(written by Islander)
I’m experiencing technical difficulties. For the second time since February 1st, our DSL service shut down. The last time we waited two weeks for the DSL company to send out a repair technician. He got it going again. He explained that a pair of wires in the main line to which our house was connected had shorted out. He connected us to a different pair, but said there were a bunch of other pairs in the line that were also shorted out.
He said he would report the need for maintenance, but I got the impression this need for maintenance is widespread around the island where we live and that we shouldn’t get our hopes up. I guess there’s not enough money to be made here for the DSL company to spend money. And so, 16 days after the last repair, the DSL service stopped working again. It’s been out since last weekend. A repair technician is supposed to visit us again on Monday. Just a one-week wait this time instead of two weeks.
No DSL means our TV is useless for streaming. It also means no internet connectivity except what I can get from my phone. I’ve been using that as a hotspot for my desktop computer. The cell service is good enough that I can get online and do most of what I can do when the DSL is working. But there’s one drawback: a lot of the time the cell service isn’t good enough to stream music and videos, in part because my wife piggy-backs on my phone too since she uses a different cell service that’s borderline useless where we live. Kind of a big drawback for a music blog like ours.
And so, over the last week I’ve been saving links to lots of new songs and videos that semed like possible candidates for my weekend roundups, but haven’t been able to watch or listen to most of them. I thought about just abandoning this weekend’s posts, but decided instead to write about some music I succeeded in downloading, and one of those songs came with a diabolical and predictably blasphemous lyric video I actually did manage to watch. I wish I could have listened to the other two dozen things for which I’d saved links, but you might be able to venture a guess about why I chose these five.
By the way, in case you’re wondering why the fuck we put up with an internet service provider that’s so unreliable and doesn’t seem to give two fucks about its customers in this area, it’s because on our road they don’t have any competition other than our cell service provider. That company advertises a plan for using its cell signals to power TV streaming and provide internet access for other devices. I guess I’ll look into it, though I have my doubts.
Anyway, I think these are what you call First World Problems. We’re not running for bomb shelters, scavaging for food, trying to find clean water, or burying our children. And here in our sector of the “First World”, where our government is spending $1 billion per day assaulting Iran but won’t provide basic subsistence or health care to all its people, we’re not broke, sick, or homeless. Instead, I’m sitting in a warm house with a good cup of coffee at hand writing about music. And hoping I remember to set the clocks ahead by one hour before bedtime. Oh yes, I’m well aware, things could be much fucking worse.
GOMMA (ڨمَّةْ) (Tunisia)
I’m not a musician or a student of music theory, and I have very little learning about the music of North Africa and the Middle East, and so when I read that the Tunisian one-person project Gomma (an Arabic word that apparently means “manhole”) “eschew[s] the common western scales typical in Black Metal in favour of Arabic scale,” and carries melodies “by maqam modes”, I can’t explain what that means. But I can certainly hear the differences between Gomma’s black metal and Western metal, even if I can’t articulate the technicalities of what produces them or easily identify the instruments that Gomma uses.
I can also understand the Arabic name of Gomma’s album, because its label includes an English translation. The translated title is Wailing and Madness, and you reliably can take some of your cues from that.
The songs include some familiar elements – vocals that expel ugly snarls choked with grit; drums that furiously hurtle and occasionally burst into rocking beats; tremolo’d riffing that kicks off savage sonic storms. But the familiarities are dwarfed by things exotic – the rattle, snap, and booming thump of unusual percussive instruments, and clean guitars and other folk instruments from Gomma’s region that ring out mysterious and seductive Arabian melodies.
Even the scathing riffing carries Arabian melodies that slowly writhe and spiral, like some djinn carried aloft on the leading edge of a sandstorm. Those melodies channel a range of moods — moods of sinister menace and red-eyed rage, but also feelings of melancholy, mournfulness, and whirling joy. Sometimes the music soars in manifestations of ancient grandeur or vibrantly shivers in shrill ecstasies. At other times, the notes gently ring, brittle but also apparitional. Occasionally, spoken words and gritty chants emerge, and at one point glitchy electronics spasm before a song takes off.
The multitude of stringed instruments, including some that involve bowing as well as plucking and picking, and even the electric guitars, carry a wide variety of tones, as do all the percussive instruments, and Gomma layers them together beautifully to create elaborate musical tapestries. The music also reflects a persistent push and pull of energy and intensity, in addition to those shifting moods mentioned earlier, which are among the many qualities about the songs that will keep listeners rooted in place as they move.
I certainly had no thought of leaving before this 32-minute album finished. It’s entirely captivating.
Wailing and Madness is Gomma’s second album. It was released independently in November 2025 but was re-released on March 6th by Hypnotic Dirge Records in collaboration with Black Metal Artists.
https://hypnoticdirgerecords.bandcamp.com/album/wailing-and-madness
https://gomma.bandcamp.com/
GORMA (Sweden)
I couldn’t resist the temptation to check out this next song after reading that Gorma (whose name is reputedly an old Swedish dialect word meaning “to scream”) is a collaboration between two members of the defunct post-hardcore band Breach — drummer/producer Per Nordmark and vocalist Tomas Liljedahl.
