SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): WĘDRUJĄCY WIATR, KLANEN, THE HOWLING WIND, SAPIENTIA DIABOLI, DREAD MAW

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Feb 062022
 

 

If you tuned in to Part 1 of this column earlier today you know that I had compiled an absurd amount of music to write about. In Part 1 I cut down the number of advance tracks I wanted to highlight from 9 to 6. That left 4 new albums, 3 new EPs, and 1 new split still on the proverbial table, and a vanishing amount of time to write about any of them today. I made some difficult choices, and am only able to provide short sketches of the ones I picked, but at the end of this post I’ll give you links to the ones I painfully omitted.

WĘDRUJĄCY WIATR (Poland)

Wędrujący Wiatr don’t move in a hurry. Six years have passed since their last album, O turniach, jeziorach i nocnych szlakach, and there was a three-year interval between that one and their debut full-length, Tam, gdzie miesiąc opłakuje świt. Their past music was so strikingly good that we don’t really need constant reminders of the band’s existence, but still, six years is a long time — which made the appearance of a new album last week even more thrilling. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): KRALLICE, TÓMARÚM, MORTE FRANCE, NIGHT BEHEADED, SACRILEGA, TOME OF THE UNREPLENISHED

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Feb 062022
 

 

This morning I gazed with bleary eyes at the choices I’d made for this column: 1 new video; 8 individual advance tracks; 4 new albums; 3 new EPs; and 1 new split. I had discovered and listened to all of them just since this time last week. The idea of actually writing about all of them was of course absurd, and even more absurd because I slept much later than usual this morning. What to do?

Well, I cut the group of individual songs (and one video) down to 6, which is what you’re now about to experience. As for the albums and EPs, I’ll have to cut those down into something more manageable for Part 2 of today’s column, though at the moment I haven’t yet figured out how to do that. Stay tuned….

KRALLICE (U.S.)

I’ve already said my piece about the tremendous new Krallice album Crystalline Exhaustion. Don’t let another day go by without listening to it if you haven’t already. Be sure to watch this next video too. It shows this uber-talented quartet live-recording the instrumental performances for the song “Archlights“. I found it astonishing. It’s as if we are witnessing a hive mind at work. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: KRALLICE, ANIMA HERETICAE, CHTHONIC CULT, “THRALL OF THE WINTER MOON” SPLIT, ENDLYSET

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Jan 312022
 

You may have seen that I prepared a long installment of our Most Infectious Song list yesterday. That effort cut into the time available for me to finish the column you’re now embarking upon, especially because I had to leave the house by mid-morning to keep another commitment. So, I’m a day late with this.

What you’ll find here is a recently released complete album, a new video from a previously released EP, a new advance track, a new split, and an album released almost two months ago that I just discovered. There’s more death metal in the mix than usual for this column, but it would be fair to call those entries blackened death metal.

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART II): PURE WRATH, IN APHELION, HELL MILITIA, SEPULCHRAL, OLDE THRONE, HELTEKVAD, FUNESTUS

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Jan 242022
 

 

I hope you saw Part I of this column yesterday, because in my humble opinion it includes a lot of great charred music. The same is true of this second Part, even though it doesn’t involve quite as many musical twists and turns as the first one.

PURE WRATH (Indonesia)

This Indonesian black metal project has been a favorite of mine since discovering the first advance track from its debut album Ascetic Eventide back in 2016. Since then the band has moved from a local label (Hitam Kelam Records) to Pest Productions (for the second album) and then to Debemur Morti Productions, which released the 2020 EP The Forlorn Soldier and will soon release the band’s third album Hymn to the Woeful Hearts (which includes drumming by ex-White Ward drummer Yurii Kononov).

The second single from the new album, “Presages From A Restless Soul“, came out last week. I’d like to share the inspiration for the song as described by the band’s mastermind Januaryo Hardy: Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART I): KVAEN, CHAOS PERVERSION, BAALZAGOTH, CAILLEACH CALLING, TONGUES, YSYRY MOLLVÜN

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jan 232022
 

 

After exhausting myself yesterday preparing a 12-song round-up of new music and videos I thought I’d take it easy with NCS today, not completely abandoning the SHADES OF BLACK column but limiting it to about three songs. But after I started working my way through a list of possible choices I succumbed to compulsion. How could I leave this one off, or that one, or that one over there?

At the end of that agony I had 13 pieces of music I wanted to convey, most of them advance tracks from forthcoming records but with two EPs and an album in the mix. I arranged them as best I could and then chopped them into two parts. Here’s Part I (please apologize to your wallet for me).

KVAEN (Sweden)

In December I premiered a play-through video for the title track to Kvaen‘s fine new album, The Great Below. A few days ago a second song emerged, along with a lyric video. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: STANGARIGEL, KLUIZENAER, MUR, SCHAUER, A PREGNANT LIGHT, SIVYJ YAR

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jan 092022
 

It may seem like a paradox, but the less time I have to devote to preparing these columns the easier it is for me to do them. When I have a greater than usual amount of time, I listen to more music, I find more releases that I want to recommend, and then I struggle to whittle down the choices into a group that I can manage to write about in the time I have left.

