(written by Islander)
As we are prone to do, more often than some literal-minded visitors approve of, we’re about to premiere a song that’s an extravagant exception to the command in our site’s title, and it arrives through the good graces of the mercurial Roman band Night Gaunt.
The name of the song is “The Deer and the Hunter“, and it’s the second track to surface so far from their new album Rupture, which will be released by Aural Music on November 6th.
Rupture follows Night Gaunt’s last album The Room by nearly eight full years, and we’ve read that it is the product of years of relentless reworking and reinvention. The circulating press materials describe the outcome in these words:
Doom metal remains its beating heart, yet the album moves with quiet confidence through desolate acoustic passages, haunted folk melodies, post-punk shadows, and industrial unease. These seemingly distant worlds converge into a work that feels less like a collection of songs than a solitary passage through fractured inner landscapes, where beauty reveals itself in decay and light exists only because darkness gives it shape.
Night Gaunt vocalist Giuseppe Colio has quite a malleable voice, and he shapeshifts it in eye-popping ways as “The Deer and the Hunter” undergoes its own surreal, genre-jumping transformations. Revealing an impressive range, which extends into explosive falsetto highs and descends into sinister near-snarls, with a lot of vibrant singing in between, the vocals play a key role in the song’s diabolical push and pull.
The music’s other ingredients are of course equally vital in creating such a strange yet seductive experience. They include slowly slashing and squirming guitars and keys with a high and haunting sheen, but also beats that jump, skip, and rock. The song also includes nimbly grumbling bass notes, bursts of bright discordance and horn-like fanfares, and an urgently throbbing pulse that provides the grounding for a sorcerous guitar solo and the dance of spectral haunted-house keys.
The music continually changes pace, intensity, and moods. It will get heads and feet moving, but is equally likely to pull people off-balance. There’s a measure of despair in the music, but it’s leavened with measures of chilling menace, fiendish glee, and soaring extravagance (or at least that’s how this listener hears it).
Don’t be surprised if it gets stuck in your head too.
Aural Music will release Rupture on vinyl LP, jewel-box CD, and digital formats (see the links below). We’re also including a stream of the previously released opening song on the album, “Of Clouds and Gleam“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://nightgaunt.bandcamp.com/album/rupture
https://www.auralmusic.com/
NIGHT GAUNT:
https://www.facebook.com/nightgauntdoom
https://nightgaunt.bandcamp.com