By sheer chance, their first single “They Wait” unexpectedly turned out to have a few things in common with the music of Gomma. To repeat, I have only a glancing familiarity with the traditional music of North Africa and the Middle East, but as I hear it the melodies in this song borrow from those traditions, and there’s even something about the quick percussive patters in the song’s opening that seem connected.
That opening also includes an intriguing female voice and bright, intriguing notes. When the song ramps up, the drums boom and crash, other instruments jolt and squeal, and that exotic melody heavily comes through, and through repetition digs in. The vocals scream and shred, creating a startling (and furiously unhinged) contrast with the seductive charisma of the music around them. I wasn’t ready for the song to end. More please!
(“They Wait” was released exclusively on Bandcamp on March 6th, and it will be followed by a wider DSP release via Trust No One Recordings on March 27th. I’ve read that, “Drawing direct inspiration from the surrealist dream logic of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, the production seeks to bridge the gap between beauty and terror.”)
https://gorma.bandcamp.com/track/they-wait
GHOROT (U.S.)
Ghorot are a “blackened doom-metal” trio from Boise, Idaho, about 500 miles southeast of where I’m writing this. The members are Carson Russell (Ealdor Bealu), Brandon Walker (ex-Ghost Tours), and Chad Remains (ex-Uzala). On April 10th their third album Obsidian will be released by the Dutch label Lay Bare Recordings and the U.S. label King of the Monsters, and the opening song “Void Drinker” is now available for streaming.
I made sure to listen to this one because I’ve been powerfully impressed by the band’s first two albums, Loss of Light (2021) and Wound (2023). “Void Drinker” is damned impressive too.
With just a quick shriek of feedback to prepare you, it blows open in a tempest of riotously hammering drums, maniacally feverish bass, dense riffing that traumatically sears but flows like tides, and off-the-chain howls and screams. Without pulling back too much on its intensity, the song shifts into a head-moving throb backed by rocking beats, but turns into a maelstrom again.
The music also grandly blares and heavily heaves. Something manically sparkles on the side. A psychedelic guitar solo strikingly writhes and wails. Instrumental convulsions ensue, and the vocals convulse too, with no remnants of sanity left, but the band continue coming back to their tremendously muscle-moving grooves and urgently surging heaviness, with yet another trippy solo lying in wait, again backed by electrifying drum-fills.
This song is a viscerally compulsive and head-spinning explosion, and a great indicator that Obsidian will be well worth everyone’s time. I’m sure I will have more to say about it after I’m able to sink into the next five songs, unless someone else around here beats me to it.
https://ghorot.bandcamp.com/album/obsidian
https://www.facebook.com/ghorot/
GOATPSALM (Russia)
“Dark ethnic ritual doom” is the description of Goatpsalm’s current music that I read in a press release, though I gather that the band’s far older material was far different. The current music is captured in an album named Beneath that will be released by Aesthetic Death on April 10th, and the first single, “Heart Of Damballah Wedo“, is my next selection today.
In this song, ragged and ruined notes slowly worm and reverberate around big heart-like beats, and the words come forth from a deep, beastly voice whose frequencies have a serrated edge. The music dismally moans, brutishly clangs, and brightly quivers, creating an utterly surreal sonic vision, while the gut-punching kick-drum, the neck-biting snare, and the subterranean bass-lines create intriguing and menacing frolics. Eventually, in its upper reaches, the music wondrously shimmers and flows. A fascinating song that unfolds like a sinister spell….
P.S. Some google searching reveals that Damballah Wedo refers to a primordial spirit (Damballah), the most important of all loa “in West African Vodun, Haitian Voodoo and other African diaspora religious traditions such as Obeah,” and that “Damballa originated in the city of Wedo (Whydah or Ouidah) in modern-day Benin.”
https://aestheticdeath.bandcamp.com/album/beneath
https://goatpsalm.bandcamp.com/album/beneath
GLUTTONY (Sweden)
“The new video and title track for GLUTTONY’s new album, ‘EULOGY TO BLASPHEMY‘, delivers disgusting Swedish old-school DEATH METAL for people who love the stench of corpses.” So reported Gluttony’s label FDA Records, and that was all it took to lure me to the video — well, that, and the fact that Gluttony’s name begins with a G.
As forecast by that quote, “Eulogy to Blasphemy” delivers massive chainsawing riffage, thunderous low frequencies, manically galloping beats, and voracious vocals that come for the throat with fangs bared. The song also includes deliriously squirming and miserably writhing lead guitars, momentous percussive detonations, swaths of dense riffage that are both utterly cruel and abysmal, and a shrieking guitar solo that might be an ecstasy or might be an agony.
The song is explosive and raging, horror-steeped and hateful, corrosive but also catchy — and it will be high-octane fuel for human engines who find it.
FDA will release Eulogy to Blasphemy on Friday the 13th of March, and they recommend it for fans of Grave, Facebreaker, and LIK. It’s the band’s fourth album overall.
https://fda-records.com/de/
https://gluttony.se/
https://www.facebook.com/gluttonyswe