(written by Islander)
We had an 11th-hour cancellation of a premiere I had committed to write for today. With the unexpected free time dropping in my lap like that, I thought I ought to get a head-start on the coming weekend roundups.
A head-start is sorely needed because the backlog of new music I haven’t had a chance to include here has swelled to humongous proportions, thanks to me shirking my duties while at Maryland Deathfest last weekend. The swell has become even more swollen in light of all the new songs that have surfaced just since last Sunday.
To reduce the swelling, we’ll lance the infection and let the following new songs and videos spurt out. (Yeah, that was a gross analogy, but the music isn’t gross, although a lot of it is indeed infectious.)
PSYCROPTIC (Australia)
We begin with a video directed and edited by Robert Brens for a song from Psycroptic’s new album The Pulse of Annihilation. It features an underfed, unwashed contortionist who’s behind on her paperwork, a captor whose face seems to have melted, and quick cuts of the band melting faces too (you saw that coming a mile away, didn’t you?).
The band’s main face-melter on “Gathering a Venomous Herd” is Jason Peppiatt. His vocals are a blast furnace, and the fury in his face might melt faces all by itself. There’s a lot of heat in the instrumentation too, but it’s more calculated to scramble brains than melt flesh.
Fingers and limbs fly at high speed as if with accelerated insectile minds of their own, discharging demented and diabolical flurries of sound accentuated by rapidly pulsating thrusts and knee-capping beats.
What a riff-packed thrill-ride this is, but that will come as no surprise to the band’s fiendish fans. It’s also infectious despite its brain-scrambling effects, but that’s no surprise either, is it?
The Pulse of Annihilation is Psycroptic’s first full-length release for Metal Blade Records, and it has a July 17 release date.
https://www.metalblade.com/psycroptic/
https://psycroptic.bandcamp.com/album/the-pulse-of-annihilation
https://www.facebook.com/psycroptic/
FEN (UK)
Next up is another song presented through a video. This short film features a woodland trek by the East Anglian trio Fen, interspersed with cascading clouds, the froth and flow of strange fluids, the solemn gathering of dead things to create a pagan symbol, hallucinatory visions of nature, ancient ruins, finely machined clockwork, and vocalist The Watcher’s raging face.
The song — “Tectonic” — makes a good follow-on from Psycroptic’s new one. Like that one, “Tectonic” is often fast and reveals impressive technical dexterity, even though Fen aren’t competing in the tech-death arms race. It’s also burly, with big rhythms that will rock your head and throb your bones (the bass-work really seizes attention in the final minutes).
But this being Fen, the music is also sweeping and bleak, as well as frenzied, darting, head-butting, and furiously blasting. It also has haunting and otherworldly aspects, underscored by ethereally pinging keys and impassioned chants.
“Tectonic” is off a new Fen album named Elemental (Part 1: Mourning Earth). It will be out August 21st on Prophecy Productions.
https://spkr.store/collections/fen
https://fenuk.bandcamp.com/album/elemental-part-one-mourning-earth
https://www.facebook.com/fenofficial/
CONDUIT (Portugal)
I owe thanks to Joe Waller (of Amiensus, Ex Cinere, Sarasvati) for his recommendation of this next EP, The World Turns in Sleep. It was released on May 12th and is the debut work of Conduit, a solo black/death project of Nuno Verdades (Ethereal Wound, The Devouring Void, Unkempt), accompanied here by impressive session drummer Sathrath.
When I install Bandcamp music streams for complete albums or EPs in these write-ups, I often embed a record’s opening song, even when the artist has chosen a different one to play first. Not here. Here, Conduit chose the closing song to play first. It would be borderline criminal for me to dishonor Nuno’s choice, because that song — “Conduit to a Threshold” — is jaw-dropping.
It erupts in an attack of furiously blasting drums fronting abrasive riffing that seems to dismally writhe, magma-strength bass flurries, and piercing lead-guitars that scream in pain. The vocals are haughty, commanding, and monstrous.
The drum-and-bass-work changes constantly. The music also contorts, slowly crying out in dissonant expressions of anguish, convulsing in bursts of tremolo’d violence, and ringing like mutilated chimes, while the vocals explode in screams and eerily sing. At the end, strange ambient tones and an apparitional guest vocalist put chills on a listener’s flesh.
The song is elaborate, a spinning black gem of many facets, unsettling but deeply engrossing. If you then go back and start at the beginning you’ll encounter the brief title track, which is itself a strange collage of distorted spoken words and sinister, mind-warping electronics that connects with how the last song ends.
