(written by Islander)
I have bit off more than I can chew. All five of today’s picks are complete albums or EPs. I have listened to a couple of them a couple of times and others only once. A good reviewer would only write about one or two of them, and do so thoroughly and after considered reflection. You’ll have to go elsewhere for that kind of coherent professionalism. Here, you’ll just find a dude jumping up and down, waving his arms and yelling “Listen to this!”
I put them in alphabetical order by band name because I couldn’t figure out a better way to arrange them as step-wise progressions of sound, and because my brain was already overloaded by what I bit off.
ARA SUBVERSOR (U.S.)
Death Prayer Records released this Florida band’s new EP Retribution on Friday. This is one of the records in today’s collection that I’ve listened to more than once. I actually wrote about one of the songs (“The Pall of War”) when Ara Subversor released it as a single last summer.
In a nutshell, this EP delivers engulfing music, raging black metal that’s also dramatic and expansive, designed to overpower and overwhelm. It begins with gunfire and sirens and then becomes a gale-force storm pierced by scalding vocal savagery.
The sound is explosively powerful but sharp in sound, and the intensity is unrelenting. The drumming sounds like weaponry, a fully stocked armament furiously deployed. The rapidly whirring riffage broadly sweeps as it violently roils, but the music often sounds desperate and anguished as well as cold and cruel. It’s especially cold and cruel when Ars Subversor constrain their expansiveness and inflict feral slashing chords and brutish stomping beats.
The songs create terrible and tragic grandeur, operating on a broad scale. The EP sounds as much like pain and condemnation as it does retribution. It’s excellent.
https://deathprayerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/retribution
https://www.deathprayerrecords.com/shop/
https://www.facebook.com/deathprayerrecords
https://arasubversor.bandcamp.com/
FØSPHENE (U.S.)
Back in April I frothed at the mouth about the eponymous opening song on this Oregon band’s self-titled debut album. The album was released on May 2nd. I kept meaning to get to the album as a whole, and kept getting diverted. This weekend I got there.
You might have difficulty trying to guess about the nature of the music based on the cover painting by Winslow Homer (“Watching the Breakers,” 1891). The music turns out to be as intriguing as the choice of artwork. It may be the power of suggestion at work, but I came to think of the music as a kind of black metal Americana.
On the one hand, Føsphene inflict corrosive riffing and blasting drums, music that’s raw and ruinous, coupled with cut-throat snarls. On the other hand, the guitars also brightly ring and vividly swirl (only lightly coated in grit or very clean), the drums rumble and pound, and the bass seems to muse. On the third hand, Føsphene create magnificent musical panoramas. On the fourth hand, they use softly spoken words and a gentle piano melody to open the long closing song (while a storm seems to blow in the background).
Even when the rapidly whirring riffage roars and cuts like a sandstorm, and especially when it pierces with relative clarity, it carries discernible melodies that channel discernible emotions and get stuck in the head — moods of yearning and desolation as well as moods of anger, wonder, and jubilation. Føsphene describe what they’re doing as “Brandishing American nihilism”, but to my ears they wear their hearts on their sleeves.
Especially for a debut album, the songwriting is very strong. All the performers are given a lot of freedom in the often elaborate ways in which they embellish the songs, but every part beautifully interlocks in the creation of atmosphere and emotion. Føsphene clearly had elevated ambitions for this album, and for the most part they beautifully achieved them.
If you’re just looking to taste-test the record, you won’t go wrong with any pick, other than the more experimental instrumental track “Apostasy,” which isn’t as complete a demonstration of Føsphene‘s abilities as others. But I think my own favorite, and a great demonstration of what I’ve been trying to describe about the album as a whole, is “Memento Mori“.
https://fospheneblackmetal.bandcamp.com/album/f-sphene
https://www.instagram.com/fosphene_band/
KORELTSAK (U.S.)
Not sure whether you would call this next self-titled release an album or an EP; it’s five songs long and on the borderline time-wise. Koreltsak describe it as a record that “collects music from splits iv, v & an unreleased song redone with drums by U. & remastered as a whole.”
Neill Jameson wrote about the last of those splits (with Kommodus) in one of his year-end columns for us last December (here). He wrote: “Koreltsak presents a tense and somewhat off-the-rails style of black metal, psychotic but restrained just enough to feel like it could snap at any note.”
More recently, Ron Ben-Tovim wrote about this new compilation release at Machine Music: “[I]t’s all fire. Fire. Emotional, frenetic, and has that unique sense of, perhaps like Trhä at its best, being written by an alien/troll. Insane shit.”
The music does sound psychotic, in the sense of the inner visions of a mind in turmoil, seeing things more “well-adjusted” people never see. It combines sadistic swaths of dense, fizzing abrasion and tones of wild and piercing brilliance, along with thoroughly unhinged, throat-slaughtering vocals and vividly variable drumming that’s frequently lights-out.
