SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: AGRICULTURE, BLESSINGS OF MARA, CAVERN WOMB, DEVOURER, GOM JABBAR, OIL SPILL, URZAH

This has been an unusual week for me. I broke out of my hermit-like existence (originally provoked by covid but comfortably extending to the present) and made a quick Wednesday-Friday trip to Texas for a celebration of an old friend. The travel part of it was an annoying hassle; the celebration part of it was great.

During that trip I didn’t accomplish much for NCS. Among the things I didn’t accomplish was paying attention to the emergence of new songs and videos I might want to celebrate today. I bookmarked a few things in even more random fashion than usual while away and quickly spotted a few more things this morning.

These roundups are never comprehensive; this one skims the surface even more lightly. Kind of like a flying fish briefly airborne, with bigger toothsome things hungrily rocketing up from below without warning, jaws gnashing for a bite. The following things jumped up and bit me.

AGRICULTURE (U.S.)

To begin, prepare for glorious blazes of sound, whirling and pealing in exhilarating triumph above thunderous drums, exultant bass lines, and furious screams and wretched cries.

Also prepare for many twists and turns, including a grumbling bass solo, crazed soloing that spirals up and off the charts, crashing stops and starts, and some kind of commentary dimly heard through the tumult and finally clear at the end: “You strive constantly to believe in a world just beyond the one you see. It comes to you sometimes, but only when you stop looking.”

The song is “In The House of Angel Flesh“, from this LA band’s new EP Living is Easy, which will be out on May 3rd from The Flenser (it will also be released in a tape edition that includes their 2022 debut EP The Circle Chant). You’ll find all the fascinating and poetic words to the song beneath the stream at YouTube.

https://agriculturemusic.bandcamp.com/album/living-is-easy
European store: http://flnsr.co/eu
Agriculture: https://www.facebook.com/agriculturemusic

 

 

BLESSINGS OF MARA (UK)

“Voidwalker” is the name of the next song, a new single from this UK band. It creates a sharp juxtaposition, combining eerily glittering and richly textured waves of sound in the high end (we are walking the void, after all) with jolting heavyweight grooves made from humongous bass tones and punishing drum blows, overlaid with gruesome roars, ferocious howls, sinister whispers, and bloody-murder screams.

An intense and disturbing experience, and would leave you black and blue, with busted bones, if sound had the punch of fists and the heft of clubs.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4y0wnHHq2dc9E5aHnQGxET
https://www.facebook.com/blessingsofmara
https://www.instagram.com/blessingsofmara/

 

 

CAVERN WOMB (U.S.)

Imagine what a song named “Exultation of Depraved Majesty” might sound like, and then find out below. What you’ll find is death metal that’s hulking and brutish, drenched in filth, but also deliciously weird and demented — and horribly grand.

Abyssal gutturals gurgle sewage; drums administer remorseless beatings; the riffing gurgles too, and sizzles, spasms, screams, and madly pulsates. Tempos changes, and the fretwork relentlessly contorts into different mad shapes, capped by a delirious solo and then a convulsion of mauling destruction, and then a descent into a choking cesspool of degradation… and then something indeed like the rising up of a depraved majesty.

The song is from this Philadelphia band’s debut EP Stages of Infinity, headed for a May 24 release by Rotted Life, who calls the record “a must for fans of Blood Incantation, Demilich, Timeghoul, and Phobopholic“.

https://rottedlife.bandcamp.com/album/stages-of-infinity
https://www.instagram.com/cavernwomb/

 

 

DEVOURER (Sweden)

Finally, I have a video to share, one that let’s us see the two current members of this long-running Swedish black/death band performing a wicked new single named “The Wicked Ones“. One of the performers, Oksana Falk (aka Oksana Rage), was the bassist on Devourer‘s last album (2022’s Raptus) but has now become the band’s vocalist too. The other is guitarist John Falk, who also handled the drum programming on the song.

Oksana‘s voice is a ravaging, diabolical ferocity, lacerating the ears and cutting throats while the riffage boils and rings like infernal chimes and the percussion blasts like weaponry. The bass work furiously bubbles and brutishly thuds, and the riffing also eerily wails and cavorts like some serpent-headed demon.

