I woke up before the sun rose today because it’s harvest season and I have crops to gather.
Ha Ha, no that’s horseshit. I have no idea why I woke up before the sun on this Saturday morning, especially given the number of adult libations I consumed (as usual) on Friday night.
The only good that came of the early rising was my ability to experience the coldest morning of the year so far, at least where I live near Puget Sound. As I slurped my coffee and inhaled the first cigarettes of the day in the blackness outside, my phone reported 35°.
On further reflection, my opening line wasn’t entirely horseshit. I do have crops to gather in, musical crops… the time of reaping is ever upon us here.
MORBID SACRIFICE (Italy)
Cold and blackness… and reaping… might have had something to do with this first choice. But even more so, madness, murder, and mayhem….
Those are all sensations to be found in Ceremonial Blood Worship, the foul and filthy second album by Morbid Sacrifice released on Thanksgiving Day by Godz Ov War. To create those sensations this quartet use truly noxious vocals (a collage of gagging and gurgling gutturals and cackling screams), guitars and bass tuned to tones of gritty abrasiveness and rancid ugliness, and neck-cracking, bowel-rumbling drumwork.
In their songwriting the band switch speeds, and thereby switch the moods. At high speed, the tremolo’d riffing sounds like swarms of rampant infection and the drumming like a maniacal race. In the lowest gears, the band give us brutish stomps and the agonies of gangrenous rot. In between, the band often convert to punk-ish beats and feral riffs that conjure visions of mosh pits in a bruising boil and poorly considered stage dives.
Not just filthy and foul, the music is also primitive and pestilential. But these black/death miscreants do have a way with hooks, which every song but the last one jams into the listener’s reptile brain.
And the songs don’t overstay their welcome. They barge in, inflict their barbarous blasphemies, and get right out again. The eight songs, which include a Sodom cover, rough-house their way through your cranium in less than 25 minutes total, with a closing track that isn’t a song at all but sounds like a field recording made in the worst place in Hell.
Yes, these are recommendations.
https://godzovwarproductions.bandcamp.com/album/ceremonial-blood-worship
https://www.facebook.com/MorbidSacrificeOfEvil
MOTOROWL (Germany)
After that opening selection you might need a palate-cleanser, though I shudder to think what’s now coating your tongue.
Motorowl frontman Max Hammann‘s tenor vocals are indeed a lot cleaner, the kind of clear-voiced singing that needs an exception to our rule, and obviously has gotten it. It’s more in line with occult rock and stoner doom than the usual metallic extremity we foist upon you on here, but it’s quite expressive and he can send it sky-high.
As for the music on “No Center“, the first single off their new album, it’s not totally in a different world from Morbid Sacrifice. It too is kind of primitive and kind of infernal, but even more head-hooking.
Motorowl set the hook right away with a big ol’ chugging riff, a gut-thudding beat, and squirmy serpentine leads, with just a whisper of shimmery keys in the background. They work their way back to that groovy beginning near the end, and in between, as Hammann croons, they shift the music in more sinister, psychedelic, and proggy directions, enlivened by lots of electric drum fills.
When they get back to that highly headbangable groove, they spin out a woozy and wailing guitar solo that sounds like sonic sorcery.
Good video too.
I first paid attention to this because of the new album’s fantastic cover art and the way it meshes with the album’s title: This house has no center. The album will be out on Supreme Chaos Records on February 16th.
https://scr-motorowl.bandcamp.com/album/this-house-has-no-center
https://www.facebook.com/motorowl/
KRASSEVILLE (France)
The mind works in mysterious ways. As often happens when I make my way through possibilities for these Saturday roundups, one thing leads me to choose something else that I might not have chosen otherwise. That happened here.
I’ve written about Krasseville once before, almost exactly three years ago. It was a curveball at the end of another one of these collections, and this one is a curveball too, even when compared to that 2020 EP Summer Songs.
This duo’s new album is named Toujours gris (“always gray”). Two tracks from it are now up on the Bandcamp for their new label Antiq Records.
