(written by Islander)
I had planned to post most of this SHADES OF BLACK column last Sunday. I obviously failed to get it finished in time for posting then, the result of being out very late on Saturday night and having to leave home very soon after waking up the next morning. I thought about finishing and posting it during a weekday last week, but never had enough time, so here it is at last on this resurrection day.
For the original version of the column I picked new music from six bands, which included four singles, two albums, and one EP — obviously a hell of a lot of music. But for today I’ve made the collection even bigger by including individual songs from three more bands at the end.
I found all the opening selections (the first five) to be emotionally very powerful — authentically powerful — and much of it apparently reflects its creators’ own sometimes difficult inner journeys (and some geographical ones as well). The results are sometimes haunting and sometimes harrowing, sometimes solemn and sometimes shattering or wondrous. They move moods as well as channel them; they’re often inspired by memories, and they’re likely to inspire a listener’s own memories too, as passionate music often does.
I don’t mean to suggest that the final four songs are lacking in emotional power — far from it — but they’re more what I’m prone to call mind-benders.
I haven’t written as much about the albums and EP as I think I should. Time still hasn’t been generous with periods of solitude over the last few days. But of course my own thoughts about the music are surplus to requirements — all you really need are working ears and freedom from distractions.
PANOPTICON (U.S.)
Panopticon’s new album Det hjemsøkte hjertet (“The Haunted Heart”) represents the closing of the “Laurentian Trilogy”, which began with …and Again into the Light and proceeded with The Rime of Memory. Austin Lunn has written extensively and eloquently at Bandcamp about what inspired the new album and the thoughts it’s intended to reflect. Rather than attempt to summarize that myself, I’ll excerpt some of the words provided by Bindrune Recordings in announcing the album:
The album follows an elder hermit in the final week of his life, interweaving childhood memories with a lament for an ecosystem transformed by modern encroachment…. At heart, Det hjemsøkte hjertet is an elegy: for wilderness altered beyond recognition, for childhood memories fading into myth, and for a life spent in quiet communion with a world slipping away.
Bindrune also previews that “a full orchestral presence runs throughout, with Charlie Anderson’s string performances adding both gravity and movement”, and that “[e]ach song features a different guest vocalist – Aaron Charles (Falls Of Rauros, Rhun), Jan Evan Åsli (Vemod), and Jan ‘Winterherz’ Van Berlekom (Waldgeflüster) among them….”
The first song revealed from the album (which had its premiere at Decibel) is “The White Cedars“, which includes a guest vocal appearance by Jan Even Åsli. That song was also released as a 12-inch single, with the second side being a reimagining of the song “Stream Keeper” originally released by Seidr (Austin’s atmospheric doom collaboration with W. Crow of Wheels Within Wheels). Here is what Austin wrote about “The White Cedars“:
“The White Cedars” is the moment in the album’s narrative when the solitary protagonist confronts the consequences of his chosen life. He reflects on his decision to withdraw from others, avoiding the risks and vulnerabilities that come with emotional bonds – the very risks his parents and grandparents once embraced, which allowed him to exist in the first place. Reaching the end of his life without meaningful connections, he recognises the cost of that path. The song becomes a lament for what might have been, and a meditation on the chances we never take.
I think it’s fair to say that, as much as anyone else making music today and more than most, Austin Lunn writes from the heart and then allows his heart to fully fuel the performances. The results may be explosive or wondrous, but also weary or steeped in sorrow, because an air of tragedy seems to shadow his expansive musical journeys like the haunting of a restless ghost that won’t leave. All of that is evident in “The White Cedars“.
It’s explosive and searing, expansive in the scale of its blazing tumult and unchained in the intensity of its howling vocal torment. As usual, the drumming is tremendous. But it also includes moments of mesmerizing and heart-breaking beauty, thanks to Charlie Anderson’s soulful and soaring violin melodies, though the violin also seems to scream in distress, amplifying the music’s immense emotional storms, and to grieve as well.
Jan Even Åsli makes his appearance near the end, powerfully singing the sad lament along with the violin. It’s an incredibly moving finale.
The new rendition of “Stream Keeper” is immediately melancholy as it joins together ethereal, shimmering trills and a deep and slowly picked melody of downcast mood. The high glimmering shrouds sound like a host of fireflies whose light has become sound.
The song becomes orders of magnitude more intense as Lunn shifts the drums from steady booms into blasting turbulence and raises his voice in solemn but stricken pronouncements and harrowing screams. The surrounding music burns, and then grievously moans. The rhythms also jolt like battering rams; the vocals cry out as if painfully mourning; and it feels like a cataclysmic thunderstorm breaks open in the low end.
The pace slows and those high trilling apparitions reappear along with plaintive piano keys and groaning strings to provide an immensely sad finale. Quite a stunning song, almost as stunning as the one it accompanies on the new single.
