(written by Islander)
As on most Saturdays, today I’ll be looking back at the recent past, recommending some selections of underground metal that caught my ears and eyes during the last week or two, but first I want to look ahead — specifically, to something I’ll be asking you to do on Monday.
On Monday I’ll post the annual NCS appeal to our visitors to share their lists of the year’s best metal. Every year this post proves to be a highlight because so many people fill up the Comments with their favorite releases, which makes those Comments a great gathering place for things other people might have otherwise missed. We keep that post linked in the upper right corner of every page on our site for the 12 months that follow (just look there now to see the 2024 lists).
Bear in mind that you don’t have to have your lists completed and ready to go on Monday. Hell, you could add a 2024 list even today. But it’s time to at least begin thinking about it. And now, on to this week’s roundup of new songs and videos….
PONTE DEL DIAVOLO (Italy)
I’l begin with a devilish coincidence. Yesterday I read an article about a “blockbuster exhibition” at the Tate Britain museum in London that focuses on the works of two famous British painters, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. At the top of the article were two paintings from the exhibition, one by each of them. The name of Turner’s painting is “The Passage of Mount St. Gothard From the Centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge)” — and here it is:
Also yesterday I watched a fantastic new video for a fantastic new song by the Italian band Ponte Del Diavolo — whose name means “Devil’s Bridge” in Italian. The way had been pointed: I had to begin today’s collection with Ponte Del Diavolo’s song and video.
The song is from a new Ponte Del Diavolo album named De Venom Natura. Season of Mist describes the song, “Spirit, Blood, Poison, Ferment!“, as one that “distills the venomous essence of De Venom Natura into a feverish hymn of possession and transformation.”
The video focuses upon an ancient king wounded in battle who wanders alone and in pain into a forest, where a transformation does indeed occur — but I won’t spoil what happens. However, I will note that the king is portrayed by Davide Straccione from Shores of Null, whose Latitudes of Sorrow split with Convocation was just released a week ago by Everlasting Spew.
The song itself is deliciously diabolical — no surprise there, given this band’s previously proven predilections. The band’s two bassists generate a heavy and vicious churn, while a guitar feverishly writhes and the drums hack like axes. Erba del Diavolo’s dramatically beautiful but spooky singing creates a key contrast as it soars and quavers above the music’s charging pulse.
And then the dulcet tones of a trombone (performed by the band’s guest, Francesco Bucci from the terrific Ottone Pesante) unexpectedly surface and seize attention. Eventually, the churning, undulating, and battering energy of the song diminishes — but only as a prelude to the drums blasting, the riffage convulsing, and the vocals beginning to sound possessed. At the end, as the bass-lines growl and gnash, the trombone sounds mysterious and haunted.
De Venom Natura will be released by Season of Mist on February 13th.
https://orcd.co/pontedeldiavolovenomnatura
https://pontedeldiavolo666.bandcamp.com/album/de-venom-natura
https://www.facebook.com/pontedeldiavolo
https://www.instagram.com/pontedeldiavoloband
NEL BUIO (Italy)
Coincidences continued to mount up when I listened to these next songs right after becoming absorbed by Ponte Del Diavolo’s new extravaganza. Not only is Nel Buio also from Italy, but the first of the three songs now streaming from their debut album Nel Buio (II) seemed very much in line with some aspects of “Spirit, Blood, Poison, Ferment!“.
That first song, “sguardo innocente,” is much faster than Ponte Del Diavolo’s, especially when it erupts in madness near the end, and there’s no singing here, but it’s also diabolical and it includes instrumental ingredients that are just as surprising as the trombone.
Those ingredients grab attention immediately, something like a feverishly twisted version of a harpsichord or calliope. Those demented and darting tones almost get drowned out by an ensuing maelstrom of maniacal drumming, blaring and heaving riffage, monstrous growls, and rabid howls. But the music also seems to miserably wail in shrill tones, and those demented darting keys reappear, along with cries that sound like a voice ripping itself apart in blood.
The song is an almost overpowering assault from beginning to end, but seems even more ruinously calamitous near the end. The vocals are really terrifying; the drums go wild; everything else, including those mad sprites in the music’s upper reaches, sounds berserk.
If you let the player below continue running, you’ll also hear “Oramai…” and “il buio l’avvolge,“. The punctuation marks in the song titles are there because those titles together form a poem that, in verse, tells the album concept — translated as follows:
Once…
shining with life,
an innocent gaze,
a pure heart.
Now…
darkness surrounds her,
no tears remain,
yet she forgives.
The track “Oramai…” (“Now…”) was entirely composed and performed by Ville Pallonen, a Finnish musician known for his work with Vargrav, Azaghal, Druadan Forest, Destro, Dim Lights, and many more. It sounds a bit like something Vangelis could have made, with sparkling keyboard reverberations that vividly ring inside our heads. It’s hypnotic and futuristic and therefore quite different from “sguardo innocente,“, yet it doesn’t seem out of place.
The third song now available, “il buio l’avvolge,“, immediately hurls listeners back into an apocalyptic storm of sound, a dense and caustic sonic miasma that also screams and blasts. As the song evolves, with drums slowing and abyssal near-spoken gutturals arriving, the music towers with symphonic power, and rapidly darting keys and feverish electronic pulses arrive in this one too.
