Sep 082020
 

 

Much is unknown about Teratolith. Its members are anonymous, their location a mystery. But what has already become apparent is that they are powerful necromancers, adepts at the creation of musical horror-scapes that engulf and submerge listeners within their frightening, avant-garde hybrid of black metal, death metal, and ambient mysteries. Last year and this year the band digitally released their first two EPs, Eclipse I and Eclipse II. And on September 25th Brucia Records will be releasing them together on an album-length CD and tape edition, also entitled Eclipse.

While much remains mysterious about the band — and intentionally so, because (as the label explains) their objective is to disconnect their creations “from virtually any other aspect of the mundane world” — Brucia has disclosed that the overarching purpose of the project is to “explore the obscure realities behind and beyond the physical dimension”, to create “unique and excruciating meditations on the occult as seen through the eyes of Death and Chaos itself.” Continue reading »

Sep 082020
 

 

As we all continue to struggle through the disturbing tremors and ruinous upheavals of this plague year, it becomes almost second-nature to view art of all kinds through the lens of this experience. That urge is irresistible in the case of “Suspended Alive“, the song we’re premiering today, through an evocative video, from the Roman doom/death band Invernoir’s debut album The Void and the Unbearable Loss. It does seem like this strange time has suspended life, as well as taken it, leaving us to wonder when a decent life will resume and what it will look like when (if?) that happens.

Even more than the title of the song, the music itself creates moods of uneasiness and longing, of turbulence and loss — a sense of grasping at memories while waiting for life to resume, but with an ominous sense that those are all gone forever and that the idea of moving forward is a fool’s dream. Continue reading »

Sep 082020
 

 

(We present Comrade Aleks interview of Adolfo Cantoya, guitarist of the Basque Country band Hex, accompanied by the live performance photos of Panda Queen.)

Hex is a relatively new band from Bilbao, Basque Country, as it was started about eight years ago, but the band’s core is built by gents who have years of experience playing heavy music behind them. For example Hex’ vocalist Jonathan Pernía García started in the brutal death act Forensick back in 2001 and guitarist Adolfo Cantoya aka Drake did some thrash with Beer Mosh and From The Cross in the early ’90s. Together they’ve strode the path of death-doom since 2012, but it took five more years to record a new album after their debut full-length Deadly Sin (2014).

And so God Has No Name was released almost a year ago by Transcending Obscurity Records, but why not revisit this album together with Adolfo today? Continue reading »

Sep 072020
 

 

While I could go on and on about the devastating magnificence of Isolert’s new album, World In Ruins, at this point I only want to consider the three songs that close this astonishing record — a trio that includes the title track, which we’re premiering today.

That concluding trio begins with “Staring At A Path Towards Nowhere“, a song I’ve written about before when it first appeared (you can find it here), whose title neatly sums up the current age. Immediately electrifying, the song’s soaring, sweeping intensity is near-celestial in its blazing magnificence. To be sure, the vocals sound like rampaging demons in the depths of hell, but even those voices sound like glorifications (of great terrors).

The other dimension of the song, which emerges when the pace slows, is a feeling of crushing grief, delivered with stately solemnity and a sense of magnificence, but conjoined with screams of harrowing vocal intensity. The segue from that passage back into the heavenly firestorm is beautifully done, as is the reprise of sorrow that comes through a beautiful but soul-stricken guitar solo that extends through a glorious maelstrom of sound and brings the song to a heart-breaking close. Continue reading »

Sep 072020
 

 

The new album by the Romanian black metal band Akral Necrosis, their third overall and their first full-length in four years, is a narrative of more than an hour in length. Entitled The Greater Absence, it follows an ambitious, ignorant protagonist in his pathetic yet hazardous quest “to reveal the mysteries of the unseen and the afterlife”. Certain parts of the exposition were inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 legendary film Vargtimmen (“Hour of the Wolf”), and it further includes a guest appearance by the young Romanian poet David Topala, with an unpublished poem that is reproduced in fragments on three of the album’s tracks.

The album’s epilogue presents a terrible vision of the final destination of the human soul, and in this the band’s perspective “breaks with the concepts of heaven and hell, as well as with the belief that any form of consciousness is suppressed by death”. We’re further told that the narrative is also “an allegory of contemporary practices adopted more and more often in the mainstream music circuit that transforms black metal into a consumer product….” Continue reading »

Sep 072020
 


TOMBS (photo by Dan Higgins)

 

EDITOR’S CONFESSION: Is it possible? Could I have actually failed to post the second installment of this series by our contributor Gonzo on Friday, just like I was late in posting the first one? Even though it’s called NEW MUSIC FRIDAY? Hell yes! It’s true! I fucked up two weeks in a row! But I’m risking covid to visit a tattoo parlor today to have NEW MUSIC FRIDAY tattooed on my forehead so I’ll never forget again. Of course, when looking in the mirror it will read YADIRF CISUM WEN.

