AN NCS INTERVIEW: OAK

 Interviews  No Responses »
May 092023
 

Photo by Catarina Rocha

(In February of this year Season of Mist released a mournful maelstrom of an album by the Portuguese atmospheric death/doom band Oak, and in the following interview Comrade Aleks discussed the accomplishment with Oak drummer Pedro Soares.)

Oak is a Portuguese duet founded in 2018 by drummer Pedro Soares and singing guitarist Guillermo Enriquez. The duet quickly recorded an impressive debut full-length Lone, with the four tracks included in the album sounding at the junction of atmospheric death-doom and funeral doom metal. The name of their new album, Disintegrate, corresponds to the name of the only, forty-five-minute, composition, which oddly enough was represented by two singles – four- and seven-minute excerpts — posted a couple of months before the release.

A one-track doom album is nothing new in itself, but Disintegrate is a brave and ingenious piece, and we made an attempt to dissect it together with Pedro. Continue reading »

BIG O(AK): OAK, OMEGA INFINITY, OAK PANTHEON

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 152023
 

(DGR was inspired to pick three particular albums from his backlog to review together, which is what you will find below the anime image above.)

Look, sometimes you lay out your “to listen to and potentially review” archives in such a way that the moment strikes you. This is one of those times where the exercise is likely to appeal to just me, and me alone, so indulge me, will you? as I crawl backwards to catch up with even more stuff that has managed to hit throughout the first quarter of this year. Sometimes you do it because the idea you had for the article photo is, in the long run, more than enough.

OAK – DISINTEGRATE

Portugal’s Oak are likely to grab people’s attention with their sophomore release Disntegrate. Their first for Season Of Mist – after debut Lone was handled by Transcending Obscurity – Disintegrate is a near forty-five-minute traversal through the roiling collision of the worlds of death and doom.

Ever-dedicated to their world-building, the two-piece comprising Oak have spent much of the lead-in to the release of Disintegrate painting their music with the visages of lumbering giants, collapsing mountains, and enough Misery to make a 1987 Barnes & Noble jealous. While the lyrical inspirations may be purposefully vague and presented as one large archival screed, the music is recognizably suffocating and slow, at times fitted more as “mood” than artistic piece. When the two lead videos for the album have the group drenched in either snow or fire – with little room for subtlety in between – then you certainly know that there is “something” present here that is going to grab people. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: SIEGE OF POWER, MEMORIAM, GOD DISEASE, OAK, UNFATHOMABLE RUINATION, DEVANGELIC, THUNRAZ, DAWN RAY’D, VELNIAS, LAMP OF MURMUUR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 142023
 

 

No, this isn’t a weather report on what’s happening in California this Saturday. The post title is just a sign that I decided to “go big” with today’s collection of new songs and videos.

The time it takes me to write up each day’s selections for our 2022 Most Infectious Song list (and surely you’ve been looking at those, haven’t you?) has prevented me from doing any “Seen and Heard” round-ups since January 4th, and consequently the pile of new things has grown to mountainous proportions. Hence the temptation to make this roundup a big one, even though what remains still looks like a mountain.

On the other hand, today IS a Saturday, and coming up I have both a work meeting and an NFL football playoff game I need to watch, even though the odds of our local team winning are remote, so to save time I’ve mostly dispensed with album art and order links, and cut back on the usual verbiage. I’ve organized these according to genre and style. Don’t forget I’ll have another column tomorrow, devoted to shades of black metal. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: WINDSWEPT, DOWNFALL OF GAIA, OAK, GOD DISEASE, INTO ORBIT, KRALLICE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jan 102019
 

 

Here are a few of the songs and videos that brightened and darkened my night. I encountered all of them in a rush of listening at full dark yesterday evening. Most of them appeared within the last 36 hours. If you’re like me, the flow of these songs will take you from a blazing high down into more cold and wretched depths, and then soaring again — and I’ll close with a stream of a new EP that was released by surprise last night.

WINDSWEPT

All three members of the Ukrainian band Windswept, including vocalist/guitarist Roman Sayenko, are also members of Drudkh, Precambrian, and Rattenfänger. Under the Windswept banner they released an excellent debut album in 2017 entitled The Great Cold Steppe (from which we hosted the premiere of a fiery song, “Shrouded In Pale Shining, So Sleeps Infinite Ancient Steppe”). Having been a fan of that album, it took about a nano-second for me to jump on the band’s new EP Visionaire when I discovered its existence last February, and (as explained here) found it to be powerfully moving as well.

Windswept now have a new album for us, which will be released by Season of Mist on February 8th. Its name is The Onlooker, and the first track in today’s collection is one released yesterday with the interesting title “Gustav Meyrink’s Prague“. (If you’d like to learn about Gustav Meyrink and of how his life changed in Prague, check this article.) Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OAK LIVE AT CASTELO DE SANTIAGO DA BARRA

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 022018
 

 

In the far northwestern corner of Portugal in the town of Viana near the Lima river estuary is a 16th-century fortress whose name is Castelo de Santiago da Barra. On the night of March 24th, in a chapel within the old castle, two talented funeral doom bands put on a memorable performance. One was Seattle’s Bell Witch, whose name has become well-known far and wide. The other is a Portuguese duo whose name is just beginning to spread. But what might now be only whispers about the band are likely to rise to an enthusiastic clamoring once more people discover their music.

That Portuguese duo, who have taken the name Oak, are both members of Gaerea, a tremendous black metal band who themselves have a new album on the horizon (you can hear the first single from the album at this location). Not long ago we had the pleasure of premiering a video for a live studio recording of an Oak composition called “Sculptures“, and today we present a professionally shot video of their set on March 24th at Castelo de Santiago da Barra. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OAK — “SCULPTURES” (LIVE AT STONE SOUND STUDIO)

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Mar 202018
 

 

On March 11, 2018, a Portuguese duo who have taken the name Oak entered Stone Sound Studio in Portugal and made a live recording of a composition called “Sculptures“. The performance was filmed, and now we present both the song and the video to the public for the first time.

Our interest in Oak began when we learned that the two men in the project are also members of the Portuguese black metal band Gaerea, whose debut EP was one of the best shorter releases of 2016 (and one we wrote about repeatedly, both before and after its release, including a post in which we named “Void of Numbness” to our list of the year’s “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs“).

But in Oak, the two participants have turned their talents in the direction of funeral doom/death — and what they’ve accomplished just with this one song is strikingly impressive. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: BESTIAL MOUTHS, MORNING MODE, OAK

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jun 302014
 

Here are three videos that caught my eye yesterday. In each case the music is different from what we normally cover here; those of you, for example, who are into the kind of aural terrors I posted in yesterday’s two Shades of Black offerings will probably turn away quickly. I’m normally just like you, though the three songs featured here have grown on me as I’ve watched the videos more than once. Yet the main reason I’m posting them is because I thought the films were very well done and made for interesting and effective interpretations of the music.

BESTIAL MOUTHS

I saw this group described as “one of Los Angeles’s premier goth/ darkwave/ synth punk bands”.  Not an enticing description. But then I saw an article on CVLT Nation that called the video “stellar” and the best one the author had seen all month. I admit that I was also intrigued by the still photo from the video (above) that accompanied the CVLT Nation article. Plus, the band’s name is metal.

An Italian visual artist named Francesco Brunotti directed the video. On the one hand, it just shows a woman (contemporary dancer Valentina Jalali) moving to the music in an abandoned building. On the other hand, she looks a lot better in corpse-paint and spikes than this guy:

 

 
Continue reading »