SHADES OF BLACK: ACATHEXIS, HALPHAS, VETER DAEMONAZ, LVME, DEPARTURE CHANDELIER, BILIOUS MIASMA, THROAT, MORS VITAQUE

Like yesterday, I was able to assemble a big round-up of fairly new music for today. It seemed like a way to welcome myself back to doing what I habitually did before I got thrown way off course by my job. And now I’m wondering, as I habitually used to do, whether I’ve overdone it.

What you’ll find below are singles from three forthcoming records, followed by five complete albums or EPs, all of them released this month. I only stopped at the total of 8 so the cover art would line up neatly in the collage I made.

If you have the patience to move through everything, you’ll find as you go deeper that the doors start coming completely off the hinges, in bizarre and even horrifying ways, but with something profoundly dreamlike at the end.

 

ACATHEXIS (Int’l)

At last we will have another album, six years after the first one, from this talented international trio (Jake Buczarski from Mare Cognitum and Det Eviga Leende; Dany Tee from Los Males del Mundo and Seelenmord, and Déhà from more bands than you could count on both hands), moving forward under a name that’s the psychoanalytical term for a general absence of normal or expected feelings.

The long song below provides a daunting amalgam of sensations, often on a titanic scale. The words spew forth in scalding screams, the drums batter and throb, the riffing blisters, but the raging violence is swathed in synths that shimmer and soar, adding elements of ethereal mystery and dire symphonic magnificence to the typhoons.

But there’s more. In the song’s mid-section, the music slows and rings, becoming inviting and seductive. The high-flying tones that carry forward become uplifting and beautifully cinematic even when the music’s tormented turbulence builds again, and a woozy and wailing melody surfaces and re-surfaces, underscoring the sorrow that’s been a fellow-traveler in the music from the beginning.

“The Other” is from a new album named Immerse, which is set for release on March 20th by Amor Fati Productions and Extraconscious Records.

https://amorfatiproductions.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/acathexisband

 

 

HALPHAS (Germany)

Here’s another band returning after a significant recording hiatus, ready to release their third album, this time with a new vocalist (Berith, from Timor Et Tremor).

Two songs from the new album are out in the world now, an introductory track named “Into the Void” and a longer one deeper into the record called “The Architects Eye“. The intro track isn’t something disjointed from what follows, but instead dives with power right into thunder and bombast, creating an atmosphere of dread and fear and galvanizing the listener’s muscles into movement.

The second song even more powerfully booms and blazes, and the feverishly sizzling riffage creates feelings of tension and turmoil as the words come for your throat in bestial but intelligible snarls. But as in the tail end of the intro track, Halphas also start swaggering and jolting, punching hard and rocking hard, but no less vicious than before.

It’s a dynamic song, and so the chords begin to sound dismal, and fervent cries of diabolical adulation rise up, segueing into deep choral singing as the music soars. In the final phase, the adrenaline-fueled attack resumes, yet the music sounds like the anguish of the lost.

These two songs are from a new album named Sermons Of The Black Flames, which is set for release on February 29th by Folter Records.

https://folterrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sermons-of-the-black-flames
https://www.facebook.com/halphasofficial

 

 

VETER DAEMONAZ (Russia)

The next song I’ve chosen is named “На Север (первое видение)“, which google translates as “To the North (first vision)”. Though driven by punkish beats at first, the music is dense and dramatic, swallowing the listener in rolling cascades of abrading yet grand sound while the vocals gnash like the teeth of a big roaring carnivore fighting against its chains.

The drums do start blasting and hammering like pistons while the bass heavily rumbles, but the music’s tidal waves continue rolling with power, rising and falling and then roiling like a vast sonic whirlpool, somehow finding an even more intense crescendo (as do the incinerating vocals), reaching a hellish zenith of apocalypse, torment, and pain.

The song is one of three from a new EP named Литания (“Litany”), which is set for release by this Russian duo on April 30th.

https://veterdaemonaz.bandcamp.com/album/–4
https://www.facebook.com/veterdaemonaz

 

 

LVME (Int’l)

Now we begin moving into recent complete releases, beginning with LVME‘s second album, Of Sinful Nature, which was released on February 16th by NoEvDia. At roughly 45 minutes, it deserves a more elaborate discussion than I’m able to give it, but I have to do what time allows rather than nothing at all.

The task of summing up is made even more challenging by the fact that four of these five songs are in the 9-11 minute range, and they’re that long because LVME clearly wanted room to maneuver in their songwriting — and maneuver they do. They trace elaborate courses through unearthly but ever-changing soundscapes replete with menace and marvels.

