Black Curse – photo by Brendan Macleod
A few times a year my spouse leaves town without me, jetting away to have fun with one of her sisters or a friend. I could join if I wanted to, but have figured out that giving her some breaks from me is a good idea. I give her some other breaks when I go off to metal fests without her (she’d rather be punched in the kidneys than go to a metal show).
These times when I’m home alone are clouds with silver linings. It doesn’t take long before I start really missing her. The sudden and prolonged silence around the house starts weighing on me. One of the silver linings is that I fill up the silence with music whenever I want to (my kind of music), and fill it up some more by spilling out thoughts about what I’m hearing.
You could guess that my spouse has been gone on one of those trips since early last week, given that I’ve now managed to pull together three roundups of new music and videos in the space of the last four days. She’ll be back home this afternoon, so I’ll most likely be back to doing these once a week on Saturdays until she plans another jaunt.
As usual, there’s a lot of randomness and impulse behind what I picked for today. Even though I’ve had more time than usual to explore new things, the universe of things to explore still dwarfs the time I have, especially since last week ended with a Bandcamp Friday, which always causes the spigot of new song and record releases to get opened wider. But, as usual, I tried for the kind of variety that would keep you off-balance, and think I succeeded.
BLACK CURSE (U.S.)
Following up their 2020 debut album Endless Wound, this Denver band (whose members are from the ranks of some very well-known groups) are returning with a new full-length named Burning In Celestial Poison.
My comrade Mr. Synn wrote a very enthusiastic review of that debut album, emphasizing just how many different stand-out moments Black Curse packed into nearly every track. They certainly gave themselves a chance to do it again when they picked a song that’s nearly 12 minutes long as the first single to release from the new album.
Perhaps influenced by the current Black Curse band photo (up above), I would say that much of “Trodden Flesh” is musical blood-spray, a turbocharged orgy of black metal violence made with roiling and ripping riffage, dense and scarring in its tones, thundering bass-lines, obliterating drum fusillades, maniacal screams, and horrid roars.
But it’s not all jet-paced arterial spray. Here and there, in the midst of the orgies, the music also maliciously pounds, dismally heaves, morbidly groans, and exultantly slugs. There’s some delirious soloing in the mix too, which sometimes slots in right along with the most berserk episodes of screaming.
Near the end the music also transforms into a massive stomping beast, threaded with spasms of crazed fretwork and backed by bursts of riotous drum-fills, hideous howls, and a repeating spoken-word mantra.
This isn’t the only long song on the new album. Two others are also in the 11-12 minute range, mixed in with one of about 4 minutes and another of about 7. I’m pretty sure that at some point one of us here will have something to say about what happens in those.
Burning in Celestial Poison will be released by Sepulchral Voice and Dark Descent on October 25th.
https://blackcurse-svr.bandcamp.com/album/burning-in-celestial-poison
https://www.darkdescentrecords.com/shop/
GREAT FALLS (U.S.)
Having lived in the Seattle area since 1995, and that being the time during which I evolved into a metalhead, the names Botch and Great Falls eventually got indelibly imprinted on my skull. And so when I saw the news that Great Falls had recorded a cover of a Rorschach song with Dave Verellen from Botch as the vocalist, I perked right up.
That song was made public yesterday, as one of many that have gradually been rolled out from a Hex Records compilation that’s being released to celebrate the label’s 25th anniversary (the others are well worth checking out too).
This cover of “Mandible” is a hard-slugging but also head-twisting blast of hardcore. It hammers and blares, but mercurial bass-lines surface, the drums tumble like acrobats, and the guitars whine and whirl. As the pacing slows the music also dismally moans and morbidly muses before it ramps up into a final burst of vicious punches. Through it all, or nearly all, Verellen furiously screams his throat raw, channeling both rage and agony.
https://hexrecords.bandcamp.com/album/hex-25-year
https://www.instagram.com/greatfallsnoise/
https://www.facebook.com/GreatFallsNoise
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063594105431 (Botch)
DROWNSHIP (Germany)
The next song, which comes with a video, is a soul-shaking piece of sludge-infused post-metal named “Where the Flood Springs“.
As demonstrated by this song, Drownship have a pair of vocalists (Jonas Borchers and bassist Edgar Berlies) who can melodically hit the wailing high notes when they sing, and they’re both lacerating screamers too, providing two dimensions of emotional intensity. As for the rest of the song, it’s also multi-dimensional, and all of them are also intense, even the softest phase.
At the outset and again near the end, Drownship heave and stomp with crushing weight and bleak, corrosive decibels, accented with both quivering lead guitars that ooze misery and also the striking impact of that high-flown, grief-stricken singing and those lacerating shrieks.
In another phase, they jump up the energy… and jump. Above an immense bass-pulse the guitars themselves also wail then, sounding like a painful yearning. And in yet another phase, introduced by a long, wretched scream, the rhythm section pause, yielding the field to the lonely, forlorn tones of brittle and glistening guitars. But even then, the shattering vocals maintain the emotional intensity.
The video gives us good views of Drownship performing the song, interspersed with a mysterious and unsettling narrative that follows the downward personal path of its protagonist.
