can still hear it’s ragged yet piercing sound when the music starts charging, though the solo becomes orders of magnitude more fleet-fingered and fiery.
Scarring growls enter the fray along with dismally blaring arpeggios, savagely hard-slugging grooves, and whirling filaments of melody that seem to straddle a line between jubilation and desperation. The soloing flares again and spirals high in electrifying fashion over skull-rattling beats and bone-bruising bass. The music viciously jolts; the vocals are humongous; the melodies again wail and burn with fever.
At the end a siren pulsates around ardent spoken words. This is, after all, a narrative tale we’ve joined in progress with this song — and a hell of a good song it is, one that’s very easy to play again and again.
Echoes of a Distant Future will be released by Emanzipation Productions on May 29th.
https://furnacesweden.bandcamp.com/album/echoes-of-a-distant-future
https://targetshop.dk/vare/echoes-of-a-distant-future/
https://www.facebook.com/blackstonechurch666/
RAKINUA (Austria)
I decided to check out this next song and video based on the Dusktone label’s intriguing description of Rakinua’s debut as a concept album “[i]nspired by Alpine sacrificial sites that have borne witness to nearly three millennia of ritual practice,” one that “follows a priestess whose desperate attempts to appease increasingly wrathful gods ultimately condemn her tribe to ruin.” The label’s comparative references to such bands as Heilung, Wardruna, Myrkur, Opeth, Porcupine Tree, and Anathema were also enticing.
The album’s first single arrived in recent days with a well-made video designed to transport viewers back to the ancient Raetic setting for the album’s narrative, and it gives us good views of the band as well.
The song, “Shepherd of the Clouds“, and the video provide central roles for the band’s vocalists Velis and Madame Noctinebra, one of whom sings with passion and the other of whom viciously snarls like a demonic lion.
It’s a hard-charging song, driven by brutally hammering drums and the grim rise and fall of slashing and writhing riffage, but it also includes a sudden digression, in which the pace dramatically slows, a harpist creates glittering notes, and the singing soulfully softens. Gradually the music and the singing begin to soar, albeit without casting off the mood of melancholy.
You know very well that I wouldn’t make an exception to our admittedly oft-violated rule about singing unless I thought the singing was very good, and here it really is.
The name of Rakinua’s debut album is Esi Um Ninu – Heal Us, Mother. Dusktone has set it for release on May 29th.
https://linktr.ee/rakinua
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/esi-um-ninu-heal-us-mother
https://www.facebook.com/rakinua/
SEA SLEEPER (U.S.)
To close this all-too-short Saturday roundup I turned to Sea Sleeper from Portland, Oregon, another band who (like Furnace) had already made me a fan — in their case, based on their 2021 debut album Nostophobia.
They have a second album on the way, one named Burden of Antlers, and they recently released its first single “Machines of the Bombing Runs” — a title that seems pretty goddamned relevant right now, wouldn’t you agree?
It’s a harrowing song. I can’t quickly identify the spoken-word sample that begins it over bomb-like drums and siren-like intensity, nor can I make out the words that are then screamed at the limits of normal vocal chords — but the words are printed at Bandcamp, and they’re as harrowing as the music.
The music thunders and crashes, spits percussive bullets at frenzied rates of speed, blares and shrieks in agony, throbs like blood from severed veins, and slows as it inflicts pile-driving trauma. The music also becomes ethereal, in time for the vocals to transform into haunted, harmonized singing (yes, more singing today!), a pouring out of sorrow in advance of the music breaking open again into another wrenching, war-like, and nightmarish rendering of cataclysm.
https://seasleeper.bandcamp.com/track/machines-of-the-bombing-runs
https://www.facebook.com/seasleeper/
https://www.instagram.com/sea_sleeper/