SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: THAW, THUMOS, THUNRAZ, THE CURE, DISFIGURE, MARTERPÆL, KEITZER

Last week I filled up this column with 16 songs from 15 bands, all but two of those tracks from forthcoming records. This week I’ve taken a different tack, recommending some complete new records and singles, and fewer advance songs.

With a smaller number of bands I also decided not to arrange things in alphabetical order, other than three in a row at the start for groups whose names share a couple of opening consonants. And to break things up I stuck a curveball in the middle instead of at the end.

 

THAW (Poland)

These always-interesting Polish noise merchants are returning with a new album seven years after their last one (Grains), and “The Great Devourer” is the first track disclosed from it.

“Always interesting” continues to apply, based on this song, which provides sizzling sensations that will sear your brain like a nice black-and-blue steak, huge heaving stomps that radiate imperious malice, extravagant vocals that straddle a line between wailing and snarling, and a closing dose of auditory hallucinogens. Come to think of it, the whole thing is hallucinatory.

“The Great Devourer” is from an album named Fading Backwards, which will be out on October 25th via Agonia Records.

http://thaw.agoniarecords.com/
https://orcd.co/arcd282s1
https://agoniarecords.bandcamp.com/album/fading-backwards
https://www.facebook.com/thawnoise

 

 

THUMOS (U.S.)

Thumos have stayed busy this year, releasing a single, an EP, a split with Spaceseer, and now another single, which happens to be a cover of a song by the late Robert Miles from his album Dreamland.

“Children” was an enormous hit when it was released in 1995. “Dream house” is the genre label often attached to it. I guess EDM is what we’d call it now. I’m no expert in either, but I know enough to assert that what Thumos does with the song wouldn’t fit under either label.

Whereas the original song is light and effervescent, bouncy and innocent (well, those really did seem like far more innocent times in retrospect), the Thumos cover turns it a few shades darker and more haunting, and also dials up the heat to acetylene strength. It will still bounce you, but with real drum-and-bass tones instead of electro-beats, and it adds some big jolts and grim dragging chords near the end.

Well, I guess this is kind of a curveball too, though not as much as the one that’s still coming.

You can listen to the Thumos cover of “Children” at Bandcamp, but Thumos also prepared a video for it that stitches together old documentary film clips from what appears to be Central or South American locations (if I find out for sure what we’re seeing and why we’re seeing it, I’ll update this with a P.S.).

P.S. – I’ve learned that the video is archival footage taken in Guatemala.

https://thumos.bandcamp.com/track/children
https://www.instagram.com/thumosband/

 

 

THUNRAZ (Estonia)

This solo project of Madis Jalakas released not one but two albums last year, and I gave them lots of attention, including premiering the second one, which I strained to sum up as “brutal dissonant avant-garde industrial death metal”.

For anyone who worried that Thunraz might let an entire year go by without something new, you can rest easy because Thunraz will release another album in November — though you really can’t expect that anything from this band will be either restful or easy.

Incineration Day is the name of the new full-length, and “Incinerator” is the name of the first advance song from it. You can listen to the song at Bandcamp or via a drum playthrough video executed by drummer Sean Rehmer, who accompanied Madis on the new album (always fun for non-performers like me who think watching metal drummers is like a magic show). I’ve put both streams below.

The lyrics of Thunraz are always bleak, because they often fondly or not so fondly wish for life to end, and that’s the main theme of this song too, expressing a desire to burn and hence to be set free.

As for the music, this is a short, swift, hook-filled punch, amalgamating skull-rattling percussion, grim and grievous riffing, guttural roars, and boiled-in-oil screams. The music itself also begins to boil, and to viciously slash and blast, but it will get legs bouncing too.

https://thunraz.bandcamp.com/album/incineration-day
https://www.facebook.com/thunrazmetal/

 

 

THE CURE (UK)

Here’s the curveball.

On November 1st The Cure will release their first studio album in sixteen years, and it’s been a whole hell of a lot longer since the albums they released in the ’80s that made them stars and influenced a googolplex of other bands over the ensuing decades, straight through to today.

As an early adopter of The Cure, I had to listen to “Alone“, the first song they released from the new album. It might be the most memorable of all the songs I listened to when putting together this column, though of course true memorability depends on the passage of time. It’s also very sad, which has often, but certainly not always, been true of this band’s music.

It takes a while for Robert Smith‘s distinctive voice to appear in the new song. When it does, I imagined him clinging to a ruined boat slowly drifting on a horizon-less sea made by the instruments, beneath stars the instruments also make, with us waiting for him to let go and calmly sink beneath the gentle waves.

The video for the song presents different imagery than the one I imagined, but it’s also hypnotic, as a half-sculpted bust slowly spins away from us, gradually receding into the void. I found the wailed words compelling, and about as lyrically The Cure as The Cure can get.

The long-promised new album is entitled Songs Of A Lost World.

https://thecure.lnk.to/SongsOfALostWorldYT
https://www.facebook.com/thecure/

 

 

DISFIGURE (U.S.)

For better or worse, depending on your reactions, that new song by The Cure won’t continue to slowly spin through your head because we’re going back into the trenches straight away, or more accurately we’re leaping from the trenches and charging into no man’s land via the highly stressful but highly cathartic debut album by Connecticut’s Disfigure that they released about 10 days ago. The album’s name is New Age of Judgement.

In genre terms, Disfigure suggest they sound like “Tragedy playing 2nd-wave black metal riffs”, or in other terms, “Dark Hardcore”. They charge through 11 songs in about 30 minutes, and you can do the math: all but the five-minute closer are short.

