AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DANTALION — “SOUNDS OF BELLS AND OPEN SCISSORS”

Aug 112023

Since the release of their debit album When the Ravens Fly Over Me in 2006, the Spanish band Dantalion have followed a winding path through time, one that has seen them release seven more studio albums and a compilation record across a changing array of labels.

It’s also a path that for a time led them away from their black metal origins and into music that Metal-Archives has characterized as “Melodic Death/Doom Metal”. However, with 2018’s The Seventh Wandering Soul they began returning to those black metal roots and did so even more decisively with 2021’s Time To Pass Away.

On September 8th of this year Non Serviam Record‘s will release this band’s ninth record overall, a full-length named Fatum that Dantalion call “the declaration of our comeback” and “the definitive confirmation of the true identity of the band”. There’s also a good argument to be made that it’s the band’s best work yet.

As evidence of that, what we have for you today is a lyric video for Fatum‘s second single, and what an evocative name it has: “Sounds of Bells and Open Scissors“.

Of course, funeral bells slowly toll at the outset, but then the sharp edges come out and the music flies fast, like an arrow straight toward the dead center of a bullseye. Thriving from the strength of a piercing production, the riffing rolls like vast tides of searing fire above hyper-speed blasting and heavy lo-frequency thrumming. The initial long scream from vocalist Sanguinist is shockingly intense, and his ensuing throat-splitting wails and howls, ragged and ruinous, are just as spine-tingling in their torment.

The words of the song portray humanity’s desecration of the earth in stark terms, but its protagonist also describes visions of their own corpse, and makes beseeching appeals to occult powers. The music itself is sprawling in its scale, channeling sweeping feelings of anguish and despair commensurate with the words. There are moments when the turbocharged drumming slows or vanishes, and in those pauses the guitars ring out like chiming laments, joined by those soul-shattering vocals, which hold nothing back.

And so the song isn’t just near-overwhelming in its gale-force, oxygen-consuming power, it’s also emotionally overpowering as well in its expressions of torment and suffering — and it’s a musical arrow that lodges itself very damned deep in the mind.

We also want to share again the first single from the new album. “Novena Wake Begins” is also a harrowing experience, again made even more so by the lyrics.

The wretchedness and agony that pour forth bloody from Sanguinist‘s vocals are again frightening in their intensity. The song’s great moving wash of melody is also powerfully distressing, like vast oceanic movements of pain sweeping inland. The drumming is usually full-throttle, but briefly morphs into different patterns, as only a slight distraction from the dire ringing of the guitars, which then become more magisterial in their manifestations of downfall.