SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: PINCER CONSORTIUM, OTTONE PESANTE, DÖ, OUTER GRAVES

Another Saturday, another opportunity to help spread the word about new music. It’s always difficult to decide what to include in these roundups, and a bit more difficult than usual because I’ve spent a fair amount of time addressing the first item below, which is a new album released at the end of last week.

In deciding what to do with my meager remaining time, I decided not to include new songs and videos I came across from bands whose profiles are high enough that most people probably already know about them, i.e., Mastodon and Lamb of God (collaborating), Defeated Sanity, 1349, and Ensiferum. But if you don’t know about those songs, now you have the links that will take you to them.

But now, let’s get to that new album, and then follow it with just a few other worthy new songs from forthcoming records.

PINCER CONSORTIUM (UK)

The Belfast-based duo known as Pincer Consortium released their debut single in 2022, and then two more in 2023. I wrote about each one of those songs in other editions of these weekend roundups (here’s the proof). All three of those are included on Pincer Consortium‘s debut album Geminus Schism, which they released the day before yesterday, along with four more tracks.

I will get to the music, but there’s a good reason to pick up the digipack CD version of the album (released by the Polish label Deformeathing Production) that is almost independent of the music: In addition to a 20-page booklet that includes the album’s lyrics, it includes a code to download not only the songs’ digital files but also a 448-page artbook (in PDF format) that illustrates every phrase in the dense blocks of surreal text that make up the lyrics for each song.

I have a copy of that, and it’s just flat-out astounding. I’ll scatter pieces of it accompanying the lyrical phrases from the first song among the paragraphs that follow. (I haven’t counted, but I think the band have uploaded most of the artbook images to their Facebook page too, which you can inspect here.)

The two people behind Pincer Consortium are Maciek Pasiński (ex-Sirrah, TheMANcalledTEA, qip) and Pete Dempsey (Scald). After crossing paths with each other in November 2019 they first cooperated in completing Scald‘s album Regius I and then turned their attention to Pincer Consortium.

Dempsey provided the libretto for what became their debut album. Conceptually, it “follows a descending pyramid of critical stages of existence, encompassing life, death and rebirth of a parallel universe on an astronomical scale and microscopic, both in the physical and psychological sphere”. (This is Google Translate’s English rendition of the Polish-language description at Deformeathing Production‘s page for the album.) Pasiński then created the soundscape for the tale, with both of them contributing vocals.

The soundscape is as startling as the lyrical artwork. Let’s take, for example, one of the album tracks I haven’t already written about, “Dual Termination Shock“, which was presented with a video around the time the album was released last week. The band described the video as “a visual catastrophe that combines the aesthetics of a tar pit with the vibes of a fever dream,” delivering “an unparalleled level of ugliness”.

Indeed, the video is pretty ugly but also bizarre, and it will also give you a taste for the style of the lyrics. The music is pretty ugly too, but it’s also mind-boggling, a phantasm of swift jolts and rumbling thunder, of maniacally darting and screaming guitars, of malignant gutturals and maddened howls. The sounds are simultaneously brutalizing, insanely intricate, and deliriously freaked-out, like the soundtrack to some horrid, dystopian future or a terrifying parallel dimension.

In genre terms, the album could be considered a mad intergalactic mashup of black, death, and industrial metal, albeit with the kind of adventurous, unpredictable, and technically impressive instrumental maneuvers that summon the phrase “avant-garde”, because the word “progressive” seems too tame.

“Dual Termination Shock” might be the most crazed track on the album, but not the most destructive — because all of them are destructive. Others generate different moods, because they are more melodic, and some even include extravagant singing. The opener “Alpha Omega Decay“, for example, is at first almost dreamlike, and the term “progressive” does seem fitting for that one, but its mood is anguished even though the guitars and keys brilliantly gleam and sparkle, and even though that track becomes so viciously jolting that it may loosen your teeth.

Because it’s such a multi-faceted experience, “Alpha Omega Decay” is one of the album’s best tracks, but in truth every song includes many own twists and turns. Some are more violent than others, with drums that sound like the discharge of high-speed automatic weaponry and riffing that roils, burns, and eviscerates.

Others make space for more primitive and bombastic grooves, more celestial ambient sweep, and theatrical choral voices (along with muttered words) which, along with orchestral instrumentation (including horn-like fanfares and rippling piano melodies), make the music sound almost operatic — but even those transform into convulsive war-zones of sound.

All of the songs also continually achieve a feeling of vastness, in keeping with the idea that the album portrays conflict on an astronomical scale, and they’re all intrinsically alien, even those that bend into more prog-minded and even Pink Floydian territory (e.g., “Tandemic Dispersal“), or those that soar to heights of breathtaking grandeur (e.g., “Spectral Dyad“).

“Space opera” is a well-known genre term among fans of science fiction, and that term keeps coming to mind as I think about Geminus Schism, not only because it sounds so far-flung and futuristic (and so alien) but also because it’s so fantastically elaborate, so meticulously constructed, and so completely over the top in its extravagance.

