Inter Arma
I did a better than average job of making lists of new songs and videos that surfaced over the past week. As I knew from experience but had to re-learn, that was a double-edged sword. It made it less likely I’d miss something that would interest me, and more likely I’d be left with a big and difficult chore of deciding what to pick for today’s roundup. The choosing was somewhat (but only somewhat) less agonizing, since I moved a lot of possibilities into a virtual box for tomorrow’s black metal column.
I’ll forewarn you that, with one dramatic exception, all the music I picked for today is intense, often disturbingly intense, and sometimes pitched toward sonic and emotional ruination, though some of the songs get there more gradually than others.
Or, to put it another way, if you came here hoping to headbang, you might be disappointed. However, if you want to get wrung out, have your head spun, and find some bone splinters poking through your flesh by the end, your wishes will be granted.
INTER ARMA (U.S.)
I decided to lead off with the bamboozling title track from Inter Arma‘s new album New Heaven. The song is built around an eerie and unnerving riff that whines and slowly squirms. With that as their jumping off point, the band mutate the music further in even more elaborately macabre directions, while preserving the fundamental dissonance and queasiness of the experience.
As the band unbalance the listener’s inner ear and create one woozy yet nightmarish musical apparition after another, the drumming repeatedly shifts the gears and provides a turbocharged electricity that contrasts with the hallucinatory riffing and creepy soloing, while guttural vocals add a different dimension of horror.
New Heaven will be released by Relapse on April 26th.
https://interarma.bandcamp.com/album/new-heaven
http://bit.ly/interarma-newheaven
http://orcd.co/interarma-newheaven
https://www.facebook.com/INTERARMA/
CIVEROUS (U.S.)
The newest song from the new Civerous album is next. Over the course of its 8 1/2 minutes it morphs in unnerving ways, though not in the ways that Inter Arma‘s new song did. The changes are more abrupt and more dramatic, less likely to leave you feeling dizzy and more likely to leave you feeling smashed into fragments, some parts of you to be buried like congealing viscera and some of them fed through a high-speed meat-grinder.
Dismal and dragging at first, then gruesomely pounding beneath weirdly wailing ethereal tones, the song suddenly convulses in thunderous low-end assaults, screaming vocals, and a dense roiling miasma of guitar distortion.
Back and forth the music goes, creating episodes of enchained and suffocating death/doom and bursts of grisly and gutting delirium, augmented by cold-hearted attacks of jackhammering punishment and flurries of supernatural-sounding freakishness, culminating in a finale of haunting and harrowing grandeur.
The name of the new album is Maze Envy. It’s set for release by 20 Buck Spin on March 22nd. Cover art by Juanjo Castellano.
https://www.20buckspin.com/civerous
https://20buckspin.bandcamp.com/album/maze-envy
LHAÄD (Belgium)
This Belgian black metal project’s new album (its second one) is named Beneath, and the album’s cover image seems to depict a scene from far beneath the ocean’s surface.The song from the album revealed this past week, “Beneath V“, adds to that impression with dense, sea-sick riffing.
The music slowly and then more violently roils, like whirlpool seas. Backed by rampantly plundering drum-and-bass, the guitars also glitter like phosphorus and whine like desperate souls in danger of being sucked… beneath.
The music also soars toward zeniths of vast splendor and descends into ice-cold depths where a deep voice whispers in your ear — different from the raging growls and inflamed howls that occupy most of the vocals.
Beneath will be jointly released on March 20th by Amor Fati Productions, Extraconscious Records, and The Nox Entity.
https://shop.amor-fati-productions.de/en/
https://entropicrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/beneath
https://thenoxentity.bandcamp.com/album/lha-d-beneath
ENGULFED (Turkey)
New music from Engulfed is always welcome around here, and I whole-heartedly welcome this next song from them, even though it sounds like it wants to rip my heart from my chest and eat it while it’s still beating.
But as we’ve come to know about the music of this band, it’s not entirely a ruthless assault on the sense. The feverish, intriguing ring of the guitars at the outset of this new song are a sign of that, as is the slithering lead that worms its way through the humongous drum blows that follow the opening.
Even after the violence explodes in a fusillade of blistering drums and a rapidly writhing swarm of guitars in seizure-mode, coupled with horrid gutturals, the lead guitar squirms and screams its solos with riveting effect.
The rapid and technically impressive changes keep coming, and the production enables listeners to follow all the fast-moving parts, even as the combined effect dazzles the senses (and maniacally inflicts brutish beatings).
“In the Abyss of Death’s Obscurity” is the opening song on Engulfed‘s new album Unearthly Litanies of Despair, which will be released by Me Saco Un Ojo and Dark Descent on April 19th.
https://mesacounojo.bandcamp.com/album/unearthly-litanies-of-despair
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/unearthly-litanies-of-despair
https://www.facebook.com/engulfedtr
SYLVAINE (Norway)
Now we come to the stark departure I mentioned in the introduction to today’s collection. I usually don’t try to play DJ in arranging the songs in these collections, but knowing what came before this spot in the roundup, and knowing what will come next, I felt it might be a mercy to put Sylvaine‘s new song here.
