(written by Islander)
I was going to begin by sharing some thoughts about “current events”. I started writing them. Then it dawned on me that if you wanted to read some dude’s thoughts about current events right at this moment, you wouldn’t be here. You might even be trying to forget about current events, to put off thinking about them until another hour, another day, another month.
And anyway, trashing what I started writing rather than finishing it provided more time for thoughts about another couple of songs. You might not want to read those either, but you might listen, and that’s good enough.
Once again, there’s a lot here. I’ve alternated between complete albums and preview tracks from forthcoming records, followed by a couple of clean-singing head-knockers and something quite out of the ordinary at the end.
EZOV (Sweden)
I wrote about this Swedish duo’s debut album Cerca Trova (2018) and their follow-on EP Cui Peccare Licet Peccat Minus (2019), but I was unaware they’d recently released another EP until getting linked to it by Rennie Resmini (starkweather), which is fitting since he’s the person who turned me onto Ezov in the first place.
The name of the new EP is Ty Högmod och Fiendeskap Äro Vår Brynsten, which (according to google) translates to “For Pride and Enmity Are Our Crucibles”. It consists of two ultra-long songs, “And the Stones Thereof” and “Orchestrating Violence“.
The lyrics, which you can find at Bandcamp are also extensive, and apocalyptic, and stylictically biblical. I won’t try to summarize them, other than to say they address weighty subjects, dealing with the spiritual hollowness and self-destructive horrors of humankind and the demands of righteousness by a vengeful god.
“And the Stones Thereof” is also weighty and apocalyptic, an often dissonant and frequently turbulent amalgam of black and death metal that’s scathing and searing, haughty and hammering, flailing in agony and sometimes drenched in doom. The drumming is quite active and impressive, as is the bass performance, though they pull back just as the music does, and those words come forth not only in fanatical, gritty howls stretched to the screaming point but also through grim, growled pronouncements and passionate singing.
That first song, as you might hope in light of its length, is dynamic and elaborate, but it will continually put your nerves on edge, and your teeth too. Even when the drums seem to meander or eccentrically bounce and the guitars strangely chime or uncomfortably quiver, it’s an unnerving experience.
Despite its name, “Orchestrating Violence” begins with a melodious, classically inclined instrumental overture that sounds solemn and reverent, like something from the Middle Ages. After a pause, however, the song gradually becomes more distressing, more deranged, and (yes) more violent — as well as more funereal.
The bulk of the song is again intricate, unpredictable, and uncomfortably dissonant, and it again features another terrific drum-and-bass performance of considerable variety, as well as harrowing vocal intensity, punishing riffage, and piercing guitar-trills that are electrifying (and distressing) to hear. In its maelstroms and its agonies it seems to depict end-of-world days and terrible judgments, not for the self-satisfied or the faint of heart. It ends in mystical and mesmerizing fashion, with some very old instrument taking the lead.
The album is available digitally from Ezov, and on cassette tape from Iskra Cassettes and Kandelaber Records.
https://ezovband.bandcamp.com/album/ty-h-gmod-och-fiendeskap-ro-v-r-brynsten
https://iskracassettes.com/en/categories/120-p120-.html
https://kandelaber.bandcamp.com/album/ty-h-gmod-och-fiendeskap-ro-v-r-brysten
https://www.facebook.com/EzovOfficial
DIZZINESS (Greece)
Roughly five years after their last album, the Greek black metal band Dizziness are returning with a new full-length named Abhorrent Flickering Of Obscurity. It includes six new songs and special guest appearances by Beldaroh from Besatt (Poland), Astraea from Melan Selas (Greece), and Arkhon Sakrificer from Temple Of Evil (Cyprus). Dizziness says of the new album:
“We combined different spectrums of madness arising from deranged esoteric struggles. A mosaic of agony and torment, absurdity and internal conflict forcing us to eternal turmoil.”
True to the band’s name, the two songs available now truly are dizzying. “Smoulder Dun” features a great keyboard introduction that seizes attention immediately, and then the music becomes extravagantly destructive and head-spinning. Anchored by enormous bass tones and vividly assaulting drums, the music flies high, writhing and warping, fronted by voices both maniacal and solemn. At its heights, the music is also majestic, while simultaneously fraught with moods of despair.
