SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): VERBERIS, NOVAE MILITIAE

 

Let’s take a quick tour through the underground, shall we? Just to see what kind of carnage is happening down there right now, where the sun don’t shine and no one sleeps easy in their beds.

I collected music from 8 bands for this round-up. Normally I would have put all of it together in one humongous post. Today I decided to split it into four parts and scatter the parts around today in between the other things we’ve planned, which include a review and a bunch of premieres).

VERBERIS

If you have any kind of anxiety disorder, extreme fear of the unknown, clinical depression, or deep-seated paranoia, you probably shouldn’t listen to this first song. It’s such a brutally grim, tension-creating, tension-ratcheting, frightful experience that you’d better have your emotional moorings firmly in place before going into it.

 

 

It’s also 11 minutes long, so there’s no quick escape from its grasp. Most of the time, the music is heavy, heaving, crushing in its lumbering gait, and plague-like in its atmosphere. The vocalist’s horrific echoing howls underscore the terror that lurks in the shadows, and the terror leaps at your throat when the band unleash flurries of blasting drumwork and manic riffing.

You’ll come to a start-stop segmentation of the sound, which sounds like a prelude to something, and that something turns out to be an even more mind-warping display of guitar derangement and percussive assault and battery. Vast tar-pits of death and decay lie ahead after that, and Verberis drag you down into them by your hair. There are a few pretty, mystical notes at the end, but they’re not enough to save you.

The song is “Vorant“, one of two tracks on this Berlin-based band’s new recording, Vorant Gnosis, which will be released on May 18th. If you’re encountering Verberis now for the first time, check out our friend Craig Hayes’ review at our site of their 2016 debut full-length Vexamen.

Bandcamp:
https://verberis.bandcamp.com/track/vorant

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/verberis/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOVAE MILITIAE

After that opening song by Verberis, I didn’t see any reason to pull you out of the abyss. You’re already there, so I thought it best to deliver this next track now. This one is also really intense.

“Daemon Est Deus Inversus” is only one song from Gash’khalah, the second release by the French black metal band Novae Militiae. The massive moving front of toxic, grinding riffs and thundering percussion is almost overpowering, the vibrating, radioactive chords heaving gradually at first and then becoming more berserk. Swirls of warped, alien melody erupt from the gale like heat lightening triggered by an active volcano. The vocals resemble the howls of some nocturnal predator that has lost its mind from hunger. What an absolutely gripping (and unnerving) song!

Gash’khalah was released by Argento Records and Sentient Ruin on April 14th (vinyl, cassette, digital). I only just discovered it. I desperately want to hear more as soon as time permits.

Bandcamp:
https://sentientruin.bandcamp.com/album/gash-khalah
https://argentorecords.bandcamp.com/album/gashkhalah

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/novae.militiae/