(written by Islander)
In mid-June we helped spread the welcome news that the L.A.-based black metal band Oskoreien was returning with a new album after a roughly 9-year absence, and to help do that we premiered the album’s opening song “Prismatic Reason“.
Now we’re on the eve of the album’s release, and the time is thus right to express some thoughts about the record as a whole.
Oskoreien is the work of multi-instrumentalist Jay Valena. It was a solo endeavor for most of its time, but on the new album he was joined by guitarist Rashid Nadjib and bassist Matthew Durkee. Valena describes it as “an intensely personal album borne of severance and survival – a visceral exploration for meaning in the wake of a near-death experience, of love twisted by personality disorder, and of family shattered by schizophrenia and suicide.” It “provides a cathartic voice of recognition and understanding of this pain in its incisive fury and splendor.”
The album consists of five songs, each of them in the 7-9 minute range. As we wrote in that previous premiere, the opener “Prismatic Reason” powerfully seizes attention in a multitude of ways, all of them breathtaking. It powerfully surges and feverishly storms, and it also rolls in waves, displaying beleaguered measures of torment, creating a panorama of pain augmented by a slowly wailing guitar solo that adds feelings of grief.
The pacing continually rushes and recedes as the riffing changes, and further soloing fluidly ascends in piercing fashion, as if expressing intense yearning for relief from harrowing experiences. Near the end, the riffing begins to fervently throb, paving the way to perhaps the most extravagant solo of them all, and everything comes together in a closing crescendo that’s uplifting, resilient, even hopeful.
We called that song “a completely captivating emotional powerhouse”, but that’s true of the album as a whole. The sound is sharp — the snare hammers like it’s set up inside the listener’s head; the bass bubbles and rumbles as if gut-dwelling; the tremolo’d riffing is often layered and dense but glittering as well as abrading, like storms of sparks discharged from massifs of flint; slashed chords magnificently tower; and arpeggios brilliantly swirl.
Every song traverses changing emotional ground in elaborate ways. The pacing races and stalks; the guitars manifest degradation and confusion, wrenching torment and tempestuous fury, wistfulness and yearning, but also fierce joy and daunting magnificence; and the soloing is perpetually mind-piercing and gripping, regardless of its own mood. The production gives the bass-work a place of prominence, for good reason because it’s persistently nimble and nuanced.
The vocals are shattering in different ways — voraciously snarling, rabidly screaming, and crying out like a torture victim. The music’s intensity ebbs and flows (at some point every song scorches like typhoons of flame), but even at low tide its mood-manifesting and mood-changing power is formidable.
You could randomly pick out any one of these five songs and get lost in it, lost in the expanding weave of its own tapestry, because every song (to use an overworked word) is its own journey. The opening of “Fragments”, for example, might be the album’s most broken and distressing phase, but every song feels emotionally broken at some part and in some way, and even “Fragments” becomes a channel for fretwork-frenzy and a vision of splendor (as well as home to a bass solo). At some point every song also expands to panoramic proportions and scathes the senses, sometimes simultaneously.
What you really won’t find is any one song that would allow your heart to settle for very long. There’s no real break in the action, no calm interludes. About as close as you get is an extended guitar solo in the midst of “To Kiss the Viper’s Fang”. Scratchy in tone and bluesy in style, it holds the floor without beats for a while, and then evolves into something spectacular as the song’s intensity swells to extravagant proportions again.
Earlier in this review we quoted Jay Valena calling the album “a visceral exploration for meaning” in the wake of some very dark events, and a “cathartic voice”. That really comes through in the music and explains its near-relentless intensity and striking authenticity. A tremendously good album, and one I urge you to hear — which you can do below.
Hollow Fangs was produced by Jay Valena and Rashid Nadjib, and was recorded, engineered, and mixed by Jay Valena in Los Angeles, CA during 2024-25. It was mastered by Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden Studios. Cover photo and art design by Jay Valena, stained glass by Williams Burges, Cardiff Castle, Wales.
ACQUIRE:
https://oskoreien.bandcamp.com/album/hollow-fangs
PRE-SAVE (Spotify):
https://recordu.lnk.to/Hollow_Fangs
SOCIAL MEDIA:
https://www.facebook.com/oskoreienband
https://www.instagram.com/oskoreien