(written by Islander)
For this Sunday I don’t have as many selections to recommend as usual. That’s not because I haven’t come across more releases that are worth recommending but because I’m short of time as I begin writing this.
On the other hand, this collection includes two complete albums. To forewarn you, both of them are unconventional, which is to say they may pose a challenge to some listeners who are less inclined to spend their time with avant-garde and experimental concoctions. But for people inclined to get off the usual beaten paths, with a taste for getting their minds bent, both albums are remarkable.
I’ve followed those two with two singles from forthcoming albums. Compared to today’s first two selections, they’re more easily grasped, but they’re still very engrossing.
ALKUHARMONIAN KANTAJA (Finland)
The first album today, Melas Khole, was just released on I, Voidhanger Records and Korpituli Productions on June 26th. I spent a little time with it in advance of the release, and more time with it yesterday, but still not nearly enough to fully comprehend all of it. And yet, it’s the kind of album that I’m confident won’t drift out of my head but instead will pull me back despite all of my constant scurrying as a listener.
I’m going to begin my too-brief thoughts about the album by focusing on the second track instead of the first one, even though the first one is more likely to hook newcomers. And I’m jumping to the second one because it was first released with a fascinating video which has a fascinating background.
The video consists entirely of clips from the 1929 Soviet film Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov. According to The Font of All Human Knowledge, the film “presents urban life in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa during the late 1920s,” and “is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed.”
Whoever made the video for Alkuharmonian Kantaja had to pick the excerpts and arrange them, and did so with mind-bending results, and the video is also tinted in a way that fits the song’s title — “Purple Storms (The Desert Unites and Cloaks the World)“.
I would say the song isn’t as mind-bending as the visuals, but it really couldn’t be and still be called a song. Yet it’s still mind-bending compared to most of what you’ve probably listened to this week, or last week, or the week before.
It includes strangely contorting dual-guitar riffage with a dissonant edge and an aura that’s equal parts dismal and demented, backed by heavily booming rhythms. The riffing also busily whines as well as pulsates (becoming even more demented and despairing), and the bass woozily wanders as well as urgently throbs.
Eventually, the drums blast and then gallop, the bass bubbles, and the guitars maniacally sizzle, freakishly twist, and frantically quiver. Not to be outdone by the instrumentation, the vocals range from drugged singing to diabolical proclamations, malignant snarls, and gravel-throated growls.
The song is a surreal experience, yet it still manages to get stuck in this listener’s head.
The rest of the album — a luxurious eight more songs — includes even more vocal variations (highly theatrical singing of various kinds as well as goblin and banshee voices of various kinds), and those songs throw listeners through a multitude of equally surreal passageways and morphing moods on your way to the end.
As mentioned, the opener “Culprit Sunsets (To Chew on Darkness)” probably has more hooks in it than the song in the video, especially when it frenetically dances and vividly bounces, but it too is hallucinatory. So are the other songs. You might begin to think of a House of Mirrors, the kind of disorienting labyrinth that’s full of distorted reflections and warped realities.
I should mention that “6th of Senses (The Shape of Unknown)” gets hazy, pastoral, and kind of beautiful, and that “Melankolia (The Silent Acceptance)” is an almost spring-like piece with beautiful bass-work and choral vocals (and not the only song in which brass-like instrumental textures surface), while “The Redeemer (Smudged Flesh Withers)” will tear up your nerves after those other two songs have somewhat soothed them.
The production qualities are perfect for this. The channel-separation of the guitars; the cracking sharpness and pungent thump of the drums; the prominence of the highly variable bass maneuvers; and the diabolical pageantry of the vocals — it all clearly comes through, with no one ingredient domineering over the others.
I, Voidhanger refers to the influence of Ved Buens Ende and Fleurety, and those are useful references. I would add that another brief review I read (here) calls the music “weirdo, artsy black metal in the vein of anything Vicotnik-related and kinda sorta in the (modern) Trelldom wheelhouse.”
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/melas-khole
https://www.facebook.com/alkuharmoniankantaja/
THE WATER WITCH (UK)
The Water Witch includes members of A Forest of Stars – four of them at the time of this band’s first album (according to M-A), but I’m not sure if the lineup has remained the same for their just-released second album. And it wouldn’t be surprising if some change has occurred, because the second album has followed the first one by 14 years!
I haven’t listened to that first album (The Heavens in Traction) or a follow-on EP released nine years later (The Eternal, Unrelenting Daylight), so I can’t tell you how the new one compares to those. I’ve just taken it as it is, impelled to listen to it because of the membership connection to A Forest of Stars.
As I wrote at the outset, this is an unorthodox album, and in this case what I mean is that it doesn’t traffic in the orthodoxies of any one genre, but brews aspects of many together, though of course black metal is one source or you wouldn’t find the album here. The overall brew is also quite distinctively unconventional
The opener “Undreaming” is an abrasive and hulking beast, spewing grit and acid in an almost siren-like pulse around neck-chopping drums and bass upheavals that might vibrate your internal organs. But the music also shifts without warning into an eerie ambient-music phase in which ghostly voices seem to mutter and something like a cello mourns.
