(written by Islander)
I am lucky, because every day brings me some new surprise. Most often it’s a musical surprise, because I spend so much of my days listening to music. Even when I’m listening to a song that’s built with familiar ingredients, I sometimes get surprised by how much I like it when it’s essentially no different than something I’ve heard many times before.
Beyond that, I find surprises in conversations with my wife or friends, or in watching our brother cats, or in a movement in my peripheral vision while sitting on our deck outside — a squirrel or a bird or a deer or a raccoon clawing its way up a tree before sunrise.
A couple of mornings ago I found some very small paper-thin objects in a corner of that deck I don’t remember seeing before. Here they are:
After some web searching, I concluded they are remnants of a wasp nest, the remains of small works of art genetically encoded in tiny minds, and brought down by the emergence of what gestated there, who will someday make them again. What a world we live in.
Of course the songs I’ve chosen for today’s recommendations were more consciously conceived and deliberately created (and a lot tougher) than those nests. I think you’ll find they also hold some welcome surprises.
And hey, just so you don’t think I’ve taken to wearing rose-colored glasses, I’m well aware that our days bring bad surprises too, like the motherfucker who nearly side-swiped me yesterday while speeding into a traffic circle I was already in – a small circle with a posted 5 mph speed limit. The good surprise was that I braked hard before he could hit me, so I suppose there’s your “glass half full” perspective.
MASTODON (U.S.)
When I saw the news that Mastodon had surprise-released a new song last week, their first one since the passing of Brent Hinds, I became anxious. They have made some of my favorite albums of all time (Leviathan and Crack the Skye come to mind first), and even Mastodon albums I don’t listen to as much usually include at least a few great songs. But for my tastes I’ve reluctantly found that the ratio of hits to misses has shrunk over the last decade or so.
Thus, I became anxious. So much so that I didn’t immediately listen to the song and instead asked friends to give me their opinions first. Most of those reactions were positive. Here’s a sampling:
“Better than Hushed and Grim.”
“Sick prog riff at the end, reminds me of Opeth.”
“Honestly it feels like they didn’t miss a beat. It’s definitely Mastodon as you’d expect. I’m a big fan of Emperor of Sand and rate it in their upper half and this feels like it could have been on that.”
“Infectious beyond all fornication.”
“I went in expecting nothing more than mild sadness about it. By 2 mins in, I was pleasantly surprised & enjoyed my ears’ happiness just beating the ever-loving bejeezus out of my brain.”
Feeling encouraged, I finally listened to the song — “Your Ghost Again” — which the band conceived as a tribute to Hinds. I’m moved to say this one is a hit, not a miss — and the accompanying video is great too.
The music is immediately ferocious and hard-charging, and the high-flying vocals tremendously add to the surging power. But the music also mysteriously swirls and rings as the vocals shift into more ghostly registers, collectively creating a more haunting experience.
The rhythm-section work is great throughout, as are the vocals in all of their changing aspects; there’s a quick and exhilarating guitar solo in the mix, as well as a plethora of mercurial riffing that’s both sinister and seductive; and the song includes a surprising and very cool little keyboard bridge near the end that paves the way toward an electrifying finale that (as one of my friends wrote me) “is just so life-affirming”.
And hell yes, it’s immediately infectious too.
The song is the first to be revealed from a new Mastodon album, which includes the contributions of new guitarist/vocalist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira. Presumably more details about that will be coming in the weeks and months ahead.
P.S. The great cover art for the single was created by Paul Romano.
P.P.S. Mastodon are heading out on a U.S. tour this fall with Deafheaven and Alcest; you can get the details here.
https://i.mastodonrocks.com/yourghostagain
https://www.facebook.com/Mastodon/
FUMING MOUTH (U.S.)
Staying on the U.S. east coast but moving much further north from Atlanta, my next recommendation is a video for a new song from the immaculately named Massachusetts-based Fuming Mouth. Like that Mastodon song, it’s also immediately a ferocious hard-charger, but much more beastly and bruising, as you might expect from the song’s name — “A Blaze of Nihilism” — and from this band’s previous fusions of death metal and hardcore.
The music is both thunderous and as cutting as a massive circle saw. The vocals, in both their gutturally roaring and raw howling aspects, are frightening. The music also dismally moans and heaves, brutally pounds, and ejects shrill and eerily swirling guitar solos. In its slowest and most crushing phase, it seems Fuming Mouth’s mission is to methodically pound the life out of everything around them.
When it seems from the video (a very good video!) that the band have finished their punishing work and are enjoying post-coital smokes, the music continues, with mysteriously wailing tones wafting above shrill quivering needles of feedback.
The song is from a new Fuming Mouth album named The Ringing Bell. It has a release date of July 17th on Triple B Records, and it’s the first one to feature drummer Jay Weinberg alongside vocalist/guitarist Mark Whelan, guitarist Pat Merson, and bassist Chris Berg.
https://lnk.to/fumingmouth
https://fumingmouth.bandcamp.com/album/the-ringing-bell
https://www.facebook.com/fumingmouth
SOOTHSAYER (Ireland)
Perhaps only my addled mind is capable of finding a connection between these next two songs and the two above, but to me they seemed to fit very well in this spot.
