Photo Credit: Paul McGuire
Wallet- and pocketbook-protective dikes continue to fail at an alarming rate, deluging bank accounts with continuing torrents of new music. Yes, cheap-ass streaming services like Spotify might let your money keep its meager head above water for the time being, but at some point your conscience will assert its ascendancy, won’t it?
Way too much new music to cover comprehensively in this mid-week roundup. I just grabbed a few ugly gems as they swept by, with one hand still on the felled tree that’s serving as my temporary life preserver as the flood carries me toward that bridge pylon ahead. Hopefully we won’t hit it as hard as the Dali.
MALIGNANCY (U.S.)
Five years on from Intrauterine Cannibalism, a practice abhorred by right-to-lifers even when the seasoning is handled just right, these Yonkers-based maniacs are returning with an album named …Discontinued, one they describe as “a post-apocalyptic auditory assault on the listener from beginning to end”.
Pretty fair description based on the album’s first single, “Purity of Purpose,” which premiered at Toilet Ov Hell yesterday — though one could argue that it’s the sound of the apocalypse in progress rather than what comes after.
The bludgeoning is of course ruthless and the gutturals horrid, but the riffing and the warbling bass lines are so weirdly mercurial and pathologically demented that it sounds like the apocalypse was preceded by an episode of mass insanity. It also sounds like Malignancy haven’t actually left cannibalism behind either.
…Discontinued will be released by Willowtip on June 14th. It will be available for pre-order on Friday.
https://willowtip.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/MalignancyOfficial
UMBRA VITAE (U.S.)
One good dose of insanity deserves another, and the next dose comes from this collective with the eye-opening lineup of Jacob Bannon (Converge), Sean Martin (Twitching Tongues, ex-Hatebreed), Mike McKenzie (The Red Chord), Jon Rice (Uncle Acid, Tsjuder), and Greg Weeks (The Red Chord).
They also have a new album on the way, and its first single is “Belief is Obsolete,” though try telling that to the jillions of people who are convinced that belief is superior to facts, no matter how moronic the belief.
In the song, the guitars swarm like hornets aflame and skitter like feeding rats while the rhythm section administer crowbar-blows and discharge blast-beat obliteration and the vocals come in torrents of red-eyed fury. There’s also a thuggish breakdown ahead, which seems guaranteed to whip up a frothy moshpit and leave eyes blackened as well as bloodshot.
But let’s go back to the song’s title. Per Jacob Bannon: “Lyrically I explore the idea that ‘belief’ in the traditional sense is obsolete in the modern age we live in. It is abused as a shield and weapon socially, politically, and spiritually, ultimately becoming a burden for all.” True.
The album’s title is Light of Death. It’s set for release on June 7th via Deathwish Inc.
https://dthw.sh/lightofdeath
https://umbravitae.bandcamp.com/album/light-of-death
https://www.umbravitae.com/
LIMBONIC ART (Norway)
Now we come to the third band in a row with a new release whose past work creates eagerness for it, though in this case the wait has been much longer, with 7 years passing since Limbonic Art‘s last full-length, Spectre Abysm.
The new Limbonic Art album is entitled Opus Daemoniacal, and its first single, accompanied by a torch-lit, snowbound video that goes off-planet (in more ways than one), is “Ad Astra et Abyssos“. Prepare for sweeping and soaring waves of mysterious melodic brilliance, hell-for-leather drums, heavily undulating bass-lines, scalding vocal intemperance, choral chants, and the crack of lightning flashes.
The music feels tormented as well as wild and grand, and even seems to writhe in large-scale illness or fear in the face of the song’s other terrors, and although the song’s intensity is un-relenting it grows more dismal and unsettling as it goes, and the screams more frightening.
The album is scheduled for release on June 28th by Kyrck Productions & Armour.
http://lnk.spkr.media/limbonic-art-opus
https://www.instagram.com/limbonicartofficial
SUMAC (U.S.)
Maybe before the weekend I’ll get to a roundup of new music from bands whose pedigrees aren’t already well-established, but not today. Today, we’ll finish with the first single off a new album by Sumac — the collective consisting of Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer), Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists), and Brian Cook (Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes).
That first single, “Yellow Dawn“, seems like the slow unfolding of a dark hallucination at first — whistling tones warbling, beats pounding like the backing stomp for a primitive and menacing ritual, a bass that intriguingly murmurs. The clarion tones of the lead guitar, when it appears, woozily weave and beckon.
Things do get a lot heavier, with the arrival of big brutish chugs, bone-gnawing bass frequencies, and grizzly-like growls. Bursts of blaring abrasive chords and pulsating scrapes coil the tension, which Sumac ratchet up with increasingly feverish and demented fretwork and manic percussive outbursts — though the brutish, pounding punishment is never far away.
Letting the bass take the lead with its primal throbs is a precursor to an extended freakout of screeching and screaming dual-guitar convulsions — the firestorm of fretwork insanity where everything has been leading. Don’t worry, your reptile brain will continue reacting to the big groove while the frontal lobes get lacerated and burned with an acetylene torch.
Whatever’s left of your mind will get a dose of narcotics at the end, too, though it’s not exactly a painkiller, and anyway, the band ferociously cut loose again at the very end, quickly conducting an exhilarating demolition job.
The name of Sumac‘s new album is The Healer, and damn you’ll need one after this first song. It comes out on Thrill Jockey Records on June 21st.
https://sumac.bandcamp.com/album/the-healer
https://www.facebook.com/SUMACBAND