(Our editor Islander 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 1-5 of his list (find those here), and now we’re proceeding with Part 6 — almost the final part.)
Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies of ’23 – Part VI (of 6.16… because the sacred number is 13, my mom is – no word of a lie – the 13th child and even though they grew up rather Christian, French-influenced paganism still had a strong hold and they called themselves the 12 after you-know-who’s acolytes, seeing as baby #12 sadly didn’t make it. 6+1+6 equals 13 and if isopsephy is mangled by the kind of imposter disordered numerologist that tattooed a clock pointing to 3:37 on his left shoulder seeing as his idol growing up was Anthony Kiedis and Scar tissue was exactly that length, then why not use that number as the final installment?
This gives you an idea where my style sprouts from, ‘that’ Riot Hyatt McCarthy–word-salad spitter, sprinkle in some filth, and garnish it with the dust of your dreams served next to a walled orchard and you get my meander. 666 added up is just eighteen, ask the Greeks, they would know. And yes, I’m therefore doing an Islander and adding one more with links to all the tracks that there is not enough sand in the hourglass for to keep writing about last year.
“Yes, this one time you’ve been bold
But don’t you get a big head
Remind yourself what you’ve been told
Don’t you get carried away”
– Atlantic (Holocene), written by Robin Staps
It is sometimes the case that we bite off more than we were prepared to even contemplate masticating.
I realized that the way I write can be taxing on most folks’ patience, so in order to make things more palatable, I wondered if I could challenge myself into finding a shorter form. In an attempt to keep people actually reading NCS articles not written by the core, I endeavored a stab at a new format, probably a once-off (there were semblances in the other installments). One could go for the 6-word novel or hey, even reviews in haikus, but then Andy Synn already did that. I’m therefore doing a mix of both, for those who feel the paragraphs are TL;DGR for them (and yes I kept referencing thát logorrheic wordsmith ‘cos I cannot believe no-one else has made the pun-tastic connection as of yet hahahaha).
One could be requested to hold (McCar)thy mead for its (infinite) Obscure Verses of the Multiverse, or one could follow the (Heming)way and revert to theorizing icebergs of omission in sextuplets akin to “fat man eats pie then farts.” The King himself eponymously said it best in On Writing, “omit needless words.” But I’ll be Acheron-accursed if language exists only for formality of form. One ape’s deific damnation is another’s Beelzebubian blessing. The fun thing is dredging sometimes hadopelagic levels of depth in extracting from a language that which is salitter scattered… and so this brings the prefatory list of MMXXIII infections to an (almost) end.
I wrote parts 2-6 in one sitting, editing over the span of a few days (re-editing did in fact occur, upon which I realized that I was this guy holding the ocean back with a broom, an exercise in futility really to include everything, so if your favourite song is not included even in the “on deck” list to follow, hopefully you at least found something new).
The entries in this here supposed final instalment are all concentrated musings, with an unsolicited epitaph for the year ahead as anchor. {edit…the absence of bonuses in my particular line of mercenary work as a day job means that I don’t like to see others go without one. I’m doing a dweller of isles “on deck” appendix after this here ‘final’ part. It isn’t edited by Jamie Selkirk after all. (LOTR 3 Return of the King… had three bore-fest endings)}
- The Faith Hills Have Eyes (Wisconsin, USA) – Juggalo Wild Wings – 3 February 2023
Thanks to Cicada
the Burrower’s awesome list
on their Facebook page.
If you forgot your
Chinos but tabernacled
Synesthetic zen
https://thefaithhillshaveeyes.bandcamp.com/album/the-riffth-element
https://www.facebook.com/thefaithhillshaveeyesarerad
- Sarmat (USA) – Formed from Filth – 16 June 2023
Lunchbucket malevolent ministrations,
interspersed iniquitous indulgence.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/determined-to-strike
- Vulture industries (NORWAY) – New Lords of Light – 16 June 2023
Abate abelian Abba-toir,
abject amorous equipoise.
https://www.facebook.com/vultureindustries/
https://vultureindustries.bandcamp.com/album/ghosts-from-the-past
- Blackbraid (USA) – Twilight Hymn of Ancient Blood – 7 July 2023
Casually blood-slaked
unto the cerulean endarkenment.
https://www.instagram.com/blackbraid_kvlt/
https://blackbraid.bandcamp.com/
- Behold The Arctopus (USA) – Insane in the 11th Membrane – 13 September 2023
Happenstantial Hallucinatory Haranguing
into Harlequinade Havoc.
https://www.facebook.com/beholdthearctopus/
https://beholdthearctopus.bandcamp.com/
- Dødssanger (Vietnam) – Penance – 12 May 2023
Hebephrenic grimoire,
hellatious hymnals of ill-grace.
