As you can see, this week’s SOB is very short. I had a late night out with my spouse and friends and a really long hibernation afterward. Also, not long from now, I’ll be heading out again to watch the broadcast of an inconsistent Seattle football team trying to beat a pretty bad New York football team. They’re playing in the East so it’s an early start here in the West.
The upshot is, I don’t have much time to write about music this morning. I thought about not trying to do anything with this column, but man, for 15 years and counting I’ve really hated to leave a void on any day at NCS.
With time short and too many things to choose from, I made the arguably bizarre decision to focus on the three black (or “blackened”) metal bands who e-mailed us most recently about their music – none of whom I knew anything about before listening. Purely by coincidence, all their names begin with “A“. Purely by coincidence, they all turned out to be good, in very different ways.
ALIÉNATION (Germany)
The first selection today is the just-released, self-titled debut EP by the Berlin duo Aliénation. They describe themselves as a “post-black metal/blackgaze band born in the summer of 2023.”
The EP is a musical chameleon, changing its shades under shifting lights and shadows. By turns, the music is squalling and harsh, eerily haunting and savagely raking, gentle and gigantic, moody and murderous. The sweeping melodies catch in the head, most of them tinged with moods of melancholy or tormented yearning.
The songs also benefit from earth-moving bass-lines and potent drumwork that alternately rocks and blasts in primal terms, and from trilling guitar-leads that vividly ring and boil with heat, coupled with scalding vocal intensity.
The last two tracks are a bit different from the preceding four, with “Rêves obscurs d’une anhédonie” (which includes some gloomy, semi-spoken, semi-sung words) more overtly depressive and ultimately chiming in its sounds of sorrow, and the brief “Lumières d’un soir” more celestial and haunting (but with some vocal scariness in the mix).
The EP is an involving and exploratory experience, and certainly makes me interested in what Aliénation will do next based on these experiments.
https://alienation-official.bandcamp.com/album/ali-nation
https://www.facebook.com/alienationbm/
AM I IN TROUBLE? (U.S.)
This New Jersey band is the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Steve Wiener. On their debut album Spectrum, he’s joined by lots of other people from both sides of the Atlantic, including drummer Chris Barber and Canadian flutist Ember Belladonna. Wiener describes the album as “A love-letter to the eclecticism and experimentation displayed in the early-to-mid 2000s avantgarde black metal explosion.”
In line with the album’s title and cover art, all seven of the album tracks are named for colors. The three that can be streamed now are “White,” “Red,” and “Black.”
Just those three lead the listener on a wide-ranging and instrumentally elaborate trip. “White” (as I hear it) leans into Scandinavian folk-metal, with a mix of harmonized singing and savage screams, bright acoustic instrumentation and vividly whirling guitars, cracking drums and lashing riffs, with galloping surges pushing the intensity.
“Red“, on the other hand, is generally a more warlike and head-moving assault, albeit richly laced with intricate and idiosyncratic fretwork and moods of mourning – and again with an amalgam of singing and harshness in the vocal department, both of them theatrical in their extravagance, and a softer and moodier acoustic phase at the end.
And finally, strong rocking and battering beats back “Black“. It’s even proggier in its instrumental proclivities than “Red“, and both more mysterious and more glorious in its moods (the guitar solo is especially glorious).
One more time, the startling (and again theatrical) vocal variety seizes attention in the call-and-response between singing, shrieking, and ravenous snarling. “Black” also has its own softer phase, near-jazzy in its style, which leads into a high-flying finale.
I think it will be interesting to discover the other colors on this record, even though the music isn’t as brazenly extreme as most of what finds its way into these Sunday columns.
Spectrum is set for release on January 3rd via the Brooklyn label Negative Wingspan.
https://amiintrouble.bandcamp.com/album/spectrum
https://www.instagram.com/ami_in_trouble/
ANTUMBRA (Romania)
There’s just one song streaming so far from this Romanian one-man band’s forthcoming fifth album, Days of Future Ravaged Lands. It’s the opening track, “Forgotten“.
Without time for a listener to gasp a breath, the song surges ahead in a ravishing spectacle of sound, heavy and rumbling in the low end and blazing yet despairing up above. The vocals are also incendiary, and raw in their intensity.
The song has a vast and sweeping musical quality, a “skies on fire” effect, though the feelings of sorrow in those dramatic cascades grow deeper, and the enormous impact of the low-end turbulence persists even when the earthquakes and avalanches they generate slow or shift into martial grooves, and the vocals are also persistently shattering.
Like the album title portends, the song is ravaging (yet also haunting).
Days of Future Ravaged Lands will be released by Loud Rage Music on December 22nd.
https://loudragemusic.bandcamp.com/album/antumbra-days-of-future-ravaged-lands
https://www.facebook.com/antumbra.ro/