(written by Islander)
Welp, I got another very late start on this Saturday. Of course, for most well-adjusted people Saturday is made for getting late starts. Not being well-adjusted, I get anxious when it happens, nervously staring at the clock and realizing I have to hurry or I won’t get roundups like this one finished in time for anyone in quadrants east of here to pay attention before sundown.
Enough of that. I should use my diminishing time to introduce the large handful of things I picked for today’s recommendations, including the semi-usual curveball at the end.
GOJIRA (France)
The fact that From Mars To Sirius is 20 years old makes me feel… old. It also makes me feel very nostalgic. I fucking loved that album, and still do. I loved the chances I got to hear Gojira play songs from it live, before they got so big that Seattle clubs aren’t on their tour maps any more. (I’m not griping, I also love the fact that Gojira got big.)
Anyway, while feeling… old… I also couldn’t resist watching the video that I picked to lead us off today, in which Gojira play three songs from the album (“Ocean Planet“, “From the Sky“, and “Where Dragons Dwell“) live at Silver Chord Studios in New York.
Man, this is good.
https://www.gojira-music.com
https://www.facebook.com/GojiraMusic/
ZADISM (Sweden)
I didn’t go hunting for music from bands whose names begin with Z, but when I scrolled through all the many links I’d saved in anticipation of this column there they were, four of them. I hoped the music of all four would be good, so I could stack them in here. My peculiar wish was granted.
I had an inkling I would enjoy what three of these bands have recently released, because I’ve enjoyed what they released in years past. But the music of this first one, Zadism, was new to my ears. In fact, the song below is the first one they’ve divulged from their first record, a debut EP named Under Sadistic Law.
Their labels describe Zadism as hailing “from the blackened mines of Bergslagen and rising from the ashes of the now‑defunct band Maniak,” and their music as “guided by the spirit of the early Brazilian underground… and the savage blueprint laid down by the German thrash metal pioneers at the dawn of the scene.”
This first song, “Under Sacred Soil“, is almost primitive and punk in its aspects, from the bounding and plodding beats to the brazen, feral rawness of the (highly infectious) riffing and the scalding vehemence of the howled vocals. The song also includes a vividly roiling guitar solo and urgently surging riffage, which collectively enhance the song’s already-diabolical aspects.
This song got under my skin very damned fast, so much so that I had to stop myself from playing it 3 or 4 more times so I could get to everything else.
Under Sadistic Law will be released on November 21st by De:Nihil Records and Dala Destroi Records.
https://www.instagram.com/zadism_swe
https://denihilrecords.blogspot.com/
https://www.instagram.com/denihilrecords/
https://daladestroirecords.com/
https://www.instagram.com/daladestroirecords/
ZAKAZ (Iceland)
Continuing our foray into world war “Z“, we move next into the three bands whose past music has proved appealing, beginning with Zakaz (the solo project of Icelandic artist Kristján Jóhann Júlíusson) and its dark new album Merki Sólar (“The Mark of the Sun”), released by Gymnocal Industries on November 7th.
The album’s opening song “Ást á Sjálfseyðingu” (“Love of Self-Destruction, per google translate) establishes what turns out to be one of the default positions (often but not always) of the album’s music: It’s towering, looming, immense, intense — or pick some other word for an experience that’s tremendously dark and daunting. Maybe think of Mount Doom and the dreadful gaze of the Eye of Sauron.
The whirring riffage is vivid, piercing, and pernicious, managing to be both distraught and dangerous. The low-end throbbing undercurrents are earth-shaking. The moan and wail of old fiddle strings (or something that sounds like them) play a key role. The guitars also urgently pulse and mysteriously simmer; symphonic overlays expand the music’s scale to vast proportions; the drums, initially rock-steady, erupt in blast-beat torrents. The roaring vocals might be the most immense and dominating of all the ingredients.
After that eye-popping first song Zakaz take listeners on a continuing musical tour of dark and ancient realms. Although the sonic ingredients are often similar to what you hear in the first song, the mix of them and the moods change.
Augmented by deep chants and howls of seeming despair, “Dáleiðing og Tálmar” is a wrenching lament, and the corrosive, pulsating squall of guitars makes “Endalausi Vítahringur” sound fierce and cruel, until the violin and a piano pour out their grief.
