(written by Islander)
As I did in yesterday’s weekend roundup, for today’s column I’ve chosen a mix of complete new releases and advance tracks from forthcoming records. I’ve also consciously mixed up the musical styles, all of which use black metal as a touchstone but throw other stones at us as well. At the end I’ve also embedded three new videos without commentary; they’re all worth seeing and hearing, even though I haven’t tried to explain why.
P.S. In certain parts of the Christian world today is Michaelmas, feast day of the archangel Michael, who is celebrated for casting the Devil from Heaven. The Devil has had a celebrated career on Earth since then, as today’s music helps prove. Today is also probably the birthday of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote, which will always inspire its readers to continue tilting at windmills, which thankfully all of today’s bands are doing.
OLD WAINDS (Russia)
A decade has passed since these Murmansk heathens released their last album Nordraum, leaving us to wonder whether we would ever hear from them again, but lo and behold they are back, with a new album named Stormheart due for arrival in late November.
The first advance song, “Of Night and Ice“, arrived with a lyric video. It shows Old Wainds in blizzard gear, delivering vicious gales of high-flown, icy riffage and frantic beats, capped with raging, strangled snarls and berserk screams. The guitars fly even higher, exulting in their delirium, but also contort into channels of grim cruelty and fracturing despair.
This audio stormfront never spends itself, racing from beginning to end, thoroughly electric, but as noted, the shifts in melody and mood are also relentless, both glorious and disturbing.
The album will be released on November 27th by Darkness Shall Rise Productions.
https://darknessshallrise.de/
https://oldwaindsdarknessshallrise.bandcamp.com/album/stormheart
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61565691417094
VALONTUOJA (Finland)
We’ll remain ensconced in the frozen north with the first two songs disclosed from the debut album of the Finnish solo project Valontuoja.
The album opener, “Kodistani Karkoitettu“, sends shrill, writhing guitars and tidal synths way up into the stratosphere, icy but crazed, while the drums canter in a steady gallop and then hammer away. The vocals are crazed too, wretched in their screams.
As in the case of that Old Wainds song, the intensity of the spectral melodies in this song never abates but their emotional quality changes. The layered guitars seem to chime but also to become significantly more distressing, as if igniting the skies with a pain so severe that it has driven the afflicted to madness.
The second song, “Jään tulen alle“, deploys similar ingredients — galloping and blasting beats, stratospheric guitars and synths, and tortured screams. It’s equally vast in its sweep, and equally desperate in its moods.
In this song, however, the pace does briefly slow, allowing the lead guitar to mysteriously quiver and convulse, which it continues to vividly do even when the music races and blazes again. Moreover, the moods of the song, while often severely distraught, do reveal visions of daunting and delirious glory.
The name of the album is Luonnon armoilla. It will be released by Inverse Records on November 8th. I’ll be curious to see whether other songs vary the methods of the first two before listeners run out of air.
https://valontuoja.bandcamp.com/album/luonnon-armoilla
https://www.facebook.com/Valontuojablackmetal
CALCARATA (Germany)
How could I resist a black metal album with a cover depicting a giant snail being ridden by a hooded figure? That’s a rhetorical question, because I obviously couldn’t. In addition to the cover art, I paid attention to this description at Bandcamp:
Calcarata is German atmospheric black metal and one of several two-man-projects by Natt (guitar) and Yuggoth (vocals, bass, drums). The debut album Der müde Mensch touches on four worlds: the dreamlands, the realm of the dead, the Earth and the soul. With clear vocals at times and a sprawling psychedelic solo, we follow the giant snail of slumber up and down the slopes of mind.
In line with that preview, the album (just released by Naturmacht Productions) consists of four songs, all of them quite long (in the range of 9-17 minutes). Regardless of genre, I tend to have trepidations when I see song-lengths like these. But there’s a big snail on the cover!
Girding my loins and hoping I wouldn’t need supplemental caffeine injections, I dived in. Thankfully, the album turns out not to be an endurance contest, but instead an experience with the capacity to carry a listener far away from the mundane world, lost in the fantastic and forlorn worlds that Calcarata create. I’ve fallen completely in love with it.
Each song includes bountiful lyrics in German, which I used google to translate. More on that in a few minutes, but for now I’ll say that their manner of expression is part of what makes this music so interesting. The voice is at times deep and smooth, and wavers between speaking and singing in a way that’s heartfelt but also kind of professorial and kind of diabolical. At other times it explodes in tormented screams so severe as to strip the paint from your walls.
The music, as it must be for songs of such length, is continually variant. It benefits from clarity, from the sharpness and punch of the drums to the prominent nimbleness and heft of the bass and the ringing and ravishing shine of the guitars. The variance reveals itself in many ways.
In the rhythms, the band are quite comfortable rocking and rolling but they also stagger or furiously blast away, and they get proggy too. In the surrounding music, they abrade like sandstorms and whip like whirlpools but also rapidly levitate, to create breathtaking panoramas of sound, sweeping and vast, sometimes wondrous and sometimes stricken with sorrow.
They also find soft moments in which a strummed guitar (still shining) wistfully muses, joined at times by the deep hum of tones that might be a mimicry of orchestral strings (the bass section) or might be that baritone voice, or both.
