(written by Islander)
As you may remember, I spent last weekend working on (and enjoying the performances at) Northwest Terror Fest in Seattle. It was a tremendous three-day event that formed many indelible memories, but it did mean that I had no time for the usual NCS weekend roundups. Because of that, I now find myself with twice the usual number of new songs and videos to consider for this roundup and for the SHADES OF BLACK collection for tomorrow.
I jumped around among many different possibilities, enjoying a lot of what I heard and saw and also (therefore) agonizing over what to choose. I also had to force myself to stop listening with dozens of tabs still open, or else this column would never be written.
But while the agony remains, I’m happy with these selections and hope you will be too. I’m beginning with three bands whose previous music was familiar to me and following with three that were brand new discoveries.
EMPTINESS (Belgium)
I decided to lead off with new music from Emptiness, a band whose fascinating and unsettling music has exerted a perpetual pull on both myself and other friends of mine around NCS. They have a new album named Nowhere Speaks that’s due for release on July 17th by Season of Mist, and the lead single is “The Clash of Forces“.
But before we get to that new song, here’s an excerpt from the PR materials that I think is worth sharing:
Emptiness’ previous album, Vide (2021), had no distortion, was sung entirely in French, and existed at the edge of silence; Nowhere Speaks moves in the opposite direction, and does so deliberately, opening exactly where Nothing But The Whole (2014) cut off mid-riff and closing by looping back to that album’s opening riff.
Now to the song: While the rhythm section vigorously boom and batter, the riffing inflicts vicious swarms of writhing abrasion and frenzied fretwork spasms. The vocals are ghastly, straddling a line between gasps and snarls. The band create a brief tremolo-picked interlude that’s mesmerizing but haunting, leading the way toward an exhilarating guitar solo before they throb bones and cause the guitars to snarl and sizzle flesh again one more time in the finale.
Except for vocals, keyboards, and additional effects the new Emptiness album was played live in the studio. And so it’s fitting that the video accompanying “The Clash of Forces” depicts the band performing the song. It’s also fitting, given the nature of the music, that the visuals are kind of nightmarish.
https://orcd.co/emptinessnowherespeaks
https://emptiness.bandcamp.com/album/nowhere-speaks
https://www.facebook.com/Emptiness.be
IMPURE WILHELMINA (Switzerland)
The long-running but still-evolving Swiss post-hardcore band Impure Wilhelmina have a new album named Le Sanglot that’s set for release on May 22nd by Season of Mist. Based on descriptions of the album that I’ve read, I’m very interested to check it out. Though I haven’t yet found time to do that, I did make time to hear the most recent single off the album (“Train Mort“), for two reasons.
First, the PR materials describe it as the album’s “most confrontational moment”, and its most abrasive. Of course, I found that appealing. And second, the song includes a howling guest vocal appearance by French artist Mütterlein (Marion Leclercq) — who also co-wrote the song. I am a big fan of Mütterlein.
“Train Mort” turns out to be a very dark song, and indeed a confrontational one. It create ominous tension immediately, with throbbing low-end notes and frantically flickering arpeggios in a shrill range, accompanied by maddened snarls. The music torques the tension further, escalating its tonal range, before bringing in gigantic bass-throbs, bashing beats, harrowing screams, and momentous melodic waves.
The tension breaks — but only slightly — when the music segues into harsh whispers and a ringing guitar harmony that’s nervously bereft in its mood. The music storms again after that, dramatically dialing up the tension and inflicting bone-bruising blows while those flickering tones in the high end manifest derangement.
The song’s surreal accompanying animated video, which includes brief excerpts of the French lyrics, is a very fitting visual companion for the music’s own surreal darkness. BTW, “un homme poussé à bout” translates to “a man pushed to the limit”.
https://impurewilhelmina.bandcamp.com/album/le-sanglot
https://orcd.co/iwlesanglot
https://www.facebook.com/impurewilhelmina/
LECHEROUS NOCTURNE (U.S.)
