(written by Islander)
I haven’t kept a running count, but I think a substantial majority of the music I’ve written about in these Sunday columns has consisted of singles, usually advance tracks from forthcoming albums. A couple of reasons for that:
First, I can put our spotlight on a lot more bands and records that way. In the time it would take me to listen to and scribble thoughts about one album, I can do that for pieces of six or seven albums.
Second, I don’t think I’m great at writing album reviews. I find it difficult to provide some kind of succinct discussion because I always feel like I’m leaving out important aspects of the music, and so I often get bogged down in the details. Even when an album is already out I feel that way, even though it might be a silly feeling since everyone can listen and discover the details for themselves.
All of that makes today’s collection a rarity, because today I’ve chosen to write about three albums that have already been released, and one new song (and video) that’s a bonus track for the vinyl edition of another album that’s already out.
ALIOTH BOREALIS (U.S.)
In mid-summer of this year I wrote about two songs, one of which we premiered, from a new Alioth Borealis album named Beyond the Stars / Below the Waves. The band’s songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Vastarien describes the project as “atmospheric black metal from Cleveland OH with cosmic horror themes – 90’s Norway worship and an obsession with weird fiction and southern gothic literature”.
On this new album, which was released at the end of August, he enlisted Jesse Greenfeather (from Cloak, Burial Oath, Wyld Timez, and ex-Uada) as session drummer; Jesse also mixed the album. And Pittsburgh’s Veska contributed the lyrics and vocals on the sixth track.
The songs are often rich in detail. As explained above, that makes it difficult for someone like me to feel capable of doing it justice without getting bogged down in an effort to highlight everything that seems meaningful.
At a high level (a very high level), the music combines almost primitive, low-toned riffs that are rough and gouging with tones that wondrously sparkle and ring, or swirl and shine. The former ground the music in broken earth and fragmented stone; the latter create celestial visions.
Up high is mainly where the melodies dwell, often carried by ambient synths, but while they’re rendered in sounds of brilliance, their moods are often distressing, especially when the synths sear and wail. So is the impact of Vastarien‘s ear-lacerating shrieks. Seemingly pitched at the bleeding edge of human endurance, they sound like spikes scratching glass.
The details include Jesse Greenfeather‘s quite varied drumming, which provides a nuanced grounding for the ebbs and flows in the music’s intensity and moods, and sometimes a source of contrast with those changes. Other details include brief piano melodies in a couple of the songs; organ-like chords with a gothic influence; and instances in which those ragged guitar tones bleakly carry the melodies.
Also worth mentioning is that surprising sixth track, which includes conga-like drum rhythms, hallucinatory guitar-writhing, feverish bass throbs, acid-spray vocals, and glorious synth accents.
The final two tracks include neither drums nor voices. The penultimate one, “Andromeda Reprise“, is the most “cosmic”, the most vast in scope and wonder, of all the tracks. The quavering “Music of the Spheres/Pulsar” is different from everything else; it’s the most eerie of the tracks, but also includes a big electro-beat. It also incorporates samples from the “Golden Record,” which was launched towards deep space in 1977 aboard Voyager “as our message to extraterrestrials”.
The album as a whole is a very interesting and very immersive trip. It’s out digitally from the band and in a cassette tape edition via Jems Label. The eye-catching cover art is by degenearts.
https://aliothborealis.bandcamp.com/album/beyond-the-stars-below-the-waves
https://www.instagram.com/aliothborealis/
https://www.facebook.com/aliothborealis
https://www.jemslabel.com/product/alioth-borealis-beyond-the-stars-below-the-waves-cassette-ltd-30-w-free-sticker
https://www.facebook.com/jemslabel
ACHERAD (Finland)
Acherad is a Finnish black metal quartet with experienced members from other bands. They’ve said their lineup began to take shape in 2019, and recently they made their recording debut with an album named The Perpetual Katabasis, released by MARA Production and the band on November 11th (CD and digital).
As elaborated over the course of 8 songs, each in the range of about 4-6 minutes, Acherad‘s expression of black metal is often furiously raging in its intensity, propelled by high-octane drumming and lashing the senses with cauterizing screams, monstrous roars, and riffing that’s ravenous, sandpaper-rough, and occult in its atmosphere.
However, though the songs are assaulting, and though slashing and darting riffs sometimes come across as cruel and imperious, the songs also incorporate moving but dark melodies, which tend to emerge when the whirring guitars elevate, channeling sensations of pain and despair.
Acherad switch things up in other ways too. “Wickerman” is a good example of that. There, the drums slow down and the riffing sounds both feral and infernally occult, though it too includes a gripping high-end melody in its final phase.
On the other hand, “Thousand Gods (On Spears Engraved)” sounds like blood-lusting delirium and the rise of a horned imperium, while the guitars in the more mid-paced “(I Saw) Atlas” sound like cracked and quivering chimes and trill like a balalaika, creating a deeply chilling experience with a Mesopotamian atmosphere — until it frighteningly convulses and grotesque growls make their entrance.
And oh look, I’m doing it again – getting bogged down in the details and creeping into a track-by-track writeup. I’ll cut that short and just say this about the remaining four songs: Like the first four, they incorporate dynamic changes of pace and mood; melodies that sound exotically middle-eastern or Persian as well as fiendishly feral or melancholy; and drum rhythms that punch and rock as well as race hell-for-leather.
