(After a hiatus since last spring our South African contributor Vizzah Harri has returned with his review of a debut album by the New York band Astral Alchemy, which was released this past June by Naturmacht Productions. As is often the case, the music prompted thoughts that led him off in many unpredictable directions, in addition to noting just how many happy boxes it checks.)
You click on the cover that has the purple on it.
This is a clear sign that it will be a certain form of black metal par excellence …
Bathing in the Sap of the Moonflower: official video on Naturmacht’s official page on YouTube
The choral opening harkens back to times of old.
The lead and then soft synth set to a more ethereal paean thrust-punches the gut right in the vibes.
You don’t give a fuck that the cover is a pair of becloaked mofos passing a neon-ly pinkish orb in a forest not infiltrated with winter dandruff.
It’s temporally appropriate; for a band that has “alchemy” in the name, you wouldn’t think they would be as scientifically- accurate-ly disposed, but it was summer in New York and no snow or parks rangers around to save anyone from a photo-op like in Scandinavia.
Quintessential Scandinavian band lost in forest meme. The band in the picture’s name is Noumena and they have a new album out this year too! https://noumena.bandcamp.com/album/maan-ri
The leads conflagrate, the drums din in a thunderous rumble, and the vox hit just a tad after, and you nod to yourself in fortuitous knowing.
Even before the acoustic break hits that sweet spot of “yes, this is indeed the verily yassness of ‘the shit’”:
You hit buy.
You tell all your friends.
They can get fucked if they want some bs A.I. cover art.
If it hasn’t been made clear to you by now, I may be no-one, but those I support are legion, and you will suffer the consequences of your insipid and infantile vote to lick the corporate boots of enshittification (that word don’t need to be no hapax [legomenon]*)
Purple is a sign of good black metal? Sure, some shit-for-brains reading this is wanting to pump his favourite plague-wielding plagiarism machine with prompt prompts to scrape the interwebs for ideas to fill the negative void that is their creative inner universe; perish the fools, pity them not, they can go suck satan’s barbed asshole. Also, some color in there that “ain’t just black ‘n’ red?” – means it won’t just be bone-dry death, and it might even keep bigots scared of the other rainbow colors at bay. haha.
Intolerance for the power of that which is feminine or not cis-het: everpresent. Intolerance leading to mass mob mobilization and then bloodshed starts with fear of the other, then it is tha “queers”, then it is your neighbour, then it is you. Both US-ians and Sarf-Africans have a big vote in November. Make it count.
And as far as album covers go, I mean, you can’t always judge one on its cover. It took me 3 fucking hours of searching through my YouTube history for this one “meme”; scrolling through every single post of The Avant-Void (sheeiit, you didn’t know of the best evangelist of all things avant?), experiencing Meta singultus (Hiccoughs, ‘nhưng mà’ [yet] we all know it just be *Enshittification); tried every single mvtherfvcking tag I knew to possibly be adjacent (as in GERMAN, it was, black metal, duh, and dsbm…skiced on a stick!) on BandCamp… Nothing. and to make matters worse: Firefox’s worst feature is that tabgroups just disappear into the ether… what the fuck is with that shit!!!? Long story short, memes are kinda crucial to my being.
BC tags don’t always work so well…
the collage is of my failed search on the interwebs and then where I eventually found it…lol
So, the only way I eventually found “it” (the whyte-backgrounded cover with an older person’s hands and a deep red rose) is because I saved it in one of my numerous registries of lists’ folders in a word doc… Don’t judge an album by its cover, cos my instant take was not a good one, until I pressed play. Therefore, also give this one a spin:
It is in need of its own review, however I’m gonna try and rein in the ADHD today and focus (what the fuck does that ever mean? “Oh wow, is that another Hadida ibis over there!?”) back to the topic at left hand…
Logo by Caylen Darling
Album title filled with semi-obscure cool sounding mystical shit, check.
Band name cosmic yet esoteric, check.
Blastbeats, check!
Summoning-worshiping synth-riFFFs, double-dog-darin check.
Percussive flair & riffs for a few more days than are allowed in a week, check. (Truth be told, a metal cover does exist, however the band that did it are misogynistic cretins, and so the original remastered version is the link.)
Fire sizzle-‘n’-pop intro to track 2, check.
#3 is Tria Prima Offering to the Great Serpent. This image is a representation of the three alchemical primes L-R in Sulfur/soul, Salt/body, Mercury/spirit
Filthy bass with rapid fire occult whispers, check!
A production grilled, then fried, and then griddled just a bit more for that finely crusted and blackened crispiness that is just too damn perfect, check!!
Oh, all the guits go left ear and then back to both, motherfucking checkers beaches!!!!
Channeling Mgla, Uada, Blackbraid, and that black metal band from America that produced a great album a while ago that made it on some AOTY lists but then fell off the earth vibes? check. (I was gonna ask the NCS hivemind but, albumoftheyear.org was my savior…) The second name that evaded me was Black Anvil’s “As Was”… and the dude-bros that “know all about” everything meh-tal slated it.