From there you’ll dive into “The Old House (Apertures)” and “Resonance Mantra“, which are at least as elaborate as the closing song. The former booms and sizzles, strangely ripples and mightily throbs, breaks into brittle picking and earth-moving stomps, sears the senses and gloomily crashes and quivers. It reflects Conduit’s avant-garde death/black proclivities for creating hallucinatory and unnerving experiences, richly textured and carefully plotted.
“Resonance Mantra” then leads us into its own mind-altering labyrinth, a twisting and turning adventure that again deploys an elaborately layered array of dissonant vibrations and non-stop percussive variations, as well as soaring cosmic radiations and harrowing vocal intensity. Once more, Conduit puts nerves on edge, creates frightening and desolate visions, and gets very strange at the end.
This really is an astonishing EP, at least for people who look for things off the usual well-beaten paths and don’t mind feeling like they’ve been pulled into a different dimension than the one we breathe in.
https://conduitpt.bandcamp.com/album/the-world-turns-in-sleep
https://www.instagram.com/conduit.pt/
SUFFERING QUOTA (Netherlands)
I came across the artwork for Suffering Quota’s new album last Monday morning, the morning after the last night at Maryland Deathfest when I and my Seattle friends with whom I journeyed were feeling like death warmed over (well, I was). I shared the artwork with them, though I’m not sure any of them immediately understood why.
The art suits the name of the record — Sisyphean Life. It also seemed to suit the challenges of a festival like MDF, muscling the boulder uphill (the boulder being our bodies) and then beginning again the next day, and the next, and the next.
To be clear, however, there is nothing ponderously straining about the first song off the album (which had its premiere at IO). Instead, it’s a spasm of violent fury.
The drums are crazed yet meticulous. The shrill screamed vocals are traumatizing. The riffing maniacally boils and blares in agony. The bass feels like the approach of Shai Hulud deep beneath the shivering surface sands.
At the top of Sisyphean Life’s Bandcamp page you can watch a very strange video for the song, but I haven’t found it on YouTube or any way to embed it here. It does include a man on fire, which fits.
The album will be co-released by 7 Degrees Records and Tartarus Records on August 20th.
https://sufferingquota.bandcamp.com/album/sisyphean-life
http://www.facebook.com/suffferingquota
SKELETAL SERPENT (UK)
In 2018 we partially reviewed the impressive debut EP of Skeletal Serpent. They are now back after an 8-year absence, though “they” really means Andy Kang, since the come-back demo — titled Ritual of the Living Seal — is now his solo work.
The demo is a single song of 5 minutes. Immediately it’s the stuff of nightmares, with a monstrously groaning and pulsating bass far below, eerily wailing tones high above, and lycanthropic snarls and growls in between. The drums lock into a ritualistic pattern, adding to the feeling that the song is calling forth some Lovecraftian monstrosity to wake from where it dreams hideous dreams.
That bass may loosen your bowels. The shivering, razor-edged riffing may feel like the slicing and broiling of your brain. The drums feel like ax-blows. The vocals are just as scary when they shift from bestial gutturals into distorted spoken words and wailed chants. Near the end, the lead guitar screeches as if mimicking the sound of a demon stretched on the rack.
You wouldn’t think something so nightmarish, so primitive and predatory, could be mesmerizing, but it is!
https://skeletal-serpentband.bandcamp.com/album/ritual-of-the-living-seal-demo
https://www.facebook.com/skeletalserpentband
THEURGIA (Colombia)
As acknowledged more than once, I have made many valuable musical discoveries thanks to tips from Rennie Resmini of starkweather and his intermittent reviews on the starkweather Substack. He pointed me to this final selection today, which is a song from a forthcoming third album by the Venezuelan-born but now Colombian-resident black/death metal band Theurgia, the solo work of Daemonae.
The song’s name is “Mundane Exhibition of Misery“, but nothing about it is even borderline-mundane. Its sinister and somewhat orchestral overture sets the stage by sending chills down the spine, and then, with drums furiously hurtling and a voice howling in madness, the music begins sweeping across the senses, grand but apocalyptically dire.
The layered guitars slowly writhe and frantically flicker. The keys elevate the music into celestial climes, both wondrous and emotionally damaged. The wide-ranging vocals are in the throes of terrible passion throughout, even when they wail. The drums skip and thud, become adventurously acrobatic, hammer in a rage, and brutishly pound like Vulcan’s hammer.
Definitely an eye-opening, jaw-dropping song. One wonders what other transfixing horrors await in the rest of the album that will include this track.
The name of the album is D E T R I T V S. It will be released at some point by Ascension Records.
https://theurgia.bandcamp.com/track/mundane-exhibition-of-misery
https://www.facebook.com/theurgiaband