Det hjemsøkte hjertet will be released by Bindrune and Nordvis on May 8th. The two-track single is available now.
https://shop.bindrunerecordings.com/
https://shop.silentfuture.se/panopticon
https://nordvis.lnk.to/panopticon
https://panopticon-nordvis.bandcamp.com/album/the-white-cedars-b-w-stream-keeper
https://bindrunerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/det-hjems-kte-hjertet
https://www.facebook.com/TheTruePanopticon
PURE WRATH (Indonesia)
Januaryo Hardy is returning with a new album by his Pure Wrath project named Bleak Days Ahead, a record described by Debemur Morti Productions as “a stridently modern and characteristically emotive record exploring the despair of living under uncertain conditions in dismal industrialised environments…. The nostalgist now hyper-attuned to harsh everyday realities.” Or in Hardy’s words, “Bleak Days Ahead is a lament for those silently drowning in a life that demands everything and gives back almost nothing.”
I’ve already shared some thoughts about the album’s first single, “Spectral Insomnia“, and now there’s a second one available along with a fire-starting video that helps get the message across. On this one, “Haven of Echoes“, Danny Tee provides a forward, and Yurii Ciel (Stoned Jesus, ex-White Ward) handles the drumming, as he does throughout the album.
Slowly paced at first, the music of “Haven of Echoes” shivers and quivers in glittering tones that create a lonely kind of distress, eventually joined by Danny Tee‘s deep growling words and by ragged, broken cries. The music then transforms, blazing and furiously hammering, torquing the distress to a precipice on the breaking point, and the screamed vocals sound like a soul splintering into bleeding shards.
The fire in the music elevates, becomes dense and even more distraught, but also dismally clangs and staggers with its head down, frantically swirls in seeming confusion and feverish pain, rages again as well, and becomes extremely bleak. After a brief pause, the guitar quivers and shivers once more, but more morosely this time, and then the music crashes and throbs — offering no hope at the end.
https://purewrath.bandcamp.com/album/bleak-days-ahead
http://www.facebook.com/purewrath
ETHEREAL DARKNESS (Belgium)
In late January of this year we premiered one of the six songs from a new Ethereal Darkness album named Echoes, and I spilled a lot of words about both that song (“On the Edge of the Cliff“) and one other that had previously surfaced (“The Cycle“). Now the entire album has been released, with mixing and mastering by Dan Swanö at Unisound and cover art by Adam Burke. It’s well worth your time.
There’s a lot to unpack here — all six songs are long ones, ranging from nearly 8 minutes to almost 13 1/2, and these aren’t droning trances either. Each song truly is a musical excursion across dramatically changing soundscapes.
They’re capable of creating vast visions of crushing sorrow, towering monuments of brooding darkness and breathtaking splendor, and slashing or swarming conflagrations of fierce resilience. They’re also capable of weaving elegant tapestries of mystical beauty and seductive elegance, and of jolting listeners back on their heels.
The songs include melancholy piano melodies, heart-breaking guitar motifs and stirring solos, acoustic picking that twangs or glitters, tremolo’d chords that brilliantly whirl, synths (both symphonic and cosmic) that mysteriously glimmer and engulf like enormous tides (some of them celestial tides), carefully crafted bass-lines and drum progressions, and continually changing tempos and moods.
Sometimes the music feels like a destructive avalanche or a stunning nova, sometimes like the grief of a solitary huddled figure, sometimes like an intense yearning for better days. The songs are filled with crests and troughs of intensity and feeling.
One of the album’s most striking features is the remarkably wide range of the vocals, which include harrowing screams, savagely growling roars, fervent singing capable of soaring toward the skies, and strangled gasps. They’re a key factor in how the songs change moods and intensity.
The album is an hour long, and trust me when I say that the preceding paragraphs are only the barest summary of what it encompasses, but hopefully enough encouragement for you to immerse yourselves in it. It’s a very ambitious, richly elaborate, carefully crafted, and relentlessly captivating pageant.
https://etherealdarkness.bandcamp.com/album/echoes
https://www.facebook.com/etherealplace/
https://www.instagram.com/etherealdarknessband
LIGHTLORN (Sweden)
As in the case of Ethereal Darkness, I wrote about the first two songs disclosed from a new album by the Swedish band Lightlorn (The Ebb and Flow of Galactic Tides), and now the entire album is out. You shouldn’t overlook this one either.
As in the case of that Ethereal Darkness album, there’s a lot to unpack here. These six songs are also longer than average. And although they’re not quite as expansive as the works of Ethereal Darkness, they provide many changing experiences as they unfold.
