(written by Islander)
Here we are again, another day of difficult decisions. Even after the modest head-start I got a couple of days ago, I still found myself staring at dozens of links on my list of new songs and videos.
DGR compounded the problem by popping up two days ago with another half-dozen I hadn’t yet noticed. My fellow writers around here don’t often suggest things for this roundup (maybe they take pity on me), so when they do, I try to pay attention. Hence, half the songs in today’s collection were among DGR’s suggestions.
Two of the songs he proposed include (gasp) singing, but I knew from past experience with the bands that it would be good, even if I didn’t foresee that it would vary from what I thought I’d be hearing.
As a counterweight, I’ve filled out the post with sounds from beastly and blowtorch throats. I also made the usual effort to include a genre-variety of songs (though I pushed off a lot of the black metal to tomorrow’s column), because no one but me likes everything, do they?
As the title of this column states, I really do write it on Saturday mornings while listening to the music and watching the videos. Quite often, I decide what to include as I’m making my way through possibilities during those same listening and viewing sessions. Less frequently, I figure it out the day before, which is what happened this time because I knew I would be out and about last night with a very late arrival back home and a late rising this morning.
What I did last night was to watch three blue men put on an immensely entertaining and frequently hilarious show in Seattle, a combination of bizarre antics and eye-popping percussive spectacles. For many of the spectacles they were joined on an elevated platform by a drummer known only as The Rockstar, and man, she really was. She is also the daughter of an old friend, which is why I was in the audience.
And, although you didn’t ask, that’s why I was very late to bed, late to rise, and slow to get this thing finished. But now it’s finished, and here it is:
THE OCEAN COLLECTIVE (Germany)
The Ocean Collective’s new album is named Solaris, a title that immediately put me in mind of Stanislaw Lem’s immortal science fiction novel of the same name and the stunning 1972 Soviet movie based upon it (the U.S. remake isn’t nearly as good). And sure enough, according to press releases the new album is indeed based on Andrei Tarkovsky’s brilliant film.
The album is also the work of a new lineup for this vaunted group. Founding guitarist, songwriter, and lyricist Robin Staps, longtime bassist Mattias Hägerstrand, and new drummer Jordi Farré (also of Crippled Black Phoenix) still remain, but the group is now completed by new vocalists Enrico Tiberi and Lane Shi (Elizabeth Colour Wheel, Otay:Onii), and new guitarists Emmanuel Jessua (Hypno5e) and Marco Gennaro. On the new album, Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream also made synthesizer contributions.
The first single “Light Pollution” arrived yesterday along with a stunning video made by Craig Murray (Mogwai, Converge). Lyrically, the song’s subject matter is a more direct and modern commentary than the references to Solaris might suggest. As Robin Staps explains:
“We’ve witnessed several communication revolutions throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, but have we actually become any better at communicating? Has there really been forward movement, or has the motion been orbital — have we merely been treading water? Light pollution symbolizes the transparency of the postmodern age, permeating everything and everyone. Everything is constantly visible; we’ve lost the darkness to hide in, and with the relentless glare of communication, we’ve also lost our privacy.”
On the other hand, the video does allude to the strange visions and experiences of the interstellar venturers on board a research station above the vast oceanic planet (and living organism) Solaris. Like the novel and the film, the video is mysterious and dreamlike – and ultimately depicts nightmarish transformations. Enrico Tiberi and Lane Shi also prove themselves to be very capable actors as well as vocalists.
The video is so transfixing that to fully appreciate the song you’ll probably need to listen at least once more without watching what’s happening on screen. Much like the source material that inspired the album, the music is fluid and oceanic. It creates experiences of mysterious and beguiling beauty, but also swells to immense crests of harrowing power.
It includes glittering futuristic electronics, booming beats, riffing that seems to moan and wail, intricate percussive exercises, smoky saxophone soloing, gargantuan low-end thrusts, musing bass nuances, dismally clawing arpeggios, heaving stomps steeped in catastrophic gloom, and frantic fretwork spasms.
The vocals vary as well, ranging from silken and soaring song, including Sade-like expressions by Lane Shi, to impassioned explosions by both vocalists that threaten larynx integrity.