This does not matter, what does is that I just lied to you, not even using any elegant sleight of hand. It’s not merely that I suck at recommending For-Fans-Of ideas, I don’t think the band with the hilarious acronym, A.A., need any comparisons right now. This is the best black metal album you haven’t yet heard this year.
Going fast then slow, but the vox are piercing, caustic, and ya can hear every crackle, sputter, and spit of that vocal-firehose popping off, check.
Them mute stops doing the echo before the guits go back on the left-hand path yet again? check!!!
This shit slaps harder than your newly unwed ex-wife right outside the ass-crack-of-America’s community court post-dissolution…
review over.
lol, jokes. Cleveland is the best city in the land named after Amerrigo Vespucci… fight me. And my ex-wife is the definition of awesome, and way more metal than me. I did not just deserve that palm-kiss, I’d take it again!
Also, who are we kidding here? This is supreme fucking black metal. Have you hit play yet? Or are you hoping this review was gonna stop using the same formulaic trajectory? Check, interlinked.
What, try to reinvent the bespoked wheel on an album that follows a tried and tested formula, positively not just surprises but jumps the shark on genre conventions and expectations? Perish the 13 hours dead effluvia dripping off my heart’s expired husk.
Sorry, I meant the antonym of hopping the Megalodon (not a comment on the band, one of the best live shows you’ll see in Mzansi)…
Images by Chris Fallows whose Insta somehow has even more astonishing captures!
Cos that idiom is actually linked to “seasonal rot” and what I’m referring to is the antonymic end of this relating to vibrancy. And no, I’m not ignorant enough to think that the overarching sonic genre of black metal is in need of rejuvenation (I have bones to pick with the Metal-Archives aka Encyclopaedia Metallum… and probably the single fattest reason I’ve been quiet for so long… it’s an uhm, Project of note), we just like it when things are nice and fresh with new ideas.
The term for visual media in series-form improving as its chronology progresses is called “growing the beard”, which, is a tad “gay” in the sense that it happily be too -centric on referring to base-ically only 50% of the population.
I propose it be called ‘Growing the Vagina’, cos those bafflingly understudied organs literally and sufferingly squeezed, even languorously labored, yet furiously forced and belaboringly breached each and every one of us into this world. Yep, C-sections are a thing, but the 9 months of eating mom’s food and inducing her to a trip no villainous dose will ever equate, is no easy spell to perform either. The chances of another meme at this point are slim, but never zero…
Cackles in Hyena’d Hadida
this can’t be the point at which you question whether this actually is a review right?
Solos, in black metal? What the fuck is that shit? Repackaging the same riff into different epic unto superlative and shattering heights with experimentation on the layered vox and mint sampling? …Yassis, demented (yassis= “jesus” in the original South African dialect). Chack chackedy chack!
The word check, which most of us connect back to chess, is borrowed from Persian:
This album had me slapping double bass on my tile floor so hard my downstairs neighbours came to inspect if I haven’t lost my mind and started exercising at 11pm at night. I played air guitar so much, the nails I lost in pre-school – when a kid named Warren slammed the sliding divider door into them – came off anew; and there was blood everywhere. Perhaps I need to take a course in air guitarship? Hey, at least it’s more real than whatever the fuck suno “curators” are prompting. Lmfao. “suno” is almost “anus” reversed. They sure have things ass-backwards.
suno etymologized means to copy or imitate, go figure…
If you don’t like melodicism, you might have to go listen to some noise mate. If this is too slow for you, the anchor of track 3 has got your back. Dimmu Borgir made a mistake bringing their teeth scraper of an album out this year (if you’ve got hyperlink fatigue…it’s a reference to comebacks); this here well, this is something that might just have you be like, “am I listening to the same album right now?” (in reference to: have you fucking pressed play on tracks 3-5 YET!? FVCK!)
Did they just make a Chris Barnes reference? Oh, wait, no, that bit got deleted when my ROG’s batt died of no Powah… yep, we still get loadshedding in these parts, “blackouts” might be more syllabically economical, though frowned upon down here. If you were waiting for the lyrical sheet, it got cancelled by:
Go listen to Stars of Ruin already, it’ll put a smile on your face, whether ironically or not. Hit that goddamn play button!
Collapse of the Cosmos, how can you not be piqued by a name like that? Sameyness in riffage in my worst attempt at not sounding facetious, ever heard of cohesion in songwriting(?), like outside of a lyrical/conceptual piece, there is this thing where musicians like try to write music that fits together into a complete whole. Or is that the hole you find yourself unable to scrabble out of from after the high you got thru the spell weaved by the magick in the announcements of said thaumaturgy made manifest in sonic alchemy?
