WANDERING INTO BLACKENED REACHES — 4 CRITICAL BLACK METAL ALBUMS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

(In this article our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri brings us four reviews of four unusual albums from blackened realms — albums created by Skeletal Augury, Cemetery Trip, Conifère, and Xw​î​n.)

The following 4 albums have been on my to-do list for months. You won’t find a slew of reviews on their Bandcamp pages sharing the praises from bigger media outlets. I couldn’t even find many reviews of the albums themselves out there. And partially this could be because of it being one hell of a year for black metal, but isn’t that just every year?

If you like black metal, you’re bound to love at least one of what I’m sharing with you today. The only order here is chronological because I don’t have a favorite amongst them and their styles diverge violently. There were more albums which I will hopefully be able to get to soon, but 4 is a nice number for its tetraphobic propensities in East Asia. The number 4, you see, signifies shaking hands with Elvis (I only learned that slang phrase for death today).

 

Skeletal Augury (China) – 尤​瑞​卡 (Eureka)

Released February 24, 2024

We start off with this Chinese band to get the blood positively bursting through the ventral walls of our chests. I’m a bit of a black metal fan, I also adore a good bit of thrash. Like potassium and chloride being basically benign on their own, together, just like black and thrash metal fused, a lethal injection of un-aliving propensity is created. From second one Skeletal Augury invite us into a listening experience for the riff-depraved, and the cover art is spellbinding.

With track titles like 薄暮 (dusk) and 尖叫的屍陀林 (the screaming corpse), track 6 seems a bit more romantic: 血染花 (blood-stained flower) and has bass that is at ASMR-levels of satisfying. Track 7, 滌除, can either mean elimination or to cleanse; well, if you’re in need of that palette cleanser after too much brutality, core, suffocating death, or whatever your fix is, Skeletal Augury is here to level things. It’s an absolute stomper, but there isn’t a skippable track present either.

The demented depth and transfixing weight of the vocals might not seem to fit on paper; on vellum it elevates what could have been the unprecedented forerunner for AOTY in blackened thrash instrumental albums had it been a thing.

There is no way on Pangu’s (the Chinese creator god…) good earth that Islander will again allow me to helm the infectious lists this year, but I would be beyond surprised if Skeletal Augury don’t feature on that list. Play blind darts with the jukebox and try sitting still. Crunchy as all fuck, pestiferous, blistering and very punky. Thrashed-up to bursting, blackened at the core. Sick. Don’t be fooled by the dearth of words, it deserves a more excessive writeup; once you click play however, the sounds that follow will consume you and you’ll thank me for keeping it short.

 

 

Cemetery Trip (USA) – Cave Beast

Released: March 2, 2024

 Death visits us unknowing at times. Like when a filling drops, and everything tastes like a decomposing rat stuck between the drywall and ceiling of your mouth. Described on their media as: “anti-psychiatric blackened punk. 30 minutes of abyssal despondency and primal sonic decay.” Cave Beast is like infusing the cyberpunk of Blade Runner 2049 with the bestial psychedelic dreams of a carnivorous worm feasting on the recently deceased by psilocybin overdose.

Just one glance at their Bandcamp page would suffice to waylay fears that this is some punked-up black metal project that have never dabbled in psychedelics. Cemetery Trip, it must have something to do with their name. The coloring on that logo is trippy af. Look at that album cover and then scroll upwards with your eyes to the logo. See that pigment alteration that fades in? That’s such a good rendition for what the music is. Until you get to track 8 that is, when that pink neon effervescence goes full blown.

Expanding on 2023’s Rot Warp which had an even more unvarnished aesthetic, Cave Beast takes things into less feral territory. The tunes, while decidedly locked into blackened realms and with punk beats punching through, display an ominous air of futility enshrouding from those percussive keys that aim to please.

Cemetery Trip take us straight down the rabbit hole. The opener is crusty, vox are hounded out, drowned, suffocated, we drive with the riff. Reverbed cavern shrieks, over an effective as fuck main riff and a fuzzy bass. If you went to a graveyard and someone was on the cusp of breaking out of their casket and attempted mouthing screams and yowls, that’s what their vocalist sounds like. Acting here as catalyst, with the strings and percussion given the room to breathe and flourish and innovate.