And then it shifts again, miserably searing and brutishly stomping, and then clanging, slashing, and hammering. That’s followed by brittle strumming and deft picking, but still with a dark and desolate mood, and then it delivers a burst of churning abrasion, wretched singing, monstrous gutturals, and drumming that shifts gears with abandon.
More changes come, including extravagant spoken words, a pulsating riff that seems to plead, and a closing storm of sound, but one in which the song’s pulsating main riff rears its head one more time.
Have no fear — I’m not going to provide such detailed map-making for every other track. If I did, we would be here all day, because the remaining songs are also audacious shapeshifters, capable of knocking you off-balance repeatedly, capable of channeling derangement and spiking your head with fear, but capable of getting your addled head bobbing too.
The songs ignite flash fires of sweeping magnitudes, but also part the veil into haunted realms where all bodies have been left far behind. Shimmering keyboards and brightly ringing guitars create weird and wondrous visions, and the band then waste no time shredding them with fretwork that generates bizarre ecstasies.
Warming sirens go off and percussive artillery launches strafing runs; world serpents slither below us and shake the earth; our faces get viciously die-stamped with arcane symbols. Two instrumental interludes present themselves, and might be the scariest moments on the whole album – which is full of scary moments.
The album ends with the two-part title song, more than 10 minutes in total. They are the album’s true centerpiece, though they come at the end. And at times they sound (cataclysmically) like the end of the world. Yet at other times they sound elegantly ethereal, proggy, astonishingly glorious, miserably distressed, or bleak and brooding.
I’ll close with a word about the vocals. After listening to Alkuharmonian Kantaja’s new album I thought it would be an extremely long time before I heard anything with such an astonishing array of voices. I was wrong, because the vocals on this new full-length by The Water Witch are in the same league, which is to say, a league of their own. They’re less theatrical, but still stunningly varied and scary.
https://thewaterwitch.bandcamp.com/album/a-distant-fire-in-the-dark
https://www.facebook.com/AndTheMistOfTheWerra
BLODTÅR (Sweden)
Now we move to the two singles I mentioned at the outset. The first of them is a song by the the Stockholm-based duo Blodtår, a song that shares the name of the band.
To repeat an adjective I’ve already used today, “Blodtår” (the song) is a shapeshifter. Its opening moments are devoted to a ringing guitar harmony with a medieval (and very downcast) resonance. But suddenly the music erupts — in a glorious blaze of broiling and throbbing riffage, furiously galloping beats, vividly pulsating low frequencies, and anguished screams that sound on the verge of coming apart in a spray of blood.
The song returns to the more gentle melodic arpeggio, but still with those shattering vocals riding along, and returns again to the more blazing and desperate rendition of the melody. Further melodic variations, and variations in intensity, lie ahead, as well as mournful choral singing, elevations of the song to a towering scale, a descent into a soulful and very sad guitar solo, and a closing barrage that includes both one final dose of those absolutely wrenching vocals and also heroic singing voices.
The song is the opening track on an album named Monark, which is set for release by Nordvis on September 18th. The label’s comments include this one:
Where earlier works balanced woodland atmosphere with icy composure, “Monark” is driven by something more volatile. Conceived in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, the album took shape with uncompromising urgency. The opening track, “Blodtår”, emerged directly from that moment, setting the tone for a work which moves through overwhelming spiritual pain toward a fragile yet undeniable light.
https://blodtar.bandcamp.com/album/monark
https://www.facebook.com/BlodtarOfficial/
BLACK DOOR (Netherlands)
And to close, I have the title song from a new Black Door album named In the Shadows of a Funerary Gleam.
On the one hand, the song bears a few hallmarks of both raw black metal and DSBM. The roiling riffage is fast, dense, and scarring; the drums blast at high-octane speed; the vocals scream as if being tortured in a crypt; and the mood of the music sounds desperate and distraught.
On the other hand, the drums also canter and bounce; and the layered music flows and seems to spin in a grand dance, channeling a kind of ancient and even joyous grandeur. The vocals still sound ruinously tortured (or fanatically furious), and as momentous drums boom, the music shifts in a way that reminds us of its more dark and desperate dimensions.
As the music continues to morph, it eventually offers an especially disturbing guitar-trill as well as an incendiary and dramatically sweeping finale, and the rhythm section consistently get muscles moving. And while it might only be keyboards in the upper range of that breathtaking finale, an extravagant voice might be singing up there too.
In the Shadows of a Funerary Gleam will be released on August 28th by Wolves of Hades. I’ll include this segment from descriptive materials offered on behalf of the label:
In the Shadows of a Funerary Gleam delves further into the dimensions between life and death, nostalgia and oblivion. From the spectral procession of its haunting introduction to the Promethean revelations that conclude the album, these compositions unfold as chapters of a singular journey through the funerary mist of forgotten kingdoms inhabited by restless specters….
[It] stands as a fully realized expression of the project’s evolving vision, one that balances haunting melody, strife, nocturnal atmosphere, and triumphant darkness with a reverence for the mysterious and the eternal.
https://wolvesofhades.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-shadows-of-a-funerary-gleam
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61590729989111