And once more, those truly shattering cries and screams explode in expressions of shattering torment and pain, propelling the music toward a zenith of world-ending enormity — but the song ends in a way that seems to connect to the sensations of “Oramai…”.
I think this is an album that’s going to be best heard straight through, and I’m very eager to do that.
Nel Buio (II) will be released by Avantgarde Music on December 5th.
https://avantgardemusic.bandcamp.com/album/nel-buio-ii
https://www.facebook.com/p/NEL-BUIO-61552755640782/
BIND TORTURE KILL (France)
I dragged myself away from Italy and next checked out the following video for a song called “Lapidée” off an album released last month by the French crust/hardcore band Bind Torture Kill.
The video shows the BTK trio throwing themselves into the performance of the song. It surges forward with battering drum-gallops, hard-slugging bass-lines, gnarly riffing that viciously churns and feverishly blurts, and absolutely furious vocals. It’s electrifying and destructive, but the song also includes a breakdown in which the music seems to groan and gasp in agony — but will still punch you black and blue.
BTK’s new album is named Sauvagerie. It’s out now on a bunch of different formats from a bunch of different labels, all of them linked on the Bandcamp page shown below.
https://btkmetal.bandcamp.com/album/sauvagerie
https://www.facebook.com/BTK.bind.torture.kill.metal/
NÍLIM (Ireland)
Forgive me for now shoving you off-balance (again), but I’m about to make a sharp turn away from the hardcore fury of Bind Torture Kill and into a brutish spine-fracturing stompfest of stupefying magnitude, the kind of thing that will make you feel a few inches shorter in stature than you are now.
Seriously, “The Relic” is ugly and squalling in tone, primitive in construction, and traumatic in effect, creating a weapon of rhythmic pulverization accented by drums going off like pistol fire. When the vocals arrive they go sky-high, too splintered and shattered and distraught to qualify as actual singing.
As this black-hearted song evolves (still trying to pound the life out of listeners), the riffing periodically crawls like some great dying beast trailing its agonies like filthy ichor, miserably moaning and wailing but still caked in grit, and shrill, squealing soloing sounds like seizures of pain-induced madness. Through it all, the vocals are never less than bloody raw and spine-tingling.
Nílim is the solo work of Limerick-based JQ. The song is from an EP named Uncoiling that will be released on December 12th.
https://nilim.bandcamp.com/album/uncoiling
https://nilim.neocities.org/
https://www.instagram.com/nilim.noise
EQUILIBRIUM (Germany)
Apologies once more for another shift in the progression of today’s music that will attack your… equilibrium.
Before watching this next video I hadn’t listened to anything from Equilibrium’s new album Equinox, which was just released yesterday by Nuclear Blast, and so I can’t say to what extent the song “Nexus” is representative of the rest of the album. It’s an extravagant and often head-spinning mashup of styles, and may not appeal to purists of any of them.
At first I thought it sounded a bit like something Heilung or Nytt Land would do, but that impression quickly changed. It does include aspects of primitive Nordic folk music and throat-singing but it also includes (and this isn’t an exhaustive list):
enormous industrial-music grooves; pulsating electro-throbs; bestial snarls; chant-like feminine vocals; fanatical screams; choral voices that blend harsh and clean; aurora-like synth expanses; vividly darting and dancing keyboards with a New Wave influence (as I hear it); bass-lines that move like a tunnel-boring machine; and dramatic ebbs and flows of intensity.
And so the song seems to bridge millennia, sounding both ancient and futuristic. It’s a big muscle-mover too.
But I’m putting this here as much for the video as for the stirring music. It’s beautifully made and has a mythic aura. I thought I could guess where it was going, but instead its narrative is unexpected and even perplexing, and that’s because the scenes are metaphors for a person’s inner struggle between opposing forces (Animus and Anima) and an attempt to unite them (a theme reflected in the song’s lyrics).
https://equilibrium.bfan.link/equinox.yde
https://www.facebook.com/equilibrium/
MARISSA NADLER (U.S.)
I guess you’ll know by now that my final choice for today’s roundup won’t let you find your balance, but will instead cause your head to wobble in another direction from the preceding Equilibrium spectacle.
What I’ve chosen is a video for Marissa Nadler’s cover of the Nine Inch Nails song “The Great Below“. Her rendition appears on Magnetic Eye Records’ Best of Nine Inch Nails Redux, which was released yesterday. The video matches the song perfectly, and that’s because Ms. Nadler made the video too.
The original version of the song is itself surreal and haunting, but mesmerizing, very much like slowly drifting downward into the sea, surrounded by both perils and strange marvels. It does very gradually become more intense, both instrumentally and vocally, but still strange.
Marissa Nadler’s version captures all that, and also holds on to the song’s small and subtle hooks, while also adding a few instrumental variations. But of course her remarkable, range-spanning voice is the biggest difference, creating a chilling spell, making the song even more spine-tingling and haunting, even more suspenseful and sad.
Best of Nine Inch Nails Redux includes 12 more NIN cover songs by a variety of talented artists and groups. Below I’ve included the full stream of that album. Simultaneously, Magnetic Eye also released The Downward Spiral Redux, which contains 14 cover renditions of the original album tracks in sequence.
https://spkr.store/collections/redux-classic-album-re-imagined
https://www.facebook.com/MarissaNadlerMusic/