Or we can just say more succinctly that it’s a stunning introduction to a highly anticipated new album.
Solaris will be released by Pelagic Records on September 26th. It reportedly has a run-time of more than 70 minutes.
https://orcd.co/theocean-solaris
https://theocean.bandcamp.com/album/solaris
https://www.facebook.com/theoceancollective/
RIPPER (Chile)
I decided not to put the songs with singing back to back, but to separate them with something a lot nastier. Ripper’s new song served that purpose exceedingly well. Plus, it’s fucking Ripper, returned from the grave with their first new full-length since 2016’s Experiment of Existence. Plus, it gives me the always-welcome opportunity to stick a Paolo Girardi painting in front of your orbs.
The new song, “The Source Exterminator“, is indeed a ripper. The riffing savagely charges and maniacally swarms, equal parts abrasive and clear in tone, accompanied by furiously battering beats and bestial growls, howls, and barks.
The layered guitars also exotically swirl and soar, like devilish spirits that are both lost in their own ecstasies and seductively beckoning us to join them. The song also includes a nimble bass solo that’s also seductive (and a bit jazzy), followed by a ravishing display of fretwork fireworks and pulse-punching, head-moving savagery.
Fantastic stuff. Ripper’s new album is named Towards Rebirth. It will be released by Dark Descent on July 24th.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/towards-rebirth
https://www.facebook.com/ripperchileoficial/
HIPPOTRAKTOR (Belgium)
Now for more singing, and yet another band favored by DGR with an album forthcoming on Pelagic Records. The band is Hippotraktor, whose previous releases have landed well with many of us around our moldy halls, and this next song is from a new album named ANNIHILIST that will be released by Pelagic on the far distant date of October 2nd.
Like that new song from The Ocean Collective up above, this one — “A Different Now” — arrived with a very good video (directed by Nick Suchak), though it mainly features the band’s performance (and a slowly writhing half-naked body) rather than harrowing visions.
As for the music, Hippotraktor waste no time — they start spinning heads immediately with a display of rhythmic interplay that’s equal parts slugging and intricate. After grabbing attention that way, they turn down the heat so the singing can soothe and seduce us, and then the entire band (including vocalist Stefan De Graef) ramp up the intensity.
The hard-hitting but also inventively elaborate antics of the rhythm section anchor the song throughout, with the high-flying vocals and thoroughly captivating guitar soloing being the main carriers of melody. For the second time today, thoughts of Sade come to mind, though the song packs plenty of muscle-throbbing punch too.
https://orcd.co/hippotraktor-annihilist
https://www.facebook.com/hippotraktorband
https://hippotraktor.bandcamp.com
ABSOLUTISM (Spain)
For those of you who find singing to be an annoying distraction in heavy metal, even when it’s accompanied by the kind of outbursts of intensity evident in the mostly clean-sung songs above, you’ll be happy to know that from here on harshness reigns, beginning with a new single from Barcelona-based Absolutism (another of DGR’s recommendations).
You should know by now that DGR is a tech-death maven, and what you’ll encounter within “Scylla Adrift” does include helpings of fleet-fingered and fleet-limbed instrumentation. But I would say that it’s also very eerie, in that the riffing strangely swirls, throbs, and glitters just as much as it savagely assaults the senses.
It also elevates and expands, creating sonic visions of wonder, but also brutally jolts and feverishly gnashes at listeners, blares in unsettling fashion, and seems to ooze anguish. As all of this happens, the drumming and bass-work varies constantly, and the guttural vocals are imperiously commanding.
In reflecting further, I don’t think it’s right to call this song tech-death, despite the band’s impressive technical chops, because it might create misleading impressions. This is much more unorthodox and “avant-garde” than what we usually find in that sphere, much more intriguing and atmospherically unearthly, and all the better for it.
https://absolutism.bandcamp.com/track/scylla-adrift
https://www.facebook.com/absolutismband
DEAD SLEEP (Sweden)
I don’t recall encountering the music of Dead Sleep until trying out this next song and video yesterday. I was lured into “Bring Me the Head” when I read that it was inspired by the Biblical tale of Salome, who (at the urging of her mother) asked for and accepted the decapitated head of John the Baptist, perhaps in revenge for his rejection of her.
