AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MNAJDRA — “IN THE NAME OF THE GODDESS”

(Writtenby Islander)

Last year the mysterious U.S. band Mnajdra made a splash with its self-titled debut album. Granted, it was a splash in a far corner of the small tributary of metal that spikes away from the vast ocean of music on a broader scale, but it still sent ripples, especially through devotees of terrorizing yet surprising musical extremity.

We attempted to review the album here, from which this is an excerpt:

The music isn’t easy to sum up, because it draws from scattered wellsprings of black metal, death metal, sludge/doom, post-metal, and psychedelia — whatever works to create wide-ranging sensations of catastrophe…. [B]e prepared to have your head spun and your dreams disturbed.

It is a relief that the secretive people behind Mnajdra, who clearly had done other things before that album, decided not to make the record a one-and-done effort. Instead, they’ve recorded a second album, and we’re thrilled to premiere it today — on the day of its release by Fiadh Productions and Snow Wolf Records.

Metal-Archives informs us that Mnajdra is a megalithic temple complex found on the island of Malta, and The Font of All Human Knowledge describes it as “among the most ancient religious sites on Earth” and a “unique architectural masterpiece”.

The new album, In the Name of the Goddess, continues the Maltese connection, inspired by that island-nation’s long history of goddess worship dating back to ancient times. It includes 8 tracks, one of them a mid-point instrumental, and 50 minutes of music.

It’s tempting to say that In the Name of the Goddess is more of the same, but that’s a slippery term because there was no “sameness” among the songs in Mnajdra‘s first album, and none here either.

Album opener “Mouth of the Wind” is a heaving hulk but boils like an ant-swarm on fire. It erupts in blast-fueled firestorms of fury but also woozily wanders, grimly groans, and ecstatically scampers as the guitars continue generating immersive and blinding vibrations of brilliance.

In keeping with the album’s focus on traditions of divinity, the scale of the songs is often towering, like ancient statuary shadowing the sun, and the stratospheric sheen of the riffage often sounds far from earth-bound. But the musical ingredients and the moods are as much in flux in the subsequent songs as the opener, and even more so.

As on the debut album, the drumming varies constantly, continually shifting the tempos and the patterns, and the bass brings a bone-deep throb, while the vocals are relentlessly screaming tirades, so frighteningly extreme that they send shivers down the spine. The tone of the guitars also operates at peak range with piercing clarity and the reverberation of bells (burning bells).

In “Bastion” the surrounding sounds create mesmerizing sonic panoramas made of those ringing chime-like tones; “Anna Perenna” fires like automatic weaponry and sears like wildfires, but also swirls in strange and seductive colors and jolts like a battering ram; and “The Maymūna Stone“, while ringing still but scratchier in its texture, sounds lonely and forlorn at the beginning and nearer the end, but the song also passes through phases that are menacing and dangerously cruel, haughty and desperate, and even world-ending in its cataclysmic crescendo.

“Oracle Chamber” is the instrumental, and its manifold otherworldly reverberations, including acoustic guitar and multiple ambient shimmerings, are spell-binding.

The remaining three songs make use of all the key Mnajdra ingredients on the album again, creating new contrasts of sound and mood, with a similarly exhilarating, bowel-loosening, and head-spinning effect as the first four before the interlude. Among other things, “Calypso” sounds like an esoteric waltz, and “For the Son of Bat, the King” has the mind-altering aroma of opium but also grimly stalks and towers in daunting grandeur.

Once more, Mnajdra have made music that’s tough to sum up. It’s muscular and neck-cracking, crazed and combustible, but also chthonic and celestial. Its grooves are hard as stone, but it also shatters like glass, with the crystalline shards still shivering, creating ethereal sensations that evoke visions of divinity, wondrous but also sometimes haunting.

 

 

In The Name Of The Goddess is being released today on CDs and tapes by Fiadh Productions, and it’s available digitally from Snow Wolf Records, which we understand will also have shirts available.

BUY:
https://fiadh.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-name-of-the-goddess
https://mnajdra.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-name-of-the-goddess