(written by Islander)
This happened to be a week when I paid a lot of attention to the emergence of new songs and videos. In my case, what that means is saving links and making lists instead of actually listening and watching. I don’t know why I do this. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, given that the result is just a gigantic string of band names and links staring me in the face on Saturday mornings like this one. I guess it’s further evidence that I have a bit of OCD in my makeup, though “a bit of OCD” probably isn’t a term that clinicians use; I’m wary of finding out what their actual diagnosis might be.
Anyway, the list stared at me and I stared back. A few notable names caught my eye, along with a notable piece of artwork, and so I checked those out. They were all winners, and that greatly speeded my task. I also added one of the few songs on the list that I actually listened to last week; I knew even then that it had to be here.
But I started the morning with music from the two Colombian bands you’ll find below, two bands I didn’t know about until receiving a recommendation for them a few days ago. And then the last thing I heard before finishing the selection is also the last song and video in this grouping — yet another notable name.
The word of the day, by the way, is “pandemonium”.
MANNVEIRA (Iceland)
The Icelandic black metal band Mannveira haven’t been prolific. Since their formation in 2010 they’ve only released one EP, a split with Ellorsith, and a debut album five years ago named Vítahringur. Part of the explanation is that the band’s members are involved in other Icelandic groups, which of course is typical of Icelandic metal bands. But Mannveira’s career so far exemplifies a preference for quality over quantity, which is no bad thing at all.
This fall we will get their second album, Vesold, through the band’s collaboration with Dark Descent Records. The album’s opening song, “Lygar himinsins“, surfaced just yesterday. It’s both blazing and bleak, both searing and despairing, and it rages even as the riffing creates feverishly swirling and vibrantly soaring manifestations of apparent anxiousness and agony.
The vocals are shattering in their intensity, and the song also rhythmically hammers very damned hard. Great to have this band back in our midst again.
Vesold will be released by Dark Descent on October 16th.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/vesold
https://www.facebook.com/mannveira/
LUGUBRIOUS GARMENT (Italy)
Last year brought us the debut demo from the intriguingly named Lugubrious Garment, which was a new project from Gabriele Gramaglia, best known for his other projects Cosmic Putrefaction, Vertebra Atlantis, and Turris Eburnea (among others). To quote the Nuclear Winter label, which released the demo, Lugubrious Garment “was born out of an urge to channel a more brutal, ravenous instinct compared to Gramaglia’s other ventures, giving shape to a merciless yet dynamic form of extreme metal.” I shared some perky thoughts about the demo here.
That demo also perked up ears at 20 Buck Spin, who will be releasing Lugubrious Garment’s debut album In The Wide Vale Of Uncreated Night on October 16th. The album includes some guest appearances, including a violin performance by the wonderful Andrea Morgan, and terrific session drumming (as on the demo) by Claudio Invidia. The first advance track released for listening last week is “Profaned Fountain of Leaden Waters“.
I did promise pandemonium, and this is the first song today that really planted that word in my head. It’s berserk — but also wildly unpredictable. It screeches and swarms, but it also unexpectedly bounces up and down, ejects bursts of ecstatically swirling and elegantly darting melody, and seems to ooze dismal intoxicated visions too.
The vocals are as ugly, as ravenous, and as multi-headed as Cerberus, but I detect singing too. The drumming is just as mind-boggling as the vocals and the rest of the instrumentation (including the wonderful bass-work), and what a great choice to end the song with a beautiful piano melody, because why not?!?
All in all, it’s like an extravagant musical carnival that’s pitched its colorful and dangerous tents right inside our heads.
https://20buckspin.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-wide-vale-of-uncreated-night
https://www.facebook.com/p/Lugubrious-Garment-61581118918912/
MORGUE (France)
Now here’s the song I paid attention to because of the cover art for the album that includes it. It’s immediately recognizable as a painting by Paolo Girardi, and a hell of an image it is. The song, “Obedient to No Will” is a hell of a thing too.
On the one hand, the rapidly vibrating tremolo’d riffing sounds thoroughly deranged and desperate (pandemonium!) but the riffs are simultaneously very catchy. On the other hand, the song also includes traceries of bleak and haunting melody, and the gritty growls are bestial. On the third hand, the rhythms stagger as well as race, and the song is also a ruthless bludgeoner.
And so, although Morgue has a reputation as a blender of brutal death metal and grindcore, this song reveals many more facets than just those, chief among them being the presence of mood-altering and memorable melodies.
“Obedient to No Will” is from a new Morgue album named Herald the Dawn. It’s set for release by Godz Ov War Productions on October 16th.
https://godzovwarproductions.bandcamp.com/album/herald-the-dawn
https://www.facebook.com/official.morgue/
BEATEN TO DEATH (Norway)
The unorthodox Norwegian grindcore band Beaten To Death are returning this fall with their seventh album, Vntrve (a title that kind of sums up Beaten To Death’s offbeat persona), and last week Decibel premiered a song from it named “The Tolerator“. I would have eventually listened to it regardless of the fact that it includes a saxophone performance, but curiosity about how the band used the sax caused me to listen sooner rather than later.
Before the sax rears its head Beaten To Death feverishly stitch and brutally bludgeon, insidiously squirm and brazenly howl, mechanistically hammer and insanely screech. They yield the floor to the rhythm section for a quick and cool bass-and-drum groove, and then add to that with strangled screams and a dose of strangely slithering riffage. When the sax arrives it goes wild, and more wildness of different kinds ensues in the final phase of this madcap romp.
