Unreqvited
(written by Islander)
In Part I of this Saturday’s roundup of new songs and videos I likened the flow of them, as I’ve arranged them, to a river that twists and turns through passages of greater and lesser turbulence and gloom. Now you’ll have a better idea why I wrote that.
In this Part, as compared to Part I, our musical river begins to make a bend into increasingly less turbulent and more haunted environs, though it will prove to be a long curve and not a sudden one — and the river also leaves the earth at first.
UNREQVITED (Canada)
We start the arc with a lyric video for “The Starforger“, the first single off Unreqvited‘s forthcoming seventh album, A Pathway to the Moon.
Unreqvited‘s mastermind 鬼 (Ghost) has offered these thoughts about the song: “The first single ‘The Starforger‘ is a cavalcade through a cavernous evocation of an illuminated emptiness. It is furthermore a foreboding malaise confuted by celestial melodies that phosphoresce over the forlorn, abysmal expanse. Its pinnacle aggrandized and evangelical, it is an adumbration of the universality of its greater context.”
While that statement is more mysteriously evocative than a nuts-and-bolts description, I think you’ll find it more understandable when you hear the music. The song reveals multiple facets, from glittering acoustic guitars, shimmering lunar synths, and seductively wailing arpeggios, crystalline in tone, to roughened clawing chords and booming throbs, from dancing keyboard pings and passionately soaring falsetto vocals to writhing and wrenching guitars, thundering drums, and paint-stripping screams.
This probably won’t be metal enough for many of our visitors, but as the song cycled through those facets, it made itself quite comfortable in the rooms of my head, particularly the ones open to the skies.
A Pathway to the Moon is set for release by Prophecy Productions on January 24th.
http://lnk.spkr.media/unreqvited-pathway
https://unreqvited.bandcamp.com/album/a-pathway-to-the-moon
https://www.facebook.com/unreqvited
https://www.instagram.com/unrqvtd
MONOLITHE (France)
A day or two ago the Parisian prog/doom outfit Monolithe released the second single from their new album Black Hole District, and that’s what’s next in this Part of today’s collection.
As is Monolithe‘s want, “Sentience Amidst the Lights” is a long-form experience, an even 10 minutes in length, just like their first single (“On the Run to Nowhere“). Like the Unreqvited song above, it too reveals multiple facets as it turns, but is an order of magnitude more dark, heavy, and hopeless.
The grim and near-guttural speaking voice that begins the song joins with big ritual drums and dismally sizzling reverberations to create an aura of cold foreboding and haunting menace. The doom rises up through a guitar that dismally moans over an undulating bass and gun-shot drums, and wafting keys and twisting guitars elevate it further, joined by jolting grooves and monstrous growls.
There’s singing in this song, too, both silken and strident, and wailing guitars that spiral around the music’s towering edifice and earth-moving, body-shaking strides. Ever-menacing, ever-sinister, but also increasingly daunting and despairing in its moods, the song reaches a pinnacle of unearthliness, and then comes to an even more intense rendering of the song’s opening phase, which chills and dooms the mind again.
Hammerheart Records will release Black Hole District on November 15th.
https://monolithe.lnk.to/blackholedistrict
https://www.facebook.com/monolithedoom
THE ANSWER LIES IN THE BLACK VOID (Hungary/Netherlands)
Now we’re even more spectacularly crashing right through the guardrails of our site’s name, lured beyond the bounds by the spectacular voice of Martina Horváth, whom many of you here will know through her work with Thy Catafalque.
Her pure and stratospheric singing isn’t the only attraction in this band’s Halloween-timed cover of “Mists Of Krakatoa“, originally recorded by The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble on their 2009 album Here Be Dragons.
There’s also the guitar tone deployed by Jason Köhnen (himself a former member of TKDE), which will hum the marrow in your bones as the notes grimly heave; the visceral punch and snap of the drums; the bass and soundscape contributions by Attila Kovacs; and the gripping violin performance by Sarah Anderson, which adds yet another disconcerting aspect of the unearthly (at times shrill and shrieking) to the music.