I was also tempted by a description of Dead Sleep’s music as “blending punk energy, old-school thrash, and a refusal to fully belong to any one scene” — and more vividly as “an unholy, unbridled metal blend that sounds like Venom, Slayer and Sodom blended in a Discharge thrash mixer.”
Let me say right away that I would not want to get on the wrong side of vocalist Anna Wagner. It’s not just that she’s a screamer of blowtorch intensity. Look at her maniacally raging face in the video for “Bring Me the Head“, and you’ll worry she’s coming to tear off your own head — with her teeth.
Her bandmates Marcus Bader and Per Olofsson aren’t nearly so scary in their appearance (they’re more ominously menacing), but they’re damned good at what they’re doing. And what they’re doing here is discharging diabolically swirling riffage, blood-rushing percussion, and doses of battering-ram thuggery.
Anna Wagner doesn’t just scream like a ravenous banshee; she also wails in spine-tingling fashion, utters acidic proclamations like a dangerous high priestess, expresses words in a lower but still very scary register, and delivers very nimble bass-work. As the drum rhythms shift, the guitar also viciously swarms, mysteriously gleams, and slowly sways like a sonic cobra.
I found the song diabolical, exhilarating, and packed with hooks of differing kinds. Now I need to discover what else these folks have done.
Speaking of which, “Bring Me the Head” is the third song to be revealed from Dead Sleep’s new EP Repulsion, which is due out on June 26th. The video was filmed by Julian Bader and edited by Dead Sleep.
https://www.anlop.io/deadsleep
https://www.facebook.com/DEADSLEEPMalmo/
https://www.instagram.com/deadsleepofficial/
PYLAR (Spain)
My choice of a closing song epitomizes the “last but not least” adage. In fact, “Apoteosis” might be the most menacing, mind-bending, and blood-rushing spectacle of all today’s choices.
To help prepare you (and especially if you’ve never heard Pylar before), I’ll share that the name of the album which includes the song is Delyrio. I’ll also share this evocative passage from a press release we received:
Across the album, Delyrio unfolds as a dark rhizomatic structure, weaving together fragments of extreme music traditions into a dense and hallucinatory sonic architecture across four massive movements. Layers of sound collide and mutate continuously, creating an unstable and extravagant continuum where ritualistic weight, psychedelic dissolution, and industrial unease coexist.
Echoes of Swans, Oranssi Pazuzu, and Teitanblood may surface momentarily throughout the album, yet PYLAR reshapes these spectral influences into something entirely its own: a vortex of speculative metal alchemy operating beyond convention and genre boundaries.
Many things happen across the labyrinthine 10 1/2 minutes of “Apoteosis“, and they are sometimes unexpected and usually esoteric occurrences that lie in wait around smooth corners toward which Pylar lead or propel their listeners. But in the main, the song sounds like some dangerous and hallucinogen-fueled ritual designed to call forth dangerous powers.
I’ll resist the temptation to carefully map for you (as if I could!) all of the song’s twists and turns, and just mention the main ingredients:
The music (and not just the vocals) sometimes sounds like a cacophony of hell-spawned beasts growling and screaming; the band also brutishly pound and choke listeners as truly monstrous roars and gagging snarls rise up from hideous abysses; ritualistic rhythms take over and progressively become more frantic as chanting voices and tortured screams elevate and primitive chords gnash and slash.
The bass briefly mimics the beat of a beastly pulse; the drums catch the pulse and excitedly accelerate it; the fretwork ecstatically flickers, gleaming; the ritual becomes a delirious convulsion as everything, including the drums, go wild. After that, what’s left of the song sizzles and sears, following one last extravagant wail.
After listening to this you may need to shake yourself like a wet dog in an effort to recapture where and what you are, to re-center yourself in the mundane world. Or not. You could instead play it again.
Delyrio will be released on July 10th by Cyclic Law’s extreme imprint Cavsas.
https://cavsas.bandcamp.com/album/delyrio
https://www.pylar.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/PPYLARR