The ghostly opening phase of the first one (“Eroding the Sky“) seemed to flow well from the strange closing moments of the Fuming Mouth video, and it was a welcome surprise to hear how well the band then connected that eerily warbling overture to the much fierier but still eerie and frightening main riff, which queasily flickers and quivers above balls-to-the-wall drumming and rabid screams.
When the pace eventually slows and monstrous growls rise up, the music heavily heaves, ominously crashes, and feverishly wails, creating dramatic moods of dismal dread and heart-breaking hopelessness. But the music also strangely warps, and the vocals soar in torment and threaten to split apart (a truly spine-tingling experience).
The drumming is terrific, and I do detect aspects of Mastodonian influence in the song, though it’s an extremely dark piece of music. At the end, they reprise both the song’s most fiery and frightening phase and its most crushing episodes — capped by one final display of vocal insanity.
It’s the kind of song that probably left my jaw hanging open and the whites of my eyes showing all ’round, but I was less focused on my face than on what would happen in the immediately following song, “Sooner Acceptance“.
This one creates a contrast with the finale of the first one, unfurling an amalgam of gently throbbing and mysteriously glinting notes, paired with yet another aspect (still scary) of the vocals. Gradually the music swells and wails as iron-shod beats start slugging. Gradually, the music becomes much more apocalyptic, heaving and stomping its way forward like some gigantic black-pelted beast.
The guitars viciously slash and poisonously sizzle; the drums begin kicking up a storm, and eventually they bolt into blast-beat furies and d-beat gallops as the riffing frantically slithers and desperately sears. When the notes dismally ring again near the end, it’s as if they’re announcing the most frightening phase of the song — and the final moments are exactly that.
Honestly, you’ve really got to focus to detect the instrumental changes, even though the riffing creates lots of insidious hooks and the rhythm-section will get your muscles moving, because the vocals (if I haven’t already made this clear) are maybe the most possessed, the most explosively crazed, the most larynx-threatening I’ve heard in a long time.
These two songs are the ones that open an album named The Unbinding, which is the second full-length from the Irish atmospheric doom/sludge band Soothsayer. It’s set for release on July 3rd by Apocalyptic Witchcraft Recordings.
https://apocalypticwitchcraft.bandcamp.com/album/the-unbinding
https://www.facebook.com/soothsayerdoom/
85 SEGUNDOS (Chile)
The full name of the band that recorded this next song is 85 Segundos para el Fin del Mundo (85 seconds until the end of the world). They are the Chilean duo of Cristian Olivares (ex-Lefutray) and Matías Leonicio (Nuclear), and their name is a nod to the “Doomsday Clock”, “reflecting how close our civilization is to its own demise”.
That symbolic clock was established in 1947 by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and since then they have moved the hands progressively closer to or farther away from midnight, which is the clock’s representation of global catastrophe. The original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. In their most recent assessment in January of this year, they moved the clock to 85 seconds from midnight, its closest proximity to doomsday since 1947.
85 Segundos released a debut singled called “Hienas y Buitres” (Hyenas and Vultures) in March of this year, and last week they released a second one named “Hibakusha“, accompanied by a lyric video. I decided to check it out based on this statement I saw in a press release:
Historically, the hibakusha are the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; a term that literally translates to “person affected by the explosion”.
In this new release, the band takes this dramatic concept and transforms it into a sharp contemporary metaphor. The song acts as a mirror for modern humanity, suggesting that on a planet dangerously close to collapse, we are all potential survivors exposed to new forms of destruction, whether nuclear, environmental, or social. It is both a condemnation of a violent, decaying system and a symbol of resistance in the face of catastrophe.
Thankfully for my present purposes, it turned out that the song “Hibakusha” fits the through-line of sonic and emotional intensity which ties together the preceding songs in today’s collection.
The drumming both riotously thunders and hammers muscle-moving back-beats; the bass throbs like a manic heart; the riffing frantically writhes and sears, creating feelings of burning and desperation; the howling vocals are explosively furious.
As the momentum ebbs, the music also flows in broad swaths of terrible agony, and the guitars slowly peal, miserably whine, and seem to plead for relief. It is a heart-breaking experience to hear that, especially in the song’s grief-stricken closing arpeggio, and it’s equally shattering to hear the extreme intensity of the vocals.
Recorded samples also appear in the song, including the famous harrowing words of J. Robert Oppenheimer (“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”), and the video includes factual texts reporting the bombings’ horrors (all of it in Spanish).
Below I’ll also include the lyric video for the band’s viscerally powerful first single “Hienas y Buitres“. It leans more into a fusion of death metal and crust punk, and it’s also searing in its anguished intensity, pulse-pounding in its rhythmic grooves, crushing in its heaviness, and furiously raging in its vocals.
Both of these songs make for a very promising start, and I look forward to hearing more from 85 Segundos, though I wonder if they’ll have to change their name next January, when Bulletin of Atomic Scientists take stock of where we are then.