Weaving Chilling Magical Dreamworlds was conceived as one long song. Aye, there are breaks between songs, but it listens as an album. And if you were at all interested in just one lick of the opener, there is no way you’re going to skip anything.
Add in some glitches, I go clickedy motherfucking click.
Yo, a band uses a word like “speculum” (tool for investigating bodily orifices), a new one for me, my ears prick up. Who said you can’t learn new shit listening to the dark arts?
5 tracks, none of them under 5 minutes, and a closer that’s nigh on that holy number of tha disciples minus that one suppositious asshole Judas?
Astral Alchemy crack round with some acoustics to, ya know, calm things down before the onslaught we knooow is gonna slam in more contagious than the clap; and they draw it out, but if you pay attention, they are also toying with their audience. Cos it is dreamy as fuck, that somnolent aside that seems simply serenity ordained.
Until the contrasting foil emerges. Some discordantly dissonant traces, some offbeat bleats – albeit miniscule, minute cautions and reminders that these fuckers know that the magician is interchangeable with the magus, with the joker, the harlequin, the fool, and that perfection is wishful thinking.
Well, that is until the headlong plummet into oblivion that is to ultimately transpire way after the first faux-drop.
Hey kids, you thought I was lying when I said you can learn pronunciation from black metal!? That new word got enunciated so nicely for all of us sitting in the back.
You know the band that you had hopes for, or the new album they made that you hoped would not have that universally reviled issue of “filller” …? Apparently people define interludes, acoustic and/or folk asides as filler, I’m an omnivore, I consume all.
The closer seems to run its course 4 minutes in; what’s the other 7 minutes for…? Don’t fucking tell me it’s FiLleR!? LMFAO. Please Baal’s ballz be bedizened with some hope of a lie filthier and more believable than another keys overture (best keys interlude on the best Dimmu album ever)? Please gawd?
Ah yeah, nah, it fucking fades just as presumed. My ears aren’t lying, it must be a hidden track.
Thanks to TigerclawTheDiabeticCat we got this jem on the old YT (10,000 Days played at the same time as Viginti Tres and Wings For Marie)
Get fucked sons and daughters (apparently my brain was on fire when I initially typed this up cos I knew there was a song reference, I just couldn’t place it… ended up being The Serpentine Offering… of course lol)
Astral Alchemy, it all is in the name – are here to arrive, not to bow out, and any good band knows a good show is only as good as its encore.
And that grandmotherfucking solo that you should wait for will probably either be in Islander’s infectious list or in a “transmissable” addenda somewhere if allowed. Yep. I’d put the whole goddamn album in there, but then, oh wait, that’s what AOTY lists are for, right? Apologies, I’m kinda ignorant to most things, lists included.
Good Writing – I tell my students (and you’re probably scratching your head thinking, “this motherfucker teaches ppl how to write!? god save us all…”) – just like good speeches, is all about tying everything back up with a good paraphrase in ellipse at the end.
Astral Alchemy picked the color of the amethyst not just for the association it has in many fans’ minds of supremacy. They end with the same harmonic note that rallied in the fury, to wave in again the acoustics and tranquil sphere of atmos you began this final track with. They chose purple cos they know what they just produced is up there in the realms of black metal royalty. Cos purple, if you didn’t know, is the color of all them inbred motherfuckers, the uhm ignoble royals of the world, which etymologizes back to French as “fit for a king” lol.
Gimp-ed by a mad anchorite pt.1
Post Script:
On the umptieth listen, thoughts implaced, conceptions re-placed, expectations soletaken-ed or d’ivers-ed; and only after 2.3 readthroughs plus the countless starts of Malazan Book of The Fallen, I only now realize and see the pattern in those shapeshifters’ nomen…
In an epic written to be reread, retread, and goddamn, I wonder how many series come close to the depth on rereads in prosaic- poetic- philosophical levels, the human level, being historically dense, intrepidly wrought, sinuously fraught with gut-wrenching humor in a dimension-quarked gossamer web stilted and petrified in an instant cosmic ice storm (a globe of gossamers spinning on an axis). If it seems left-field to once again plug my favorite fantasy series of all time: The answer is in the simple root of those words I used above.
Soletaken: soul taken. di’ivers: diverse…simple yet profound haha. Which is much the same for the album. And y’all, that is the uppermost ascendence of acclaim for He Who Wields Twin Scepters of Malice and He Who Walks Under the Blood Moon.
Astral Alchemy’s ‘Weaving Chilling Magical Dreamworlds’ is as life-affirming as Starer’s ’25 fucking opus Ancient Monument And Modern Sadness. That is if you don’t fall for the feint that is the opener of today’s alliterative orchestra… enough fireworks ensue in Weaving…’s 1st third to forgive the final drawn-out lull before it steps up a gear or sexdecillion into warpdrive.
I bow.
Gimp-ed by a mad anchorite pt.2
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