That’s the situation I find myself in today. Because my spouse has been out of the house a lot over the last couple of days galavanting around with one of her visiting sisters, I plowed through a lot of new music. The listening sessions were a blast, but then I had to engage in a painful winnowing process. The results may be painful in a different way for you: Even after the winnowing, today’s column provides a lot to take in, and might put added pressure on your bank accounts if you find as much to like as I did.

Speaking of how much music I’ve included today, I narrowed the albums down to three new ones (which is still more than usual for these SOB installments), and then sprinkled in some advance tracks from forthcoming records, plus one new EP. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: HORN, PROMETEUS, STRAEGOR

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Jan 022022
 

 

Dead Week is dead and so is the old year. With a turn of the calendar page we’ve started another 365-day march into the unknown even though everything feels just as familiar as yesterday. Tomorrow will be more work or more school and definitely more covid, which is why I’ve always felt the first Monday of a new year is kind of depressing: What’s on the horizon that’s worth looking forward to?

Well, hopefully you can find something, perhaps some new music. I have some of that to share with you today, in this first Shades of Black for 2022 — which is more abbreviated than usual and probably more strange than usual too.

HORN (Germany)

Horn‘s new single “Alpenrekorder” is as majestic and as desolate as the alpine vistas in the accompanying video. The music is both uplifting and deeply melancholy, and carries a feeling of reverence in both of those aspects. It benefits from a guest cello performance and from Horn‘s own performance on another old instrument, which seems to be an hourglass-style mountain dulcimer (based on my own internet browsing). Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ESCHATOS, NASHMEH, ORDEM SATÂNICA, SUCCUMB

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Dec 262021
 

 

Whatever you did with yesterday, I hope it turned out to be a good one. In Friday’s round-up of new songs and videos I surmised that I wouldn’t post anything this weekend. But I got fidgety this morning, not like drug, alcohol, or nicotine withdrawal, but itchy enough that I wanted to scratch it, that itch that comes from having missed a day of posting something for NCS. So here I am.

The morning’s half-gone already, a function of sleeping in and then staring for a while at how the overnight snowfall changed the look of everything where we live (e.g., the photo above), so I’m just foisting a handful of quickly chosen singles at you. After this I’m going to listen to some of the black metal selections that will appear in the final installment of Neill Jameson‘s year-end lists for NCS, an installment he calls “The Top Shelf“. You’ll see that tomorrow if you come back here. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: USTALOST, DIABOLISCHES WERK, CLAMOSUM, VALRAVNE

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Dec 192021
 

 

News flash: If you don’t get shit-faced at night, sleep half the next day away and wake up with a crippling hangover, you can get more stuff done. Unlike last weekend, I didn’t do any of that this weekend. Turns out that parking on the couch with snoozing cats and watching movies while sipping moderate amounts of booze works out a lot better when it comes to writing for NCS the next day. And so I got this column done in time to blacken the sabbath, as usual.

The following selections are a reminder that lots of new music is still coming out near year-end, even though it’s less likely to get noticed now. We still have the winter solstice ahead of us, and especially in the pagan-influenced realms of black metal we’ll undoubtedly see a surge that day, even with only 10 days left in 2021 at that point. By all means, enjoy all the YE lists that are coming out here and elsewhere, but don’t completely take your eyes off what else December is bringing us.

USTALOST (U.S.)

Anything connected to the NYBM band Yellow Eyes is going to be worth a listen, and that’s certainly true of Ustalost, even if you missed the project’s tremendous full-length debut in 2016 (The Spoor of Vipers). The connection in this case is that Yellow Eyes vocalist/guitarist Will Skarstad is the man behind Ustalost. Under the Ustalost name he released a new album named Before the Glinting Spell Unvests on December 17th (via Gilead Media). Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): HÄSSLIG, DET EVIGA LEENDET, TERMINARCH

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Nov 292021
 

Somehow civilization didn’t collapse yesterday when I failed to post the usual Sunday SHADES OF BLACK column, though it did leave a black hole in our site for the day. I had plans for most of the day outside the house that took me away from my computer, and I unexpectedly slept in, so didn’t have time to get it done before departing.

My tentative selections for the column as of yesterday were extensive, which also contributed to my inability to get it done. I thought about cutting back the size of the column today, in an effort to make sure I got it done without further delay, but decided to hell with that. So here it is in all its humongous, twisting and turning, glory, though with only compact commentary — and divided into two Parts, with the second Part projected for tomorrow.

HÄSSLIG (Spain)

Dissociative Visions/Mystískaos sent out messages over the Thanksgiving holiday announcing four new releases, accompanied by music premieres. Three of those are targeted for release in February, but Hässlig‘s debut album is out now in full. Well, it’s called a full-length, but it falls just shy of 19 minutes across 8 tracks. Its name is Guillotine, and that turns out to be an evocative description; it drops, and heads will roll. Continue reading »

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