Their heaviness often hits at a visceral level, thanks to the prominent rumbling of a very burly bass and the often thundering vehemence of the drumming. On the other end of the scale, the rapidly whirring melodic riffs (which straddle a line between corrosive grit and polished shine) often flow in vast swaths of incendiary and distressing power, and the vocals relentlessly howl as if someone is violently turning himself inside-out, with blood spraying (though there’s also a guest appearance by Flo V. Schwarz of Pyogenesis in the fantastic fourth song which provides a stunning contrast).
Augmenting and varying those experiences, the songs also include flowing waves of wondrous symphonic and ambient synth melody, gently glinting guitar arpeggios or piano keys, or pinging electronics, as well as crashing kinetic strikes that seem capable of leveling mountains, or accelerated torrents of blistering and battering fury and soaring riffs that inspire visions of the heavens on fire.
Lightlorn also pull from wellsprings of heavy metal, rock, and electronica well beyond the usual bounds of black metal, which is yet another reason why these songs are so captivating. That fourth song I mentioned above, “I Carry Galaxies“, is probably the best example of this (with “Eternal Recurrence of the Same” a close second), and also probably the album’s most inspiring and joyful song, though others display feelings of resilience as well as sorrow and shattering torment.
The album explores the emergence of human intelligence within a vast and daunting universe, and all the hopes, fears, destructiveness, and ambitions to which humans are prone: “Generation upon generation they proliferate, evolve, and philosophize, seldom recognizing that all they are, all they know, and all they ever will be, is solely contingent on the ebb and flow of galactic tides…” (That’s an excerpt from a longer statement at the album’s Bandcamp page, which is well worth reading in full.)
Those are grand ambitions, and Lightlorn fulfill them in grand fashion, creating music of non-stop emotional authenticity and elaborate construction, and managing to hit home not only when they target feelings we all know (i.e., the human heart) but also when they manifest the ebb and flow of galactic tides and the great dice roll of human existence. This band has come a long way in a relatively short time, and this album is clearly their crowning achievement.
https://lightlorn.bandcamp.com/album/the-ebb-and-flow-of-galactic-tides
https://www.facebook.com/lightlorn
RAAT (India)
Next up is a three-song EP released on March 12th named Like Light Dissolved by the Indian black metal project Raat. It is described as: “Three movements shaped by radiance. Expansive. Celestial. Ascendant.” I thought it would follow well from Lightlorn’s album.
As you can foresee based on the words quoted above, the music on this EP has luminous and numinous qualities that are often vast in their scale and sweeping in their expanse, but there is still something about those searing celestial displays that feels intensely frightening and stressful, and the screamed vocals sound fueled by pain.
The long title song, which opens the EP, is a prime example of Raat pushing both the panoramic scope and stressful intensity of the music to the breaking point, undergirding those distressing novas of sound with beautifully nuanced bass performances and tremendous drumming. When the tension first breaks, it still doesn’t really break, just feels more lonely, downtrodden, or nearly hopeless — though the riffing also becomes fierce and jolting while an otherworldly melody soulfully wails behind it.
The other two songs also braid together elements of immersive yet harrowing musical tides, riveting rhythm-section work, scalding vocals, and ringing arpeggios that sound both out of this world and very much within the emotional stressfulness of the world. Both also include softer, more poignant, and more wondrous moments. There is a reason why “Lunar Glow” has the name it has, and “Exuvia” mysteriously wavers and quavers, and seems to reach out with hopeful hands — though it also batters, broils, descends into dismay, and seems to weep in agony.
https://raat.bandcamp.com/album/like-light-dissolved-2
https://linktr.ee/raatzone
https://www.facebook.com/raatzone/
UNTO THEE (UK)
I know I’ve already thrown a lot of music at you today, but I hope you’ll be patient enough and have time enough to listen to this next selection, because it is a very good song and arrives with a very good video. The song is “We Were Fire“, and it’s the first single released by Unto Thee, a black metal project based in Northumberland (UK). We’re told that the project was originally founded in the late ’90s, but remained dormant until now.
The music here is an unusual amalgam of ingredients, brought together with mind-bending results. It includes immense subterranean upheavals that include deep scouring floods of gurgling grit; raw riffing that violently froths like torrents of flint; diabolical lead-guitars that brilliantly flash and frenetically swirl; and eerily quivering ethereal tones. All of that combines to create a cataclysmic experience.
The song also includes startling vocals which vary from fanatical chants and cut-throat screams to soaring cries and gloomy/ghostly singing that you really won’t see coming, as well as a sizzling fret-melter of a guitar solo, feverish bass-lines, flowing tides of dark, ominous melody, and something that sounds like angels grieving. Oh, and there’s a little piano melody at the end too.
The video is a very elaborate and professional production, a short film that commands attention in its depiction of both occult events and the performances of the hooded band members. It provides a feast for the eyes as well as the ears, well beyond what you might expect from a new band releasing its first single. That first single is out on streaming services now and is also available at Bandcamp.
