Hopefully you noticed that we began the last NCS Sunday with a premiere. That song and video by Weald & Woe were well worth the time required to prepare the write-up, and it would have fit well into the usual Sunday roundup of new black and black-ish metal, but it did leave me with less time than I needed to pull together the usual Shades of Black column.
So, I’ve taken an extra two days to finish gathering together what I wanted to recommend this week. I’m very happy with these eight selections and hope you’ll also find all of them well worth your time. (Yeah, there’s a lot here — bookmark it, try a little here and a little there, in between trying to make a living, drinking yourself silly, washing your cat and your clothes, bathroom breaks, sleeping, etc.)
RAAT (India)
As steadfast visitors to our site are well aware, I’ve been enthusiastically following the progression of Raat‘s music since early days, and thus was eager to delve into the band’s fourth album, Enchantment, which was released about 10 days ago.
It’s a substantial addition to Raat‘s discography, providing eight songs (including a bonus track) that collectively span an hour of time. Especially because the music itself is wide-ranging in its sounds and moods, it deserves even more extensive discussion than I’m able to give it.
Those eight songs create a spectrum of decibels, energies, and emotional experiences, and mini-spectrums within each of the songs individually. As before, black metal is also only one of the stylistic ingredients, though an important one; the other ingredients come out in greater abundance in the record’s back half. (The Bandcamp tags tell part of the tale: “atmospheric black metal”, “blackgaze”, “post-black metal”, “dark metal”, “avant-garde metal”….)
To pick one point on the spectrum, the music indeed becomes enchanting. It chimes and glimmers, wafts like the smoky soulfulness of a saxophone, throbs like a golden pulse, intriguingly warbles, and swims like moonlit ambient seas.
To pick another point on the spectrum, it can sound like a continent-sized hurricane violently tearing the earth apart in stunning storms of searing riffage, herculean bass upheavals, hurtling drums, wide-screen synths, and wrenching screams. When the lead guitar rings there, it sounds like a wretched warning siren for apocalypse or the whistling of tracer-rounds in flight.
Not surprising from the title of the breathtaking opening song “Luminous Wrath“, it hits both those points on the spectrum, and others. Elsewhere, the music also glitters and wonderingly muses, or becomes lush and enveloping, as preludes to cataclysm or a balm for musical agonies. Within the storms, shining lights also sweep overhead, brilliant and awe-inspiring in their sound but somehow also making the catastrophes even more frightening.
Still elsewhere, the music seems to heave like heavy seas or a reeling mind, be-clouded and beset by distress, dense and dark, warped and wailing in its tones — but it also can sound amazed and hopeful.
As the music moves among the points on the spectrum, ebbing and flowing, the drumming holds a prominent place and continually seizes attention, continually changing patterns and degrees of intensity, and the bass-work proves to be equally nuanced and notable. On the other hand, the vocals are a non-stop napalm-spray of unbridled screaming, in the red zone every time.
The songs are meticulously designed and carefully, often richly, layered, especially when they hit with typhoon strength and orchestral immensity. The consequences are dramatic and vast, and as wondrous as they are stupefying.
I don’t think there’s much question that this is Raat‘s best release yet, and a tough one for the project’s alter ego S.R. to top — but let’s hope he tries!
The phenomenal cover art is a painting by Adolf Hirémy-Hirsch (1860–1933).
https://raat.bandcamp.com/album/enchantment
https://www.facebook.com/raatzone/
PAYDRETZ (France)
In 2021 the Antiq label released Chroniques de l’Insurrection, the first album of Paydretz, and so far their only album. We supported it with commentary in this Shades of Black series, a song premiere, and a fascinating and immensely informative interview (you can find all of that here).
But in case you happened to overlook the album, it’s the work of members of Véhémence, Himinbjorg, Hanternoz, Grylle, Belenos, and Wÿntër Ärvn, and it provided a musical narrative of the bloody and tragic “War in the Vendée” that took place in France between 1793 and 1796, in which insurgents made up largely of peasants, artisans, and shopkeepers revolted against the government and army of the French Republic.
Antiq has chosen to recently release a double-vinyl edition of the album, and that edition includes a bonus track that’s also just become available digitally. It’s the next selection in today’s column, paired with a lyric video (in French of course).