The haunting video accompanying the song is also a major attraction, as you’re about to see.
In other news, The Answer Lies In The Black Void is currently in the studio recording their third album, tentatively set for release in mid-2025.
https://www.theanswerliesintheblackvoid.com
https://theanswerliesintheblackvoid.bandcamp.com/track/mists-of-krakatoa-2
https://www.facebook.com/TheAnswerLiesInTheBlackVoid
https://www.instagram.com/theanswerliesintheblackvoid
KÆLAN MIKLA (Iceland)
Staying on the other side of the site’s guardrails, I’m turning next to a new song and video from Kælan Mikla.
“Stjörnuljós” is spookier, dreamier, and even more unsettling than the trio’s usually bouncier post-punk and darkwave efforts, but with sparklers too, both in the song and in the engrossing video — which is also spooky, dreamy, and unsettling.
To be sure, it still brings its rhythmic punches and musical elements of seduction and beckoning along with more fraught sensations; even the haunted vocals become more distraught as the sparklers come out.
The lyrics are in Icelandic of course. I had Google translate them. Turns out the track is kind of a love song, or at least a song of longing, a desire for a rekindling of something gone as cold as icebergs.
(Thanks to Miloš for the link to this video.)
https://kaelanmikla.bandcamp.com/track/stj-rnulj-s
https://www.facebook.com/Kaelanmikla/
https://www.instagram.com/kaelanmikla/
MOROKH (Russia)
By happenstance, the haunted opening piano melody of “Malum,” the first song on Morokh‘s new EP X, made for an excellent segue from that Kælan Mikla song into something else. What does it segue into?
Well, it brings another turn in today’s musical river, a violent turn back into greater and more harrowing extremity — a great storm of ravishing riffage, furiously chopping drums, rabid screams, and bestial, roaring growls. The impact is apocalyptic in mood and scale, violent and dark, increasingly barren and vast, though perpetually wrenching in the intensity of the screams and roars, and marked by devastating upheavals.
This year is Morokh‘s tenth anniversary as a band, and like “Malum“, the subsequent two songs on the EP are “anniversary versions” of songs from Morokh‘s first album, all three of them given new names in addition to new performances.
Those next two songs — “Diaboli” and “Obscurum” — are also heavy as earthquakes, and scary as hell in different ways. “Diaboli” is also threaded with vibrantly glistening guitars and brilliantly vibrating keys that create wonder in the midst of ruination, as well as humongous, heaving bass tones, while “Obscurum” combines full-bore, world-eating savagery with ethereal tones of delirium and grief.
The final track is a cover of a song called “Control” by the Russian underground rock band Chimera (which disbanded in 1997 after their singer/guitarist hanged himself in the attic of their rehearsal space — or so says this article). I haven’t heard the original, but in Morokh‘s hands it becomes electrifying, and as panoramically devastating as the EP’s three original songs, with the tag-team vocals again utterly unhinged.
Further proof that Morokh don’t do anything by half-measures.
https://morokh.bandcamp.com/album/x
https://www.facebook.com/morokhband
https://www.instagram.com/morokhband/
ULVER (Norway)
And to close, here we have another Halloween offering. It would have fit better in the flow somewhere up in that sequence that ended with Kælan Mikla, but it was something of a last-minute choice and so I decided to give it the last minutes.
Thanks to some of my pre-metal tastes in music, I’ve enjoyed the directions Ulver has followed, including the many singles they’ve released this year. This newest one, “The Red Light“, might be my favorite of their 2024 releases, in part because of the beautifully voiced lyrics (so relevant to the harrowing bleakness of our current days), which you’ll find at Bandcamp if you can’t make them out in the singing, but also because the viscerally propulsive song incorporates so many intriguing sounds and sensations.
Not just because of the words, it’s the kind of song made to take the passenger seat while you drive through the night, whether in a car on neon-lit urban streets or just trying to make it through a night of your mind to some kind of dawn.
https://ulver.bandcamp.com/track/the-red-light
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ulver/31166220421
https://www.instagram.com/ulver_official/