Well, enough with the words and pictures. The player is below. Prepare for a truly head-spinning experience and dive right in….

https://pincerconsortium.bandcamp.com/album/geminus-schism
https://deformeathing.com/pl/p/PINCER-CONSORTIUM-Geminus-Schism-CD-Digipack/3438
https://www.facebook.com/PincerConsortium/

 

 

OTTONE PESANTE (Italy)

I picked music from Ottone Pesante to come next because it didn’t seem fair to ask anyone else to follow something as mind-boggling as that Pincer Consortium album, and because Ottone Pesante are also capable of boggling minds, albeit in a different way.

As I hope you know by now, from discovering this band either in previous features at NCS or elsewhere, they use metal to make metal, and by that I mean they bring the brass. Their new album is named Scrolls of War, and they’ve introduced it with these words:

There was a time long ago when droughts, famines, earthquakes, floods, and epidemics occurred almost simultaneously, within a very short period, forcing peoples to migrate for survival. These mass movements were desperate and caused atrocious and extremely violent wars. The ancients sanctified these wars in the name of a god leading them to victory, delivering the so-called “rules of war.” Priests were in charge of announcing the movements of the army to the sound of their trumpets and horns.

The first single from the album is named “Battle of Qadesh“. The Font of All Human Knowledge tells us that the Battle of Qadesh “took place in the 13th century BC between the Egyptian Empire led by pharaoh Ramesses II and the Hittite Empire led by king Muwatalli II,” and occurred “along what is today the Lebanon–Syria border.” That same source reports that “[i]t is believed to be the largest battle ever fought involving chariots, numbering at a total of 5,000 to 6,000,” and that it “is considered to have ended in a stalemate.”

The beautifully made video accompanying the song seems calculated to make the point that nothing changes. We can see cave drawings of ancient conflicts, and millennia later we can watch video of war in Ukraine and Gaza. Humanity seems destined to continually stalemate itself, drenched in blood. (The video portrays other interesting juxtapositions of antiquity and modernity, but I won’t spoil those by describing them.)

The song itself is a slow build. We’re ushered into it by the persistent throb of trumpets, a throb that never completely vanishes but only becomes more feverish when it reappears. It’s gradually joined by other instrumentation, including vivid drumbeats, distorted droning tones, and warbling wails that grow increasingly piercing. (Ottone Pesante coax a lot of variable sounds from trumpet and trombone.)

Tension and vigor build in the music until the band’s guest Lili Refrain appears, with her extraordinary voice adding another order of magnitude of shattering emotional intensity, backed by sweeping waves of desperate music and stunning drumwork.

It’s really a breathtaking experience.

Scrolls of War is the first album of a concept trilogy about the history of brass music. It will be released by Aural Music on October 18th.

https://www.auralwebstore.com/
http://www.ottonepesante.it/
https://www.facebook.com/ottonepesante/

 

 

DÖ (Finland)

I’m not sure there was any natural progression from that last song (or the album before it) into something else, so an unnatural progression will have to do.

What I’ve chosen next is the newest song from DÖ — “the riff-praising, cosmos-worshipping trio from Finland that feeds on dark astral energy and compresses it into what [they] call “döömer”.

This song, ominously named “Ode to the Dark Matter“, eerily glitters and rings but also heaves and groans like a mastodon with rhythm. As the words come forth in beastly snarls and famished screams, the song quakes the earth, lurching and weaving with heartless heaviness, dark and devastating in its impact, but it also becomes astral and eerie again as the music shimmers and chimes.

The massive pounding resumes, along with that shaggy, hook-laden main riff, just in time to flatten things and thus make a clear path for an extravagantly wailing and warping guitar solo and another outbreak of crazed vocal intensity.

The song is from DÖ‘s new album Universum, which will be released on September 18th by Lay Bare Recordings.

https://laybarerecordings.com/release/unversum-lbr057
http://www.astraldeathcult.com/
https://www.facebook.com/astraldeathcult
https://doofficial666.bandcamp.com/album/black-hole-mass

 

 

OUTER GRAVES (U.S.)

I barely have time for two more songs in today’s roundup, and they’re both from the debut album Terminal Limit by the Wisconsin-based “malevolent cosmic Death Metal band” Outer Graves.

In the case of “Malevolent Entity“, prepare for an amalgam of brute-force pile-driver blows, poisonously slithering and sizzling riffage, neck-cracking drumwork, convulsions of viciously roiling guitars, and utterly berserk screams. The song moves rapidly from one tempo to another and from one dimension of malevolence to another, and it’s exhilarating as well as decimating.

In the case of “Termination Quadrant” the band do something similar, vigorously applying jackhammers and mallets to the spine but also spinning up the fretwork into displays of unnerving dementia, all of it accompanied by blood-spraying screams. It will work your neck. It will flay your mind.

Terminal Limit will be released on September 20th by Transylvanian Recordings.

https://transylvanianrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/outer-graves-terminal-limit
https://www.facebook.com/p/Outer-Graves-100088500273167/