That bonus song, “Paydretz (1793-2023)“, features a performance by Cadavre, the drummer of the Québec City bands Cantique Lépreux and Forteresse. Paydretz have explained that the song is “definitely more folk and violent”, and “will allow you to discover our new musical direction”.
The song is indeed violent, as it must be, given the subject matter. (Paydretz was the nickname given to the fighters of the Vendean general François Athanase Charette de La Contrie). Following an excerpt from an old recording of a stirring 19th-century song written in praise of Charette, the music surges — drums going off like guns, the bass rumbling like thunder, the riffing blazes and blares, the vocals and the lead guitar screaming in defiance.
Wild cries rise up and the music seems to march. Folk elements also emerge, as a whirling flute leads the way; as elsewhere on the album, we might also be hearing a bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy, or at least instruments that sound like them. Yet the song also begins to sound grim and desperate even as the captivating melodies ring, but its resilience shines through too as the music gloriously soars.
https://antiqofficial.bandcamp.com/album/paydretz-chroniques-de-linsurrection-dlp-w-bonus
https://www.facebook.com/Paydretz/
STARER (U.S.)
Next up is the title song to a new EP by Starer from Bowling Green, Kentucky. It was recorded during the sessions for Starer‘s 2023 album Wind, Breeze, or Breath, but was cut from that album.
I positioned this ravishing, heart-pounding song as the follow-on to “Paydretz” in part because it also has its own martial, violent, and desperate aspects. The drums hurtle, the sweep of the music is grim, horns seem to blaze in the upper reaches, the gleaming lead guitar feverishly flickers, and the serrated-edge vocals roar in harrowing fashion and seem to become the cacophony of combatants.
Parts of this song also have a glorious, folkish swing, and it brings a feeling of brazen defiance as the massed horns sweep and fiery guitars go mad. Only near the end does the stirring tumult briefly abate, and what comes after sounds grim and defeated, though no less expansive in its scale.
Waking (the EP) also includes two other previously unreleased tracks plus remixed and re-mastered versions of songs from two previous Starer EPs. It’s being released on August 16th by Snow Wolf Records.
https://starer.bandcamp.com/album/waking
https://www.facebook.com/starermusic
GEISTERFAUST (Germany)
At least in my addled mind, the next song fit well with the last two. Its name is “Death“, subtitled as “The End Of All Human Suffering: Metamorphosis and Catharsis”.
At the start, mysterious notes and strummed chords beckon us in like the casting of a spell, joined by a thumping beat and abyssal reverberations in the low end. With a brief pause, that opening melody becomes more delirious and sinister, but no less captivating, now joined by galloping drums, wild goblin-like howls, and squealing strings.
The song seems to spin and dance, but it’s a diabolical experience. That recurring melody digs in, but behind it you see lusting red eyes and sharp claws. When the spinning stops, the music seems to slowly gouge and heavily stalk, but the vocals are every bit as macabre and mad as before — and that central melody reemerges in yet another variation on the main theme.
The music spins up again, still with its claws in you, and diminishes again, more haunting and dismal this time. The spellcasting resumes, but seems even more sinister and chilling — and the song becomes very weird, twisted, and dissonant in its final phase.
“Death” is the first single from the self-titles debut album of Geisterfaust, whose music is branded as “blackened sludge”. It will be released on September 13th by the Crawling Chaos label (CD, vinyl and digital).
https://www.thecrawlingchaos-records.de/
https://thecrawlingchaosrecords.bandcamp.com/
https://geisterfaust.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/geisterfaustband
HAND OF OMEGA (UK)
Next I’ve selected “A Mentats Oath“, the first song revealed from The End Of The Beginning, which is the debut album from the Staffordshire band Hand of Omega.
I plunged into this one intrigued by the labeling of the music as “Black\thrash\doom crossover”. What I found was the whispering sounds of a haunted house, soon followed by cruel drilling tones, battering-ram thrusts, skull-cracking beats, vampiric screams, and lycanthropic howls.
The music heaves and harrows with equal aplomb, casting a pall of oppressive darkness and blood-lusting menace as it does. The guitars seem to moan in agony and plead for mercy, but the resumption of clobbering and drilling shows that none is to be found here, a conclusion reinforced when the song staggers and jackhammers once more.
Near the end, Hand of Omega bring in a new sensation, a slithering lead-guitar that spawns visions of reptilian hunger (or computational chaos). At the very end, there’s a sample of ardent spoken words — the titular oath of the human computers and near-prescient strategists from the Dune universe known as Mentats:
“It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.”