Last summer we had the pleasure of announcing the return of South Carolina’s Lecherous Nocturne and premiering a playthrough video for “Serpentence“, the first song revealed from a forthcoming full-length assault of ferocity named Violust.
More news about the new album recently surfaced, along with the debut of the album’s first official single (accompanied by a lyric video). This new song is “Fission“, and it features the band’s new vocalist Zach Jeter (Nile). If Lecherous Nocturne followed the songwriting path of most metal bands, they wrote the music before the lyrics were composed. If so, you can understand why the lyrical theme concerns atomic fission, because the music is nuclear incineration in audio form.
The song is furiously fast and brutally battering; the bass-lines bubble like magma; the riffage is mauling; and the frantically flickering lead-guitars are utterly crazed. The roaring and screaming vocals are equally crazed, but an order of magnitude more vicious. Fitting that the closing moments of the song sound like a radiation detector going off, too late to save us.
We still don’t have an official release date for Violust, though it’s projected to hit the streets at some point this coming fall. We’re told that additional singles will precede the release.
https://linktr.ee/lecherousnocturne
https://www.instagram.com/lecherousnocturne/
https://www.facebook.com/lecherousnocturne
MOON REAPER (UK)
Bristol-based Moon Reaper is the first of the three bands in today’s collection whose previous music I don’t recall ever hearing. I was induced to listen to their new single after seeing a PR description of their sound as a blend of “post-metal, black metal, doom, and industrial weight, drawing comparisons to Gojira, Meshuggah, Opeth, and Conjurer“.
This kaleidoscopic new song, “Dirge of the Moons“, also has an interesting theme. The band describe the track as following “a lost moon pulled across the empty vastness until it is finally consumed by a black hole”. “This track,” they say, “is the sound of a dying star’s final breath. A lament carried across the cold, infinite dark”.
Moon Reaper pack a lot of ingredients into the song, from thudding, bone-bruising grooves and frenetic fretwork frenzies to moodily humming bass-lines and sorrowfully wailing melodies, from scorching blackened screams to bestial death-roars.
They shift tempos repeatedly; bring in a hardcore mosh-inducer; scorch the senses with torrents of broiling riffage and blasting drums; draw out the lament with the doomy ring of a lead guitar; and help close things out with a heavily throbbing bass groove backed by eerie ambient shimmers and guitars that scathe and warp.
The song was released with a well-made red-tinted video of the band’s performance that’s a gripping thing to see.
https://moonreaperuk.bandcamp.com/
https://linktr.ee/MoonReaperUK
https://www.facebook.com/moonreaperuk
VRYXOR (UK)
Vryxor caught my attention when I saw that their lineup features former or current members of Cult Burial, Hideous Divinity, and Chestcrush, plus the exceptional Robin Stone on drums. The lyrical theme of their recent debut single “Voidborn” — which concerns stellar collapse and never-ending spirals of death and rebirth — was also intriguing, and I encourage you to read the words at Bandcamp.
In the music, Vryxor create a changing but relentlessly gripping experience. Following a very scary overture they inflict a contrasting tandem of slowly cascading cosmic keys and viciously snarling riffwork abrasion, coupled with thunderous double-bass rolls, skull-snapping snare, and scalding vocal hostility.
The high-end cascades begin to sound more distressing and traumatized as the abrasive riffing even more viciously gnashes and churns. But then the song seizes attention even more dramatically when the band lock into a stomping groove and unfurl a spiraling, clear-toned guitar solo.
Things get more catastrophic after that as the drums go wild and the riffing manifests as a caustic maelstrom, but the piercing, ethereal musical movements up in the stratosphere continue creating sounds of wonder (and ruin). We drift out into freezing space lanes at the end.
This makes for a fascinating and very promising introduction to Vryxor. My understanding is that they will be releasing another single in a few more weeks.
https://vryxor.bandcamp.com/track/voidborn
ESCAPING AGHARTHA (U.S.)