The rhythm section plays a prominent role in changing the courses, dramatically varying the tempos and the propulsive patterns, with the drummer adding the spice of electrifying fills at unpredictable times and the bassist time and again proving to be agile and inventive.

Keyboards of varying kinds, from submerging synths to gothic organ tones, also play a prominent role in the music’s dynamism, but are also largely responsible for why the atmosphere of the music is so esoteric and otherworldly.

That’s not to say the guitars are second thoughts. They slither, swirl, shiver, and chime, adding their own traceries of exotic and devilish design to this elaborate sonic tapestry, augmented by the kind of soulful and psychedelic soloing, clarion-clear in tone, that’s rarely found in black metal.

I’d go so far as to way that the masterful soloing is only one facet of the music that makes me want to call it “psychedelic” or “hallucinatory” black metal, though because of the band’s frequently surfacing prog influences I’m equally tempted to call it “progressive black metal”

As for the crackling vocals, well, demonic possession is usually the order of the day — fangs bared, eyes red, and rage uncaged — though a few solemn chants and ghostly wails can be heard among the few softer moments in the album (though those might be keyboard effects too).

All in all, LVME give us a head-spinning trip through deepest Hades, providing visions of torture, exultant delirium, perilous spells, and dreadful grandeur. A long trip, to be sure, with each song flowing into the next without pause, but not one that allows the mind to wander.

https://lvme.bandcamp.com/album/of-sinful-nature
https://www.facebook.com/lvmebm

 

 

DEPARTURE CHANDELIER (Canada/U.S.)

At last we have something substantial from this band that wasn’t recorded a decade and a half ago. Like the earlier recordings, the new one follows the band’s unusual thematic conception in which they envision Napoleon as the Antichrist. Based upon the extensive discussion at the new album’s Bandcamp page, it recounts the looting for profit of fallen bodies on Napoleon’s battlefields against the backdrop of the emperor’s coronation and his ascent to deity as the Antichrist.

This one’s not as long or elaborate as the LVME album that precedes it in today’s collection, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have its own fair share of twists and turns — because it does.

After setting the stage with sounds of gunfire, funereal organ chords, and heavenly dancing keys of more modern origin, the band begin bounding, raking, and savagely snarling in the first full track, but still with shining keys providing a sweeping celestial overlay. It’s almost like a hybrid of black metal, punk rock, and synthwave, all of it with arguable roots in the ’80s, and that proves to be a winning combination.

You could almost call the music “stripped down”, and it’s definitely unpretentious, but man, every ensuing song is just as packed with feral melodic and rhythmic hooks as that first full one, and every one of them just as fanatically barbaric and infernally wild in the vocal department. The keys continue playing their roles, to greater and lesser extents in each song (and occupying the sole roles in a mid-album interlude), adding their embellishments to the variety but also bringing reminders of what the narrative is about.

And speaking of the overarching narrative, as the moods in the song move, they also bring reminders that we’re dealing with the rise of hell on earth, and so the slashing and swarming riffs bring sounds of blood-pumping lust, cold-hearted cruelty, ugly corruption, and oppressive grief, as well as the abandon of untamed violence — as the keys continually unfurl banners of glory and gold along the way.

If you want one track as a taste-test, I’d recommend “Accipitridae“, which might be my favorite of a strong bunch, in part because it’s home to a highly infectious heavy metal riff along with all the other vital ingredients I’ve been trying to identify above.

The name of the new album is Satan Soldier Of Fortune. It was released on February 1st. I think it’s fair to say you won’t hear anything else like it this year.

https://departurechandelier.bandcamp.com/album/satan-soldier-of-fortune

 

 

BILIOUS MIASMA (U.S.)

Metal-Archives identifies this new formation as part of Ordo Vampyr Orientis along with Bat Magic, Bad Manor, Beastial Majesty, and Bellum Mortis. The same M-A page says two of the Bilious Miasma members are also in those bands, along with a third from Doldrum and Erraunt.

What you’ll find below is their self-titled debut EP, released on February 2nd. And if you remember my opening comments way up above, this is where the doors really come off the hinges — like, blasted off by a brick of C-4, with sheer derangement then exploding out from the other side.

That’s the immediate impression of the short opener “Korpse Fyre“, which discharges a blistering torrent of riotous drumming, sleet-storm riffing, and a big bestiary of distorted vocals, all of them crazed.