The End Of The Beginning will be released by Cursed Monk Records on September 13th (CD and digital).
https://cursedmonk.bandcamp.com/album/the-end-of-the-beginning
https://www.facebook.com/handofomegaband/
SALQIU (Brazil)
Two years have passed since the Portuguese avant-garde black metal band Salqiu released its latest album, though it did participate in a split release last year. Early this year Salqiu released a new single (reviewed here and available here) and just last week Salqiu released another one, “In This Mortal Coil“. The project’s mastermind Nuno Lourenço has described it as a “raw and raging track” — a “direct, untampered, non-experimental track”.
These are relative terms, best understood in the context of Salqiu‘s previous releases. Raw and raging, this new single definitely is, but it still has its own unorthodox and unexpected aspects.
At the outset of this 11-minute excursion, as horrid growls chant, the music sounds like terrors become sound — immense and mangling sound peppered with flute-like whistling tones and a blaring siren.
Things don’t get any more comfortable. Immense low frequencies manically undulate; higher frequencies wail and swarm; the drums rapidly hammer and chop like axes; the vocals become a chorus of beasts in Bedlam.
We might be hearing amplified ants or hornets feeding on raw flesh while industrial-strength demolition machines lose their minds. Eerily slithering and whirring vibrations and tortured screaming add further dimensions of nightmare. Something that resembles a twisted calliope surfaces, to add further insanity.
The densely layered sounds are intricate, elaborate, and even bizarrely ecstatic, but relentlessly mind-mutilating and bone-breaking. It’s all chaotic and kaleidoscopic, but for something so deconstructive, destabilizing, and ravenously theroid, it’s also fascinating.
https://salqiu.bandcamp.com/track/in-this-mortal-coil-single
https://www.facebook.com/salqiublackmetal/
MANṢŪR (France)
I’m bending the usual genre boundaries of this column with the next song, but I was so pleasantly surprised by it than I wanted to make a recommendation sooner rather than later. This selection also reinforces the point that we don’t just pay attention to bands who have the backing of PR agents and labels.
This song, “To Each Their Own“, is the first one released by the solo project Manṣūr from Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in France.
The song has these things to recommend it: Scratchy strummed riffing that quickly creates a grim mood; gut-heaving bass-lines; neck-crack drums; and crazed vocals scalding enough to boil the paint from your walls.
The lead guitar also sizzles like a dangerous fever, throbs like the pulse it’s heating up, and crackles like flashes of heat-lightning. On top of that, weirdly whirling tones near the end provide a dose of hallucinogens.
This one will get your muscles twitching as it broils your brain. It’s from a debut EP named Seul Parmi Les Autres. I’m not sure about its release date.
https://mansvr.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61561336739171
MORK (Norway)
Just for the sheer hell of it I decided to wait until the end to put in new music from the best-known band in today’s collection, instead of starting with it — reversing my habit of beginning with the known quantities as a way of luring people into greater obscurity.
This final song, “Utbrent“, is the first single from the seventh Mork album, which will commemorate the band’s 20th year of existence. It’s a reminder why Mork is still turning heads after two decades.
The song fires on all cylinders as it hurtles forward, but even at the beginning the guitars eccentrically twist and morph, dissonantly mewling and whining, and somehow setting hooks at the same time. Strange glimmering tones also move between the channels, providing a prelude to woozy and wailing yet sinister vocals (at least i think those are vocals) that maneuver above a funky bass groove and compulsive beats.
The harsh, crackling vocals sound like a furious devil gnashing its fangs, contrasting with the beguiling wooziness of the spreading psychedelia. Near the end, the guitar jumps in with a skittering pulse — another prelude, but this time leading into more crazed instrumental spasms and a reprise of the weird hooks the band lodged in your gills at the outset.
Definitely eccentric but also strangely addictive, and a sure sign that Mork aren’t resting on their laurels or playing it safe.
The new album’s name is Syv. It will be released on September 20th by Peaceville. Mork‘s mastermind Thomas Eriksen describes it as “my most varied album to date”: “Brutal riffs meeting melancholy and melodic passages with a slight progressive approach. Lyrically scraping the bottom of human existence and frailty as well as touching an immense pride and strength.”
https://orcd.co/mork_utbrent_listen
https://mork.lnk.to/SYV
https://www.facebook.com/MORKOFFICIAL/