This prolific North Carolina band’s new album Lurkers of Languid Waters grabbed my attention because of its unconventional subject matter — and that was really the sole lure, because I can’t recall having listened to the band’s music before now. Here’s the description:
On Lurkers of Languid Waters, Escaping Aghartha’s ninth full-length record, the band focuses on the ongoing declines of anguillid eels, the most notable of which are the Critically Endangered European Eel, Endangered American Eel, and Endangered Japanese Eel. A mammoth of a record with a nearly 80 min runtime, Escaping Aghartha explores the threats to anguillid eels in addition to their biology and incredible life cycle through a tapestry of progressive blackened doom, discordant ambience, and black metal urgency.
Not only is the album thematically devoted to the perilous fate of anguillid eels, both Escaping Aghartha and their label Hypnotic Dirge are donating certain proceeds from sales to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Anguillid Eel Specialist Group (AESG), which has a history of success in researching, advocating for, and implementing eel conservation.
Definitely an unusual theme, but more understandable in light of the fact that Escaping Aghartha’s founder and only permanent member Avery Dart is a conservation biologist, and it appears that many of the band’s releases thematically concern environmental degradation and have been used to raise funds for various conservation organizations.
As noted above, this is a big record, and up to now all I’ve heard are the three songs currently available for streaming on Bandcamp. As I often do, I thought it best to say something about these songs now rather than waiting until I hear the whole album and risk saying nothing at all due to lack of time.
The first of the three songs from the new album now streaming at Bandcamp is “Degrade and Impede“. It turns out to be a very interesting amalgam of stylistic influences. It includes howling and snarling vocals that are as rabid and vitriolic as you could want out of a death or black metal band, but it also includes dissonantly screaming notes and warping keys that sound out of this world, and lots of inventive drum-and-bass progressions.
The music blares and pulsates, and throbbing electronics add their own vividly darting pulse. One begins to think of a strangely enticing, futuristic form of prog-death — but the pace also slows and the music segues into something more primitive, more oppressive, and more doomed in its mood.
As the music’s intensity ramps up again, the drumming seizes attention once more, as does a brightly ringing and dancing keyboard melody that you won’t find in death and black metal in many other (or any other) places.
The other two songs now available for listening — “Eaten to Obliteration” and the album closer “Journey to the Sargasso Sea” — are both quite long, each of the hovering around the 12-minute mark.
I won’t risk reader tedium by tracing their evolution in as much detail as I did for the first song. Let’s just say that they are even more multi-faceted, even more richly and unpredictably adorned in both their instrumental ingredients and their changing moods.
“Eaten to Obliteration” includes episodes of luminous beauty, haunting grief, frantic desperation, hard-charging aggressiveness (briefly), and crushing gloom. Among other things (many other things) it also includes adamant spoken words in addition to the usual come-for-your-throat harsh vox, some magnificent (and quite moving) guitar soloing, and an elegantly spectral organ instrumental in its closing phase.
“Journey to the Sargasso Sea” is overall a more intense and distressing affair than “Eaten to Obliteration“, more frantic and fraught in its moods and more hard-charging in its momentum, but still very much a prog-influenced pageant.
It also includes a moody piano melody and impassioned clean choral singing along with the beastly growls and throat-ripping screams. As the song evolves and the music soars, it also begins to channel feelings of splendor and resilience, even though it also descends into cinematic, keyboard-led phases of deep sorrow.
Lurkers of Languid Waters releases May 22nd on Hypnotic Dirge Records on both CD/digital, and will be released on DLP later this year. Fiadh Productions is releasing the album on tape around May 22nd.
At Bandcamp you can find a lot more very interesting info about the fascinating creatures that are the subject of the album.
https://escaping-aghartha.bandcamp.com/album/lurkers-of-languid-waters
https://hypnoticdirgerecords.bandcamp.com/album/lurkers-of-languid-waters
https://fiadh.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/EscapingAghartha/