(Our editor wasn’t able to compile a list of Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs from 2023, but our supporter Vizzah Harri, a resident of Hanoi, Vietnam, has stepped in to fill the void. We published Part I of his list here, and now we’re proceeding with Part II. The remaining four parts will follow in fairly short order.)
‘We live in uncertain times’ is both clichéd and antiquated. Fear has been a massive driving-force towards change and, just like anything else, conceivable change is not always good. We understand change as a constant, almost a law as such, yet we fear it and our fear of it more often than not is what drives us towards horrid acts against our fellow human beings.
And so in order to inoculate against fear (of the other), of change, of that which we do not understand, we can take cues from why some of us are so compelled to find that new riff, to experience something for the first time, for our minds not just to open, but to bend around that axis of perdition into a fused vessel. Transported into worlds hitherto unknown. Always keeping a keen ear to the ground and another filled with that which challenges and provokes, that is what keeps us, and therefore also our art, closer to our initial true intentions.
Just like people investing more time and money towards upliftment, an inverse effect becomes observable when humans in groupings and strata across the entire spectrum of potential outsets shift their focus towards the big payoff. It’s like a kind of immutable law of nature akin to the law of the conservation of energy that for lay people like me means that energy cannot disappear or be created but that in a closed system it is conserved. If something feels magically or nefariously different, the priority shift was not just an apriority, but empirical.
This is noticeable in the small mom-and-pop pie shop round the corner that made the best pies you ever had and misconstrue as rosy retrospection, because once they start expanding, the quality of those sumptuous pies gradually declines until one day you buy one filled with tapioca as filling and the love you remember tasting having been infused is now only a false memory in being sleight-ed.
What I mean is that if more energy is put into the making of money, the end product is cheapened. You nod your head as you think of bands that have perhaps not dropped their quality of output, but whose art has become flavorless. A focus therefore towards music from the underground, with no advertisements and a clear intention of not rating or at all having a fixation on the negative, is why we continue to enjoy quality writing and tunes here at NCS.
Islander was reliving the 1972 Iranian blizzard in work-load and it shouldn’t be surprising, but it is certainly impressive, that he can still churn out writing at a standard as high as this Shades of Black entry. Something else therefore to consider is that when quality or sophistication seems to have increased or is at a very high level, the work going into it, and the suffering endured in attaining it, must have been equal in energy.
You want to read this on your computer or listen on your headphones what is on offer? It was impossible without the rare-earth mineral neodymium mined at great cost for your pleasure. I’m reading that and thinking I need to buy more albums in support of bands for the mental and physical suffering endured in creating great art.
- Ὁπλίτης [Hoplites] (China) – Ἔκτρωμα – 9 April 2023
If you’re looking for maximalism, look no further than whatever Ὁπλίτης are positively and prolifically Esoctrili-humming into the world (I for one did not know they released yet another album under their Vitriolic Sage moniker.)
You don’t hit anything from shots you don’t take. A medium-sized alley off Tran Dang Ninh Street, opening flanked by a brothel on one side and a flashy women’s clothing store on the other. Leads to an opening for tenement blocks surrounding a small concrete play area with benches and trees creating shade for the old trà đá (iced-tea) lady on the corner of the park, and the middle-aged woman with short hair who cooks skewers on a tin can sat on her haunches. Walking past three men, two arranging detritus-born bracken, twigs, straw and building material into a makeshift wall-assisted oven for the strangled chicken the third man carries. I couldn’t get a good shot.
But nearing the opening onto TDN, there is to one’s right the crack between the rear of two rows of buildings. A thin crevice of an alley, leading to a dead end. Even on a summer’s day this little hole exudes an infectious gloom. One can see but a few backdoors, some bicycles that don’t seem to have been used for decades, rubble on the ground and some trash. I once saw a young man in black jeans and a shiny golden jacket with baseball cap on walking down into the gloom. It was the most beautiful shot, and I missed it. For being shy and for paranoia. Take the shot, Ὁπλίτης did and aren’t we all the richer for them having taken it?
It was not easy choosing a song from any of Ὁπλίτης’s albums, though Ἔκτρωμα was such a fun pick because of how traditionally catchy it starts off. Sure Θεῖα δεσμά might have been a more straightforward choice with its fevered yet pointed and punked up rhythm section, and who could have forgotten the entropic majesty that was Ὁ τῶν δακρύων ψεῦδος or the riffed revved up pop-a-cap-in-your-aspirational atavistic astrolabes that was Ὁπλῖτις? The song below was for me a fascinating representation of devolvement into insanity furnished with just the right level of unsettling tones girded with percussion so spectacularly offbeat.