If you’re not entranced, bobbing, swaying, or nodding along by the third track, please give your GP a call. The bass gets downright filthy in Psychic Bondage, notwithstanding the eerie as an icepick poltergeist-ed unceremoniously into an auricular orifice that the synths provide.

Brooding in the lulls yet fulminating into psychedelic obliteration of semblances of dormancy in the flow. Layered to perfection. In Black Sunset you can scarcely hear the vox. They’re there simply as a side offering. Until the break, where everything gets as much room as the drums. Masterful mixing.

Blackened punk sounds nice on paper, but what if the artist also had a feel for composition, space, drive, and air, for build, for abeyance? Cave Beast is cut like someone watched Every Frame a Painting and made an opus in filmic homage. Cut to perfection. And that’s not just because of the cinematic touches like in Psychic Bondage that are reminiscent of Blade Runner, or Vangelis for that matter.

Crossing musical divides with State Lines into post- what would be almost gothic with how choral the synths behave. Going full post-punk and then flipping it into a bass-loaded slugfest to the maximum. The vocalist does remind one however of what is at stake here. There’s so much reverb added to the vocals that one starts to wonder whether it really matters anymore to distinguish between organic and instrumental elements.

If you turn this record on and try to forget about it, you won’t, but you will look up almost every other song to see if your computer didn’t bug out or do some weird tone swap, cos, goddamn if this ain’t taking from the rich and giving to the audibly poor. This is one of my favorite releases of 2024 and it should be yours too. Lo-fi drowned-out vox with driving and ecstatic leads, and that bass is so tasty.

Penultimate track Earth Wormed is probably the strongest on the album for its unrelenting hooked-up main riff, foul bass, driving drums, and drowned-out vox, but damn, what a great way to end the album in Floating Dagger.

The closer is melodic overload to the point of bursting. Segueing into doom. Synthed-up tuning in the tremolos, it’s that exact post-gig post-rambunctious bacchanal trip you need, till it goes full-blown hyper-speed in your face and then breaks into the pagoda gong acid trip of yesteryear. Getting all spiritual on us with them gongs tracking into the endless echoes of a depthless crevice.

 

 

 

Conifère (Québec) – L’Imp​ô​t du Sang

Released: April 11, 2024

My tastes might be a bit off-kilter even for dwellers of the underground. Digging in the dirt of Bandcamp recommendations for art that stands out, I don’t think I found Conifère on any anti-fascist channel, but it could just as well have been.

This black metallic attack is gonna end up on an AOTY list somewhere, definitely mine. And that’s perhaps why it won’t hit that many; they’re practically unknown, pack too much quirkiness in their blackened keep, are too airy, exude too much touchy-feely goodness. What the fuck, are we talking about an Enya album here? Haha. Though I doubt they would ever have named an album ‘blood tax’, the translation of L’Imp​ô​t du Sang.

Conifère are slated as a black metal/ambient/dungeon-synth act. There’s quite a bit of synth present, they do dwell in dungeons, and it is unapologetically black. The riffs are fairly upbeat too. Ascending, not so much ecstatic, but more in the line of shoving art in the face of adversity, in style. There are heavy metal aspects too with hard rock, post metal, and even spaced-out atmospherics. One of the more diverse offerings I’ve had the honor of experiencing this year.

The 1^st track has 2 movements clearly stipulated in the lyrics, and once noticed, it is conceivably not that rare that lyrics really grab one as emphatically as this. Featuring the (abbreviated) famous poem Liberté by Paul Éluard, the recording is also an original recital by the poet. Furia takes a darker turn, yet the music veers between atmospheric elegance to elegiac vicissitudes. The bass and guitar interplay is masterful.

In Le Grand Hyver (The Great Winter) Conifère get the blood to pump from the get-go. There’s a doubling down on that riff, it’s emphatically catchy, and reminds me of those endless Verdunkeln or Fluisteraars riffs. The higher end of the allowable sound spectrum is on display a lot; the breakdown, if you could call it that, is tastier than a marbled steak.

Urgency slays enervation in the way that the best black metal drummers know how to do. With an understanding of stadium arcadiums and having the self-assuredness to then actually throw in a rock solo. It ain’t punk black, but it certainly is punk-rock as all fornication.

