AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOLGOTHA — “SPREADING THE WINGS OF HOPE”

Over the course of a career that began in 1992 and has continued fairly steadily ever since (interrupted by one long break following their third album in 2005), the Spanish band Golgotha have remained devoted to musical renditions of melancholy and desolate sorrow. They remain devoted to their own traditions in their newest album, and yet, as the album’s title itself portrays, they have not lost hope.

That album, Spreading the Wings of Hope, comes from a place of maturity and the depth of emotional reflection that only many decades of daily experience can bring — experiences of deceit and pain, of inner psychological trauma and persistent injustice in the outer world, but also experiences of resilience and beauty.

For Golgotha, it is evident, as they say themselves, that they still carry “the flickering flame of hope”: “It burns low, but it burns still…” That comes through in both the lyrics and the music on the new album, though what also comes through is that Golgotha have not forsaken the need to express the doom and desolation that continues to plague human existence, as it always has.

Spreading the Wings of Hope will be released by Golgotha‘s new label Ardua Music on June 14th, and we’re privileged to let you hear all of it today.

The press materials for the new album include some accurate words of summation: This is an album “of sombre reflection and measured melodies, tossed upon a tempestuous sea of love and mourning,” and it is “a marriage of contrasts,” “as towering, resplendent riffs and aching, intimate fragility meet and entwine.”

Other contrasts mark the album experience, including the interplay of María J. Lladó‘s clean singing and the ravaging roars and stricken howls of Andrew Spinosa. Each of them seize attention by themselves — Maria‘s soulful laments sound earthy and with a wisdom hard-earned, while Andrew‘s growls bring the monstrosity of death and the intensity of rage to the fore — but the trade-offs between them make each expression even more striking.

All of these contrasts (and more) reveal themselves from the very beginning, through the album opener “For Every Tear“. The elegant, haunting ring of piano keys opens the song, but very soon dark chords tower and the drums boom like cannons.

Just as Maria‘s voice arrives, the band segue into an enormous chugging riff backed by hard-slugging drum- and bass-work, but the music also wails in the heavens, expands into a display of tragic grandeur, and convulses in spasms of feverish fretwork. The contrasting harsh vocals are frightening, and Maria‘s voice undergoes a strange processing that makes it sound like an eerie old recording, and the song also includes a slowly wailing extended guitar solo that’s both sublime and stricken with grief.

Throughout the album, the rhythm section’s heavy work produces convulsive effects, causing heads to move and feet to stomp — and that’s confirmed by what they do in the very next song, “Gilded Cage“, where both of the contrasting voices themselves rise higher in their range, as does the music, elevating like the sun over a sprawling landscape. To be sure, moods of darkness also shadow the song, but it’s also beautiful, even glorious, and it does sound resilient… and hopeful. (Be forewarned, it will also get stuck in your head, just as it may put your heart in your throat.)

Also throughout the album, Golgotha give places of honor to primal chugging and hammering grooves, which feed our reptile heavy-metal brains but also contrast with the elegance and grandeur of sweeping melodies, melancholy piano refrains, and poignant guitar soloing of variable tuning (some of the solos sound like horns, and maybe they are). Drums that sound like the crack of gun-shots and the earth-quaking boom of artillery, as well as bursts of jolting and skittering riffage, create their own contrasts with the song’s mesmerizing phases.

We’ve continued to underscore the contrasts in the music, and the moods of the songs also contrast as Golgotha move from one to the next. Some are slower and more menacing and oppressive, others more hard-charging and harrowing (see especially “Hear Their Cries“), and still others more despondent and despairing. But these are variations of degree, because all of the songs are dynamic affairs, and each of them brings the listener all these sensations in a differing balance.

Suffice to say that Golgotha, still operating under the guiding hand of founding guitarist Vicente J. Paya, have created a daunting but grand palace of music, vast and haunted but also mesmerizing, exhilarating, and levitating. Lost souls dwell there but fires also blaze in crumbling hearths and human hearts pound with desire and the fight to survive. All the long years since the band’s inception have made such a magnificent record possible, and you can hear it now.

 

 

GOLGOTHA are:
María J. Lladó: Vocals.
Vicente J. Payá: Guitars & Vocals.
Tomeu Crespi: Drums.
Andrew Espinosa: Bass & Vocals.
Dan García: Guitars.

Guest Musician:
Javier Fernández: Keyboards & Arrangements.

Spreading the Wings of Hope was recorded by Vicente J. Payá at Black Night Studios (room #1, Secar De La Real) except drums, recorded by Tomeu Crespi (room #2, Santa Margalida), Islas Baleares. The album was produced, mixed, and mastered by Javier Fernández at Montseny Studios (Guadalajara).

Ardua Music will release it on CD, tape, and digital formats, and recommend it for fans of: Hallatar, Novembers Doom, Draconian, and Saturnus. For further info, check the links below.

Also below, we’ve included extensive and insightful comments about the album by María J. Lladó, which are well worth reading.

PRE-ORDER:
https://www.arduamusic.com/
https://arduamusic.bandcamp.com/album/spreading-the-wings-of-hope
https://golgotha.bandcamp.com/album/spreading-the-wings-of-hope

GOLGOTHA:
https://golgotha.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/GolgothaOfficialBand
https://www.instagram.com/golgothadoom/

Some words from Maria:

This new work by Golgotha is called Spreading The Wings Of Hope since we believe that we must open our hearts to hope because there is always the possibility of improving in all aspects.

In it we talk about experiences that we have lived or that people who are in our environment are living. Situations that can become very hard, that can be very painful, but that we can always get out of, and above all get out of it.

We talk about toxic relationships that make us see their protagonists as a couple who love and hate each other in equal parts. They are relationships that actually occur in all areas of human relationships, not only in love… in family, in friendship, at work, etc…

We also talk about impossible relationships, about people who don’t know how to love and want to do it at all costs even though they don’t get it and learn to love themselves.

People who have had to overcome many trances in life and have had to overcome themselves whether they are psychological mishaps due to love losses, family, etc… Or like our guitarist who lost a leg in an accident and had to remake himself.

We talk about human injustices to animals that destroy us as a race, since believing that we are superior and that we can do with them and their environment what we want makes us totally inferior.

And after all this that we tell, we firmly believe that we must have hope, that we must know that there is someone, that maybe it is our own consciousness, that it is always there to give us strength and to feel that there is that hope to which we must extend our arms and embrace it.

Vicente is the composer of all these songs and wanted to give a melancholic touch, as the band has always had, but also give him strength and above all some Death Metal touches to have that sound more Doom-Death of the bands of the ’90s.

We believe that with this album we have come to create a stable formation that has allowed us to get the sound we were really looking for since we all walked in the same direction. We have given more prominence to clean voices to enhance that melancholic atmosphere that with guttural voices create that halo of darkness that we like to create so much.

The cover is the continuation and above all the evolution, of our three previous albums where there is that being who is suffering but who with his perseverance and belief in hope comes out successful, and with his raised hand says Enough to so much injustice.”