(written by Islander)
Now we begin the final week of this month-long song rollout. I know most of what this week’s last five segments will include, but not everything. I still have some agonizing decisions to make before calling a halt.
If you set your clocks by our posts (and of course you do), you’ll know that we got a late start today, and that this newest installment of our Most Infectious Song list is especially tardy in appearing. And so I’ll cut this intro short and plunge straightaway into these next three songs.
UMBRÍO
I want to begin with a song by the Chilean band Umbrío that flooded my head with visions of both fire and ice when I first heard it last November. It also felt like I’d just stepped on a live power line still surging with tremendous voltage.
“Envueltos en signos errantes” is the song’s name, which I guess translates into English as “Enveloped in wandering signs”. It is indeed an entirely enveloping song, discharging waves of frantically trilling riffage that sounds jubilantly cruel, backed by furiously battering beats and fronted by scorching howls. Even more jubilant (and more berserk), a shrill lead guitar flickers like fire in the midst of the tidal maelstroms.
The drumming shifts gears a lot, and the riffing, though still fast, also begins to sound dismal, or at least more cruel, and even the wild howls cry out in a way that’s haunting. But the song creates an even bigger change, pausing and then slowing, making space for the lead guitar to ring out a surreal, seductive, and sinister melody, perhaps with melodic roots in the band’s homeland — followed of course by another thunderous and blazing combination of sleet-storm and firestorm, but this time with gloomy yet possessed singing in the mix.
When I first wrote about the song, in a post which then unexpectedly expanded into a review of the entire album that includes it (Quintaesencia Nocturna), I opined that it’s the kind of track that once heard isn’t easily forgotten. I still haven’t forgotten it.
https://vampiricmilitantlegions.bandcamp.com/album/umbr-o-quintaesencia-nocturna
https://www.facebook.com/p/Umbr%C3%ADo-100063997892243/
DEATH OBVIOUS
The next song, like a few others I’ve previously included on this list, is one we premiered here, and especially because I’m so late in getting this Part 17 posted, I’ll crib from what I previously wrote about the song:
Think of some great shaggy beast lumbering toward a bleak destination, grimly yowling and miserably wailing as it goes. That will give you some idea of how the song begins. But with a tormented howl, the riffing begins to writhe and pulsate; the drumming flares into the pumping of pistons; agonized notes ring out and grimly undulate; scalding howls and unhinged screams vent the words with teeth apparently bared.
The layers of quivering, wailing, oozing, and screeching instrumentation manifest in changing patterns, augmented by eerie keys, with the band’s low-end thrust-or-crawl and the variably thumping beats keeping things on course (sort of). The experience is surreal and scary, but not the kind of thing you can turn away from, because it’s such an immaculately crafted manifestation of misery and madness.
Obviously, the song stayed with me, but so did this Finnish band’s whole self-titled album released last year (and then picked up by Transcending Obscurity Records). If you haven’t listened to all of it yet, you really should.
https://deathobvious-label.bandcamp.com/album/self-titled
https://facebook.com/DeathObvious
INFERNAL THORNS
Just like the song above and a few more on the list, here’s yet another one I premiered at NCS. And so once again I’m going to borrow heavily from what I’ve already written about it.
Back then, I explained that in listening to the song I had immediately been “caught up in the sheer flood of adrenaline in the bloodstream, marveling at the hellishness of the heat and the bolting changes, muscles twitching from all the diabolical musical barbs,” not bothering to jot down even one word about what I was experiencing.
Of course, eventually I did jot down some words, and eventually formed them into sentences. I wanted to call out one of the most strikingly hysterical guitar solos I’ve heard this year — one that’s immediately followed by eerily yowling notes that conjure visions of bodies dissolving.
I wanted to call out the main guitar tones, which are really mind-raking even for a listener who’s hardened to the sonic abrasion of steel rasps working at ruinous speed. I wanted to somehow capture the galvanic turbocharge of the hell-spawned riffing, which is simultaneously violent and jubilant, veering between viciously jolting assaults and episodes of maniacally writhing dual-guitar madness.
I wanted to call out the exhilarating effect of thunderous bass-lines, skull-splitting drumwork, hard-slugging grooves, and a tandem of gang howls and monstrous roars, but also to highlight the blood-congealing effect of brief interstices that cause the music to drag and groan.
And so now I’ve called out all that a second time. The first time I also guaranteed that this song, or one of the others on the album (Christus Venari), would be on this list. Promise kept.
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/christus-venari
https://www.facebook.com/infernalthorns