(written by Islander)
Today is the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere. I suppose everyone knows its astronomical significance — that it is a day of transition between the year’s shortest and darkest day into a period of increasing daylight. That is the source of its symbolic and spiritual significance, an annual representation of rebirth that human beings in far-flung cultures have commemorated and celebrated since prehistory.
But obviously, the overnight change doesn’t happen dramatically. Where I live in the Seattle area, on this shortest day of the year the sun will rise at 7:55 a.m. and set at 4:20 p.m., bringing eight hours, 25 minutes, and 25 seconds of daylight — though the term “daylight” is misleading because the skies will be deep gray and sodden. Daylight hours will begin to grow longer, but at first very slowly, only a matter of seconds per day. By the spring equinox in March the change will peak at around three and a half minutes per day.
Apart from how gradually the change occurs, the days will actually seem darker because we will experience less and less twilight as we move through January and February, twilight being the time of day when the sun is just below the horizon, before sunrise and after sunset. Here at this northern latitude, we will actually lose about 10 minutes total of twilight (five minutes on each end) between New Year’s and the vernal equinox. On top of that, January is historically the coldest and cloudiest month of the year.
So, although some people celebrate the Winter Solstice with “festivals of light”, that’s the symbolic thing at work. As a matter of astronomical and meteorological fact, it will remain very fucking dark, cold, and wet where many of us live for months to come. In keeping with that reality, today’s musical selections of black metal aren’t festivals of light, even though glimmers of light do shine within some of them.
If you’re like me, and prefer the winter months to summer, you can bookmark this page and come back here on the Summer Solstice in June (when we will have 16 hours of daylight in this area!) to experience welcome darkness when the earth and sun aren’t cooperating to provide it. And on that note, Happy Summer Solstice to those you in the South!
LUNAR AMULET (U.S.)
To begin today, I recommend the self-titled debut release of Lunar Amulet, whose duration is in that twilight state between an EP and an album (just over 29 minutes). It should attract attention because it’s the solo work of Aaron Charles from Portland, Maine, one of the vocalists and guitarists in Falls of Rauros and a live member of Panopticon. On this debut release he was accompanied by session drummer “Orion III” of the Hidden Dawn collective.
Aaron summarizes Lunar Amulet as “Raw & Mystical Black Metal”, and that’s a good shorthand description. At full throttle the riffing is abrasively gritty, and the vocals scalding and splintering in their soul-bearing intensity. But the music is also threaded with supernal melodies — guitar-leads, expansive synths, and ethereally ringing keys that create intersections of nightside wonder and haunting melancholy.
The record also includes drum-less interlude tracks, “Myth I” and “Myth II”, that underscore the mystical elements in different ways. The former includes arpeggios suggestive of woodwinds or flutes; the latter is a scratchy, soulful, and deeply sorrowful guitar instrumental, lightly shrouded in ethereal shimmers.
Those mystical ingredients create startling contrasts not only with the rough and raw timbre of the riffage but also with the visceral heavyweight power of the bass and drums. You can feel those in your bones, and their dynamism is a big factor in the songs’ appeal — they thunder and they blast, but also get into bounding and scampering punk beats, especially at the outset of “Yoke of Oblivion” — a song that breathtakingly expands into phases of searing, sweeping, and wrenching brilliance — and they mount a beleaguered march within “Lament For A Starving Moon”.
The record is an ever-changing experience, no two songs quite alike. “Lament…”, for example, is often tremendously bleak, to the point of desperation. It seems to pour out its heart in melodies of yearning and loss, but like “Yoke of Oblivion” it also climbs and expands in breathtaking fashion, and the tormented vocals are so explosively intense as to be frightening.
The drum-less closing “Coda”, on the other hand, is mesmerizing, and although grieving and haunted in its mood it also sparkles. It made me think of a modest old organ in a small, modest church set back in the woods, solemnly and soulfully setting the stage for a funeral service.
In a word, Lunar Amulet is fantastic, and won’t be soon forgotten by people who repeatedly submerge themselves within it.
https://lunar-amulet.bandcamp.com/album/lunar-amulet
https://thehiddendawn.bandcamp.com/album/lunar-amulet
https://www.facebook.com/fallsofraurosOfficial
MISERERE LUMINIS (Canada)
Last week Debemur Morti Productions announced that in March it will release a new album by the Québec black metal band Miserere Luminis. This one, titled Sidera, is described as a follow-up to the band’s last album Ordalie (2023) (reviewed here by Mr. Synn). As you can see, it’s adorned by the stunning cover art of Adam Burke.
DMP also released a first advance track from Sidera named “De cris & de cendres“. At nearly 12 minutes in length it provides a rich tapestry of changing sensations. They range from mesmerizing cinematic soundtracks to phases of racing and roiling turmoil, from grim marches shredded with dissonant expressions of pain to glittering arpeggios of near-medieval but mutated elegance, from elevations of wondrous grandeur and celestial splendor to turbulent and tortured contortions of near-chaos.
The song’s penultimate phase features gasping exhalations and a beautiful classical piano melody steeped in sorrow, ultimately joined by a closing sonic expanse that magnifies the scale of the grief.
