SEEN AND HEARD: BAPHOMET’S BLOOD, AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED, BEYOND THE DARK, KZOHH

 

I have so much new music I’d like to tell you about, but not enough time for all the telling. Not for the first time, I thought about giving the tracks to the loris horde and letting them do the write-ups. Not for the first time, I came to my senses before it was too late. I’d still be waiting for their work product this time next year. So, with a sigh, I’ve randomly picked new music from four bands for now, and hope to write about more tomorrow (assuming I can finish a review I’m scribbling about something very surprising).

BAPHOMET’S BLOOD

On Saturday, Iron Bonehead Productions announced that on January 25, 2016, they will release a vinyl version of a new album by Italy’s Baphomet’s Blood. This is the band’s fourth album, and their first one in nearly seven years, and its name is In Satan We Trust. On they same day, we got the first advance track to stream, a whiskey-fueled rocker named… “Whiskey Rocker”.

 

 

Baphomet’s Blood (whose line-up includes members of the almighty Blasphemophagher) make no secret of the fact that they bow to the triumvirate of Motörhead, Venom, and Bulldozer. And in this new song (following a hilarious sample at the start), they’ll fuckin’ rip you a new one. Vocalist Necrovomiterror really does sound like Lemmy (but with not quite so much mileage on the vocal chords), the speed metal riffs are like bottled lightning, the guitar solo will lift your claws to the sky in praise, and the rhythm section hurtles along like a big semi-truck on hell’s highway.

Man, this is so damned good that I had a very hard time tearing myself away from it for long enough to write the rest of this post.

https://www.facebook.com/Baphomets-Blood-official-116241875112834
http://www.ironbonehead.de
https://www.facebook.com/IronBoneheadProductions

 

 

 

 

 

 

AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED

Yesterday, the intrepid NCS pigeon aeronauts delivered a press release to our compound, somewhat crumpled and moist with pigeon evacuations, but still legible. It proclaimed the joyous news that Agoraphobic Nosebleed will be releasing a series of four EPs via Relapse Records, and that the first one — entitled ARC — will be available on January 22, 2016. The press release further reported that each of these EPs “will represent the musical influences and tastes of each member”.

ARC will consist of three tracks totaling over 25 minutes of music, and it’s billed as a “sludge-fueled feast” that’s “heavier, doomier and more destructive” than anything ANB have done before (and it would appear to represent the influences of vocalist Kat Katz). That certainly peaked my interest, especially when I then learned that a trailer of clips from the EP had been posted to YouTube.

The excerpt in this video will probably take you at least partly by surprise — it did me — but I sure like what I hear, and want to hear a lot more. The first excerpt is a crusher, the second is a flamethrower, and the vocals in both are hair-raising.

Those interested in pre-ordering ARC should go here — or here:

https://agoraphobicnosebleed.bandcamp.com/album/arc

P.S.  The press statement said that on January 22,  Relapse also plans to reissue ANB’s Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope and Altered States Of America on vinyl.

https://www.facebook.com/AgoraphobicNosebleed/

 

 

 

 

 

 

BEYOND THE DARK

Beyond the Dark are a Roman band whose self-titled debut EP was released via Bandcamp yesterday. I intended only to sample a song or two to see what it was about, but was pulled in all the way, surfacing only after the sixth and final track had left me mangled, with severe neck sprain and oozing bodily fluids.

Beyond the Dark play melodic death metal without forgetting that the genre is still supposed to be death metal. There’s a feral and ferocious quality to the harsh vocals that don’t let you forget that, and neither do the scything riffs and bone-rattling drumbeats. But along with those core components of rampaging savagery, the songs do include melodies that stick in your head, astute changes of pace, and some huge, pile-driving grooves. The EP is also produced in a way that makes the music thunderingly heavy — scalpel-sharp to be sure, but with a low-end power capable of loosening your bowels.

For the most part, the music is full-throttle and bursting with energy, but the final track gives you a taste of something slower and gloomier, though still barbarous and memorable. Here and there, including on that final track, some somber clean vocals make an appearance, and you know what I think about that. But I’ve decided that in this case they work.

https://beyondthedark.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/beyondthedarkofficial

 

 

 

 

 

KZOHH

The Ukrainian black metal band KZOHH includes members of such other excellent groups as Khors and Reusmarkt, among others, and that was enough to draw me to a sample track from their just-released second album (via No Colours Records), Rye. Fleas. Chrismon.

This particular track is named “Alousia et Pestilentia Ignearia”. It’s more than 11 minutes long, and it’s excellent — very grim, very ominous, very alien-sounding, with an array of crazed voices muttering and screaming their poisonous ravings over the equally pestilential miasma of the instrumental music.

For much of the song, the music proceeds at the staggering pace of a funeral dirge, with mystic guitar notes and undefinable electronic sounds floating around like lost phantasms, and ambient keyboard melody drifting like clouds across the moon. But at the beginning and near the end, it moves like a whirlwind of knives, propelled by a metronomic drumbeat. At the end, you enter a narcotic dream, a hypnotic and hallucinatory finale to a strange yet gripping journey.

This avant-garde offering of black metal succeeds in being both spell-binding and disturbing, beautifully gloomy and nightmarish. This sounds like an album that will be well-worth exploring in depth.

To learn more about Rye. Fleas. Chrismon. (which is available on a limited-edition, hand-numbered CD), go here.

https://www.facebook.com/KZOHHband

http://www.no-colours-records.de