“Into Nullity” is equally breathtaking, equally vast and towering in its scale. It burns, and it’s glorious. The dissonant, rapidly contorting guitars (and perhaps keys) sound tormented and unhinged, and the drum-and-bass-work is so ruinous it’s jaw-dropping.
There are a couple points at which the fury relents. The first time the music is no less gripping, and even more dire in its anguish. The second time, it sounds celestial – and the music stays stratospheric from there, until it drifts away into mystic elegance at the end. Once again, the vocals are so unhinged as to be terrorizing.
Abhorrent Flickering Of Obscurity will be released on November 30th.
https://dizziness.bandcamp.com/album/abhorrent-flickering-of-obscurity-2024
https://www.facebook.com/dizzinessvault/
[4672] (Poland)
I’ve already provided hints of what lies in store within [4672]‘s new album, [Ołów], but now you can hear the whole thing, all 17 tracks, start to finish — which is how you should hear it.
Trying to provide a succinct review of the record, which unfortunately is all I’ve left room for, is a bit of a fool’s errand, because across those 17 tracks a whole hell of a lot of things happen, and the happenings can’t be forced into genre pigeon-holes, even ones labeled with a bushel-full of hyphens, though I suppose “avant-garde industrial” might be the shortest formulation.
The album offers futuristic and psychedelic electronics, and it offers skull-butting grooves and glitchy spasms. It puts bursts of blow-torch searing into the ears and depth-charge detonations into the guts. It quivers and it ticks; it jolts and it groans; it blares and it scrapes; it slithers like scaly serpents and shimmers like an oasis way out across the dunes.
The drums mimic rhythmic nail-guns and full-auto weaponry; machine-monsters coldly pile-drive through pavement and provide glimpses of the alien structures they’re erecting; a saxophone gets to frolic and lose its mind, but also to become sultry in its duet with a piano (in “Łuna“, where things also intentionally go dead silent).
The songs also include gruff and near-gasping narration and raw, fervent yells. They offer equally fervent and sometimes woozy singing, as well as fang-bared snarls and barks, distorted screeches, and hair-on-fire screaming. And more.
You can get your groove on to the industrial grooves and the neck-snapping beats, but the rhythms go off-kilter too, and much of the time your brain may simultaneously feel like it’s in a frying pan with the heat turned up, or like someone slipped a prohibited substance into your drink, maybe a psychedelic, maybe an aphrodisiac, maybe poison.
It’s a mad carnival, with no way to predict what’s inside each tent you peer into, and laid out in such a way that the whole adventure is also one big surprising whirligig, with just enough soft to break up the hard but not much sanity to be found.
https://4672.bandcamp.com/album/o-w
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/4672/ow/
https://www.facebook.com/4672x
THE SUN’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE NIGHT (UK)
Now I’ll turn to a horse of a very different color than whatever you want to call that [4672] album.
This next band, originally the solo endeavor of “No One“, expanded to a full lineup with their last album Worldless (2023), reviewed for us by Andy Synn here.
Now they’re back in fairly short order with a chilling cosmic video for a cataclysmic new single named “No Light Left To Bear“. The strummed ringing tones and droning hum at the song’s beginning also sound cosmic, but the sudden bursts of absolute percussive obliteration which intrude are shocks to the senses, and the ensuing shrill, searing waves of riffage, ferocious drumming, feverish bass-lines, and piercing screams ratchet up the destructiveness even further.
The band get their jolts in too, and the very agile rhythm section also shift things up, providing dynamics in the midst of all the mind-melting intensity. Even as the high-end tones quiver and scream, the music also begins to sound expansive, inter-stellar if you will, and there’s a reprise of both those glittering tones from the opening, those introductory bursts of pulverization, and those wave-fronts of fire.
In the video, the final message from this fury is this: “Hail No One”
“No Light Left To Bear” is available digitally, and it’s also being offered on burnt-orange cassette, joined by an unheard, re-recorded version of “The Black Pyramid“.
https://thesunsjourneythroughthenight.bandcamp.com/album/no-light-left-to-bear
https://www.instagram.com/thesunsjourneythroughthenight
https://www.facebook.com/p/The-Suns-Journey-Through-The-Night-61553446097365/
SLUG SALT LAVA (Turkey)
Six years have passed since this band’s last EP Siaynoq, and they closed the gap on November 1st with a debut album entitled Apathy Indefinite. With a band name like Slug Salt Lava, it jumped out at me as soon as I got the Bandcamp alert.