Throughout this meticulously crafted and deeply moving song, the raging vocals are… wild. And the bass- and drum-work constantly provide nuanced accents and frequent counterpoints to what else is happening. Really a stunning song in all respects.
https://miserereluminis.bandcamp.com/album/sidera
https://www.instagram.com/miserere.luminis.official/
https://www.facebook.com/luminis/
FYRNASK (Germany)
In March Ván Records will release a fifth studio album titled Íosir by the formidable German black metal band Fyrnask. The next song, “Loginn Ómyndaði“, is the first one disclosed from the new record along with a lyric video.
The first words that come to mind in reflecting on this song are “dire” and “daunting”. Until near the end, the vocals imperiously roar and bay at the moon as if possessed by some old god consumed with fury. The music looms like an obsidian edifice of death (gleaming yet pitch black) but also maniacally and diabolically writhes and hurtles.
It swaths the senses with brilliant but haunting sonic sheens and heaving orchestration that sounds haughty… and hopeless… but demented arpeggios also insidiously infiltrate the music. It manages to be oppressively ominous, fearsome, and frightening, but also exhilarating.
The cover artwork is the creation of Khaos Diktator Design. Pre-order opportunities are yet to come.
https://fyrnask.bandcamp.com/music
https://vanrecords.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Fyrnask
BLACK EDIFICE (Norway)
Black Edifice is the frightening solo endeavor of Anders Westbye, whose appropriate moniker here is The Archfiend. He is also a member of Nachash and Hideous Death. Last week Black Edifice released a 7″ EP, From the Ancient of Night, under the banner of Ancient Night Productions, and that’s my next recommendation today.
To be clear, I recommend it only if you enjoy being chilled to the bone. The music’s chilling nature derives from multiple sources. In “Rite of the Serpent God” they include a combination of tones that in part are abusively raw and ruinous and in part ring like bells across the Styx, but also sound ruthlessly imperious; drums that sound like martial tattoos but also ecstatically tumble and solemnly march; and truly bestial vocals that hideously snarl and viciously gnash with fangs bared.
That song does seem to manifest like fanfares for a hellish god for whom cruelty and domination are the coins of the realm and mercy is an un-heard word. The following track, “Entranced by Death Sorcery”, brings more chills, courtesy of big booming beats, big throbbing bass pulses, poisonous but haughty riffing and organ-toned keys, piercing chime-like shivers, and another dose of those malignant, throat-cutting vocals. The music has a strong occult aroma, which is to say it sounds like a coronation in Hades — but also like the bloody revels of demons run amok.
The Outro track, “Coffin Worms”, lets a grand organ take the lead, tracing a solemn and sinister melody, a hooded and haunting funereal thing (and something else hooded and haunting seems to be gasping in the background).
https://nachashband.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-ancient-of-night
https://www.facebook.com/nachashnorway
KASM (Canada)
This was a last-minute pick I made for today’s black metal roundup, an album named Gravitational Echoes that was just released today by the Northern Shadow label. I’ve had the music for a few weeks but had forgotten today would be the release date until Rennie from starkweather reminded me with a link to an album stream at YouTube.
Wanting to strike while this iron is hot, I just want to leave you a few scattered thoughts today, because I fear I’ll never get a complete review done if I wait (year-end stuff around here is crazy, as usual). One thought is that the album’s concept is unusual. As the band explain:
Conceptually, the album draws from Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, using its core idea of describing vast cosmic events through familiar human emotions. The lyrics reinterpret this lens through the existential dread of black metal, turning Calvino’s sense of wonder into a meditation on cosmic insignificance and the slow collapse of all things. The record evokes distant memories of universal origins as a way to explore the darkness and emptiness that linger in eternal existence, presenting the creation of the universe not as a miracle, but as a brief and violent fluctuation in an infinite void.
A second observation for you is that the album consists of three long songs, the shortest being about 8 1/2 minutes and the longest about 15.
As you might expect, given the concept, in each of these songs Kasm scale their music to extravagant heights, spreading sensations of cosmic expanse and celestial wonder in the sonic stratospheres. But they also drench the listener in dense swarms of harrowing riffage, channeling a variety of distressing moods, backed by furious percussive propulsion and fronted by an array of furious howls, tormented screams, and tortured wails.
Even in the stratospheric elevations, the music can sound distressing, like searing cosmic flares of anguish or flowing tides of grief. When the full-throttle drumming pulls back, orchestral swaths sometimes generate panoramic visions, less cosmic and more earthbound (and melancholy), or Kasm make a space for ethereally pinging keys or vividly swirling strings that fashion wonder of a different and brighter kind.
The music is usually elaborately layered, especially at peak intensity, with the layers carefully assigned across the channels, and it’s well-balanced so as not to obscure the contributions of each instrumental and vocal ingredient. And so while the music is often wholly immersive, and even engulfing as it blazes, all of its many filigrees stand out.
To return to the album’s concept as explained above, the music does create a persisting intersection between visions of astral vastness and dark but recognizably human moods, moods of abject bleakness and poignant sorrow, of frustration and rage. The music is often spellbinding and haunting, but it’s also often traumatic. And because its recurring peaks and troughs are well-designed and so well-executed in all their changing facets, it’s easy to lose track of how many minutes are passing.
https://kasmblackmetal.bandcamp.com/album/gravitational-echoes-2
https://northernshadow.ca/products/kasm-gravitational-echoes-12-lp-preorder
https://www.facebook.com/northernshadowwebstore