(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’ve already published Parts 1-3 of his list (find those here), and now we’re proceeding with Part 4.)
Why is NCS posting this so deep into the year already and why does it allow this semi-literate baboon back for more? Well, two reasons, one of which needs a bit more extrapolation.
The editor of this fine establishment somehow lived vicariously through me and took the wrong cup of rượu (rice wine), thereby inducing temporary blindness and resulting in him just okay-ing it… but on a serious note if you’re at all as addicted to year-end lists and particularly the most infectious lists… then we all know it had to happen, no matter how long it took this reader to edit down his sleep-deprived lunar new year frenzy of an essay. I say sleep-deprived when in actual fact my self-induced insomnolence was abetted by experimenting with copious amounts of mind-altering substances, for research purposes of course.
We live in a time where the kids are getting smarter but the bread ain’t getting cheaper. You might have to let go of what you understand as the whole variegated realm of what could possibly be catching to the extent that we can experience either physiological or metaphysical ceraunophilic ego-death. (MS Word does not recognize this word referring to lovers of thunder and lightning and suggests a plethora of other unpronounceable terms like keraunophobia, sudanophilic, gerontophilic – gee whiz, itself a form of chronophilia, and crurophilia… a few inches up from having fixations akin to Tarantino)
NCS has been the high-watermark fucking stratospheric-into-the-Van-Allen-belt of taste and refinement and they somehow accepted an article I wrote.
Tết-ifications (lunar new year preparations and celebrations) have been in full folking (Diablo) Swing (Orchestra) [and if you are as inclined as I am to recognize melodies, yes, the vocals and keys from that live performance of New World Widows in parts do resemble SOAD’s ‘Aerials’] and even though I did not yet have a toke off the Điếu bát this year, I was blessed with the bong water of the Thuốc lào tobacco pipe to prevent mountain leeches from sucking me dry of blood when I climbed Pù Luông mountain as my last physical act of 2023.
Fireworks from Đền Lừ Lake Park – pic taken by Vizzah Harri 9 February ‘24
I had a year…. In fact, it was the worst since my brother passed away 5 years ago. Some close friends distanced themselves from me, others stuck by me, and more. I had a supraliminal and baseline consciousness-ruptured experience of agency ripped by a truck hitting me in March of last year. I got off fairly unscathed though the concussion was no joke. Collateral damage manifested in confusion and aggression mixed with pigheadedness (and taking unprecedented amounts of DMT and psilocybin with necrosis in my foot, yes gangrene) made me the worst person to be around. Hanoi and my family here rode it out though. It was time to give back.
NCS and the music I’ve discovered through the years from the musicians and avid listeners and writers here have gone a long way in keeping me on this mortal coil. The least I could do was to offer up some of my time, divergent-humour, and madness, as any good jester would. Islander posting word salads I concocted from defiling the thesaurus comes as less of a ‘fuck yes!’ moment, than, ‘okay, how do I top this?’.
Parts 2-6 took longer because I’m a bit of a madman, but somehow Islander approved these too. I can die happy now.
- Anti-God Hand (Canada) – Barge of Light – 25 August 2023
Heliotrope me up into that cloud.
Blight Year takes you on a journey commensurate with what the cover art presents. Emotionally stunning, balancing the hushed fury of blackened blight with prog-suffused melody and cinematic proclivities.
Epic, nah, prodigiously Homeric album, and like so many others here it was hard to pick just one track. Accordingly, it was impossible not to pick the one that showcased a disentangled effervescence ensconced in the Bhagavad of a Djinn’s ambergris (sometimes it’s best to let the music speak for itself, so in assistance towards your succor from the suck of having to ocularly tap-dance prior to each track, I do short-form descriptions too at times)
https://antigodhand.bandcamp.com/album/blight-year
- Kostnatění (Minnesota, USA) – Řemen (The Belt) – 26 May 2023
Does not sound American at all. Perhaps the excellent interview that the eclectic melomaniac at Machine Music did with this beguiling act holds some answers.
From meditations on a world expanding in size and also heating up, this folk- and noise-infused mammoth of an album attempts to relay the “story of the human condition as a function of heat.”
And that guitar tone at the beginning of Řemen is just so sublime. It both speeds up and gets more frenetic until you’re shoved into the forever burn of Hořím navždy. Embroidered in fever-black filaments of fortuitous effluvium of Heisenberg-ian godfire. Accordingly, to quote one of the godsends of prolific posting on everyone’s favourite Avant-fb-page – Zippity Doodah John – “please git sum ” (not gate-keeping, but if you do actually read these articles and possess a constitution commensurate to being inundated with an inordinate volume of new muzak daily but can actually contribute and not just lurk, reply below and I’ll post the link)
https://www.facebook.com/kostnateni
https://kostnateni.bandcamp.com/album/pal
- Leiþa (Germany) – Fremdkörper – 13 January 2023
Imagine an Asthâghul + Liu Zhenyang + Noise collaboration.