But the music turns out not to be overwhelmingly cacophonous (though at times it is). I would even venture to say there’s a kind of elegance in the songwriting, and a capacity to channel emotion in visceral and authentic ways — and not just lethal emotions. At times the emotion is sadness, even hopelessness; at others the music seems to spin like a dervish in ecstasy.
Among those tones of wild and piercing brilliance is a recurring element that sounds like a cross between a mandolin-type instrument and a chime-like one. I don’t know what it is; maybe it’s just an electric guitar with unusual tuning and effects. Whatever it is, it helps make these songs stand out from the pack.
And that’s not the only unusual instrument in the mix. Some eerily quivering keyed instrument (maybe a concertina?) also surfaces within “pathway to the ruined palace”, and joins in again with acoustic guitar at the opening of “empty handed i entered this world, barefoot i leave it” and in the entirety of the heart-breaking instrumental closer, “departure for the front”. And then there’s the jazzy instrumentation and female singing at the end of “empty handed,”another unexpected vision.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that despite some superficial appearances you shouldn’t mistake these songs as simply vicious, raw black metal. There’s a hell of a lot more going on here which makes these songs uncommon. I shouldn’t have waited so long to see what Koreltsak was all about.
https://koreltsak.bandcamp.com/album/koreltsak
https://www.instagram.com/koreltsak/
NON SERVIAM (France)
I never know quite what to expect from this band. They go off in all sorts of different directions from release to release, which I suspect is why Metal-Archives won’t give them the time of day. Outside of the band’s anonymous members, and maybe not even them, I doubt many people are enthusiastic about every one of their releases. But they’re never dull, and so I keep paying attention. Very glad I have.
Their latest release, an EP named Ne regarde plus les bombes tomber (“Don’t watch the bombs fall anymore”), is intended to raise money for the Olga Taratuta Initiative, an antiwar initiative dedicated to supporting Russian and Belarusian deserters and pacifists as a way to help end the war in Ukraine. The initiative also appears to support Ukrainians who oppose the war.
Lyrically, the first song finds commonality in the wars in Gaza and Ukraine (in translation, “across their states / the bourgeoisies send proles / to bomb other proles”). The second takes as its text a striking poem written by Guillaume Apollinaire in the midst of the First World War. The third song, the title track, is 20 minutes long. Its words, also about the insanity and ruin of war, are eloquently anguished and angry.
That first one, a short one, is abrasive and enraged, shrieking and sizzling, battering and bombing. A piercing and trilling lead cries out like agony in a war zone.
In the second and even more wrenching one, haunted and explosive singing rises up (at times falsetto) above dismally moaning tones, heavy low-end turbulence, and waves of searing abrasion; shrill organ-like fevers rise up even higher. The song bespeaks catastrophe and pain in harrowing terms. You’ll surely recognize Oppenheimer’s spoken-word sample at the end.
As for the 20-minute song, it’s quite a wide-ranging amalgam, and it stands the test of all those minutes. It includes cosmic cinematic synths and strident singing; gnarly, snarling, low-frequency riffage and skull-smacking beats; deft acoustic guitar and woozily tunneling bass-lines; booming electronic throbs and sprightly harpsichord keys; wailing pulses and squirming arpeggios; and more. Like the words, the music sounds anguished and enraged. Paradoxically, it also becomes hypnotic.
https://non-serviam.bandcamp.com/album/ne-regarde-plus-les-bombes-tomber-benefit-ep
https://www.facebook.com/NonServiamCircle
VOLLOÍOM (Canada)
This makes the fourth time I’ve written about Volloíom‘s music. The last time, after I heard an EP they released in January 2024 (Katarwos), I described the music as “the madness of broken and beseeching spirits that don’t know where they are, because they don’t know they’re dead.” Make of that what you will.
Their newest release, the fourth one to come out since that EP (they are prolific), is a single 32-minute experimental song named Vnto Loss Of Spirit Undying. The cover art by Rotting Reign would have grabbed me even if I hadn’t been familiar with some of the band’s previous releases.
A couple of entries earlier, I quoted other people describing the music of Koreltsak as insane and psychotic. Those same words sprung to mind in listening to this latest Volloíom release, except I would underline them here with a heavy pen.
The vocals all sound fanatical and asylum-spawned or hell-born, a crazed and cacophonous discourse in howling and choking madness (though I’m not sure any words are being formed). Maniacal drumming, somewhat muffled in tone, adds to the feeling of violent lunacy, as does the fuzzed miasma of caustic, lo-fi riffage that surrounds everything.
At times the drumming vanishes, ceasing to cause muscles to twitch and allowing other sensations to emerge — shrill contorting tones; heavily throbbing excavations; sounds of sizzling guitar-acid on a burner, or a cutting acetylene torch, or circle saws trying to get through steel; eerily droning pulsations from the void; and woozily wandering notes rusted in sound.
I imagine most listeners, even hardened veterans of metallic extremity, will find this abusive. I found myself transfixed, the kind of transfixion produced by horror. We each pick our own poison.
https://volloiom.bandcamp.com/album/vnto-loss-of-spirit-undying
https://www.instagram.com/volloiom/