(written by Islander)
My spouse and I are going to an early lunch with a friend we’ve known for… ahem… decades. She’s always a ton of fun to be with, but the timing’s not great for this column. I had added dozens of new songs and complete releases arriving over the past week that I intended to check out. And I didn’t get a head-start yesterday because I spend a chunk of the afternoon and early evening watching a Mariners baseball game that was… ahem… dispiriting. Don’t ask me why I did that, because I knew our opponents were very good and the odds were very high that my team would… ahem… suck (again).
Anyway, I had a lot of hard choices to make this morning and a rapidly vanishing amount of time in which to make them and then peck out some thoughts. I hope I’ll be able to catch up with more new music for the usual Sunday collection.
NORILLAG (Canada)
When I get jammed up on time, as has happened today, I often default to recommendations from people I know. I saw two such recommendations for a new album named Kombinat by Norillag from Vancouver, B.C.
One was from Shawn, who called it “absolutely incredible” and something that deserves AOTY list placement. Another was from Rennie, who vouched his certainty that “metalheads will dig it”. He also made comparisons to Test Dept, Crash Worship, and Missing Foundation. I had to look up all names, and it appears they were all projects from the ’80s that made early industrial music and experimental art projects.
Norillag describe Kombinat as their “first live off the floor studio effort”, “a full band playing together in the same room”, “a more direct and raw variation of our musical approach”. The credits at Bandcamp include a pair of vocalists, three people performing “scrap metal percussion”, a drummer, a bassist, and a creator of “live electronics and effects”. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into.
Rennie also sent me a link to a video of the Norillag collective playing these same five tracks in front of a live audience in Vancouver last summer. Honestly, I haven’t closely compared the video and the album to determine whether the album is a recording of the live performance. But given the improvisational aspects of the music, I’m guessing that it may be.
Anyway, my thoughts about the album are based on the Bandcamp tracks, because the sound quality is better, though I did later watch parts of the video to see how they did what they did.
The album opener, “Sacrifice (Corpus)“, is the kind of thing I often think of as “throwing down the gauntlet”, i.e., it’s the album’s longest song by far (11 1/2 minutes) rather than something shorter and “hookier” that might more easily lure people into the rest of the album. In addition, it begins in a way that seems more intended to perplex than to seduce.
That beginning is a slowly swelling collage of droning low frequencies, metallic scraping tones, and various pings and clatters. It sounds like a field recording of a construction project, with a mumbling bass wondering about what’s being built. We don’t have the blueprints either.
I became sure that if this collage had persisted for 11 1/2 minutes, I wouldn’t make it to the end. However, as the track approaches the five-minute mark the clattering creates a rhythm, the bass and the drums start bounding and pounding, and my head started moving. The experience is primitive, it’s “stripped down” to almost nothing but percussion (there are some eerily wailing electronic sounds in the background), and it’s primally compulsive.
Fervent yells and ragged howls join in; their echoing reverberations sound distressed. My head kept moving as the percussive patterns and tones became more varied, though they were still locked into the main groove. I began to imagine my floor throbbing along with the thrust of the heavy industrial beats.
Obviously, I stayed with the album after that gauntlet-throwing opener. The follow-on “Nine Consecutive Months of Winter” is much shorter, just a bit more than two minutes, and much more quickly seductive. The howled lyrics are worth reading (at Bandcamp). It’s faster but no less primitive; its percussive hooks are more quickly engaging… and more head-spinning.
“Movement“, also in the 2-3 minute range, maintains the pace and the head-rattling and floor-bouncing energy. I’m getting more into the vocals too, or they’re getting more into me.
Unlike “Nine Consecutive Months of Winter“, “Movement” gloomily collapses at the end… which turns out to be an appropriate segue into “Solar Economy“. Appropriate, because that follow-on piece is a collage of electronic waves and wailing ghostly voices that’s chilling and even scary.
Percussion does eventually surface, but in the kind of random-seeming ways that characterized the opening track’s first phase. The woozy wails are joined by terrorizing screams; everything else also seems to convulse. No construction project here, but more like the frantic disassembly of a mental asylum by the inmates.
“Norilstroy’s Delirium” is the closer. It again features intriguing lyrics. It again features punchy industrial beats, vivid drum outbursts, and the slashing and grinding of metal surfaces. But this one features operatic female vocals whose soaring and quavering tones contrast with the increasing percussive delirium. Hostile snarls trade off with that soaring (and spine-tingling) voice, which breaks into falsetto stratospheres.