IV – Décombres Fumants could just as well be the opening of an Alkaline Trio song, and if a band is willing to go in that direction with their black metal, then I’m here for it all the way. With V – Rêve de nos Ancêtres – the track seems to climax already just before the 4-minute mark with soaring cleans and a crescendo of near desperation. Yet a 12-minute track might itself be too short in regaling the efforts of whom they label the Citizen Tyrant in Bonaparte.

 No need to compare it to Civil War’s insanely catchy I Will Rule The Universe, for being two very different styles. The surging leads give precedence to the runtime as the band nearly go into Obsequiae-territory of melody before a serenity only a band named after trees (Conifère=coniferous) can deliver as outro to the storm that preceded it. Conifère succeeded in creating an album with 5 chapters presented in 4 concise tracks of extremely re-playable excellence.

 

 

Xw​î​n (Kurdistan) – Xw​î​n Bi Xw​î​nê Tê Ş​û​ş​tin

Released: June 14, 2024

 Strap yourself in.

Xw​î​n Bi Xw​î​nê Tê Ş​û​ş​tin might be the first full album of Xw​î​n, but it is not the first composition coming from its creator. Hêlîn, the solo artist behind Xwîn, also released an album with another side project named Hellish under the coolest stage name ever, Graveyard Slut, as well as collaborating with the artist providing cover art for all their projects in the band Pseudocommandö. Where Hellish is more brutish and Pseudocommandö a more stripped down, down to the bare sickly bones still reeking of the meat ripped clear by scavengers, with Xw​î​n we have a more well-rounded affair as far as a purer black sound.

Xw​î​n Bi Xw​î​nê Tê Ş​û​ş​tin is 28 seconds shorter than Hellish’s Cannibalistic Madness, yet deemed an EP. Don’t let labels confuse you. Graveyard Slut produced two of her own solo albums this year and together they come in at just under an hour’s worth of seething black metal. So, it seems like it is not an anomaly anymore for people to release a bunch of material in a short space of time. Technology certainly can make it easier.

‘Blood is washed away with blood’ is what the title translates from Kurdish. Xw​î​n means blood in Kurdish. The band might be located in Turkey, though this one-woman black metal project is proudly Kurdish. A language that has been outlawed in Turkey for 44 years, which makes this album an extreme act of defiance on the creator’s part. It doesn’t get more metal than that.

Sereta acts as atmospheric ease into the onslaught that is sure to follow in Agir Got Gurp. The first full track alone has enough ideas, riffs, and intensity to fill an LP. The neolithic nihilism in riff choice with mid- to lighting-paced onslaught of drums is pure façade to the powerful breaks that further allay a reprieve of churning, ever-marching fury. Paced just right for your ears to catch a breath of solace for a second. The tone palates on display are masterful, layered with an intimate devotion to perfecting an atmosphere of indignant urgency. It ends abruptly.

Enter Azadîya Binaxkirî. Something that sounds like a disconcerting flood of steel pipes rhythmically being dropped on an ecstatic crowd, then one of Beelzebub’s most demented demons screams in a wailing of Harpetic imaginations, enraged to put your ass firmly in your seat. The music is furious, inflammatory, and caustic.

Ey qatil, dilê me yek e opens with calmer tones; it’s more measured before it seems to build into an early climax; it speeds up though, drums going max-speed before getting into a rocking jazz groove with vox deeper than the voice of Darth Vader (R.I.P.). The track’s outro is fitting, it’s a necessary respite, we know it’s going to go full mayhem in the next track, and it does.

Kaosê keeps us guessing as to where Xw​î​n wants to flow. This is not the most technical album you’ll hear this year, yet it does stand out as an album that plays extremely well within its own bounds, whatever they may be. For a track that is named after chaos, the ordered frenzy we get to experience is majestic to say the least. There’s so much layered into this one song, and like the best of compositions, truly a labor of love, seeing as Hêlîn mixed and mastered it themselves.

Qedandin – Kerixîn closes out what can only be described as an extremely promising debut by an artist that has tons of potential for having created a piece of art of this much depth. Just as you think it’s over, this inferno gets revved up with some extra gasoline before settling into a train trekking into the whistle your ear makes after a gig without hearing protection. We can rest assured that this artist doesn’t have any hearing damage yet, for this is one of the most complete and exciting debut EP’s in black metal to come out in any a year.