What makes all this even more remarkable is that Unto Thee is the solo work of a single individual (“Flamulus“), who was also the founder of the old school thrash metal band Warbastard, and it is only he who performs as the band members in the video.
https://untothee.bandcamp.com/track/we-were-fire
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1WvtBe8nYRNO2ow7a2Dl5W
https://flamulus.com/
https://www.instagram.com/_unto_thee_/
https://www.facebook.com/unt0thee
DANDELION (U.S./UK)
Now we come to the first of the songs that I added since last Sunday passed by without me posting the first six selections. This one is by a new project named Dandelion, an interesting name for a band whose music is recommended for fans of Blut Aus Nord and Disembowelment. The members identified at Bandcamp are four, and they will be familiar to steady NCS visitors:
Guitars – Pan (Ar’lyxkq’wr, Zvylpwkya)
Vocals & Synth – Ni (Ukakuja, Lux Sine Lumine)
Drums – Jared Moran (Vertebrae Fetish Totem, Clinical Depression)
Bass – Ben Vanweelden (Pillar Amongst Willows, Venomous Echoes)
The song available now is “4 Crowns on a Serpent“. Jared Moran’s drumming is always a treat to hear, even when he’s just speedily popping the snare as he does when this song kicks off, and he engages in lots of gear-shifting and traces unexpected patterns as the long song proceeds. But while the snare provides a continuing sharp snap, the riffing is raw and roiling, dense and deleterious, and the ensuing screams are like something out of an old madhouse.
Yet the song includes surprises. The riffing begins to trippily slither and whine; the bass gets kind of jazzy; a ghostly host extravagantly wails as if reverberating off mausoleum walls following a big swallow of psychedelics. The riffing also continues abrading like a belt-sander; a lead guitar with a sizzling and searing tone undergoes frantic convulsions; the drumming goes off on its own frolics; the bass rhythmically murmurs and throbs, still jazzy at times but also proggy.
Dandelion’s debut release is self-titled and includes three more songs besides this one. Presumably one or more of them will better justify the Disembowelment reference, whereas “4 Crowns on a Serpent” warrants the BAN name-drop, at least in their more hallucinogenic phases circa 777-Cosmosophy. I plan to find out when time allows. The full record is set for release by The Centipede Abyss on April 30th.
https://centipedeabyss.bandcamp.com/album/dandelion
https://www.facebook.com/TheCentipedeAbyss/
MÉLANCOLIE DU DHAMPIR (U.S.) / CŒUR DE RONCES (France?)
I hope you’re still here. I’ve recommended a massive amount of music, but still have one more recommendation before I close. Well, two recommendations, two songs from a fascinating promotional split released on April 1st, two songs that seem made for each other, to be together.
The first song is “Hollow Heart” from Mélancolie du Dhampir, the solo project of C. Dracul. It’s from an upcoming full-length named Noblesse. It offers a rich musical tapestry, a quality that gradually becomes unmistakable despite the obfuscation created by the music’s dense, abrasive, lo-fi production.
The song initially surges with blasting percussive fury; the vocals are beyond wild (perhaps some combination of singing, snarling, and screaming, though it’s hard to be sure); and the riffing is abusively raw, but the music also sends up grand fanfares and ecstatically quivers; piano keys brightly dance above bouncing beats, which themselves bring to mind an old folk dance; and accordion-like guitars join in.
The song is something like a time-traveler as it spins and shifts between these phases. Soaring guitar melodies, which sometimes recall flutes in their sound (and maybe they are), also give it a feeling of impassioned yearning.
The second song is by Cœur de Ronces, the project of vocalist Mélusine and instrumentalist L.S. (I’m guessing they’re from France but I don’t know), and it shares the name of the band. Like the other side of the split, this one makes me think of it as a time traveler.
Its graceful but also slightly distorted overture sounds like an old phonograph of orchestral ballroom music from the inter-War period, but Cœur de Ronces almost destroy that elegant and ghostly grandeur with an explosion of furiously hammering drums, acidic riffing, and fervent howls and screams. Yet you can still make out that elegant opening melody, although the piercing lead guitar causes it to more frantically whirl and dart.
This song also includes bounding folk-like beats amid spasms of percussive mayhem, and although most of the guitar tones aren’t kind to listeners, the music they’re making is still captivating, very close to mesmerizing, perhaps especially when the drums vanish near the end.
Both bands report that a tape release of the split will be forthcoming. (I owe thanks to J.R. for tipping me to this split.)
https://oakheartproductions.bandcamp.com/album/promo-mmxxvi-split-with-c-ur-de-ronces
https://lilastarless.bandcamp.com/album/promo-mmxxvi-split-w-m-lancolie-du-dhampir