SHADES OF BLACK: GOUR, BERGTAGEN, VAULDERIE

(written by Islander)

January is a schizophrenic month for the release of new music. Labels and bands seem to recognize that people aren’t focusing as much as usual on new music, because they’re diverted by things happening during the “holiday season” and then by the turbulence of returning to work and school, and so the pace of new releases in the early part of January is slower than usual. But after a week or two, the dam bursts, and new stuff starts flooding out in a fury. At least that’s how I see it from where I sit.

I had SO MANY new songs and records I was interested in checking out for purposes of this column, too many for me to realistically investigate, especially since our terribly unreliable internet service has been down since mid-day on Saturday. My phone has worked reasonably well as a hot-spot for some things, like typing what you’re reading now, but it doesn’t provide a very good platform for streaming music.

The result is that I defaulted to music I had already acquired for myself before our net service collapsed. Which is not a bad way to proceed, because there’s a reason why I had acquired all this music for myself — it’s all very good! Each selection is also very different from the other two.

 

GOUR (France)

Gour is a four-person band whose location they identify as Clermont Ferrand, France. According to Metal-Archives, Gour is a new name for a band called Κενός, which released a single EP named Inner Rituals in 2018, and it seems likely that Gour’s musical approach is also different from that of the previous incarnation. Gour describe their new album-length demo Tumultes (released on January 30th) with these words:

Tumultes is rooted in the Auvergne mountains, their slowness and harshness. This demo is an exploration of altered states of transformation and consciousness, forged by isolation and human perseverance at high altitude. A defiant and contemplative sonic emanation. Recorded live at La Raymonde, in the heart of winter 2025.

Gour’s debut demo isn’t an easy one to sum up. It is persistently immersive and fascinating while being powerfully unsettling, but identifying how it achieves those effects is a challenge, especially because the music freely crosses boundary lines as it proceeds, almost experimentally moving among strands of doom, sludge, and prog as well as black metal.

Gour make use of ragged and rasping vocals – gritty, fierce, and familiar to fans of black metal – but the vocals also devolve into wretched moans, dismal spoken words, and other sounds that come closer to the tortured howls and strangled screams of wounded mountain beasts than anything human. The vocals alone create an aura of darkness and dreadfulness for the songs, an aura that nothing else about the music could dispel even if the band tried.

But almost everything else is dark and dreadful too. Gour deploy burly bass-lines that groan and clang, gut-thumping kick drums, and mostly simple snare rhythms that lean far more on back-beats than blast-beats, with occasional drum-fill flurries and crashing cymbals that provide injections of adrenaline.

They also deploy swarming tremolo’d riffage, but just as often the guitars menacingly snarl, miserably writhe, distressingly mewl, or weirdly stumble about. In line with the hallucinatory aspects of the vocals, the music itself often becomes hallucinatory. Relatedly, there’s an improvisational aspect to the way the songs maneuver, the way they shift gears, the way they slog, bounce around, get woozy, and then violently spasm. They might make you feel like you’re being drugged.

I said almost everything is dark and dreadful, but “Pinneal Regulation” sounds fiendish, even diabolically ecstatic, and the closer “L’Ascète” sounds frighteningly hellish, like some very scary ritual or the head-twisting conjuring of poisonous spells (the vividly burbling bass notes have a lot to do with this impression, along with the weird guitar contortions and all the unnerving vocal lunacy).

As mentioned earlier, the demo was recorded live, and you can tell that it was. It has an authentic “garage band” sound, not tricked-up or manipulated. When you listen, it feels like you’re sitting right there in front of them as they did this.

I know Tumultes won’t be for everyone (what is?), but I never lost interest – not even close – and I admire Gour’s whole-hearted dedication to the twisted idiosyncrasies of their expressions.

https://gourmusic.bandcamp.com/album/tumultes
https://www.instagram.com/gour.music/

 

BERGTAGEN (U.S.)

Here is Bergtagen’s introduction of themselves at Bandcamp:

Initially founded in 2006, Bergtagen was songwriter and musician Jon Rosenthal’s emotive, atmospheric dark metal outlet. Fueled by teenage angst and an obsession with artists like Agalloch, Empyrium, and Ulver, Bergtagen released an amateur demo later that year, and, with the help of a few friends along the way, Bergtagen quickly amassed a vast arsenal of songs before disbanding in 2008. Now lost to the ages, only a fraction of this old material survived in old Guitar Pro files and in Rosenthal’s own memory.

In a fit of nostalgia, Rosenthal revived Bergtagen with his bandmate in other projects (drummer and acoustic guitarist Anthony W. of Stellar Descent, Boreal, Starless Domain et al) in late 2025, recording more matured versions of the only two songs that survived this 20 year slumber, plus a partially reimagined cover of Agalloch’s “You Were But A Ghost In My Arms,” as the In Forests Eternal EP. Mixed and mastered by Spenser Morris (who has also produced material by Panopticon and more) and featuring atmospheric art by Rotting Reign, Bergtagen has truly been brought to life once more.