The song is the title track from Devourer‘s new album, which will be released on May 8th. At Bandcamp you can also check out another album track named “Folly of Two“.

https://devourer.bandcamp.com/album/the-wicked-ones
https://www.facebook.com/devourermetal

 

 

GOM JABBAR (Scotland)

How could I resist checking out music from a band named Gom Jabbar, especially with the Dune universe having achieved renewed prominence lately?

What I found, upon listening to this next song, was a particularly horrifying rendition of death/doom, an amalgam of frenzied screeching leads, grime-encrusted groaning chords, the echoing of distorted monstrous roars, ponderous percussive detonations, and kick-drum cannonades.

The sound is dense and mauling, but those deranged guitar-leads pierce through, bent on lacerating any semblance of sanity. Near the end, other clear notes ring out like the miserable musings of a wraith imprisoned in some hollow realm. In other words, this is nightmare music.

This song, “Was Murdered“, is the opening track of a three-track collection of Gom Jabbar‘s first demos, collectively named Obsidian Black Carrion. It will be released by the Darkwoods label on June 5th. (Gom Jabbar is the solo project of Joseph Edward Kelly from the band Penny Coffin.)

https://withinthedarkwoods.bandcamp.com/album/obsidian-black-carrion
https://www.facebook.com/Darkwoods.eu
https://www.facebook.com/pennycoffindeath/

 

 

OIL SPILL (U.S.)

I and lots of other people spilled lots of wild words in efforts to describe the bamboozling music on this genre-bending Texas band’s 2020 debut EP Ashlands. You can see some of those comments, including my own, at this location. Suffice to say, that EP left a lot of us both curious and hungry to see what might come next. What has come next is another EP, this one named Silbón, released on April 18th by Memory Terminal Records. More wild words to follow.

These five tracks made me think of a big kaleidoscope being shaken at unpredictably varying speeds in a pneumatic paint mixer. That bizarre image first came to mind in listening to the calamitous opening track “Calamity“, a destabilizing cavalcade of clattering snare-drums, humongous bass undulations, barking-mad screams, and gloriously unhinged riffage. I also got images of some hellish asylum in flames, with the inmates both being immolated and exulting, bouncing off each other and all the burning walls.

As you make your way through the other four tracks, the shapes in the kaleidoscope continue to twist and fall into new configurations at differing speeds.

“Abyssum Invocat” is an instrumental hallucination with an improvisational feel, creepy and perplexing, with no steady rhythm as the bass and drums go off on their own strange frolics amidst a twisted collage of otherworldly tones that sound musing and menacing, demented and sorcerous.

Someone cranks up the dial on the paint-shaker for the third track, inventively named “iii“. It features guitars that skitter and squirm like some insect swarm that has lost its instinctive organizing principles, coupled with some organizing principles furnished by the rhythm section, though they can’t help but cavort as the mood strikes them, blasting and brawling and bounding about. The riffing sometimes includes a recognizable pulse, and the screams have a pulse too, though they’re infected by rabies.

Things get creepy and improvisational-sounding again in the instrumental “Tunnel Vision“, a psychotropic kindred spirit to “Abyssum Invocat“, though this one sounds even more deranged in its labyrinthian permutations, and also more narcotic.

And to close, Oil Spill give us “Noxious Fumes From The Wretched Abyss“. A maddened voice adamantly expresses itself; guitars and possibly other instruments glimmer and sear; and the rhythm section seizes attention again.

The intensity ramps up — screams erupt in torment; the drums maniacally hammer; the bass churns your guts; and even when the rhythm section lock into patterns that move heads, the guitars begin convulsing in shrill spasms and mewl in misery.

What goes up must come down, and so the momentum of the song slowly collapses near the end, but then the kaleidoscope falls into the shape of demons coming out, reveling and relishing the depredations they have in store for us.

https://oilspilltx.bandcamp.com/album/silb-n
https://www.facebook.com/oilspilltx/

 

 

URZAH (UK)

I have barely enough time to throw one more song at you before closing up shop, and that song is “I, Empyrean“, which is guaranteed to punch your pulse into overdrive.

Prepare for an electrifying percussive battering, gloriously blazing waves of melody, blood-spray vocals that don’t seem to hold anything back, and convulsive grooves that come on like industrial-strength jackhammers, infiltrated by bursts of rapidly swirling fretwork.

This song is the opening track from Urzah‘s new album The Scorching Gaze, which is set for release by APF Records on May 3rd.

https://urzahband.bandcamp.com/album/the-scorching-gaze
http://facebook.com/urzahband