DELIRIUM REIGNS SUPREME: PLOUGHSHARE, DESTROYER ATTACK, ERIPHION, LODGE OF THE EMPTY BED

 

Sometimes when you have no plan, the plan makes itself. A guiding hand intervenes, or if you’re not superstitious, you nod your head at the pleasures of serendipity and synchronicity.

I didn’t plan to make this post, but in searching for new music I happened, by a fortunate chance, to listen to the music in this post in the exact same order as I’m presenting it here. And it all seemed to fit together in a way that spawned the title of this post.

PLOUGHSHARE

Literature of Piss was the 2017 debut EP of this band from Canberra, Australia. In Offal, Salvation is the band’s 2018 debut album. “The Urinary Chalice Held Aloft” is the name of one of the tracks on the album. Perhaps you begin to get a sense of the band’s worldview.

 

 

I reviewed the EP here, and was mightily impressed by it. The EP tracks had no words as titles; the album does, and as you can already tell, they’re quite evocative. The first one made available for streaming, just yesterday, is named “Flesh Cleft Upon Writhing Altars“. It is a catalytic experience, and one that also subducts the listener, pulling us into a nether realm of madness, where we might indeed imagine the cleaving of flesh upon writhing altars.

The music blasts and races, the voice howls in violent ecstasy, the melodies themselves writhe like serpents and spiral upward like flickering flames. Just as you’re really getting caught up in the whirl of otherworldly lunacy, it ends… which is frustrating. Like a cliffhanger, it left me on the edge, wondering what will happen next.

In Offal, Salvation will be released by Impure Sounds on August 25th.

Bandcamp:
https://impuresounds.bandcamp.com/album/in-offal-salvation

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DESTROYER ATTACK

Solve Et Coagula is the name of the second album by Destroyer Attack, a black/death band formed in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and now apparently based in Medellin, Colombia. It will be released through Morbid Skull Records on July 13th.

“Fiendish energy and barbaric uproar, directly descended from the antediluvian hellscape” — those are some of the words employed in a press release we received in an effort to capture the atavistic assaulting power of the music. As displayed on the track “Purification to the Internal Fire“, Destroyer Attack mount their attack with a flurry of dismal riffing and pounding percussion as a prelude to a surge of boiling guitars, maniacal kit-work, and bestial growls full of murderous fury, made even more explosive by a shrieking solo.

It’s a lethal combination, somehow both deranged and cruelly cold, and there’s a febrile (and infectious) riff in the song that happily reminded me of one in Rotting Christ’s “Enuma Elish” — not the same riff, to be sure, but producing a similar ecstatic effect.

Bandcamp:
https://morbidskull.bandcamp.com/album/solve-et-coagula

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ERIPHION

Hossana is both the name of the debut EP by the Athenian black metal band Eriphion and also the word I exclaimed in my head after listening to it. An ancient word, it was originally an appeal for deliverance, but came to serve as an expression of joy and praise for deliverance granted or anticipated. In my head, purged of ecclesiastical significance, it just sounds like FUCK YEAH!.

The title track, which launches the EP, immediately sends megawatts of electrification rushing through the nervous system, its furious blast-beats, rapidly pulsing bass, and high, whirring riff looping over and over as the vocalist howls in imperious fashion. When the rushing violence subsides, the music becomes eerie and ominous, and the slow, jackhammering cadence will maketh your head to move up and down like a dying piston.

A kind of infernal eminence seems to rise up in perilous grandeur during that opening track before the band reprise the boiling madness that started it. In the remaining three tracks, they continue to display the same level of capable song-writing, while adroitly changing the moods and energies of the music.

“My Fate” (the EP’s most emotionally affecting track, along with the closer) houses a melancholy melody that soars, without abandoning that feeling of pain and loss; “Forever Me” is a grim and menacing pile-driver, ritualistic in its cadence and laced with shimmering tendrils of melody that help create the feeling of a luciferian black mass in progress; “The Forest” ends the EP in tour de force fashion, with solemn, mesmerizing, funereally paced music steeped in grief and gloom, the shrieking wretchedness of the vocals bringing to mind the madness of shattering hopelessness, the aching, rising trill of the lead guitar burrowing deeper and deeper, lingering long after the EP ends.

Hossana is a huge surprise, an unusually accomplished and multifaceted creation that sounds years ahead of what you might expect from any band’s first EP. It was released on June 23rd via Bandcamp, where it’s a “name your own price” download.

Bandcamp:
https://eriphion.bandcamp.com/releases

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LODGE OF THE EMPTY BED

A Bandcamp alert yesterday provided the news that Glossolalia Records (based in Eugene, Oregon) had just released an EP named Pacta Sunt Servanda by a project named Lodge of the Empty Bed. According to the Bandcamp page, Glossolalia’s Stephen Parker (The Will of A Million) recorded the EP in the Wilderness and was also session bassist; the band consists of instrumentalist/vocalist A False Memory and vocalist Pillar and Light, who also seem to have been involved in Grst and Maestus.

The three compact tracks on the EP fly by, but don’t sound alike. “Cognatio Naturalis” rips and rocks, with a feeling of blood-freezing delirium coursing through its poisonous veins. The vocals in that one are a shrieking nightmare, even more lunatic than the feverish psychosis that boils in the song’s most frenzied moments. By contrast, the vocals in “Ecclesiastical Law of Flesh” are a combination of grotesque roars that seem to come from a monstrous belly of hate and incinerating screams; while the music moves from grim, brutish hammering and scampering to a kind of wild, incandescent flare of sound, and back again.

The final track, “Natural Law of Flesh”, goes nuts again, blasting and flailing, with the acid-blasting vocals dominant once more. There’s a queasy, unnerving quality to the melody — and really, the whole EP is unnerving, but a well-concocted venture into a mind-razoring realm of loathing and degeneration.

The tape release of Pacta Sunt Servanda was sold out by the time of its release yesterday, but it’s available as a download.

Bandcamp:
https://glossolaliarecords.bandcamp.com/album/pacta-sunt-servanda