I have a lot to recommend today. I made some of these choices and wrote some of these words earlier in the week. I have to hurry through the rest of it this morning because a wind storm is in progress outside and the branches bombarding the roof are beginning to sound like a war zone.
Cozy inside, I can tolerate that, but where I live near Puget Sound the power lines are overhead, cradled by forest limbs, and when the limbs go down (as they will, somewhere on this little grid), the power and the internet will go out too. So, I’m hurrying now….
SATYASENA (U.S.)
The first song I chose is just gloriously wild, a high-speed roller-coaster for your mind that should leave it yelping with glee.
If I were a kinder person and more capable of self-restraint, which I’m not, I’d just stop there and not spoil the fun, much of which comes from being surprised by what happens in the song. On the other hand, I doubt that any preview words can really spoil the thrills of “My Passion“, so here goes:
Prepare for music that crashes and batters, squiggles like worms and blares like horns, with vocals that trade off between something like a madman’s fanatical yells on an urban street corner and sheer screaming lunacy, with tiny bits of singing for good measure.
The frantic-but-controlled drumming somehow continues seizing attention in the midst of a fantastically elaborate array of musical tones and freaked-out fretwork and keyboard contortions. How it was executed is a gasping marvel. How it all hangs together is another marvel. Whenever you might feel your ass is dragging, this is a sure-fire antidote.
“My Passion” is the first single from this band’s self-titled debut album, which is set for release by Sympatry Records on January 26th. Satyasena is a relatively new band, but the identities of the participants should turn some heads:
Principally it’s the work of veteran drummer Pej Mon (from Secret Chiefs 3 and Ghoul), who decided to pick up and learn guitar/vocals from scratch for this project, in addition to playing drums. For the recording, he enlisted three different bassists — Jeff Matz (High on Fire, Mutoid Man), Joe Lester (Intronaut, Secret Chiefs 3), and Rusty Kennedy (Wax People, Red Fiction) — and keyboards and synths were handled by K.J. Karam (The Locust, One Day as a Lion).
For live performances the lineup is Pej Mon (guitar/vox), Caleb Schneider (bass), and Michael Malinowski (drums).
The album was produced and recorded by Toshi Kasai, and the attention-grabbing cover art was made by Mackie Osborne.
https://satyasena.bandcamp.com/album/satyasena-2
https://www.facebook.com/SatyaSenaBand
DAWN OF A DARK AGE (Italy)
If you haven’t caught the video for “I Regi Tratturi“, the first single off the new album from Dawn of A Dark Age, you should do that now (I already spilled a great volume of words about it here):
Now there’s a second single, “Il Gran Tratturo Magno“. With help from Google I translated the Italian lyrics, which accompany the video clip. In poetic terms they extol the graces of a shepherd’s track somewhere in the hills or mountains.
The music, on the other hand, isn’t pastoral. The drumming is mostly in full-riot mode, and so is the music. With scalding vocals in the mix (sometimes going at breathtaking speed), the unusual array of instruments convulses and sears, creating a glorious sonic whirligig — though there’s mystery and seduction in some of the instrumentation too.
And of course there’s a dramatically different diversion, when piano keys ring, an acoustic guitar ripples, and another instrument (perhaps Vittorio Sabelli on the clarinetto basso?) muses. All of that sets the stage for a harmonized clarinet melody that’s captivating — with another equally captivating but energized whirl to follow.
Nope, nobody else sounds like Dawn of A Dark Age.
The new album is named Transumanza. It will be released by My Kingdom Music on December 8th.
https://shorturl.at/enqyW
https://dawnofadarkage.bandcamp.com/album/transumanza
https://www.facebook.com/dawnofadarkage
OBSCENE WORSHIP (U.S.)
I happened to see an e-mail from this murderous Denver death metal band soon after it arrived earlier this week, at a break right in the middle of my listening session for things I might want to include in this column. I impulsively decided to see what they had done on their just-released debut album, Ordained to Infernal Depths, and was immediately hooked.
“Murder Amnesia” was a great choice for an album opener. That’s the one that set the hook. It has a creepy intro, and then begins a seizure. The drumming is exhilarating, and so is the nimble bass-work. The lead guitar blurts like a frantic pulse, squeals in ecstasy, and whirls about like dervishes. The riffing creates a convulsive sandstorm of sound and slashes like knives.
The adrenaline-propelled music is both crazed and technically impressive, and somehow the roaring, howling, and screaming vocals are just as crazed. The channel separation between the cavorting guitars adds to the eye-popping nature of the spectacle.
I thought that song would be right in line with the unorthodox spectacles displayed in the first two songs in today’s collection, and it certainly left me greedy to see what else these deviant Denver savants might do next.
Now hurrying, I’ll just say that the following eight tracks are usually every bit as wild and bamboozling as “Murder Amnesia“, and further signs of a band whose songwriting is as electrifying as it is intricate and exuberantly unhinged, and whose technical talents are truly dazzling.
There are a few breaks in all the mad-scientist mayhem, when the band give you a groove, and even create music that’s hulking and menacing (yet still discordant and deranged), or throw in a creepy interlude, similar to what they did at the outset. Those breaks will help you get through the asylum gauntlet of the album as a whole, though it’s the truly brain-contorting, high-speed adventures that make the album stand way out. Like the title of the last song, it’s a deranged epiphany.
Ordained to Infernal Depths was recorded, mixed and mastered at World Famous Studios with Pete Deboer, who has produced albums for Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice, Astral Tomb, and many others.