“Where the Flood Springs” is the opening song on a Drownship debut album named Tidal Passages. It will be released by These Hands Melt on November 8th.
https://drownship.bandcamp.com/album/tidal-passages
https://song.link/i/1771386698
https://www.facebook.com/drownship
https://www.instagram.com/drownship_official
POLEMICIST (U.S.)
In service of today’s mission to keep you off-balance I decided to turn up the burner, and to do that I’m now inserting a new and thoroughly head-spinning self-titled EP from Polemicist, the formerly Philadelphia-based and now Oregon-resident duo of Lydia Giordano and Josiah Domico, now joined since last year by drummer Elijah Losch (ex-Uada).
Taking their inspiration from writings by Nietzsche and Kant, they recorded four songs for the EP. The first of them is a vibrant overture of orchestral strings (“Skepticism“) created on synth by Giordano — vibrant but also dark. And after that, in “The Ambition and the Wrath“, all hell breaks loose.
In that song we also seem to hear racing orchestral strings, in tandem with the fiery tones of maniacally flickering guitars and scorched-earth screams, and undergirded with drums that pop, canter, bash, and throb.
In some ways the song is a kindred to the opening overture track — it’s intricate, even elegant, and vibrant to the point of delirium, yet it’s also a channel of darkness. The song also brings punchy grooves and a long, wailing and soaring guitar solo that strikingly rivets attention, glorious and ultimately convulsive but also distressing.
The other three songs deploy similar ingredients to similarly electrifying effect. They’re rhythmically gripping, elaborately layered, baroque and classically influenced yet also blistering, and technically very impressive. They thrive on visceral grooves (but also rampant drum variations) and piercing, trilling riffs that rapidly whirl and sparkle in displays of magnificent and sometimes deleterious delirium; and the cackling snarls and vicious roars keep it all sounding hellish and even feral.
Within those remaining songs there are also times when the music becomes stately and grand, but still blinding in its glory, even when the rhythms stomp and march or boom like cannons. And at times in the final song, “Noumenon“, it also sounds like war, like Ragnarok.
Take deep breaths before you go into this one, because you’ll need the extra oxygen.
https://polemicistbm.bandcamp.com/album/polemicist-ep
https://www.instagram.com/polemicistpdx/
THE WEIR (Canada)
Now we’ll turn down the heat.
In 2015 and again in 2017 I premiered music created by an “atmospheric sludge band” named The Weir from Calgary, Alberta. In the case of the second premiere, for an EP named Detached, I described the music as “unquestionably an asphyxiating, bone-breaking, soul-devouring experience, convincingly atmospheric but also compelling in a way that feels physical. It draws you into a spellbinding nightmare world, even as it tears you down. Damned good stuff, and also just plain damned.”
Now, seven years after Detached, The Weir have returned with a new album, released just yesterday. Entitled Grasping, it’s two tracks long, and long tracks they are — with “Rope Dance” at 15:20 and “Bitter Breath” at 16:17.
I won’t try to map the course of these two tracks in detail, which is often what I do, because no one wants to read that many words when you can listen to the music straightaway. (And yes, it would take a lot of words, because a lot happens.) But because both of these songs require such a significant investment of time, and even more importantly of attention, I thought I should say something by way of preview. So here goes:
Across these two sprawling tracks, The Weir give shape to many haunting and harrowing shadows and deformities. The music brutally crushes in the most literal meaning of that terms; it cuts wounds and pours salt in them (the generally corrosive tone of the guitars alone seems capable of opening wounds); it slowly oozes agony like a final, congealing exsanguination; it wails like mourners at a mass grave, surrendering their minds to grief.
Low and slow is how The Weir like to go, and so you won’t ever get moved into the fast lane (though the closing phase of the second song conjures images of a primitive stomp around a blazing bonfire). But the drums and the bass still routinely manage to shake things up, and the band create variation in other ways, through different aspects of suffocating, searing, and brain-slicing sound which create differing dark and deleterious moods — not one of them hopeful.
Even the abyssal roars sometimes transform (especially in the second track) into long, haunting cries that seem to echo their pain from within mouldering catacomb walls.
https://theweir.bandcamp.com/album/grasping
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100035392346633
LYSERGIC (Portugal)
To wrap things up for today, and to shove you in a different direction from where The Weir took you, I picked the first single and video (released last week) by a Portuguese band named Lysergic, which is principally the musical vehicle of guitarist/vocalist João Corceiro. It’s from a forthcoming album, and it shares the band’s name.
Two things sold me about “Lysergic“. One of them becomes obvious pretty quickly and the other is more subtle and slips in only as you go deeper into the track.
The quickly obvious aspect is the high energy — how simultaneously groovesome and whirling the music is, and how scorching the vocals are. The slowly slithering and vividly rippling riffage is mysterious in its mood, both sinister and seductive, but the music also becomes more frantic and fraught.
The other aspect that eventually surfaces is the clear-toned ring of a bright and beautiful keyboard melody, which becomes noticeable just before a spectacular guitar solo.
The melodies in the song do prove to be a signal aspect, even in the midst of savagery, so much so that even the harshness of the most soaring vocals almost sound like singing, even thought that’s not really what’s happening.
https://lysergicpt.bandcamp.com/track/lysergic
https://open.spotify.com/track/4y99KI7j8R4872MNffOin5
https://www.facebook.com/lysergicpt