You know the old saying about situations when your eyes are bigger than your stomach? When you take on more food than you can possibly finish? That’s kind of my situation, musically, today.
Yesterday’s two-part roundup, which spilled over into today, was a big platter of delectables. What I still had sitting on the platter this morning (all the well-charred food) was just too much to get through, despite my appetite for it and the “clean your plate” philosophy with which my family raised me. Stacked on top of the two-part roundup, it probably would have been too much for you as well.
But, at the risk of an exploding gut, here are a few more servings.
EITRIN (France)
Who could possibly leave untouched a feast prepared by Vindsval (Blut Aus Nord), Marion (Mütterlein), and Dehn Sora (Throane) in celebration of Debemur Morti Productions‘ 20th anniversary? Not I.
Taking the name Eitrin, these three (plus drummer W.d.F.) wrote and recorded a self-titled album that’s a musical smorgasbord. It’s true, as DMP foreshadowed, that the album spreads its ingredients across “Black Metal, Industrial, post-Punk, vicious Hardcore and Dark Ambient”. The vocals are quite a spread too.
My valued acquaintance Rennie (starkweather) compared Marion’s vocals to the late Dawn Crosby from Fear of God and Detente. Marion does stretch her wings wide, ranging from ragged, haunting wails to raw, shattering screams that feel like claws raking the mind and ripping the flesh. Often, it sounds like she’s tearing herself apart with claws, showing the blood and bone beneath. To her vocals Dehn Sora adds his own panoply of rabid howls, furious shrieks, and hallowed but haunted choral singing.
But to get back to the music, each track is named for a lethal poison. Fittingly, they are all killer in different ways. Each of them benefits from the penetrating heaviness of Vindsval‘s fretless bass and the bone-shaking impact of the drumming. Around those potent rhythmic propellers, which rumble, rock, and stalk even more often than they batter and blast, the music accomplishes many dire objectives.
It levitates and warps the mind with vast swaths of hallucinatory magnificence, guitars glittering and synths gleaming. It diminishes into cold, eerie ambient radiations that uneasily mesmerize, accompanied by sounds that one imagines as the gasps and moans of ghosts. It swirls and spins in signs of exhilarating delirium, and heaves like a massive subterranean serpent, slowly coiling and suffocating. It queasily squirms, and seems to wail in desolation.
The shifts in decibels, grooves, and assaulting power are dramatic. The album is less of an ebb and flow than a sequence of catharsis and collapse, a sequence of eruptions and volcanic winters, or like the sky ablaze and the heavens then slowly falling, or like significantly greater and lesser doses of hallucinogens, some of which reveal cataclysms and others the cold and mysterious void.
At full and frightening intensity the album is almost overpowering. In the chasms it puts a freezing chill on the skin. Either way, there’s nothing mundane about it. It probably comes too late for many year-end lists, and I’m confident Eitrin don’t care about such things, but if my mind was orderly enough to make a list, I know this would be on it.
Eitrin was released by DMP on December 1st on lots of different formats, some of which haven’t sold out already. The artwork and layout are by Maciej Kamuda.
https://eitrin.bandcamp.com/album/eitrin
https://www.facebook.com/Vindsval.official
https://www.facebook.com/mutterlein
https://www.facebook.com/throane
FUINÄEHOT (U.S.)
I’m afraid that Lamp of Murmuur has reached that stage of success which brings out of the woodwork that special species of naysayers in the metal underground who view notoriety as a cause for scorn, representing a philosophy that it’s much more “authentic” to make music that only a handful of people listen to.
I doubt that’s why Lamp of Murmuur‘s mastermind M. took a different name for his latest release, because he hasn’t made a secret of the fact that he’s the person behind Fuinäehot. And it’s not as if he has felt that Lamp of Murmuur confines him very much in the music he makes under that name, because he seems to change it freely — though the music of Fuinäehot does feel a lot more primitive and bestial.
Well, who knows? Maybe the explanation will surface eventually (or it has and I missed it)..
Anyway, the release of Fuinäehot‘s debut demo Secrets Of The Godhead was one of many surprises that the most recent Bandcamp Friday (December 1st) brought us, including the album above. According to the brief verbiage at Bandcamp, M. recorded it in a single take, and used improvised drum tracks. It is, in two words, an exhilarating menace.
It’s rich in vicious, ugly, demonic vocals and gut-busting, neck-snapping drumwork, and the music is thoroughly sulfurous. Accented by occult keys, “From the Darkness It Will Come, The Great Evil!!!” opens with melodies that sound Eastern and arcane, maybe something Mesopotamian or Babylonian, or whatever was specifically happening in Sodom and Gomorrah that got god so fucking pissed off.
That kind of exotic/occult melodiousness flows through many other tracks, conjuring changing visions of hellish menace, diabolical frenzy, and dismal agony, accompanied by relentlessly gripping drumwork that’s just as effective in moving heads as it is in generating ruinous kick-drum avalanches.
Speaking of frenzy, there’s a guitar solo near the start of “Diabolic Surge” that will take the top of your head clean off, and the whining, distorted riffage also goes into convulsions of vicious yet poisonous madness in between moments of goatish swaggering and rutting (such moments are spread across almost the whole record).
Of course, M. has a way with riffs and leads, and they’ve got hooks here like they do in his main project, it’s just that here they’re geared toward sensations of bestial hellishness, as mentioned earlier.
Ugly music for ugly people (or maybe I should just speak for myself) — except for “The Hidden Sun“, which is built from an elegant, stately, and medieval sounding keyboard minuet. Just a small bit of refreshment before the final plunge into boiling audio sulfur, brutalizing percussion, and frightening vocal demonism — albeit a plunge accented by the piercing trill of a lead guitar melody that’s fucking glorious, and closed by an intricate guitar instrumental and shimmering keys.
https://lampofmurmuur.bandcamp.com/album/secrets-of-the-godhead-demo