The e-mail I got also reported that Obscene Ritual will begin touring behind the album this week and have about 8 dates lined up where they’ll be playing in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. I found details at their FB page. If these people can even come close to doing live what they did in the studio, those shows should be well worth seeing.
https://obsceneworship.bandcamp.com/album/ordained-to-infernal-depths
https://www.facebook.com/obsceneworship
https://www.instagram.com/obsceneworship/
HOLDLAJTORJA (Hungary)
I would have checked out this next song simply because it’s from an album that will be released by Sun & Moon Records, because I trust their tastes, but in this instance I also reacted very favorably to this band’s previous release (their only previous release), a 2020 demo named Ab Oriente ad Occidente.
Reacting to that previous demo, I wrote that “these songs create disturbing dreamworlds whose facets appear and change like an obsidian gem slowly spinning in the air, lit by supernatural light”. I also wrote of the demo’s last song:
“It pours us back into some kind of opium dream, stripped of our mundane surroundings, parting veils that separate us from glimmers of some deeper understanding. Or maybe it’s just fucking us up, but that’s perfectly fine too”.
The song from the new Holdlajtorja album just premiered yesterday. Entitled “Eidos“, it includes head-snapping beats and throbbing bass lines but the riffing, which straddles a line between scratchy and bell-like, sounds narcotic. There’s theatrical singing here, which adds to the music’s psychedelic and ritualistic qualities, as well as slow and sinuous chime-like leads that seem to beckon with ghost hands.
But for those who want something more harsh, the vocals also include ragged guttural growls, like a beast being strangled, and guitars that unnervingly quiver in arcane harmonies of agony, or maybe a fatal ecstasy.
The name of the album is Arcana Et Tenebrae, and it will be released by Sun & Moon in February 2024.
P.S. The name of this Hungarian group translates to “moon ladder”, referring to one of the cryptic visions experienced by Danforth in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
https://www.sunandmoonrecords.com/new-signing-holdlajtorja-from-hungary
https://holdlajtorja.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/holdlajtorja
THE SEPT (Ireland)
After that last song I thought it would be appropriate to follow it with something a lot more ravenous, and to suit that purpose I picked the first two songs now streaming from an EP by this Dublin collective entitled MMXXIII.
Neither of these songs breaks the 2 1/2 minute mark. Just as well, since you might still want some flesh left in tatters on your broken bones and a few fragments of sanity to cling to.
The drumming in “The Endless Knot” hammers with an ardent will and triggers blasts, while the grimy riffing comes in manic bursts and vicious swarms and the vocals scream bloody murder — though near the end the music descends into a trough of sizzling misery.
The other song, “Fissures In That Which Is Reflected“, begins by pounding the crap out of the listener while dosing the brain with some kind of diseased audio ichor. Heaving and groaning, with bursts of tremolo’d illness in the mix, and of course further doses of monstrous vocal cacophony, the song is both brutish and ghastly.
MMXXIII will be released by Ireland’s Cursed Monk Records on December 18th. It’s recommended for fans of Full of Hell, The Body, and Napalm Death. With Philip Caomhánach as leader of the pack, the EP includes vocal contributions by Liam Hughes (Soothsayer, Procession of Spectres), Nick Vahdias (Evocator, Hessian Firm), and multi-disciplinary artist Suzanne Walsh, as well as Alto-Sax performances by Cathal Roche.
https://cursedmonk.bandcamp.com/album/mmxxiii
https://www.facebook.com/TheSeptmusic
MYAELIN (Belgium)
Time to get weird again.
I, Voidhanger Records has three albums set for release on November 24th and four more coming out on December 15th, though three of those four are already now streaming in full. I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t listened to any of the seven all the way through, which is why, if I’m honest, I’ve only picked this next one to write about here — because so far there’s only one song streaming from it.
That song, “Ego Ripper“, is from a four-track record named Naesekhnaetri. I, Voidhanger explains that it delves into the poetry of Aleister Crowley, and does so with improvised compositions recorded live.
“Ego Ripper” features paint-stripping screams and strident, high-flown singing, but also dense and weirdly maneuvering fretwork and rocking beats. The fretwork mutations do have an improvisational quality, and the rhythm section occasionally downshift just when the elaborate surrounding sounds get both even more hallucinatory and even more haunted.
If the band’s aim this time was to create music that’s both chaotic and mystical, it sounds here like they succeeded. As noted, Naesekhnaetri comes out on December 15th.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/naesekhnaetri
https://www.facebook.com/Myaelinism
SANGUINARY EMPEROR (U.S.)
And to conclude, here’s some music that, like Obscene Worship‘s far above, arrived by e-mail in very timely fashion. In fact, it was literally the most recent e-mail to hit our in-box this Saturday morning, the last one I saw before turning away to finish this column.
Two songs here on this demo, a rehearsal in the studio. The band say both of them will be part of an EP coming out sometime next year. They hail from New Jersey, with a three-person lineup that includes members of Cathedrals In the Night, Reeking, and Galare.
These two songs — “Cascade… Into Everlasting Night” and “Ruination Fires Burn” — are sonic nightmare fuel. The former proceeds at the pace of a funeral march and drenches the senses in eerie and abrasive sounds while horrid vocal expulsions echo from crypt walls. The filth-encrusted music seems to moan and wail in agony, with only the ring of cymbals to provide any glimpses of light.
“Ruination…” is no faster and no less suffocating and oppressive. It melds the mauling sound of rusted grinding gears in the low end and slow peals of agony above. The echoing vocals are again horrifying, adding to the song’s unearthly atmosphere. It puts you in the boat with Charon, crossing the Styx.
“Bestial Black Doom” is what the band call this music, and that’s a pretty fair descriptor.