The first one, “Joies grégeoises“, sounds like a demonic version of Leonard Cohen (in maybe an even deeper-than-usual baritone) performing with a New Wave band. The beats bounce the dance-floor, the guitar ecstatically flickers around, the keys make it shimmer and shine, but those vocals alone make it a sinister experience. It’s highly infectious, but highly diabolical as well.
The second track, interestingly, is an “Interlude“. Just a collage of clanging and rippling guitars creating gloomy and wistful moods, and a conversation between two voices.
Even if I hadn’t heard Summer Songs, or Krasseville‘s head-scrambling subsequent release The lockdown sessions, I’d be wondering what all the other tracks sound like. (Speaking of The lockdown sessions, I’ve included its opening song below too. It includes lots of brass. Other songs include pedal-steel and bluesy acoustic picking. The vocals seem to be entirely vocal samples, and some whistling.)
The new album is set for release by Antiq on December 19th. Antiq is also re-issuing Summer Songs, which had no label backing the first time it came out.
https://krasseville.bandcamp.com/album/toujours-gris
https://www.facebook.com/krasseville
TORPE (Portugal)
I have a feeling I’ve tested the patience of some of our regular visitors with Motorowl and Krasseville, so I’ll now get back to what most folks come here for, i.e., something more vicious and assaulting, except in this case considerably weirder than usual.
What I’m referring too is the just-released Opvs I – Opróbrio by a Portuguese trio of asylum inmates named Torpe. I don’t actually know that they’re operating out of a mental institution, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
In the opening track, “Ardo, Perpétuo, Maligno“, the quivering and screeching riffage (if you can call it riffing) is dissonant and utterly deranged, and the vocals are a thoroughly crazed cornucopia of tortured humanity (and its torturers). The thrusting bass-lines and cracking and clattering snare-beats are as close as the song gets to something you can hang on to, but they turn out to be very undependable too. The ending sounds like an avalanche and burning angels and the inmates rejoicing as only they can.
Almost all the following tracks are equally lunatic. Much of it sounds improvisational, though I don’t really know. If instead they carefully mapped out these things in advance, the map would look like a morass of squiggles, with just a few straight lines here and there.
You can tell that the performers are instrumentally adept, they just chose to use their skills to sever their listeners’ cranial neurons and re-tie them in intricate knots. It’s so experimental and mad that it becomes riveting (I’m speaking only for myself, of course).
Well, it’s mad except for “Gnossienne n° 1“, which is a dark, melancholy, yet enthralling classical piano instrumental — backed by droning lo-frequency vibrations that are darker still.
And I should mention that in the fifth track the vocals include morose near-singing, along with the strain of glimmering, siren-like, and calliope-like keyboards that also make their mark in the second track. I just mention that to reinforce the idea that trying to predict what Torpe are going to do here would be a fool’s errand.
Like, you probably won’t anticipate the tribal percussion and mangling electronics that wrap up the EP, except now you will.
(Thanks to Rennie for passing along the link to this. I think I’m now ready for whatever the rest of the day has in store for me.)
https://oficialtorpe.bandcamp.com/album/opvs-i-opr-brio
https://www.facebook.com/OficialTorpe/
TRIUMPH OF DEATH (Switzerland)
Well, I’m not sure it would have been very fair to bid you adios after that Torpe escapade. It would be kind of like blowing a kiss to your drunken mate right after you’ve shoved him out into a street filled with on-rushing traffic outside the bar.
So instead I’ll leave you with a video of Tom G. Warrior and Triumph of Death performing Hellhammer‘s “Messiah” at Dark Easter Metal Meeting in Munich, Germany, in April of this year. It’s taken from Triumph of Death‘s Resurrection Of The Flesh live album, which was released two weeks ago.
The other performers are André Mathieu (guitar/vocals), Jamie Lee Cussigh (bass), and Tim Iso Wey (drums).
This kills. I don’t think I need to say anything else.
https://triumphofdeath.lnk.to/rotfyv
https://www.facebook.com/triumphofdeathofficial