“Í Tómum Veruleika” comes across like a grim funeral march, and the echoing sung vocals in this one, higher in range than before, sound sorrowfully solemn and reverent — but the drums also explode along with tormented screams. On the other hand, “Í Trójuhesti Samvizkunnar” is an ice-cold, emotionally harrowing, and broadly panoramic black metal storm pierced by scalding howls, while the title track is elegantly mystical and wistful in some of its moods, and intensely distressing and calamitous in others.
It’s a completely enthralling album, despite the darkness of its moods, straight through to the tremendous closing track “Underneath the Moon“, as heart-breaking as it is vast and ancient in the visions it conjures.
https://zakaz.bandcamp.com/album/merki-s-lar-2
https://www.facebook.com/zakazOfficial/
ZEIT (Germany)
I’ve written frequently about Zeit‘s past music, which isn’t easily summed up because they tend to indulge different interests and influences as time has passed. Here’s how Zeit describe their experimental new EP R.U.M.S at Bandcamp:
With ZEIT, a new EP means a new musical experiment. This time, the journey takes us into the vast cosmos of electronic music. Our inspiration rose from the beat driven heart of the 90s: Hardcore Techno in the vein of Thunderdome, Acid House, D’n’B, and classic minimal Electro. In combination with traditional ZEIT-elements we formed a hybrid monster: True Nihilistic Black Techno Metal.
The EP launches with “Stilltanz“, and more specifically with enormous groaning sludge/doom chords rough to the touch and slow in their pace, pierced by sharp smacking beats and sharp-toned, fire-bright filaments. And then we get what’s discussed above — enormous booming electro-beats and spurts of percussive clatter. That’s surrounded by grimly writhing, rapidly darting, and lustfully thrusting riffage, with vicious snarls and rabid howls venting the words.
Well, I thought this amalgam worked very well, creating an experience that’s dark and menacing, fierce and feral, but also a gigantic muscle-mover thanks to those big bouncing grooves.
“Wunde” works damned well too for the same reasons. It sounds both more feverishly fierce, more feverishly distressing, and more abysmally downcast, than the opener, and it brings shattering black metal screams into the vocal mix. Like the opener, it’s also catchy as hell.
The third song, “Marschieren“, is a cover of Totenmond, a leftist metal band from Germany. As one of Zeit’s members told me, “The song is from 89 I think and complains about the growing far-right movement. Sadly we are at the same point in time again.” This one is bleak and grim, heavy and urgent, with a vocal sample in the mix along with bear-like roars.
The last song, “Immer“, is a nearly 12 1/2 minute behemoth. At that length you would expect some twists and turns, and Zeit provide them, but also hammer in their refrains through repetition. The electronic ingredients are still present and accounted for, but the song’s opening movement is slow, and dominated by a reverberating guitar melody that’s a manifestation of aching misery.
That guitar melody remains dominant and digs further under the skin like needles even when the band crank up the EDM tempo (or is it EBM?) and the vocals start torching eardrums. As that corrosively-toned main melody rises and falls, pulses and drags, it’s a grim and grievous heart-sinking experience, notwithstanding how punchy the grooves are.
The addition of snarling and roaring vocals don’t make the song any more hopeful, but their raging aspect is also part of how Zeit seem to signal in the song that they won’t take things lying down. With some help from google translate, here are the lyrics:
Everything was forever, until it was no more.
We only know it this way, everything is perfectly normal,
Nothing ever changes, but then suddenly
Everything was forever, until it was no more.
Stagnation
Resignation
Repression
Dissimulation
In our comfortable space,
we remain complacent.
Just a small deal
prosperity in exchange for loyalty.
As for the album’s title, Zeit provides some meanings for the acronym:
Rave Under Moonlight Skies
Run Under Massive Stress
Rave Until Morning Sunlight
Rotten Urban Misguided Scum
https://rumsdiezeit.bandcamp.com/album/r-u-m-s
https://www.facebook.com/RumsDieZeit
ZMEY GORYNICH (Russia)
To conclude today’s tour through the tail end of the alphabet I picked an album recently released by the fun-loving (and devilish) Russian band Zmey Gorynich. The album’s title, like all the songs, is in Russian — Странствiя Рукоблуда и Сестры Его Малафѣи — but they helpfully provide a translation into English: Peregrinations of Rukoblud and His Sister Malafeya. At Bandcamp they provide translations of all the song titles too.
Also at Bandcamp they provide an extensive listing of credits for instruments and voices on the album. There, they describe the album as a “our most genuine buffoonish Folk Metal Opera” — “A fairy tale, a lie, but in it a hint, a lesson for good fellows!”
