SHADES OF BLACK: AMIENSUS, ELLENDE, HOLOGRAMAH, CAGED BASTARD

(written by Islander)

When I finished writing the SEEN AND HEARD column yesterday and scheduled it for automatic appearance this morning I really didn’t think I would be awake or clear-headed enough to prepare a SHADES OF BLACK thing for today, which is why I said there wouldn’t be one. But even though I didn’t get to sleep after my spouse’s Saturday night birthday party until 1:30 am, I woke up at 7 am — amazingly not hungover, only weary.

I still thought about not trying to do put this column together, but I really hate leaving holes in our regular schedule, so here we are. Fewer selections than usual, but (I hope you’ll agree) very good ones.

 

AMIENSUS (U.S.)

One of our site’s favorite bands, Minnesota-based Amiensus, have busied themselves this year by releasing singles — “Fields of Emerald Fire” (reviewed here), “We Still Bloom” (reviewed here), and now (as of last Wednesday) “The Peak of Denali“.

Fitting for its title, in this newest single Amiensus create aural visions of wonder and immensity, shining and suffusing senses in its higher elevations and granite-heavy in its low frequencies. Even in that opening phase, however, a feeling of melancholy spreads through the melody, and the song becomes an order of magnitude more dark when the drums launch a furious pounding and furious howls ensue.

The music expands toward panoramic proportions, and voices lift in song, renewing visions of wonder, but the music’s furious intensity also persists. The riffing rises and falls, almost desperate in its mood, leavened by dramatic singing and dominated by the sheer scale and sweep of the music. The song further includes a brief drum-less phase of mystical splendor before engulfing the listener once more — shining and storming.

P.S. For those who may not know, Denali (in the interior of Alaska) is the highest mountain peak in North America, and the tallest mountain in the world from base to peak on land. The indigenous people who inhabit the area around the mountain have referred to it as Denali for centuries, and in 2015 the Obama Administration changed the official federal name of the mountain to Denali (beginning in 1915 it had been named Mount McKinley, in honor of a U.S. president who had no connection to it at all).

Not long after his inauguration in January 2025, Trump ordered his Interior Department to change the name back to Mount McKinley, despite the opposition of indigenous communities and elected Alaska leaders. That was the same order that directed U.S. federal agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. The order praised McKinley as a champion of tariffs. (Excuse me, I’ll be back with one more postscript after I wipe the vomit off my mouth.)

P.P.S. Looking ahead, Amiensus plan to release one more single before year-end — a cover song that we’re pretty sure will make a lot of people very happy. (You’ll get to hear it at NCS.)

https://linktr.ee/amiensus
https://amiensus.bandcamp.com/track/the-peak-of-denali
https://www.facebook.com/Amiensus/

 

ELLENDE (Austria)

Letting no grass grow beneath their feet, the Austrian band Ellende have finished a new album named Zerfall only a year after the release of their last one, Todbringerin. Last week brought us a professionally filmed video for its title song. The video portrays a fascinating narrative of a painter struggling to bring to canvas what’s in his mind, interspersed with film of the band performing the song.

As for the song itself, it’s a multi-faceted experience — gently musing and meditative at first, then more disturbed when snarling vocals slash through all the shimmering and shining sounds, then hammering and flowing in burning waves.

The whirring riffage dramatically envelops the listener within harmonies that sound both desperate and defeated, while the vocals continue exploding with shattering intensity. Those tidal melodies wear their broken hearts on their sleeves, but, as the visuals dramatically change, the music also begins to channel feelings of resilience (albeit in tandem with melancholy) above big throbbing grooves.

The painter has a new vision, a new realization, finds a reason to resume, sees himself… and the music shines and becomes beautiful again.

Zerfall will be released by AOP Records on January 2nd of next year.

https://linktr.ee/aoprec
https://ellende.bandcamp.com/album/zerfall
https://www.facebook.com/ellende.official

 

HOLOGRAMAH (Chile)

I picked this next song in part because of the stark contrast it creates with today’s first two selections. Entitled “Holograms Into The Octagram,” it generates a swarming and searing hurricane of sound, half-gleaming and half-abrasive, propelled by furiously hurtling drums and immense bass undulation, and fronted by malignantly imperious growls and berserk cries.

The elaborately layered guitars create sensations of screaming and scorching delirium, head-spinning in their manifestations, electrifying in their effect, and man, those vocals are equally insane.

The song is off Hologramah‘s debut album Abyssus.Versus.Versiculos., which is set for release by Living Temple Records on October 31st (yet another in a vast multitude of Samhain-day releases). The band is a new one, but its lineup includes current or former members of such groups as Hetroertzen, Selbst, Animus Mortis, and Death Yell — so no wonder the song’s so good.

https://livingtemple.bandcamp.com/album/hologramah-abyssus-versus-versiculos
https://www.facebook.com/livingtemplerecords/

 

CAGED BASTARD (Tunisia)

Last week this solo project of Muhammad Oun released a new EP, described as the final chapter of its “Red Era”, and further described as follows:

Mantra of Psychological Violence is a 3 track immersion into the fractured psyche, a study of the self under siege. Each piece unfolds like a clinical observation of projection, and dissolution, where thought corrodes into echo and identity splinters under invisible weight…. [It] carries the scars of purging and the quiet fortitude of rebuilding.

The progression begins with “Echo Chamber of Wounds“, a howling and hammering storm of sound. The riffing wails and writhes at first, then feverishly pulsates above blistering drum work and a scorching voice, then transforms into a rushing demolition machine. In only a couple of brief, softer moments is there any chance to breathe.

The title song generates its own pulse, like a frantically warbling warning siren. The vocals still sound furious; the drum-and-bass maneuvers are inventive and interesting, not as mad as that siren-like riff. But the music changes when the bass picks up the pulse and slows it, delivering a collage of demented, discordant, and frighteningly hallucinatory sounds, in tandem with bestial gurgling snarls.

One more phase of the title song is yet to come, bringing forward head-moving grooves and swarming guitars that drench the senses with their disturbances, less disorienting than what precedes it but still distressing.

And finally, “Scripted Delusions” delivers vicious, blood-rushing bedlam, powered by the rise and fall of fast, buzzing fretwork, tumultuous bass-and-drum mechanics, and savage snarls and cries. The riffing is dense and corrosive, but again with its own manic pulse — and you’ll hear the throbbing echo of all that at the end.

Further proof from this project that one person’s torments are another person’s pleasures, which is to say this is yet another Caged Bastard recording that quickly got under this listener’s skin and stayed there.

https://cagedbastard.bandcamp.com/album/mantra-of-psychological-violence
https://www.facebook.com/cagedbastard