SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: BOLESKINE HOUSE, CROCELL, GÖDEN, UDOLS, WEREWOLVES

Following up yesterday’s roundup of recommended new songs and videos, here’s another — five more to help get your weekend off on the wrong foot.

BOLESKINE HOUSE (Italy)

The name of the debut album from Boleskine House is Miserabilist Blues. The ringing guitar harmony that opens the long song I’ve chosen to begin today’s collection is indeed miserable and blue, but “Black House Painters” transforms that feeling of aching loneliness by then processing the melody through a lens of frantic blackened riffing, tumultuous percussion, and abyssal roars.

The riffing also flows like a gritty sea of remorse and agony, running its recurring waves over variable drum rhythms and big throbbing bass-lines, but returning to that opening melody and making it worm its way deeper into the skull. The band also insinuate other glittering clean-guitar passages that are mesmerizing as well as melancholy, and portions of heaving doom heaviness that moan and wail as the music crawls and pounds.

It’s an extravagantly dynamic and multi-faceted song, both harrowing and enchanting, viscerally propulsive and ravaging but also poignant and melodically very memorable, a beautifully crafted stylistic hybrid that never wears out its welcome over 12 1/2 minutes.

Not for naught do Masked Dead Records and Sulphur Music sum up the album as “densely dramatic and nostalgic”, and call out the influence of “90’s gothic doom and shoegaze melodies”, while recommending it for fans of Katatonia, Aquilus, Alcest, Agalloch, old-era Opeth, and Paradise Lost. Those labels plan to release the album on May 17th.

Boleskine House is the work of Raven Borsi (vocals and lyrics) and Niccolò Misrachi (instrumentation and songwriting).

https://maskedeadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/miserabilist-blues
https://www.facebook.com/BoleskineHouseDoom
https://www.instagram.com/boleskine.house.doomed/

 

 

CROCELL (Denmark)

When the name Crocell popped up in our obese in-box it set off bells and whistles. To understand why, take a gander at the 7 NCS articles (preceding this one) collected at this location, beginning with Andy‘s Synn Report on the band in 2012.

Crocell did release a pair of EPs in 2021, but we haven’t had an album from them since Relics in 2018. That gap will be closed this coming June when Emanzipation Productions releases Crocell‘s latest full-length, Of Frost, of Flame, of Flesh. Its first single, “Search of Solace“, was released yesterday with a gripping video in which ominous cloaked figures stride, collapse, levitate, and writhe within changing settings.

As we’ve come to expect from Crocell, the song is one of many facets, expressing shades of darkness in different ways. Thanks to a brutishly heavy bass and bone-fracturing drumwork, it’s capable of loosening bowels. Thanks to viciously gnawing riffs and scorching screams, it’s as cruel as feeding wolves. Thanks to blasting drums, boiling guitars with an acid tone, and harrowing howls, it un-cages torment and violence.

But you’ll also encounter a slowly moaning bridge that leads to a clean-guitar melody which oozes misery and wails in desolation. The lead guitar swirls and frantically flickers as the music’s tumult breaks open again, and then the song rumbles, hammers, and slithers its way to the end like a venomous serpent.

Of Frost, of Flame, of Flesh will be released by Emanzipation Productions on June 28th. They recommend it for fans of Necrophobic, Marduk, Bölzer, and God Dethroned.

https://orcd.co/cro-sea
https://emanzipation.dk/
https://crocelldk.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/crocelldk

 

 

GÖDEN (U.S.)

From 1989 to 1994 Winter released only one demo tape (Hour of Doom), one album (Into Darkness), and one EP (Eternal Frost), and nothing since then (apart from a live album that’s due for release on April 19th). But those early recordings were enough to cement their place in the history of extreme metal and to become the jumping-off point for countless other bands in the doom and sludge genres for the last 30 years. And thus when Svart Records announced four years ago that it would be releasing an album by a band it characterized as “a long-awaited continuation of what Winter would have been”, I sat up and paid attention.