(Watch this space – musings on a live performance, the Vietnamese music scene, as well as an interview are rendering)
https://www.facebook.com/dodssanger.bm
https://dodssanger.bandcamp.com/album/reflection-of-a-wretched-soul
- Endseeker (GERMANY) – Hell is Here – 27 October 2023
Grime-caked
gullet-gurgling
and meat-cleaving mollusks(?).
https://endseeker.bandcamp.com/album/global-worming
https://www.facebook.com/endseekermusic/
- Gam (Denmark) — Af kæmpers ædle slægt – 2023
If
you missed Stormblåst
- Glyph (USA) – An Impostor’s Folly – 25 August 2023
True expression
from defying the false.
https://www.instagram.com/keeperoftheglyph/
https://keeperoftheglyph.bandcamp.com/album/an-impostor-s-folly
https://keeperoftheglyph.bandcamp.com/track/when-we-looked-at-their-ruins
- Tetragrammacide (India)- Nuit Arches over the Neither-Neither City of Cubes; Hadit Meditates While Hanging Upside Down Inside a Tesseract-Ka’aba – 2 November 2023
Precursor Gravidity
Prodromus Incubation
Ripening Manifestation
https://www.facebook.com/tetragrammacide/
https://tetragrammacide.bandcamp.com/music
OUTRO:
Tolerance, whether it’s as regards to one’s inability to fight certain dosages of toxic substances, whether it is our patience for something that might come across at first like An Abstract Illusion’s Slaves with wall-of-sound fury before abating into glory, or whether it is the tolerance we have for each other. Because even though there are incontrovertible facts in our universe, like why Creeping Death (…I had to) is the clear standout song on Ride the Lightning, tolerance can be a weird one. It is a mental exercise as well as a physical capacity, what is your level and what is the context and what are you prepared to tolerate?
I cannot speak for any community, but I can speak for myself. We tolerate bad ideas only to the extent that we know we can defeat them with logical reasoning amongst friends. When it comes to intolerance, some people do not understand why there is a popular saying being thrown around ala intolerance towards intolerance. It seems like a misnomer, a paradox. I’ll give you a brief explanation: Is it a universally accepted notion that nazis had to be subjected to the gallows post WWII? Well, that’s a direct and clear example of intolerance towards intolerance. The problem comes in when people feel we all need to take a more measured approach guided by spiritual leaders who had the arrogance to imply that “to err is human but to forgive is divine.”
Apartheid is a scourge on the history of my birth country; I live in Vietnam, have been a Nam Phi kiều (South African expat) for 15 years already, but I was born and raised in the Republic of South Africa. What you will read next is not my own crackpot idea, at least one much better-read and published historian agrees and even wrote about it partially in his book reassessing white-washed history in Southern Africa. No answers are this simple to complex issues in systems that are not easily put into closed boxes, however it is that fact of shying away from intolerance towards intolerance that led my country to the strife and struggles it faces today. We had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that heard all the misdeeds of authorities from the Apartheid government, upon which said individuals got amnesty. There is no conclusion, catharsis, or release on the side of the victim for that. It was a travesty. Hailed internationally together with our progressive constitution… it lasted not even as long as Mandela’s reign as president.
Why are you getting a history lesson? Metal music provides release, purgation, inspiration and liberationwhen at times we are psychologically assaulted. A lot of us have had to build up tolerance for a multitude of different flavours within the umbrella universe of metal genres and perhaps there still are some that we cannot equate with being music or having any rhythm at all. That’s okay. Metal is often described as protest music in the same vein as punk and its offshoots. It has also become a discipline of tolerance in this new era of inclusion. More music from a wider range of cultures and walks of life have been and are surfacing and it is becoming possible for marginalized groups and individuals to make art about their intolerance towards the discrimination and violence they are subjected to on a daily basis.