That impression of being caught in a riot moving at the speed of a blast front remains dominant in two of the ensuing three songs. But here and there the drum rhythms shift from their usual jaw-dropping pace and will get your legs jumping, the bass delivers carpet-bombing raids and granite-chewing tunnel work, and the shrill lead guitar shrieks, squirms, slashes, and cavorts in electrifying fashion in the midst of the searing abrasion. I think there are keyboards in the mix here and there too, elevating the ruinations to a higher plane.

The music is so fucking breathtaking that I wouldn’t have minded if it was all nothing but what I’ve been attempting to describe, from beginning to end. But “Azimuth” does break things up, providing a long, eerie ambient interlude. I don’t mean to suggest it’s “easy listening” — it sounds like a subterranean earthquake is happening in the low end (or thunder over the horizon), and everything else sounds damned chilling.

But catch your breath while you can, even if your breathing is not left very steady, because the closer “Paradyse” loses the hinges again, but this time with unpredictably clattering beats and weirdly pulsating riffage, high in tone, to go along with the horror-show vocals, which sound like ravenous beasts feeding and the agonies of those being fed upon.

Eventually, while the snare chops like an ax, the chords heave and moan, murdering all hope and clearing the way for another blast-front freak-out of destructive, head-spinning insanity. There, they enlisted Satan as a guest vocalist. And in the final phase, the demons he has called forth rut and rock out.

https://biliousmiasma.bandcamp.com/album/bilious-miasma

 

 

THROAT (Poland)

If you thought that maniacal Bilious Miasma rampage was unhinged, this next album might be even more unorthodox and unsettling, albeit in very different ways, so be forewarned. A press release I received uses the words “eldritch black metal horror”, and that’s a damned good shorthand.

As in other cases today, the album is difficult to sum up. It includes many twists and turns, with very little warning about when they’re going to happen, and the vocals here are almost as bestial and berserk as the ones in that Bilious Miasma offering.

The twists aren’t just a matter of changing tempos, of which there are many, but also mutations in the riffing style (usually rendered through ugly levels of distortion), the unexpected appearance of eerily shimmering synths and needling notes that pierce the brain, and plenty of veering but always-scary moods — which range from sadistic to agonized, from frenzy to suffocation, from nausea to rage.

Underneath all the unnerving fretwork mutations the bass rumbles with bowel-loosening weight and the kick-drum punches like a heavyweight. Way up high, the snare-drum often maniacally clatters with amphetamine speed, except when it’s dropping like a hungry guillotine.

The album includes some haunting interlude-like breaks at the beginning of tracks, as if we were still falling short of being sufficiently frightened. But really, there’s no shortage of frighteners in this album. They take many different shapes, most of them the stuff of asylum-strength nightmares. But these manifold horrors are fascinating, even if they might leave you sleeping with the lights on for a while.

Blood Exaltation was released on February 9th by the Finnish label Primitive Reaction.

https://primitivereaction.bandcamp.com/album/blood-exaltation
https://www.throatoftheantichrist.bandcamp.com

 

 

MORS VITAQUE (U.S.)

I suppose you could consider this final album a “palate cleanser” after everything that has preceded it – but cleansed for what? That’s the question.

The softness, spaciousness, and eerie elegance of the music allow the mind to drift, to meditate, perchance to dream, but the music also acts as a voiceless guide for where it wants your moods and visions to go, beckoning but not pushing.

In my case, as I listened, I imagined slowly wandering alone through an ancient, ornate cemetery during the wizard hours between midnight and dawn, passing by looming mausoleums beneath trees either barren or weeping black moss. I thought of the moon bleaching all the alabaster to a pearlescent gleam, glowing against pitch-black backdrops of shadow and hazed by mist.

Like some of the sounds in the music, the hard lines of the archaic headstones and tombs are blurred, whether from the moonlight glow or the erosion of time, and many of the monuments in the distance blur even more, shimmering like unlikely midnight oases in a cold place. But like other sounds in the music, some sights suddenly swell in sharpness and they pulsate, like a memory of sorrow or forfeited desire that needed a place like this to make possible its revival.

I imagined lying down on a marble slab inscribed with a dead name, closing my eyes, and drifting away, shivering, unseen things whispering in my ears.

I confess that when I finished listening to this haunting, spellbinding album I was so caught up in its dream and so loose-limbed that I actually did take a nap, one of the melodies still looping through my head. It was still circling there even when I awakened, wondering where I was.

I thought about adding a more “nuts and bolts” description of the facets in this music to the flimsier impressions I’ve already provided. And then the thought passed, because I decided to listen to the album again.

Mors Vitaque is the work of j. and z., aka Nightshade and Alkilith, founders of the Great Lakes Dungeon Synth circle

https://morsvitaque.bandcamp.com/album/another-path