Zeit
I just woke up. Over the last couple of days my fucking day job has interfered with my ability to blog as much as usual (and it will do that again today), plus I’ve had some personal stuff to deal with as well. The net result is that we only had two posts yesterday, and I wasn’t able to write anything last night to schedule as our first post for today.
I do have an idea for a post collecting some excellent new abrasive sounds that rose up from the underground and battered my head over the last 24 hours, and we will have a song premiere today as well. But it will take me some time to get those ready.
In the meantime, I wanted to leave something here to entertain you. And I found just what I needed with my first glance of the day at our exploding e-mail in-box.
This is a new video for a song called “Verloren”, which is the second track off the new EP by a band from Leipzig, Germany, named Zeit. The EP, entitled Gram, is the band’s fourth release overall.
The video was filmed in an abandoned coal power station in East Germany, and this was a DIY project, with the filming and editing handled by Zeit’s guitarist Fur. Lots of bands and labels would pay handsomely for a video as good as this one; I hope at least the other guys in Zeit bought Fur a few rounds of beers.
As I watched the video, I thought of it as a modern equivalent of the ruins made famous by Shelley’s famous sonnet about that long-forgotten “King of Kings”, Ozymandias (which I’ll paste below, for the hell of it).
As for the song itself, “Verloren” is grim and foreboding but also pulse-pounding. Composed of lethal riffs that seethe and hammer, compulsive drum rhythms with a natural sound, and the kind of vile vocals that resemble the final fury of a man being strangled with barbed wire, the song is a predatory piece of black metal with a punk vibe that also proves to be poisonously addictive. I’m looking forward to checking out the rest of Gram.
Hope you enjoy the video as much as I did this morning. I’ll be back here fairly soon with something else.
All of Zeit’s releases are available on Bandcamp (see the link below).
https://rumsdiezeit.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/RumsDieZeit
Ozymandias
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”