So, if you were able to abide by this meandering and at times not as succinct or erudite essay, may you have the patience to try something new in this year of the dragon, to give the benefit of the doubt to a person you previously stereotyped, to not have any tolerance for those weak-minded enough to punch down, or who are the very ones that marginalize.
BONUS #1:
- An Abstract Illusion (Sweden) – Slaves 9 September 2023 2022 (I’m bending the rules as a kind of prompt for readers to go explore older entries to this list from prior years. We are older, have experienced different things and it is more than possible we’ll find something new even though it was posted in the past. Yes, a shit-ton of music will and has already dropped this year. It is inevitable, just like the potency of that which might be older yet still new to our ears.)
My eyes were defiled the other day by an unsolicited quote from some page suggestion which is becoming more and more frequent these days.
“In this world you can
Search for everything,
Except Love and death.
They find you when the
Time comes.”
-Sergei Yesenin
what a load of horseshit.
The mangling of words in this manner is no less than a fecund gutter slime droplet stuck on the rim of the garb of a person that offed themself in protest to a discharge warmer for its having been excreted than for having labored and festered in the cold bowels of inanity (woah, why all the vitriol, I thought this was all about tolerance?). Why does someone have to have such an adverse and even bellicose reaction to mere words from some poet on a page that is trying to be cool, deep, and offbeat by posting feel-good quotes daubed in the fatalism of an absolutist quagmire of dusted dreams? Humor me while I draw from the ‘actual’ well where adverbially we can say “go fornicate yourself Sergei.”
Words, love, death, more words. Read with the thought-experiment in mind that everything around us is filtered through the machinated constructs we’ve naturally selected since birth to be our perception of things. Words, be you deaf, blind, mute or none of the above, words whether you feel confident enough to wield them abrogate-ly or toss around without a whim or a whimper, words my friends, together with all other expressions of art are, as contrived and forceful and pretentious as it may sound, where the real magic lies. Don’t believe me? Remind yourself that our inability to evolve societally as a human culture has much to do with magical-thinking colonies of an uncooked trip.
People like Sergei never heard of the nocebo effect. Think they’re above suggestion. I thought I was, rather elitist and pompously proclaiming my inability to fall for something as ‘weak-minded’ as induced ‘good-natured’ hypnotism. People can literally kill another person with words, and you can bring to life the numinous and sublime to an extent where if one wanted to believe in what Yesenin said: you haven’t lived, and you thought love should be written with a capital letter to somehow put it on the pedestal of its being reserved only in Eros, Ludus and Pragma, i.e.. romantically? You must be quite the human being to not be able to experience philautia, as in love yourself fully. That is the only real love, apparently; Yesenin forgot about Philia (deep friendship), Agape (love for everyone), Storge (family love), and yeah even Mania (obsessive love). Because if it is not present, everything else we do is a lie, simply a yearning for acceptance and reciprocation, we’ve ghosted ourselves into unrequited attrition our whole lives? We look for answers to love and eternal cessation all the time, and it is in art where the search turns inspiration into beauty.
Slaves tear down this holy mountain. My Sennheiser’s practiced scatology on my bed. Literally mold-infested they did become after just leaving them for a few days after I presume the wiring failed and the left ‘phone ceased producing anything.
Had to make do with a JBL and I realized something as I was sitting at one of my favorite cafes reverting instead to my el-cheapo Bluetooth earphones. There were sounds I hadn’t heard on the same track before. Them organs. If you just want to listen to the most challenging song as far as getting the audio and mix just right if you’re a technological inebriate like me, click on Slaves, and be emancipated from what you believed was possible in taking Opeth’s sound further. This band listened to Harlequin Forest and schemed, “hold my fermented malted sorghum.”
As it echoes over the tapestry of the empyreal, the album closes out with This torment has no end, only new beginnings.
And as before, here is a YouTube playlist for Part 6 (and seeing as I’m behind the times and do not use Spotify, I could not find anything other than the full Behold the Arctopus album):