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3Kp9UoUfzXxx1M8cCsw0kj
- Xoth (Seattle, USA) – Reflective Nemesis – 3 November 2023
If you’re looking for maximalism in the complete other direction of the melodic spectrum, yet like me again could not for a damn choose a song that stood out as more infectious?
Well, I settled for Reflective Nemesis for it having just the right amounts of speedy tech-inflected excrescence of an imprimatur of inexorable insouciance towards anyone else’s ability to write something catchy this year.
https://www.facebook.com/beholdxoth
https://xoth.bandcamp.com/album/exogalactic
- Claret Ash (Australia) – Cascadence of the Twilight (Orchestral Version) – 11 August 2023
On the other end of the …uhm… abundance spectrum – I know this has been covered, commented and replied about already in the EP’s list – but damn that Claret Ash EP hit hard. And then I checked: one of their members also released something this year with another project. Makes me realize how much time there actually is for creativity if the work is put in.
Well, it has been said that religions or the organized cults they be, are mental viruses, and so for comic effect – a few thought-processes removed – it certainly does work as comic relief for word salads converted into mental slavery, by Hood’s hoary balls. And the old Spanish influenza pandemic might be something of yesteryear yet similar nasties, albeit not as noxiously infectious as aforementioned cerebral necrotizing encephalitis, still do get spewed about by the same pieholes spreading the Shanghai Salvador of the masses.
Insanity has been described as doing the same thing over and over whilst expecting a different result. Thus, fate can be described as insanity. Only when you change your actions can you change what comes out, right? Claret Ash took the first song in their awesome EP and went orchestral on us. It has swooned me more sonically than Maria Ozawa or Eva Yi could ever do platonically.
https://www.facebook.com/claretashband
https://hypnoticdirgerecords.bandcamp.com/album/worldtorn-anemoia
- Thy Catafalque (HUNGARY) – A földdel egyenlő – 16 June 2023
You felt let down that the previous track was not metal per se? Well, this next one will Szíriusz-ly take the idea of traditional metal to a delayed-triplet ecstatic height.
Tamás Kátai has always been toying with the idea of doing a straight-up metal album, though he’s felt that as soon as he starts one all his jazzy avant-leanings just come sprouting forth. Alföld is the closest he’s come in the past decade to approaching something that in any way could be defined as straight-up metal. Hell, this musical genius treats ideas like inameliorate hapax legomenon for nearly always trying something new yet still being able to always retain a sound so unmistakably Thy Catafalque. Or perhaps he chose the name not for being very black metal-ly but for its meaning when abbreviated. He certainly makes music on his own terms and conditions.
So now that we’ve all calmed down, please don’t try and find light in the darkness in this shade of a portmanteau. We did forget to leave our Walkabout at the door. Undo yourself a favour, revert back to your ironically blue hue. Cos at least them progenitors of that which was proto-anything you even conceive as resembling a lick led up to Chet Faker levels of hold my bull-frogging riff unto the ages. The former that takes dance to the forefront as if it was not possible to redefine not just your means of communication but of economy of notes. Something Hungarian musicians can teach us a thing or two about.
Notorious for being self-deprecating and modest to an almost head-scratchingly obstinate level, I was dredging old interviews with him to remember which bands he has recommended to me and other readers in the past, and I finally found it (all interviews with this maestro are a good read, if only for his answers, though Comrade Aleks does at least bring it up to NCS levels of grace and it is prescient for being about the latest Thy Catafalque album, Alföld). The band I am referring to that Tamás mentioned are Perihelion, their album Orveny from 2017 is still one of my favourites.
https://www.facebook.com/thycatafalque
https://thycatafalqueuk.bandcamp.com/album/alf-ld
- Ihsahn (Norway) – The Obsever (Feat. Øystein H. Aadland on additional vox and keys) – 24 March 2023
The other cool thing about reading interviews about your favourite bands is not just about hearing what their influences are; sometimes interesting questions lead to intriguing ideas and in others you find out about songs you did not know of before. I for one certainly did not know that Ihsahn covered Portishead’s ‘Roads’. The timestamp for that video does pop up as the 2nd of January ’23, but as we all know it is not the only thing that was conceived from the mind of Ihsahn last year.
The Observer has an ‘After’-esque feel to it for me, at first, but it becomes something of its own as masterfully mixed guitars, percussion and interchanging harsh and clean vocals carry us to a finale where all the individual parts come together in a mercurial light-shorn katabasis.
https://www.facebook.com/ihsahnmusic
https://candlelightrecordsuk.bandcamp.com/album/fascination-street-sessions-ep