SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SAVAGE LANDS, LORD DYING, DEATH SCYTHE, MÊLÉE DES AURORES, VOLTUMNA, STUVEMARK, COMPRESSION, SLIIMO, VOODUS

LOTS of new metal to get to today, so this sentence is all the introduction I’ll provide.

SAVAGE LANDS (Int’l)

A charity project whose goal is to help preserve the forests of Costa Rica and the creatures that live there. Founded by drummer Dirk Verbeuren and musician-turned-activist Sylvain Demercastel (a current resident of Costa Rica). First song is about howler monkeys and features appearances by guitarist Andres Kisser (Sepultura) and vocalist John Tardy (Obituary). OK, I’ll bite.

Very glad I bit. The video for “The Last Howl” is wonderful. The performers you’ll see, in addition to those named above, also include vocalist Poun and bassist Etienne Treton, both of them from the French band Black Bomb A.

As for the song, it’s a multi-faceted piece, heavy and steeped in gloomy grandeur, but also emotionally intense (thanks largely to Tardy‘s throat-ripping screams), and with feelings of desperation in the music too. Poun‘s somber singing voice creates an appealing contrast, and Kisser‘s soloing is epic. Perhaps needless to say, given the people in the rhythm section, it packs a hard punch too.

Season of Mist is supporting the project, and Decibel helped spread the word by premiering the video.

To learn more about the project and to donate to the non-profit Savage Lands project, click the first link below. We’re told more songs will be on the way next year.

https://savagelands.org/donation/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100081754354224

 

 

LORD DYING (U.S.)

“The Endless Road Home“, which arrived with a mind-bending visualizer, is the second advance song from Lord Dying‘s new album Clandestine Transcendence, which will be out January 19th on MNRK Heavy. I thought of it as kind of a head-moving, leg-bouncing mash-up of dark post-punk, prog, and psyche. Got stuck in my head fast, especially the sung-chorus and the glorious soloing that eventually followed it.

So I made my way to their video for the first single, “I AM NOTHING I AM EVERYTHING“. The drum solo in the opening set the hook this time, and it has other hooks lying in wait (including some compulsive industrial-strength grooving), though it’s a damned sight more intense and deranged than the newer track (no singing in this one, for example), and thus more in line with what I was expecting from this band.

https://lorddying.bandcamp.com/album/clandestine-transcendence
https://lorddying.ffm.to/facebook

 

 

DEATH SCYTHE (Mexico)

In this next song the band wear their Swedish melodeath influences on their sleeves (with the likes of At the Gates, older Arch Enemy, and Amon Amarth at the forefront), even though they’re from Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

But though “Final Ascent” is an old-school homage rather than an invention, it’s still a lot of highly infectious fun to listen to, well-written and capably performed, and features fiery and seriously ferocious vox. Death Scythe‘s location also makes for some very good settings for the video that accompanies the music.

https://deathscythemx.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/DeathScytheMetal

 

 

MÊLÉE DES AURORES (Canada)

Time to get more extreme. I caught up with this next song thanks to a recommendation from Rennie (starkweather). He called it “black metal with a thrash elements gone dissonant a la Voivod“. The band’s label, Sepulchral Productions, summed up the band’s new album as “brutal, disorienting and suffocating Black Metal, landing somewhere between Blut Aus Nord, Portal and Deathspell Omega“. Before listening, I was also intrigued by the label’s reference to “piano, contrabass, violins, keyboards and other mutilated instruments”.

This song, “Soleil des méduses” wastes no time going into a seizure of manic drumming and ill riffing that heaves and writhes. It’s like being thrown into an elaborate nightmare vortex of queasiness and violence, with a growling demon beast on your back, using its voice as claws.

The nimbleness of the bass, the eye-popping escapades of the drums, the unexpected tinkling of piano keys, and the alien collage of sounds that unfold in an off-pace instrumental interlude add to the music’s bizarre fascination.

Mêlée des Aurores turns out to be side project of from Blanc-Feu and Cadavre (Cantique Lépreux, Chasse-Galerie), with a previous album released 15 years ago. The title of the new one is Aube cannibale. It’s coming out on November 23rd. Can’t wait to hear the rest.

https://www.sepulchralproductions.com/collections/tickets

 

 

VOLTUMNA (Italy)

Staying in the more extreme frontiers of the metal-verse, my next pick is the first single from a forthcoming EP by this Italian blackened death metal trio, accompanied by an intriguingly arcane video. I had it somewhere on my voluminous list of things to check out, but moved it up thanks to a link from Miloš I received.

What you’ll encounter in “Black Science” is a beastly experience, one that’s hulking, brutish, and sinister, but also whining and braying — and unexpectedly it digresses into a kind of proggy, mystical, and melodious mid-section.