It’s one of those final four — “To Fear Helios, To Be Helios” — that I’d recommend most strongly if you want to get a good sense of what the album brings, though you won’t go wrong if you just start at the beginning and take the whole trip straight through.
https://acherad.bandcamp.com/album/the-perpetual-katabasis
https://awakeninginthedark.pl/
https://maraproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-perpetual-katabasis
https://www.facebook.com/acherad.official/
THUNRAZ (Estonia)
Following on the heels of two albums released last year, this Estonian project of Madis Jalakas released another one on November 22nd, with the imposing name Incineration Day. On the new one he’s again accompanied by drummer Sean Rehmer.
Last week Decibel ran an interview with Madis. It provides insights into the bleak thoughts and emotions that inspired the album. It also indicates that Madis plans to go on “an extended hiatus” with his music, for reasons that are also bleak to take in. So it seems this will be the last manifestation of Thunraz for some indefinite period of time.
In the case of Incineration Day I’m again confronted with the challenge described in the introduction above: how to succinctly provide both a “big picture” and a sense of the details that contribute to the album’s success. It’s especially hard to portray the “big picture” here because there’s significant variation among the songs, and so it’s even more seductive to get lost in the details.
One detail that contributes to the big picture is an unusual feature of the riffing that Madis Jalakas mentions in that cited interview. He refers to it as “a kind of minimalist maximalism”, playing rhythm and lead parts together, keeping the layering within the riffs themselves rather than cooking up a riff and then recording a lead over it.
The result is that the guitars are often constantly contorting, wildly changing in the blink of an eye, simultaneously creating sensations of both chaos and structure. It’s head-spinning to listen to these songs, because the guitar work is so intricate and changes so rapidly, but they also provide recurring patterns and motifs that lock everything together.
The drumming is similar, providing lots of variety and lots of spectacles, but keeping the groove going too, and the songs give the bass some room to get nimble and nuanced too. While the vocals couldn’t possible twist and turn to the same extent as the instrumentation, there’s variety there too, ranging from brutal, guttural death growls to deranged screams and even moments of sort-of-somber, sort-of-psychedelic singing.
The songs also manage to channel moods in the midst of the often mind-boggling pyrotechnics. Granted, those moods are usually furious, disgusted, harrowed, and brutal. But the instrumental “A Day After” breaks that up in surprising fashion. Its gleaming and glittering melody is a bit moody but also bright and joyful; the percussion seems patterned after hand-drum patterns (maybe like bongos?); and the warm bass tones are a bit jazzy (come to think of it, the whole song is a bit jazzy).
The closing track, “Spiritual Self-Surgery” is also an outlier. The drumming in that one is primitive, even “tribal”, and the riffing sears and gnashes in ways that are also more primitive than what’s come before — and it’s very unsettling to hear how bleak and even nihilistic it is, like an opium dream of nightmare. Surrounded by sounds such as these, the vocals seem even more frightening.
Yes, this album is much more death metal than black metal, but I didn’t want to delay saying something about the album, which I highly recommend.
https://thunraz.bandcamp.com/album/incineration-day
https://www.facebook.com/thunrazmetal/
https://www.instagram.com/thunraz_est/
DØDSFERD (Greece)
In May of this rapidly waning year the long-running Greek black metal band Dødsferd released their 12th album, Wrath, which shares the name of its principal member and also represents the raw fury that fires much of the music. As Wrath explained, the album stands as “a vigorous indictment of the social and economic consequences of capitalism, political corruption, ecocide, and the largest argument against our civility – warfare”.
In May the album was made available by Hypnotic Dirge Records and FYC Records on digital and Digi-CD formats. But next year FYC will also release Wrath on vinyl (a DLP Gatefold) in three distinct variants in editions of 100 each, and in a 6-panel digipack CD edition. For the vinyl edition, Dødsferd recorded a bonus track named “Back to My Homeland…A Beast in Calm“, and made it the subject of a just-released video, described by the band in these words:
Video was created by George Lamprakis (Barking Dog Productions) on behalf of FYC Records.
Amongst other videos, it includes documentary of Spinalonga (prison-island, place of forced exile for lepers in the first half of the 20th century in the island of Crete, Plaka) in the 70s by Jean-Daniel Pollet. An experimental documentary about this particular phenomenon of social exclusion.
Be forewarned: the video’s imagery of the mutilated faces of these isolated and abandoned people is disturbing, and heart-breaking.
The song is a substantial one, 13 minutes long, and it’s equally mesmerizing and frightening. It builds slowly, ringing and soft at first, with folkloric instruments in the mix. That opening phase is also unsettling and haunting, and even more so when Wrath‘s tormented screams arrive, as if voicing the pain and torment of those plagued people in the video.
The video includes other film excerpts, including strange, supernatural, and absurd portrayals from old silent films and other old documentary footage of the poor and forlorn, of uncared-for buildings, of men preparing for war and falling from planes toward conflict.
Meanwhile, the music strangely quivers and rings, warbles and gleams, above the throb of a bass. It fashions a musical hallucination that’s periodically shattered by those excruciating vocals.
In time, popping drum-beats come in, along with spoken words (in Greek). In further time, the music becomes more sad, though still ethereal, and Wrath begins to speak in a somber voice. More voices (all of them Wrath‘s) come in as the notes again shiver and gleam, and the beats again clap and hum. At the end, things get nightmarish.
Dødsferd is Wrath (vocals, guitars, all arrangements) and m.Sarvok (sound design, bass, violin, drum programming). The band have announced that the vinyl and 6-panel digipack CD formats will become available for pre-order in March of next year with shipping in May.
https://fycrecords.com/dodsferd
https://fycrecords.bandcamp.com/
https://dodsferdofficial.bandcamp.com/