 

The show must go on.

Given the quality output so far in a year otherwise mired with seemingly every kind of imaginable strife dominating the headlines, you’d think those words were the mantra of every working band out there.

Some of those themes of the year, as it turns out, make for excellent and timely material to write songs out of. I have no doubt that we’ll start seeing more and more of it start to emerge as we trudge on through this supremely uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing timeline we’re living through. This week [Editor’s Correction: last week!] has dropped a few hints of what’s to come, with spectacular results. Continue reading »

Sep 062020
 

 

The “aggressive” sound of black metal — the blazing tremolo runs, the blasting drums, the shrieking and rasping vocals, the often abrasive levels of distortion — is one of the genre’s hallmarks. But black metal doesn’t always sound angry. Even when the aggressive sound is present and accounted for, the music can also seem dolorous, haunting, hysterical, or mystical (among other sensations). Today’s collection includes many of those other emotional touch-points — as well as fury.

NUBIVAGANT (Italy)

To begin, I’ve chosen two songs from Roaring Eye, the debut album by a one-person Italian project named Nubivagant. The album will draw attention because that one person is both Thorns and Omega, the drummer of Blut Aus Nord, Chaos Invocation, Enepsigos, Darvaza, Fides Inversa, and many other groups). Here, he performs all instruments, and he sings in a tenor voice. That’s right, these songs are exceptions to our rule, but well-earned ones because Omega really can sing. Continue reading »

Sep 052020
 

 

For me, this past work-week was much like the one before (and the one before that, and the one before that), i.e., I had to devote so much time to the fucking day job that I couldn’t keep up with the usual flood of new metal, much less pull together any new-music round-ups. This morning I spent some time trying to catch up, at least a little, and from that exercise I picked the following nine new songs and videos.

I arranged things in a particular way — beginning with something that’s rousing, then going down into sadness (verging on despair) with a block of songs that happen to include clean singing, then beginning to pull out of that mood with reminders that not not everything is horrible (and with music that’s more extreme), and then concluding with something that ought to perk you up again.

GAVRANOVI (Serbia)

Six months ago my Serbian friend Miloš pointed me to “Pjevanija prva” (“Cry of Yore”), the fantastic first song released by the Serbian band Gavranovi (a word that means “ravens”). I still know very little about the band, though now I know a bit more than I did then.

Gavranovi’s frontman is Nefas, who was the vocalist for the great black metal band The Stone for almost 20 years. A second member, Janković, who seems to be the principal instrumentalist, plays the gusle, a traditional horsehair-string instrument that dates back to the 9th century. And there are three more members, all of whom also perform vocals — Matković (who’s also credited as a guitarist), Sokolović, and Rančić. Continue reading »

Sep 042020
 

 

When we speak of an album as “ambitious”, we might mean different things — perhaps as little as a band simply trying to do something they’ve never attempted before, or perhaps as momentous as when a group reaches toward high levels of songwriting extravagance and performance intensity that, if successful, could leave listeners shaken or spellbound, or mentally and emotionally altered, to a degree that more commonplace achievements don’t achieve. On their new album Cosmogenie, Dysylumn’s ambitions are of the latter kind, but don’t stop there.

The album is also a massive work, extending in length to an hour and a half. And conceptually it spans three separate-yet-unified chapters, each one with its own cover art, with subjects that include (to quote from press materials for the album) “the creation of everything from nothing, in the immensity of emptiness; the formation of the primordial chaos, forming little by little the concretization of the elements; and these same elements that disperse in an infinite space until their extinction.” And thus the three chapters in the album are respectively named Apparition, Dispersion, and Extinction.

Of course, ambitions are merely goals. The loftier the ambitions, the greater the difficulty in achieving them and the higher the risk of failure. In the case of music, the test of success is in the listening. What we have for you today is a part of that test for Dysylumn, a premiere of the second Part of Cosmogenie’s second chapter, “Dispersion“, in advance of the album’s release on October 9th by Signal Rex. Continue reading »

Sep 042020
 

 

(This is Andy Synn‘s review of an expanded EP by the Detroit band Jesus Wept, released by Redefining Darkness Records on August 21st.)

Let’s make one thing clear. Apartheid Redux is, as you might have guessed from its name, not a totally new release, even though this is the first time it’s being featured here.

As a matter of fact four of these six tracks (glossing over, for now, the fun but disposable WASP cover which appears on some editions) were first heard on Jesus Wept’s appropriately crush-tastic and catchy-as-hell debut EP, Crushing Apartheid.

But, thanks to Redefining Darkness Records, who recently decided they’d be the ones to pluck the group from relative obscurity, the music from that record, along with two additional (and similarly killer) tracks is finally getting a much-needed and well-deserved wider release. Continue reading »