The band’s EP is named For Death Is Fate. It comes out on January 19th. The band acknowledge that it marks a new musical direction for them.

https://voltumna.bandcamp.com/album/for-death-is-fate
https://www.facebook.com/voltumna

 

 

STUVEMARK (Sweden)

Håkan Stuvemark has a multitude of solo projects and bands as outlets for his prolific creative impulses, but one of them is just named Stuvemark. In August he released a first EP under that name, Torment of the Wretched, and more recently he discharged a new single named “Deathbringer“.

That EP was an electrifying death metal mauler — maniacally fast, blindingly fleet-fingered, and barbarically ferocious, with ravenous vocals, but threaded with moody and miserable melodic accents and segmented with pile-driver grooves.

The new single is in line with the style of turbocharged melodic death metal that fueled the EP, but it propels things even further into the red zone. The riffing sounds like the superheated frenzies of a carnivorous insect swarm that will leave only clean bones when they’re finished. The drums blast and brutalize. The lunatic leads spiral skyward, and the vocals match the violent lunacy of everything else. Yet the soloing in this one is more sublime than insane.

Take big gulps of air before you hit play on this one.

https://wombbathofficial.bandcamp.com/track/deathbringer
https://wombbathofficial.bandcamp.com/album/torment-of-the-wretched
http://www.facebook.com/wombbath

 

 

COMPRESSION (U.S.)

If you’ve visited us on Saturdays before, you know I do enjoy providing lots of twists and turns in the playlists I compile, and so we twist again.

Like that Mêlée des Aurores song up above, this next one also came my way from Rennie, and like that previous song he again dropped a reference to Voivod — but this time also included references to Clutch and Tool.

What’s coming is a recently released demo from this long-running Baltimore band, three tracks in all. The music is heavier than tectonic plates and delivers kidney blows hard enough to leave you pissing blood. But the music goes off on all sorts of unpredictable stylistic directions, as do the vocals.

Sometimes it sounds like the heaving undulations of a world serpent, at others like the ecstasies of an asylum celebration, and at others like someone drugged your drink when you weren’t looking. The vocals veer from violent hardcore yells to sludge-metal screams to a variety of singing styles.

Go ahead, give your head a swift spin, then make time to find it again.

https://compression.bandcamp.com/album/demo-6
https://www.facebook.com/compressionland

 

 

SLIIMO (U.S.)

The NCS in-box receives 200-300 e-mails a day (seriously). For most of them I can’t make it past the subject lines. I read a recent one from Sliimo guitarist Pitt Prota (aka Spencer Davis) because the subject line included the words “(Star Wars Inspired Sludge Metal w/ Huttese Lyrics)” and because its first paragraph included this line:

“[W]e’re seeking a review on the No Clean Singing website; given that our lyrics sound like they’re coming from the raspy gargling throat of a horrific alien slug monster, it’s safe to say that we have a lot of shared interests.”

So yeah, I decided to listen to the self-titled debut EP from these Rhode Island nerds (their word, not mine), which was released by Tor Johnson Records on October 27th.

In some ways, this fits pretty well with that Compression EP above. It’s capable of getting very heavy and very woozy, woozy enough and bleak enough to blend in with the more narcotic forms of stoner metal, with ragged braying vocals to match, and it also displays some Voivod-ian weirdness.

The sharp crack and pugilistic thud of the drums bring some added life to the gnarled wails and the uber-thick and ultra-primitive fuzz-bombed riffs. More life comes from the bluesy leads, the gurgling bass, and the sledgehammer brutishness in “Grandio Lorda“, and the tribal stamping ground of “Oto Andoba“. But mainly, this is drugs.

The vocals really are kind of striking. I can believe the words are Huttese and that a Hutt is voicing them, but the other thing that comes to mind is a voodoo ritual from some indigenous community in some jungle, urban or otherwise.

https://sliimo.bandcamp.com/album/sliimo
https://www.facebook.com/sliimo.band/

 

 

VOODUS (Sweden)

Seems like you might need to clear your head and get your heart pumping again after Sliimo. This next song, and the last one I have time to write about today, will help — but it won’t entirely clear your head.

The bass-and-drum work in “The Call of the Abysmal Deep” definitely will get your head moving and your blood pumping, especially when the blasting and the screaming begin, but the manifold permutations in the music are hallucinatory, as is the accompanying video.

The riffing (and keys?) range far and wide, creating soaring, sweeping, and magically mesmerizing sensations; moments of muted and mysterious seduction; convulsions of whirring and whirling delirium; the jumping and jabbing of defiant joy; and yes, maybe some psychedelic substances are in the mix too.

Kind of an amazing thing, this song. It’s taken from the upcoming album Emanating Sparks, scheduled for release on Shadow Records/Regain Records early next year.

https://regainrecords.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.facebook.com/voodus666