Vntrve will be released by Mas-Kina Recordings on October 23rd.
https://beatentodeath.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.facebook.com/beatentodeath
https://www.mas-kinarecordings.com
NO GRAVE (U.S.)
I guess every metalhead has a favorite Sepultura song. I might have a different one tomorrow, but today it’s “Slave New World” off the band’s Chaos A.D. album. I was reminded of it earlier this week when I came across a cover of the song by the Midwest hardcore band No Grave. This is the song I mentioned in the introduction that I actually listened to last week — and I listened to it repeatedly. (Coincidentally, I premiered a song yesterday from the Danish band Hard Lessons that featured a guest appearance by No Grave vocalist Aaron Russell.)
You can’t really improve on a song like “Slave New World“, and so, for most bands, trying to change it very much will only risk embarrassment. But you can leave your own mark on it, which is what No Grave do with their cover.
They use shrieking feedback and brutally distorted instruments to make the song’s overture even more oppressive. They add a megaton weight of hardcore heft to the grooves, and they tune the riffing to even more destructive and diseased frequencies. And the vocals are even more raging.
They double-down on both the bleakness and the fury of the original, and they even put a slightly different and more deleterious spin on Andreas Kisser’s violent solo from the original.
This will get your muscles moving and leave you black-and-blue. Play it as loud as you can stand it.
https://heroesmartyrs.bandcamp.com/track/slave-new-world
https://www.instagram.com/nogravehc/
CASA DE PIQUE / FLAGELO (Colombia)
Now we come to the pair of Colombian bands mentioned way up above. One selection is an EP released by casa de pique last spring, and the other is a recent video of Flagelo giving a powerful live performance of their sole EP in Cali. There’s at least one connection between the groups that I see, i.e., the presence in both lineups of Miguel Méndez from the terrific Colombian band Mico. I’m grateful to Rennie Resmini from starkweather for linking me to both selections.
The casa de pique EP is named propaganda imperceptible. It assaults listeners with five tracks of grindcore and powerviolence that run their raging course in a total of 5 minutes and 6 seconds. The first 18 seconds of the opening track provide a cool but misleading opening, and after that the band inflict fast-changing doses of rampant destruction, fronted by changing vocals of unhinged fury.
The tempos turn on a dime; the methods of violence change on a dime too, ranging from maniacally churning riffage and blast-beat mayhem to methodically pile-driving pulverization.
The EP’s final song sort-of shares the name of the band: “casadepique“. It’s 2:49 long, which means it accounts for half of the EP’s runtime by itself. Initially, it’s the slowest and most harrowing of the songs; it feels like they’re smothering us at the same time as they’re applying sledgehammer blows to our skulls. But the song is just as unnerving when the band accelerate– and the outro is a fucking nightmare.
The lyrics are as harrowing as the music. I used an online tool to translate them from the Spanish:
hanging upside down
I can smell salt
my tongue tastes of metal
I’ve been flayed
there is no escape, I must pray
today I meet God
He takes the shape of a machete
I drink blood
it drowns me
hanging upside down
dismembered
immobilized
my mother weeps
pain chokes me
And now here’s that recently released video of Flagelo performing a show at Metal Hearts United in Cali’s Infierno Music Hall on August 22nd of this year. The B&W video is cool to watch, and the music, which is a run-through of the band’s 2024 debut EP Insaciable, is very cool too — that is, if you’re in the mood for a stylistically diverse rendering of black/death mayhem.
Across all five songs the music is almost equal parts savage and atmospheric, dissonant and thundering, blistering and gloom-drenched (the doom really dominates in the hallucinatory and experimental-sounding final song “Eslabón“). They also scamper and jump, chug and chatter, boil and burn.
They’re working with more different genre ingredients in the midst of their deathly tirades than you might expect, and it’s fun to watch them shift and stitch everything together from song to song on stage.
P.S. The drummer is maniacal, and so are the expressions on the faces of all three of the band’s vocalists.
https://casadepique.bandcamp.com/album/propaganda-imperceptible
https://nuclearwinterrecords.bandcamp.com/album/insaciable
https://flagelodeath.bandcamp.com/album/insaciable
FEAR FACTORY (U.S.)
As mentioned at the outset, I’m closing today by circling back to another notable name, undoubtedly the most broadly popular name in today’s collection, which means it’s a choice that’s the polar opposite of the underground depths we usually focus on around here. But I admit that I enjoyed this song and video so much that I felt it would be hypocritical to leave it behind.
This closing bookend is a very cool, and undoubtedly expensive, video for a new Fear Factory single named “Roboticist“, which arrived on August 29th at 2:14 am — the date and time when Skynet becomes self-aware in the Terminator film series. The video showcases the debut of Fear Factory’s new lineup: Italian vocalist Milo Silvestro; Havok drummer Pete Webber; and bassist Tony Campos, alongside guitarist Dino Cazares (who’s looking pretty svelte these days). The song also marks the recording debut of that lineup.
In reflecting on this, the word “pandemonium” again comes to mind despite the mechanist nature of the marauding, an impression that makes Silvestro’s shift from blast-furnace screams into high-flown singing quite a drastic pivot. Yet I found myself enjoying that clean-sung chorus the more I heard it. I suppose some of the song’s attraction derives from nostalgia, but whatever the reason, I got stuck on it.
And there you have it for this Saturday. Hope you enjoy the rest of your fucking day.
https://fearfactory.bfan.link/roboticist.fbi
https://www.facebook.com/fearfactory/