That band, Göden, consists of Winter’s co-founder Stephen Flam, lead vocalist Vas Kallas, and keyboardist Tony Pinnisi, who also played with Winter. I spilled quite a few words about their 2020 debut album Beyond Darkness, and thankfully they’ll be following it up with another long-player this year on the Svart label (joined on the album by drummer Jason Frantz and violinist Margaret Murphy).

The song below, “In the Vale of the Fallen“, is the first preview of the album, which is entitled Vale of the Fallen. It is, in a nutshell, a very disturbing lament, as psychedelic and bizarre as it is huge and hulking.

The macabre vocals are perhaps its most disturbing feature, along with eerily quavering keys, pavement-cracking stomps, a bass that growls like a beast in its rotting lair, and a fuzz-bombed guitar that’s a beast of a different color but also quivers in demented anticipation.

Svart Records will release the album on May 17th.

(I owe thanks to Rennie Resmini‘s new starkweather SubStack article for discovering this song (before noticing a press release), and many others that sound worth checking out.)

https://orcd.co/de6kkna
https://www.svartrecords.com/en/product/goden-vale-of-the-fallen/12280
https://www.facebook.com/goden.official

 

 

UDOLS (Spain)

To keep you on your toes, and then to fall backward in a tangled heap, I picked this next song from a forthcoming album by a band that also happens to slot in nicely in the alphabetical ordering today.

I didn’t know what to expect, because although this Barcelona-based solo project apparently has a previous album, I haven’t heard it. At first, I thought this song was going to be a bright and bouncing bit of electronica with a New Wave influence, which would have been fine with me, though I wouldn’t have included it at this site.

The reason I did include it is because of how Udols suddenly blind-sides us with abrasive crashing slashes and weirdly warbling arpeggios, manic beats, and ferocious howls. Back and forth the music goes, with other bits of weirdness inserted here and there — other diabolical voices, other electronic skitterings, dismal dragging chords, glittering ethereal lights, and a trippy guitar solo whose darting and spiraling reverberations add beautifully to the song’s non-stop twists and turns.

“Deep Black” is the first single from the upcoming album Songs Of A Modern Transcendence that will be out on April 25th. I’ll share something I found in a press release after listening to this song:

Songs For A Modern Transcendence is an original album, as eccentric and demanding as the planet we inhabit, which encourages you to gallop in ‘The Silent City’ through Martian jazz or to enter parallel universes where Arcturus, Dødheimsgard, Aborym, Imperial Triumphant, or the Shining from Norway can cohabit.

https://udolsproject.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/udolsproject

 

 

WEREWOLVES (Australia)

What better way to wrap up this Saturday roundup, and leave you madly running for the exits, than with a new bit of “completely moronic death-metal” (their words) from Werewolves — the deviant triumvirate of Dave Haley, Sam Bean, and Matt Wilcock.

Werewolves describes this song, “Beaten Back to Life“, as one whose hateful lyricism “castigates everyone with the temerity to have started listening to metal after 1992, and hates on everyone young and well-adjusted enough to have never experienced the joys of rewinding a cassette tape with a pen”. Methinks they have their tongue in their cheek.

As for the music, it’s pretty fucking hateful too, a torrent of rabidly boiling riffage, blistering drums, and gruesome growls — segmented with rapid bomb-bursts and interspersed with swirls of nausea-inducing fretwork-queasiness, boiling-in-oil screams, and frenzies of insectile guitar dementia. Obviously, this is technically top-shelf but the skills are deployed in service of serial-killer murderousness.

“Beaten Back to Life” is from the album Die For Us, which will come out on July 19th. The horrifying cover art was made by Mitchell Nolte.

Enjoy the rest of your fucking day. I’ll probably be back tomorrow with the usual SHADES OF BLACK column, though a birthday party I’m attending tonight might turn my tomorrow into a wasteland.

http://www.werewolvesdeathmetal.com/
https://www.facebook.com/werewolvesinhell/