The album includes 12 tracks, and they do provide quite a peregrination through the band’s homeland, with lots of variety in voices (both clean and harsh), instrumentation (both old and new), and moods. It really is like a folk-metal grand opera, highly theatrical in both its energies and its narrative qualities. The choirs are especially great.
In most respects the music is a romp, a high-spirited and heart-pounding whirl, but with occasional digressions in mood that create passages of melancholy and others of brutish, stomping monstrosity. I would also say, this is mainly music for peasants, not tsars (old or new), mostly reveling in old traditions of the soil, but in ways that include throwing some hard punches.
Zmey Gorynich provide their own take on what they’re doing: “As Яussian as it can get – fully packed with vodka, bears, communism and snow.” And while we devote very little of our spaces here to folk metal of any kind, I have yet to listen to anything this band do without smiling broadly.
https://zmeygorynich.bandcamp.com/album/i-peregrinations-of-rukoblud-and-his-sister-malafeya
https://www.facebook.com/lubokcore/
JOROGUMO (Scotland)
From that Zmey Gorynich romp I decided to turn today’s musical recommendations in much darker and often more demanding and disturbing directions with the debut album Babylon by Jorugumo from Glasgow.
These songs aren’t easy to sum up. The instrumentation includes a multitude of shrieking and quivering tones, urgent and brightly lilting acoustic guitars, raw and ruinous riffs both low and high, seductively ringing and swirling guitar-leads, thunderous pile-driving grooves, neck-cracking beats, proggy drum and bass patterns, and bursts of blasting mania.
The vocals range widely too, trading off between hair-on-fire screams, rabid howls, malignant roars, and high-pitched singing that’s raw instead of pretty (with some haunting wails in the mix), and occasionally sounds a bit like throat-cutting rap.
Jorugumo switch up the tempos and moods frequently. The music lumbers and stalks like a great beast, suddenly undergoes violent convulsions, freakishly jitters and skitters, writhes and spirals, goes off into soloing that’s both seductive and wildly exhilarating (and sometimes sax-like in its tones).
The Bandcamp tags include sludge, death metal, hardcore, prog, and thrash, and all of that fits. Those tags also aren’t exhaustive; they could include jazz, blues, and electronica, and the acoustic guitar interlude “Lars Moriendi” is a bit folky, as well as a bit bluesy (the singing sometimes sounds bluesy too). As I hear it, the closing song “The Harrow Grove” also brings in a swampy kind of psychedelia… before it goes mad (terrific guitar solo in that one too).
All of this is why the music is hard to sum up in conventional genre terms. But I’ll sum up the album this way: It’s a hell of an extravagant thrillride.
https://jorogumo.bandcamp.com/album/babylon
https://www.facebook.com/jorogumogla
CHRIS GEBAUER (Australia)
Now to conclude, with the promised curveball.
Chris Gebauer, as you should know, is a key figure in the extreme metal band Deadspace and the sole figure in the metal band Exitium Sui, with a resume that includes many other bands and projects besides those. But just today he released an EP under his own individual name that’s quite unlike anything else I’ve heard that he’s been involved in.
The name of the EP is Tales From Southern Skies, described as “a collection of songs that embrace the southern gothic ethos and mysterious vastness of the Australian backdrop”:
“Soul meets terrain in swirling darkness and burning light, journeying into gothic folk territory. The lyrics address personal concepts of self, family and natural phenomena, embracing inner transfiguration and ancient folklore.”
The music shares some sonic terrain with forms of dark folk music and blues familiar to people here in the U.S. While the instrumentation is predominantly acoustic, it also includes electrified guitars in widely varying tones, synth-spawned strings, very heavy bass throbs, and arresting beats. The vocals predominantly consist of singing (very good singing, btw) but it too also ranges in sound and mood (with some scary gasping snarls in the mix).
I’ve only listened to the EP once through but found it both diverse and spellbinding, capable of conjuring baking plains and nights beneath sparkling stars, hard times and happy times, regrets and resilience. Sometimes the music twangs and sounds like lonesome wails, other times it becomes mystical and wondrous. At the very end, a very dark end, it also even crashes and crushes.
I’ll add that the lyrics, which you can find at Bandcamp, are poetic, very good poetry and well worth reading even after hearing them.
https://chrisgebauermusic.bandcamp.com/album/tales-from-southern-skies
https://www.facebook.com/ChrisGebauerMusic