The words that come to mind are, unfortunately for me, clichéd. Words like “haunting” and “spellbinding”. But even though this song slowed me down in every way, I didn’t use the time to hunt the thesaurus. I was too… spellbound….
“Eg Er Framand“, which seems to translate as “I am a foreigner”, is from Sylvaine‘s new EP of the same name. It’s set for release by Season of Mist on March 22nd.
https://sylvainemusic.bandcamp.com/album/eg-er-framand
https://shopusa.season-of-mist.com/band/sylvaine
https://orcd.co/egerframand
https://www.facebook.com/sylvainemusic
KVADRAT (Greece)
The next song, “Υπόγειος Λαβύρινθος“, is one I had in mind when, in introducing today’s collection, I referred to tracks that build gradually toward what makes them distressing.
In this case, the slow and simple notes of the song’s opening, backed by shimmering wisps, will pull your heart down into a lonely despondency. That gentle but downward drift makes the no-warning storm that follows it even more startling, though the tumult is so powerful that it would have been startling even absent the intro.
Interestingly, even in the storm of furiously battering percussion and the dense, blizzard-like scathing that ensues, you can detect that despondent opening melody, though now it sounds an order of magnitude more distraught as it rings and weaves.
In the mix there’s an enormously heavy bass at work in the low frequencies, and some catastrophic drum detonations, plus heated howls whose harrowing reverberations add to the immersive wretchedness of the music. I want to underscore “immersive”, because the stricken intensity and tumultuous power of the music are capable of swallowing a listener whole.
I quickly become a cemented fan of Kvadrat‘s music after hearing and writing about both the project’s 2021 debut EP and its 2021 split with Moeror and Human Serpent. I’m thus quite happy to report that the song below is from a debut Kvadrat album named The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion, which will be jointly released on April 4th by Kvadrat, Nuclear Winter Records, and Total Dissonance Worship.
(Thanks to Miloš for alerting me to this song.)
https://kvdrt.bandcamp.com/album/the-horrible-dissonance-of-oblivion
https://desolatedepths.bigcartel.com/
https://nuclearwinterrecords.com/shop
https://totaldissonanceworship.bandcamp.com/merch
https://www.facebook.com/kvadratnoise
AORTES (Lithuania)
This next song is the other one I had in mind at the outset in referring to tracks that build toward the place where their distress flourishes in intensity. And, well, you might guess that a song named “Lifeless” will reach that place eventually.
There is certainly no human life evident in the haunting, snowbound video, and what other life might remain has been driven dormant by winter. In the music, as you gaze at these barren and abandoned scenes, brittle notes slowly ring and shimmer in front of a distant drone.
The rumble of the bass and the snap of the snare signal the build toward greater intensity, even as the notes continue to chime and shiver. Craggy chords begin to slash, fevers mount in the low end, the drums go nuts, and both the music and the vocals begin to scream, as if burning in pain.
Abrasive feedback feeds a feeling of being broken, and the heavy blows rained down by the rhythm section do the breaking. After that, the music becomes so vast and searing, the vocals so crazed in agony, that the effect is frightening.
This song was my first introduction to Aortes, and it bears out a description of the music as a blending of “post-metal, black metal, sludge, and experimental synth noises”. It’s a stand-alone single available at Bandcamp, where other music by the band is available, most of it under their previous name Autism (I have written about some of what they did under that name).
https://aortes.bandcamp.com/album/lifeless
https://www.facebook.com/aortesofficial/
OSSILEGIUM (U.S.)
I decided to close with hellfire and mortar fire, which were the first sensations that sprang to mind in listening to this last song, “Nightborn“.
From moment one, the song strikes with overpowering force, like a napalm blast front coupled with a rapid bombardment. With fanatically howling vocals in front, the roiling riffage is dense and blistering, the drums punishing, the bass a bowel-loosening engine.
It’s a breathtaking experience, even when the rhythm section starts pumping like high-octane pistons, because that’s a prelude to a gloriously swirling solo. And actually, though the riffing relentlessly blazes, it elaborately swirls and chimes too, magnificent as well as dire and deleterious.
Take deep breaths before hitting play below.
Ossilegium is a Chicago-based duo composed of Exhul (Empyreus, Kommandant, Withering Soul) and Valr (Amongst the Fallen, Blackened Temple, Kommandant). The song is from their debut album The Gods Below, which will be released by Personal Records on May 3rd. The label’s PR materials recommend it for fans of Necrophobic, Sacramentum, Unanimated, Gates of Ishtar, and Sweden’s Dawn and Naglfar.
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/the-gods-below
https://www.facebook.com/Ossilegium.666/