AN NCS PREMIERE: SITHTER — “CHAOTIC FIEND”

 

Chaotic Fiend is the name of the new album by the band Sithter from Tokyo, Japan, and it’s also the name of the album’s opening track. The song, in the band’s words, is “our invitation from hell”. And so it is.

While rooted in the traditions of sludge/doom bands such as Grief, Eyehategod and Buzzoven, Sithter push their music into realms where psychosis, violence, and psychedelic hallucinations reign. They’re bone-breakers and conjurors, equally capable of bending necks and administering psychoactive poisons straight to the bloodstream. The album’s title track, which we’re bringing your way, is a good example.

 

 

This invitation to hell begins in appropriately hellish fashion, with the wailing and shrieking sounds of violent voices and tortured guitars (or tortured voices and violent guitars), soon joined by a rain of lead-weighted riffs and spine-snapping drum beats. It seems like an introduction, but it’s a bludgeoning cacophony that goes on for nearly three minutes, a formidable way of tenderizing your flesh and cracking open your sanity, all the better to strip away your defenses in the face of the leviathan stomp that follows.

Not headbanging is not an option. While the vocalist tears his throat apart in raw brays and screams and utters deranged pronouncements, Sithter implement a campaign of enraged, pavement-splintering destruction, laced with feedback, distortion, and soloing that sounds like a banshee engulfed in flames. The end comes with riffs of doom, the music becoming slower, more diseased, groaning with the weight of catastrophe.

 

 

In speaking about the song, Sithter’s guitarist Hyo Kagawa shared these thoughts with us:

“We do not understand music well. We don’t know about musical theory or the progression of a song. I don’t even know the names of many chords or scales but I do know how to tune my guitar. So in singularities we find the key of the song and build something around it. Our sludge and doom predecessors of course influence us, but as we cannot play songs like them so when composing music and playing live we want it to be comfortably violent. It is awesome to see people squirming around to our dirty sludgy sounds and the opening track ‘Chaotic Fiend’ is our invitation from hell.”

 

Chaotic Fiend will be released on December 9 by Bonten Records. Here’s the full track list for the album:

1. Chaotic Fiend
2. I Drink Your Blood
3. Smoke Demon
4. Masque Of The Black Death 5. Lost Flowers
6. Empire
7. Punisher #13
8. Engrave The Misery
9. Jerusalem Axe Massacre

 

The song we’re premiering isn’t the only one from this new album that you can now check out now, before yelling at Sithter to take your money. “Masque of The Black Death” is streaming on their Bandcamp page, and so I’ve included that below. And the 16-minute closing track “Jerusalem Axe Massacre” is streaming at CVLT Nation (click this link to get to that).

To order Chaotic Fiend, go here:

https://bontenrecords.bandcamp.com/album/chaotic-fiend

 

 

 

 

For fans in Japan (or within manageable reach of it), Sithter will be on tour very soon with Serbian doom rockers Heretic Rites. Here’s the schedule:

23 Nov – Sendai Bird Land w. Magdalene Junen, Bergrabnis + More
25 Nov – Higashikouenji 20000V w. Magdalene Junen, King Goblin + Zothique
26 Nov – Oosaka Sengoku-Daitoryou w. Magdalene Junen, Necromantics, W.D.L.K. + Hemipenis
27 Nov – Nagoya Red Dragon w. Magdalene Junen, Vomit Monster, Viollante + Stone Banquet
29 Nov – Yokohama El Puente w. Su19b + Floaters
30 Nov – Shibuya Ruby Room w. Khola Cosmica + Dhidalah