Photo Credit: Francesco Esposito
For those of you who don’t treat our posts as among your daily essentials of life, or at least like a free oxygen mask in the vicinity of a chemical train derailment, I’ll mention again that I won’t have much time for metal this weekend.
Today is the start of an annual two-day outdoor gathering of toilers at my day job and their families. For some of us it began last night, something akin to an alcohol-fueled pre-fest for concert-goers. It was jolly, and left me somewhat jumbled this morning.
That relatively mild mental affliction, coupled with the fact that the real festivities will begin soon, have left me constrained in what I can do in this Saturday roundup. If you don’t see a Shades of Black collection tomorrow, you’ll know that my Sunday-morning affliction was more severe and my sleeping-in more prolonged.
FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE (Italy)
I decided to follow our fairly well-used formula of luring people in with a band they’ve heard of and then springing the trap with other bands you might not have seen coming. (Hopefully you won’t try to gnaw your own leg off in an attempt to get away from those.)
I don’t mean to suggest that I’m starting with a new Fleshgod song and video just because of their relative prominence in metal circles nowadays. The song and video are also bracing ways to start your weekend, or any other day for that matter.
It seems that frontman Francesco Paoli‘s near-death experience has left him pondering more deeply the importance of life as a chance for all of us to create a legacy that we can be proud of, the only part of us that death won’t extinguish. In his case, of course, it is an artistic legacy that’s at the forefront of his thinking. This explains the title of the new song revealed yesterday: “I Can Never Die“. He says it is “nothing but a glorious anthem for all those who commit their existence to art in the purest possible way”.
It’s no exaggeration to call the song “a glorious anthem”, thanks to the brandishing of soaring orchestration, the deployment of Veronica Bordacchini‘s soaring theatrical voice in the chorus, and a golden guitar solo. But of course, the band also discharge bursts of percussive obliteration and use Francesco Paoli‘s scarring howls to go on the attack.
Perhaps needless to say at this point, the accompanying video directed by Martina L. McLean, the third one made so far for the new album, is a feast for the eyes; every frame could be thought of as a diabolical painting.
“I Can Never Die” is from Fleshgod‘s new album Opera, out on August 23rd via Nuclear Blast.
https://fga.bfan.link/opera
https://www.facebook.com/fleshgodapocalypse
https://www.instagram.com/fleshgodofficial/
THE SHIVA HYPOTHESIS (Netherlands)
And now to spring the first trap.
The first moment of the album I’ve embedded below is indeed sort of like a trap being sprung, just a few seconds of shimmering and warbling tones and a few drum-beats, and then we become engulfed in a sonic hurricane, a storm of unhinged screaming, searing and heaving riffage, and brutalizing drumwork.
As “The Perilous Journey of the Soul” proceeds, the vocals come further unhinged in different ways; rapidly jolting and jarring chords spring forth; blazing fanfares scale upward; glittering arpeggios swirl; and the hurricane gales continues to scour the senses on a sweeping scale, though bleak moods also intrude.
That song is a wholly breathtaking start to this Dutch band’s EP Faustian Restlessness, released in late June. Lucky for us, it’s not an outlier. The next three songs also bring ravishing storms, berserk and malignantly ugly vocals, and an abundance of head-spinning twists and turns.
The drumming is fantastic; the music, while dense and overpowering, is an elaborate skein of wild contortions, segmented by bone-smashing jolts, dismal strummed and picked digressions, and sudden shifts in tempo.
Degraded and hopeless moods continue to thrust their way in, like mangled grasping hands clutching at the listener through the incendiary and bombastic calamities. At the outset of the title track, there’s even some gloomy singing, accompanied by a ringing guitar lament — which the band suddenly then blast away in another high-speed rendition of tumult and torment, this time segmented by a slower phase of terrible and towering grandeur.
And in the closer “Vox Rubetarum” there’s more forlorn singing, this time in harmonies. They trade places with crocodilian pronouncements, and this time they’re accompanied not only by guitar-strumming but also by a mournful brass instrument — a trumpet or perhaps a trombone?
The band clearly had some lofty ambitions when they made this startling EP, and those included the creation of diabolical atmospheres of menace and malice, of white-out violence and groaning misery, to go along with all the ravishing instrumental and vocal escapades. The ambitiousness extended to the lyrics, which are eloquent, evocative, poetic, and profound. (You can see them at the EP’s Bandcamp page.)
As they say in the trade, don’t sleep on this one!
P.S. I saw these words on the band’s FB page, which seems to be a brief summary of the EP’s conceptual synthesis:
In the pursuit of wealth and power, one tends to lose their integrity. A sacrifice of human decency in order to cast a shadow on one’s peers. But no matter the magnitude of the eclipse, this shadow can never stretch far enough. It echoes doctor Faust’s deal with the devil in Goethe’s classic. An endless urge for expansion takes hold, a restlessness that consumes a person who can never truly be satisfied. A Faustian restlessness.
https://the-shiva-hypothesis.bandcamp.com/album/faustian-restlessness
https://www.facebook.com/theshivahypothesis/
FÖHN (Greece)
To close this too-brief roundup, and to spring another trap, I picked a new song that connects in some ways to the one with which I started. Like that Fleshgod song, it too includes ingredients with a feeling of orchestral scale and sweep, and it too comes with a video that rapidly and continually seizes attention. But there the similarities end.
For one thing, Föhn‘s new song “Bereft” is significantly longer. For another, both the music and the accompanying lyric video are far more nightmarish and soul-crushing.
The audio nightmare begins immediately, bringing forth slow, iron-shod pounding, a phantasm of dissonant, dismal, and maniacally shrill tones, and what sounds like the screaming of souls being roasted in hell (but might be a saxophone?).
As those massive stomps proceed, long chords anti-melodically moan and groan beneath sky-sweeping ethereal waves of distress. Hornlike blasts wail and a gargantuan voice bellows and howls, echoing from caverns deep. It’s all so dark and oppressive that it comes as something of a relief when the band shift, making a space for brittle but glimmering guitar notes to sorrowfully ring in isolation.
When the stomping and the vocals resume, the pace is slower still, and the music descends even deeper into a feeling of tragedy and heartbreak. A solo saxophone lends its heart-rending wail to the gloom, an emanation of noirish jazz that adds to the song’s experimental dimensions.
Photo by Sakis Vlachakis/Edited by Arnaud Daval
Terrible screams come from the depths again; those gigantic thrums and jolts make sure no bones are left unbroken; and at the end something like the pinging of a child’s music box rings as a toy carousel slowly rotates in the film.
All in all, it’s an unusual manifestation of funeral doom, and one that builds intrigue for Föhn‘s album Condescending, which will be released by Hypaethral Records (Canada) and These Hands Melt (Italy) in a variety of formats on August 23rd.
P.S. On “Bereft“, Viktor Karamanis performed the tenor saxophone, and Dimitris Pantelias performed the soprano saxophone.
https://hypaethralrecords.com/collections/fohn
https://hypaethralrecords.bandcamp.com/album/condescending
https://thesehandsmelt.shop/products/fohn-condescending-gatefold-2lp
https://thesehandsmelt.bandcamp.com/album/condescending
https://www.instagram.com/foehnofficial
https://www.facebook.com/foehnofficial