The EP’s title song opens with brittle and sorrowful notes and gasping roars, and then rasp-like chords pick up that dark opening harmony and carry it forward, joined by steady and staggering beats, a warm bass line, and a wailing lead-guitar melody that reaches for the rafters. The mood is downcast but also mystical, depressive but spellbinding.

The music’s gradually escalating intensity continues to build as the drums accelerate and harrowing snarls arrive, but Bergtagen also pull back to the way they began, and beautiful strummed chords create a feeling of reflection and yearning before the drums abruptly start hammering and the layered guitars frantically quiver and shiver. That latter change is exhilarating, and it unfolds into the high pealing tones of a melody that sounds both grasping and glorious, ancient and romantic.

The whole song is wintry in both its climate and its emotional qualities, a push and pull of distress and hope, of harshness and clarity, and or that’s how I hear it. I found it captivating.

I’ve been able to hear the next two songs as well. “Oak Horizon” also finds an intersection of moods and modalities, again making use of folk-like ringing guitars and more ravaging riffage. But at times this song has a more panoramic and mythic quality than the opener, even though it’s still home to melodically stricken moods and harrowing vocal torment. The drumming is continuously more active and animating, and the song also features darting piano melodies in the midst of grand and grievous chords and electrifying drum progressions.

The EP closes with Bergtagen’s cover of Agalloch’s “You Were But A Ghost In My Arms” from The Mantle, and it’s a wonderful take on a wonderful original. A very good choice, because the musical “personality” of Bergtagen as revealed on the first two songs lends itself very well to the song.

It’s a big eye opener in every way, one of which is that it includes soaring singing (along with dour spoken words and ugly snarls) that’s very good but not revealed in the original songs, and a sign that the band has lots of room to maneuver in whatever they choose to do next. They really did the original justice; in fact, I think it’s fair to call this cover stunning.

In Forests Eternal will be digitally released by Nebulae Artifacta on February 6th, with a tape edition to follow Spring 2026 by Nebulae Artifacta and Realm and Ritual.

https://nebulaeartifacta.bandcamp.com/album/na-2601-in-forests-eternal
https://ampwall.com/a/bergtagen/album/in-forests-eternal

 

VAULDERIE (U.S.)

Vaulderie hail from the wilds of Tacoma, Washington, across the water and just down the highway from where I live. These blood-suckers put out a debut EP in 2022 (Fiends of the Night) and a split with Zabbeth (from Malta) in 2024, and this past week Witches Brew released their debut album Sanguinoctum, a 46-minute beast of vampiric black thrash.

With the album including 11 tracks and those roughly 46 minutes, there’s a lot to take in, and 10 of those are full songs after a relatively short Intro track, which is a slow and haunting classical piano instrumental that gets much scarier as it proceeds.

The main line of what Vaulderie deliver is high-octane thrash that’s vicious and indeed blood-lusting in its feral intensity, usually backed by ferociously pumping or rampantly galloping drums and fronted by nasty, fang-gnashing snarls and rabid howls, with a few pungent grunts and maniacal cackles in the mix.

The riffing is normally feverish, the kind of frantically skittering and wildly pulsating fretwork that gets adrenaline flowing, but every riff is damned catchy, and Vaulderie’s hot cauldron of riffs cooks up changing moods of evil menace, wild ecstasy, and brazen imperiousness. Apart from those shifts in mood (all of them diabolical), they keep things interesting in other ways too.

Some songs include spitfire soloing that’s right on the sharp edge of insanity and dual-guitar freakouts, or prominent bass appearances, which are lead-weighted for sure but nimble as well. Some songs include slower and more dismal segments (the title song being a prime example), while others send streamers of melody grandly flowing overhead. The drumming brings in lots of changes too, even when the band is going full-throttle.

Another reason the album maintains its interest despite its length is that most of the songs are relatively compact. They get in, whip up an electrifying storm, and get out – just in time to crank up the voltage again. The biggest exception is “Flight of the Gargoyles”, which hits the 6 ½ minute mark. Vaulderie use that extra time to pack in even more than the usual number of fleet-fingered riffs (including some highly headbangable ones), and a greater number of athletic percussive outbursts and changing moods. It also includes some truly wild screams and an exotic and exhilarating guitar solo – but even with that extra time, the band don’t take their foot off the gas.

They really don’t take their foot off the gas much at all. When they do, as in the thoroughly devilish “Mort Cage,” or at the outset of the frightening “Voivodes of Vengeance” or the occult and epic closer “Among the Aeries”, for example, it doesn’t last long. This is mainly a balls-to-the-wall black thrashing bacchanal, loaded with well-written songs and technically very impressive execution.

https://vaulderie.bandcamp.com/album/sanguinoctum
https://open.spotify.com/artist/32T0qL8cJCIYrauCf0iBRq
https://www.facebook.com/Vaulderie-107320785201129