The two people responsible for the music, guitarist Ersin Taş and drummer Kerem Çakıroğlu, still haven’t picked up a vocalist, and you might not prevent your mind from imagining some kinds of harsh voices that would augment their instrumental performances. But those performances are damned gripping, standing alone.
The drumming is persistently eye-popping, and the crashing, swirling, swarming, and jolting riffage is too. Much of this music is damned vicious and damned earth-moving, augmented by the kind of head-butting power-blows that will make you check for cranial bleeding, but Ersin Taş also routinely infiltrates contrasting sensations that periodically give the songs an otherworldly, mystifying, and glorious atmosphere.
And while many of the songs are displays of impressive, adrenaline-fueled virtuosity and pile-driving brutality, some of them bring at least moments of grim, grievous, and hulking gloom, and most of them include bursts of brazen and blazing grandeur, like the pulsing ring of stunning sirens.
I haven’t lived with the album enough to be positive about which track is my favorite, but I think I’ll recommend “Ecydysis” or “Whalefall” for those of you looking for a single-song taste-test.
And for those who might like some kind of genre reference, it’s a mixture, and I’d throw out death metal, post-metal, prog, industrial, and stoner doom as the principle ingredients, though come to think of it, that’s probably too many to be very useful.
Did I mention that the drumming is extraordinary?
https://slugsaltlava.bandcamp.com/album/apathy-indefinite
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100038803371428
SAHG (Norway)
Now we begin the short clean-singing block.
I think remembering T.Rex is different from discovering them. If you remember them, as I do, you connect their music with particular times, places, and people that surrounded you when you first heard T.Rex hits. But I think a lot of people who don’t know anything about T.Rex and Marc Bolan will still get super-pumped-up hearing Sahg‘s cover of their song “Children of the Revolution“.
The main riff in the song is damned heavy, like the head-moving lurch of a tyrannosaur, but in the hands of Sahg the vocals are every bit as magnetic, and the little wah-wah guitar solo and trippy arpeggios are big attractions too. They really did the song justice, while adding to its heaviness.
“Children of the Revolution” is from a new Sahg EP named More of Nothing, which will be released on November 29th.
https://sahg.bfan.link/more-of-nothing-EP
https://sahg.bfan.link/children-of-the-revolution
https://www.facebook.com/Sahgband/
DAEDRIC SHRYNE (Germany)
I almost never listen to metal in the vein of these next two songs by a new band named Daedric Shryne. You’ll know why. But the riffs and rhythms of both songs — “Downfall” and “Dominion” — buried big hooks in my skull really fast, such glorious hooks that I tolerated the vocals.
I don’t mean to be critical of the singing – it’s good for its style — it’s just not my usual cup of tea, though it might be yours. But it’s the chugging epic-ness of the riffs, the high fantasy of the melodies, and the neck-bending nature of the grooves that really won me over.
These songs are from Daedric Shryne‘s self-titled debut album, which will be released November 22nd by Cold Knife Records and Supreme Chaos.
https://coldkniferecords.bandcamp.com/album/daedric-shryne
https://www.instagram.com/daedric_shryne/
KT∆NA (?)
Like the first album in today’s collection I found out about this final video from Rennie Resmini, who has been following the video channel of KT∆NA. How he discovers things like this boggles my mind, but I’m damned glad he does.
What you’re about to see and hear is labeled a “rough studio demo” of a song called “BLACK 心臓“. The performers are Christian Davis (Bass/Guitar/Vocals), Bob Macko (Guitar), and Ali Said (Drums). Based on some googling, I’m pretty sure Davis and Macko are Americans, and Metal-Archives has a page for a drummer named Ali Said and it labels his nationality as Romanian.
The tones of the instrumentation in this song are fascinating. If I couldn’t see these three gentlemen performing, I’d be tempted to guess that it was almost all rendered with synths or other electronic devices. Even the drums have a muted resonance (apart from the shimmer and crash of the cymbals), with the toms resembling increasingly feverish throbs. The wailing vocals also have an ephemeral, haunting quality.
It sounds cosmic, but also jazzy (at certain times the guitar resembles a sax), both intricate and astral. Very cool to watch them perform too.
KT∆NA describe themselves at YouTube as “a live music experiment broadcast from a studio installation”. They say about their channel: “Here is where you can find weekly long-form music content including improv, rehearsal, practice, and written tracks”.