Noise has been busy. Releasing the stellar U-Bootsmann EP under Kanonenfieber and also a full-length, Legacy, under the moniker Non Est Deus; it was their Leiþa release, Reue and the track Fremdkörper especially, that struck the proverbial chord with me.
It might just be preference based on familiarity seeing as songs like The Canon of Nil and Die Havarie can be interpreted as hitting harder, having more melody and perhaps for some having more staying power.
Yet it was Fremdkörper that jackslammed with an irrevocable and unconscionable impunity, extolling an incognoscible fulcrum of formidable fiddle music.
https://noisebringer-records.bandcamp.com/album/reue
- Sulphur Aeon (Germany) – Usurper of the Earth and Sea – 13 October 2023
Ever since 2018’s The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos, many of us have been awaiting whatever Sulphur Aeon would come up with next with some anticipatory zeal.
It all sounds very familiar (and for once that is a good thing), no doubt this is the band that gave Sear Bliss a run for their money in atmosphere last time round. And when that transition at the 2:00 minute mark hits, you know you’ll be in good hands for the rest of the album too.
https://www.facebook.com/SulphurAeon
https://sulphuraeon-vanrecords.bandcamp.com/album/seven-crowns-and-seven-seals
- Crymych (Wales) – Sistrum close – 6 October 2023
I only heard this next band when I was reading Neil Jameson’s take-it-or-leave-it best of the year column, and every year without fail there’s something on his list that hits the mark, ensuing in debellatio. Pirated from my comment:
“Goatherders’ imaginary friends be damned but that Eerified Catacomb/Void of Autumn Split’s third song ‘Clothed in Rotten Copper’ has a beautiful(?) transition from donating organs into savagery. Sick. For Crymych’s Songs of Sistrum – one has to actually listen thru the first 2 minutes of the final track which is the one posted as the Bandcamp link and then all at once one understands 1. Why this ain’t gonna be on many lists 2. Why it should be 3. That this is why I keep reading your lists.”
It’s like when a band listened to the amazing surf-rock covers found on YouTube and decided, yeah, this will slap. And it does; in a killing-them-softly-and-with-a-smile kinda way. If you like this, you should check out the premiere and review of their album where Islander not only writes more eloquently and quotes our favourite circumlocuting curmudgeon, he’s also better at finding cool band pictures.
https://pembrokeshireblackcircle.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-sistrum
- Henget (FINLAND) – The Chalice of Life and Death – 19 may 2023
Taking the familiar into the surreal.
They kept their best for the closer on this album that doesn’t stretch too far into prog territory, but which certainly allures as soon as one lights eyes upon the cover art.
I’m a sucker for a flowery and colourful album cover. Even though it doesn’t always portray that well what lies within, it seems like Kuvataiteilija M.T. Salminen got it down pretty damn well. Just like the album, there’s a lot going on and quite a few themes and experimentations that at first glance/listen don’t seem to make sense, yet upon further investigation things do start locking in place, just not at Tetris level 29.
https://henget.bandcamp.com/album/beyond-north-star
https://www.facebook.com/hengetband/
- Blood Serpent (Vietnam) – Nuclear Chaos – 8 December 2023
Mammoth steps in direction of greatness.
These Hanoians have perhaps married themselves to sounds of yore but that is what any incipient in the supraprefatory sense of propagating fecundation would adhere to.
If you were looking for more brutality and bloodlust in your mix, look no further, and keep a close eye on this space. Just like their country, which is growing faster than almost any other economically, socially, and culturally, and therefore in art and music too; Vietnam is a place and Blood Serpent a band that is and will keep on producing impressive swiftly-percolating and pestiferous progressions in the future.
https://www.facebook.com/bloodserpentofficial
https://bloodserpent.bandcamp.com/album/bestial-extermination
- Austin TV (Mexico) – De La Orquídea y La Avispa – 28 September 2023
Ha, you thought it was all going to be metal?
This is for that mood of reservations about anything else going on, you just want to stay home and cancel everything. Take a synth bath, enjoy those lemniscate masks, and smile at the restrained fury in the anti-breakdown.
https://www.facebook.com/austintvoficial/
https://austin-tv.bandcamp.com/album/rizoma
Here is a YouTube playlist of all 8 songs listed in this installment: