QUICK HITS: BEYOND CREATION AND BLOOD OF SERPENTS

 

Good morning ladies and germs. Or good afternoon. Or goodnight. Time zones are hobgoblins. Anyway, wherever and whenever you are, I have a couple of new songs to recommend. Not more than a couple because time is a hobgoblin, just like time zones. If I can tame it temporarily, I might have a couple more songs to foist upon you later today after I get some other things finished that I also hope you’ll enjoy.

BEYOND CREATION

Yesterday brought the unalloyed joy of a new Beyond Creation song. If you’re a follower of the band’s music, you’ll have a good idea what you’ll get — which is a whole lot of pulse-pushing, eye-popping fun.

 

 

“The Inversion” (which includes guest vocals by Youri Raymond (Unhuman)) came our way packaged with a video, which is also lots of fun. It presents visions of the hooded band members (doesn’t everyone wear hoods these days?) deftly (and rapidly) manipulating their many-stringed instruments (MANY-stringed) to send forth flurries of rubbery bass-notes and darting guitar tones, or employing the drum kit as machine intelligences treat their hardware components when processing petaflops of data, precisely executing blinding flurries of percussive pneumatics.

The music is both aggressive and dreamlike, and although it’s as vicious as a hooded wolverine (I hear they’ve taken to wearing hoods, too), its main objective (and principal effect) is enthrallment at all times. Don’t fight it — it’s not possible to avoid at least a mild degree of rapture.

A parallel story unfolds in the video, alongside the hooded performances, in which the band members are freed from various forms of confinement by a mysterious cloaked (yes, and hooded) figure and led, mystified, to a remote, night-shrouded location, greeted by white-eyed, flame-spitting, bare-midriffed lovelies — but to what end?

“The Inversion” is taken from the forthcoming album Algorythm (not a typo), which will be released by Season of Mist on October 12th.

Find the inversion from the breach
Visualise the absence of time
Complex variations, multiple designs
Let the nature collide
Transmitting its unique way through….

Pre-Order:
http://smarturl.it/BCAlgorythm

Beyond Creation:
http://www.beyondcreationofficial.com
https://www.facebook.com/BeyondCreationOfficial/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BLOOD OF SERPENTS

What a lovely, colorful, infernal piece of cover art that is. Crafted by Khaos Diktator, it adorns Sulphur Sovereign, the new album by the Swedish black metal band Blood of Serpents, from which DECIBEL premiered the song “Devil’s Tongue” yesterday.

There have been some changes within the band since their first album (Black Dawn) four years ago. There’s a new drummer (Christoffer Andersson) who obviously has lightening in his veins, and a new vocalist (Thomas Clifford, also in Throne of Heresy, Abscession), who obviously wants to devour you raw. Guitarists Fredrik Nilsson and Kristian Roupe haven’t gone anywhere, nor has bassist Benny Åkeson, but Nilsson and Roupe seem to have changed musical directions over the last four years, not radically but noticeably. The results, at least as presented through “Devil’s Tongue”, are quite pleasing to this listener.

Well, “pleasing” is way too tame a word for this experience. It’s a blast furnace, super-heated and super-charged, usually rocket-fast and dialed-in for maximum obliteration. But apart from the sheer electrifying effect of the blinding speed and warlike vehemence of the song (and the scalding savagery of the vocals), what makes it so riveting is the high, soaring, delirious grandeur of the melody at its core — which is not easily dislodged from your brain once you’ve heard it.

Sulphur Sovereign will be released by Non Serviam Records on September 25th.

Pre-order:
https://non-serviam-records.bandcamp.com/album/sulphur-sovereign-pre-order

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