The opener “Call of The Blue Hour” is a surprising instrumental, like something unearthed from  Depression-era Americana. It also includes a vocal sample that sounds like a fanatical preacher at an old tent revival.

Even after that opener, the vocals sounds similarly fanatical, savagely yelling to be heard, but the music is a lot heavier and more harrowing. True enough, it’s an amalgam of belligerent, tremolo’d riffs drenched in distortion that slash and scorch, whirring and screaming guitar leads that often sound drenched in anguish, and rhythms that batter and burst into blasts.

For music that’s so brazen, hard-charging, hard-punching, and angry, the songs have a bleak through-line. They seem capable of cutting a swath through brick walls, and the throb of the bass is so heavy it might bring them down by itself, but these are very grim and negative assaults. They’ll get your blood rushing for sure, but there’s not much joy to be found.

As brutalizing and “stripped down” as the songs are, they have distinctive riffs and melodies (no matter how corrosive and despairing those melodies are), which create potent hooks, and those piercing guitar-leads are always attention-grabbing, as are the crazed, throat-lacerating extremities of the vocals.

Disfigure break up their barrages here and there with a few unexpected acoustic-guitar or steel-guitar digressions (sometimes backed with organ shimmers) that call back to the old folksiness of the opening track, and a few bursts of ruinous feedback, swirling electronics, or ruthless hammer blows.

The more I think about it, the more the album makes me think of Panopticon‘s Kentucky, in the way it seems to bridge long divides of time in an almost rural setting. There’s even, at least in my own imagination, a kind of Appalachian air to some of the thorough-going blackened-crust storming, with that startling lead guitar even making me think of a fiddle in a devil’s dream. But I’ve also just as often envisioned the music as a bare-knuckled survivor in urban mean streets.

It really is a hell of a fine album, straight through to that devastating 5-minute closing anthem, “The Final Advance“.

https://disfigurebandct.bandcamp.com/album/new-age-of-judgement
https://www.facebook.com/disfigurehardcore/

 

 

MARTERPÆL (Denmark)

When you listen to this Danish band’s debut album Hævnens lys you’ll probably understand why I decided to lock it together with Disfigure in this portion of today’s roundup.

Strange Aeons Records, the label that released it four days ago, calls it a combination of “the raw energy of crust punk with the life-shattering essence of Black Metal”, and they recommend it for fans of NyreDolk, Martyrdöd, Gabestok, and Hersker. On the other hand, Metal Archives calls Marterpæl‘s music “Black/Heavy Metal”.

There are ingredients of old heavy metal grandeur in the music, but the black/crust label generally fits better. Certainly, the vocals are usually the kind of screaming-vampire tirades that wouldn’t be let anywhere close to any heavy metal bands of old, though there’s also some raw yelling/singing to be found.

Yet it should also be said that Marterpæl‘s music also brings in, at least as often, the kind of old folk influences, in both some of the whirling, dancing beats and the melodies, that pull it away from punk, and in that way the album sometimes makes me think of Malokarpatan.

To further sharpen the point, they (like Disfigure above) occasionally bring in old acoustic instruments and accordion-like tones (especially in “Erotica” and “Skuffet“) to strengthen that connection. Or maybe I’m just too tunnel-visioned by the punk I grew up with in the US, and this is what Danish punk sounded like in its formative years.

I should also mention that along with all the other ingredients mentioned above, a few of the songs incorporate the kind of shimmery electric-keyboard accents, both gothic and psychedelic, that teleport the music back into the ’60s and ’70s — or would do so but for the ravenous vocals. The fantastic lead guitar motifs in “Skuffet” (the album’s greatest song) and the fuzzy psychedelic riffing in “Drømmet frelses” time-travel like that too.

And so it turns out that although the Strange Aeons PR prelude about the album isn’t wrong, it also just scratches the surface of a record that’s far more multi-faceted, adventurous, and thoughtful in its creation. It’s a relentlessly engaging album to hear.

(Thanks to Miloš for recommending this album to me.)

https://strangeaeonsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/h-vnens-lys
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093654695944

 

 

KEITZER (Germany)

Before I close up shop for today I’ll leave you with one more complete album. I had it on my radar screen, but it had fallen pretty far down the endless list of things I wanted to check out because of other discoveries.

Thankfully, former NCS writer KevinP pushed it back into the upper reaches with a message to me that called it “grindy death metal packed with catchy riffs”. He went on to say: “Hard to be impressed by new death metal albums these days but this is vicious and also super catchy and memorable, not an easy feat to pull off”.

Because the album was just released yesterday by FDA Records and I hadn’t taken advantage of the promo they sent us, I’ve only listened to Pandemonium Humanitas one time, which really isn’t long enough to form any necessarily lasting impressions or to create a basis for a worthy review. But as I’ve confessed before, sometimes I feel the need to expel something quickly about releases that hit the mark because the continuing tide of new music around here often drowns my thoughts and plans for something more substantial.

Plus, this album really does hit the mark, for just the reasons Kevin said. And man, Paolo Girardi‘s cover art is very damned cool — so cool that, as you’ve seen, I had to stick it at the top of today’s column.

And with that I’ve got to bolt away and leave you to it, without further ado.

https://fda-records.bandcamp.com/album/pandemonium-humanitas
https://keitzer.bandcamp.com/album/pandemonium-humanitas
https://www.facebook.com/keitzer