The percussive performances in the closing song might be the most galvanizing of them all; they also begin to sound like armaments of war. The song accelerates and accelerates, pressing up against the limits of human endurance, and it also sounds like massed voices are soaring in glory, or agony (though it’s probably just various metal objects screaming as they are tortured), until everything drifts away toward nothingness.
I did skip ahead in the video to see what was happening in the final minutes of this song. It tends to fortify the belief that the album is a recording of this performance, because Norillag do their best at the end to destroy almost all the found inanimate objects they had been working with. (And holy hell, the operatic vocalist is singing in her undergarments!)
I guess it’s obvious that what I’ve just written is more a collection of notes made while listening than something that might be called a review. It’s probably also obvious that I was fascinated by the experience (I even listened to “Norilstroy’s Delirium” a second time right after finishing it the first time). It’s not the kind of album whose appeal I think will be broad-based among metal listeners — though you never know what kind of thing will wake up your reptile brain, so you might be pleasantly surprised (as I was).
https://norillag.bandcamp.com/album/kombinat
https://phagetapes.bandcamp.com/album/kombinat
POACHER (U.S.)
There’s really no natural way to move on from Norrilag to something else. Any movement will of necessity be at some sharp angle, because I’m definitely not searching for someone else who sounds like them, and I doubt I’d find it even if I did search. Where we veer next is to Poacher, a new band based in my old hometown of Austin, Texas.
Apart from their location, which I confess is always a draw when I come across new music, I was drawn to Poacher when I was told that their vocalist is Champ Morgan from Triage. If you don’t know why that was another big draw, you can see my explanation in a video premiere we did here last month for a song off the new Triage album In The Trenches. (Turns out I also know Poacher’s drummer!)
Having been drawn by the afore-mentioned attractions, what I discovered was a debut five-song EP released in May named They Never Saw It Coming. It pulls no punches.
The opener “Bitterness” immediately bombards listeners with high-speed percussive artillery, depth-charge bass movements, and a scourge of withering and writhing riffage that sounds both vicious and dismal. There’s no relent in the bitter riffing, but the drums do switch into punk beats just in time for a the arrival of raw and furious vocals.
The song also delivers a grim breakdown that sounds like it could slug stone walls into a heap of rubble — a breakdown pierced by a miserably wailing lead guitar that seems to mimic a warning siren being tortured into submission.
That song is a mean, mauling, and spine-fracturing way to introduce Poacher’s brand of metallic hardcore, and the ensuing four songs match it in intensity. They’re absolutely furious, especially the traumas expressed by the raw and raging vocals. They include compulsive, iron-shod grooves (some of which hit like massive sledgehammers), bowel-loosening bass-lines, and episodes of jackhammering violence, and they also erupt in blast-beat detonations and bursts of sand-blasting riffage.
The songs are catastrophically destructive and they’re often compulsively muscle-moving, but they also include guitar melodies that are both feverishly desperate in their feeling and crushingly bleak (“Mother of Disease” and the closer “Deathward” include prime examples of both — and those songs will also beat you to a pulp, just like the other three).
P.S. I hear that Poacher played their first show last night, in Austin, and I’m looking forward to hearing about it. Wish I could have seen it myself
https://poacheratx.bandcamp.com/album/they-never-saw-it-coming
LITOST (Spain)
I’ve only got time for one more selection, just a single song named “Tràngol” (“Trance” or “Ordeal” in English) from a new album by the Spanish black/death metal band Litost. It includes a guest vocal appearance by Eloi, frontman from the band Vidres a la Sang. Here is how the band’s label describes the themes of the song:
Lyrically, It paints a grim picture of a broken ego drowning in ambition, hysteria, and self-ridicule, before an avalanche of reality breaks the facade entirely. It’s an honest, raw, and uncomfortable exploration of inner rot, shifting between chaotic aggression and cold, atmospheric despair.
The song is extremely multi-faceted and tempo-dynamic. It creates sensations of violent delirium, wildly pulsating vigor, boiling pain, frantic confusion, and frightening hallucination. It also includes a mesmerizing guitar solo that further channels some of those moods. The wide-ranging vocals, which ravenously roar, insanely scream, and miserably wail, are as wild and unhinged as the music. Quite an attention-seizing song.
The name of Litost’s new album is Logos. It will be released on October 23rd by Art Gates Records.
https://bfan.link/trangol
https://www.artgatesrecords.com
https://www.facebook.com/LitostMusicVlc/