The push and pull of the music creates recurring sonic scenes of splendor, tragedy, and poignance, but also with intermittent outbursts of violence, and those harsh vocals never fail to send shivers down the spine, because they’re so terrifyingly intense (you get a lot more of them than the near-singing voice).
Plus, as forecast by the quotation way up above, there is indeed a sprawling guitar solo in “Heilung” that might be the most spectacular thing in an album filled with spectacles, not merely a jaw-dropping display of technical skill but a powerful channel for ranging emotions; it’s worth the price of admission all by itself.
In fact, I’d have to think long and hard, because the thinking would probably have to take me back into the ’60s and ’70s, to find a guitar solo more fantastic than this one. (I’m thinking of people like Hendricks, Page, Clapton, Gilmour, Santana.)
The album (and each song) unfolds and changes in ways that are remarkably elaborate and have a narrative quality, as if they’re the soundtrack to something mythic, some trying journey by some beleaguered but determined pilgrim in search of a grail of some kind, or mere personal salvation. Or maybe you’ll think of it as a black metal musical or rock opera?
I think you’d have that reaction even if you knew nothing about the lyrics — but the lyrics (available at Bandcamp), which are literary and eloquent, can be interpreted as a narrative, a quest for meaning, a kind of spiritual journey of downfall and uplift, in which the protagonist seems like a stand-in for all of humankind. The last words (in translation) are these, though they’re better understood if you’ve read everything that precedes them:
How can a person be so tired? Something was lost on the journey.
The eyes were so addicted to darkness and peace, the mind froze in doing nothing. How wonderful the world was when he saw through divine eyes. So close to the moment in timeless unity, but now there is nothing left of it.
I’d rather wrap myself in white noise than desperately plead for healing. All my life I will listen to the screams and watch the stars move. Only when the angels take me to themselves does their cry give way to another song. I will face them in the light, and within me it will be quieter than ever.
https://calcarata.bandcamp.com/album/der-m-de-mensch-2
PAENIL ERA (Romania)
I was doubtful I could find anything to follow Calcarata‘s album that wouldn’t be a letdown. But fortune smiled upon me when I heard Idle Cage, a new album by Paenil Era from Romania (the solo work of one Erwin Weber, which was previously known as Signatura Rerum).
Like that Calcarata album, this one includes four songs, and like that one, Idle Cage includes a couple of unusually long tracks at the beginning and end.
At the beginning is “The Cage“, and at the beginning of “The Cage” is something like the wavering drone of a didgeridoo or tuba and the frantic quivering of violin strings, backed by big tribal beats. That seizes attention very damned fast, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.
From there the song magnificently but devilishly soars and swirls; the drums become more rambunctious and then blast; a weighty bass puts its throb in your guts; and serrated-edge howls come for your throat. The music sounds psychedelic but also raging. It includes outbursts of gob-smacking splendor but also a sequence of eerily slithering arpeggios and bursts of crashing percussion.
It brings forward ravishing fanfares of sound, but also the brittle ring of solitary chimes, drums that go off like gunshots, eerily shimmering synths, and even soulful singing (which reverberates like everything else).
In the ensuing three songs, which all seamlessly flow from one to the next, Paenil Era continues extending the lines of its sprawling musical roadmap, each of them as multi-faceted and constantly variable as “The Cage“, and none of them any more strictly beholden to the traditional tropes of black metal. They intertwine stylistic ingredients that include psychedelia, prog rock, classical music, and folk music to create one rich musical pageant after another, with a clarity of production that allows all the ingredients to stand out.
Those ingredients also include punchy, lead-weighted grooves and aggressively jabbing riffage that will wake up your reptile brain, as well as cosmic ambient drifts and beautifully glistening or dreamily meandering notes that mesmerize, plus such a wide array of instrumental tones (including the vivid trill of a mandolin-like instrument, soloing in the long final track) that you might think the album’s solo creator is backed with an orchestra’s worth of performers.
Sometimes it’s only his scalding howls and the almost gratuitous blast-beats that keep the music tethered to black metal, though at the album’s very end things get very dark and devastating indeed.
Like the preceding album in today’s collection, this one also continually ebbs and flows, and seems like a piece of black metal musical theater, or a black metal rock opera. It’s elaborate and extravagant, prepared with obvious care but well-calculated to keep listeners’ heads spinning from start to finish. The fact that it’s all the work of one person just makes it all the more extraordinary.
P.S. Shortly before posting this column I found from Paenil Era‘s FB page that Erwin Weber has formed a lineup to play live, and they’ve just released a video of a live session that features two songs from the new album, “The Cage” and “The Chain“. I’ve included the video below.
https://paenil-era.bandcamp.com/album/idle-cage
https://www.facebook.com/paenil.era
AND MORE
Here at the end, as promised, I’ve collected three new videos for three new songs from forthcoming or just-released albums by well-known bands (or at least well-known by anyone with a taste for black metal who’s likely to visit our site).
Because my NCS time today is rapidly running out, I’ll dispense with the usual previews. The Schammasch song (“Image of the Infinite”) is from their album The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean, to be released on October 25th. Groza‘s song (“Asbest”) is from their album Nadir, which is out now on AOP Records. Gaerea‘s song (“Suspended”) is off their album Coma, which Season of Mist will release on October 25th.