SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: KLEXOS, SARIN, KARNAR, ISHTEMBASHTOK, WARM GADGET, BESTIA ATER, FULCI, CELESTIAL SANCTUARY

 

As I was trying to go to sleep last night I mentally fidgeted about what I was going to do for NCS today. The problem was that last week I didn’t have the time or patience to go through our e-mails carefully or do the other things I usually do to sniff out new songs and videos that would be fodder for a round-up. Most weeks I have long lists of possibilities to check out by now. As of last night I had made no such list.

As I tried to find sleep, I grudgingly resolved that I would have to spend a few hours this morning doing what I’d failed to do since last Monday, and make that list — and then start listening. I had to trash that idea this morning when I realized I had slept for 10 hours and that a big chunk of the morning was already gone. So, making the big list of newly released songs and videos will have to wait. Here, I’ve picked from things I already knew about a week ago, and added just a couple of songs more recently recommended to me by valued sources.

KLEXOS (U.S.)

“Obfuscâre Veritas”, the first song now up for streaming from Apocryphal Parabolam, the new album by Kentucky’s Klexos, is dissonant and deranged, twisted and ever-twisting, brazen and brawling — and generally berserk. The vocals display a lot of harrowing dynamism as well. The song exhibits impressive technicality, which is necessary, given how wildly and rapidly the music veers and careens. It will also give you a vigorous beating, which you probably deserve.

The second song, “Astathmêta”, is more melodious, moody and almost self-reflective at first and eerily glorious later, but not without its own magnificently unpredictable and insane machinations. It also delivers more beatings; undoubtedly you deserve those too.

(Thanks to Rennie [starkweather] for urging these breath-takers upon me.)

https://klexosband.bandcamp.com/album/apocryphal-parabolam
https://www.facebook.com/KlexosBand

 

 

 

 

 

SARIN (Canada)

Now I’m turning to a trio of videos, beginning with an especially nightmarish one created by Jakub Moth for “Thick Mire”, a song off the just-released album You Can’t Go Back by the Canadian post-metal band Sarin. The song is mysterious, alien, and disturbing at first — and then the little groove from that introductory section becomes A REALLY BIG GROOVE, one that mercilessly slugs you in the gut while it feverishly jitters at the same time.

Great drumwork throughout, and the braying guitar excretions create a feeling of livid mayhem. The band pull the plug on that body-racking groove so as to fuck around with your mind for a bit with buzzing and ringing tonalities that together create a creepy yet enticing audio hallucination. Then they go after your lizard brain again, and there’s no stopping them.

http://smarturl.it/Sarin
https://www.facebook.com/sarinofficial/

 

 

 

 

 

KARNAR (Italy)

I’m not much of a poker player because I’m not a very good one. Back when I was still trying, I was dealt some truly wretched flops in Texas Hold ‘Em, but nothing like the badness of the cards in the brilliant new video for Karnar’s song “Till the End”.

I guarantee you will enjoy the video. You should also enjoy the band’s infliction of brutish and maniacal musical punishment — their hammering percussion, their darting and relentlessly jackhammering riffage, their braying chords, their guttural roaring and hair-on-fire screaming, their freakish soloing. It’s an evil thrill-ride that will get your adrenaline flooding and your crooked toes tapping. (It seems the video was designed and created by the band’s composer and guitarist Marius — truly a man of many talents.)

https://www.facebook.com/karnarband

 

 

 

 

 

ISHTEMBASHTOK (Belgium)

Ishtembashtok found the perfect animated video for his strange but enticing amalgam of looping, hook-heavy beats, howling vocal madness, and swirling, screaming, incinerating cacophonies of sound. Welcome to a rave in hell.

The song is “Kermis in de hel”, from a forthcoming album named Transylvanian Hangover 🙂

(Thank you Milos for pointing me to this mixture of entrancement and derangement.)

https://ishtembashtok.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/Ishtembashtok-111319613771192

 

 

 

 

 

WARM GADGET (U.S.)

Speaking of people who will have an intimate relationship with your lizard brain, allow me to introduce Warm Gadget from Bend, Oregon. They look dapper but also slightly demented and degraded in their band photo. Their song “New Industry“, the first single from a forthcoming EP, is, as its name implies, a beast of industrial metal that thunders, whines, pulsates, and cuts like a blizzard of razors. The vocals are close to singing, but not too close (and they get further away as time passes). There’s more than a little nostalgia to be found in this track, and your lizard brain will love it too (sitting still is not an option).

https://warmgadget.bandcamp.com/track/new-industry-2
https://www.facebook.com/warmgadget

 

 

 

 

 

BESTIA ATER (Bulgaria)

Bestia Ater‘s new song “Div E Sefid” is home to some punishing, pile-driving grooves too, but along with that they inflict heavy doses of crazily squirming leads, bubbling bass notes, galloping beats, and barbarous vocal savagery, while adding in a shrieking guitar solo for good measure, as if the song weren’t already deranged enough. This marauding, bone-smashing death metal will get your pulse rate firing on all cylinders.

The song is the opening track on Bestia Ater‘s new album Anno Bestia Chrysallis, and if you let the Bandcamp player below continue to go, you’ll hear the rest of it.

https://bestiaater.bandcamp.com/album/anno-bestia-chrysallis
https://www.facebook.com/BestiaAter.deathmetal

 

 

 

 

 

FULCI (Italy)

And now we’ll take your pulse rate down with “Paura“, but make it quiver with fear at the same time. The song proceeds in a measured stagger, with a beat something like a slowing heart. Long chords ring out, fashioning a sensation of misery, creeping closer to desperation. The song begins to hammer in more livid fashion, and then the double-kicks come in, while the guitars begin to wail. You’re left with teeth-on-edge feedback and a collage of voices and ambient sounds that sound like we’ve been ushered into a torture chamber.

“Paura” is the Italian word for “Fear” (which will come as no surprise at all after you listen to the song) and it is one of the bonus tracks included in Fulci’s remastered 2015 debut album Opening The Hell Gates, which is being released by Time To Kill Records on April 2nd.

https://fulcicult.bandcamp.com/album/opening-the-hell-gates-remastered-edition
https://www.facebook.com/fulciband

 

 

 

 

 

CELESTIAL SANCTUARY (UK)

I’ll end this round-up with “Soul Diminished”, the first advance track (which is also the title track) from a debut album by Celestial Sanctuary from Cambridge in the UK. I have already put it on my list of candidates for our 2021 Most Infectious Song list (some other tracks in today’s collection may go there too).

What we have hear is a morbid and horror-strewn piece of music that stomps so hard and so heavy you can imagine the floor beneath you fracturing and caving in. The rabidly howling vocals don’t come in until about the minute-and-a-half mark, at which point the music becomes a conjunction of titanic pounding and earthquake upheaval. The song occasionally shifts into a higher gear as the riffing emulates a mass of piranha in a feeding frenzy. But at no point do the band back off their determination to bludgeon your skull and spine into splinters. It’s the kind of primitive, primal, and grisly dose of dread and devastation that you don’t easily escape from.

The album will be unleashed on March 26th by Redefining Darkness/Church Road Records (Vinyl/CD) and Sewer Rot Records (Cassette).

https://celestialsanctuary-uk.bandcamp.com/album/soul-diminished
https://www.facebook.com/Celestial-Sanctuary-102967897880008