I had ideas ready for this weekly post today, and notes about the music I’d selected. When I was ready to begin writing this morning, my desktop computer shit the bed (basically, it wouldn’t start up and showed an error symbol).
I spent the next two hours following a variety of Apple instructions sourced from my laptop, none of which worked. Now I have to take the computer to the nearest Apple Store this afternoon, which is about a 90-minute commute from where I live. This is a much more miserable way to spend the day than I’d expected, but of course you and I can imagine worse ways.
In a state of extreme mental frustration and with much of the morning gone, I thought about abandoning this column for today, but as you can see, I didn’t. However, it doesn’t included all the selections I wanted to cover, or even all the words I wish I could have written about the ones below.
BEEHIVE REVOLT (Greece)
The band’s name is what caught first caught my attention, and then the artwork, and then this statement at Bandcamp about their debut album HVSK, which they released on November 29th:
The literal meaning of HVSK (or in its mundane form, Husk) is outer shell. The eight compositions found herein are a figurative interpretation of that, with each song illustrating a different shape or form of black metal, from the melodic brand to horrendous dissonance, or from a rural landscape to a cold industrial wasteland, drawing inspiration from a multitude of the scene’s auteurs.
The album is as diverse as that statement says it will be. With more time to myself, I’d try to provide a more detailed description of what happens, but will have to content myself with just a few incomplete notes:
The vocals include demonically rabid snarls and screams, extravagantly theatrical singing, and spoken words that are alternately menacing, ugly, and brazenly deranged.
The music is usually convoluted and crazed, like an explosive yet intricate intersection of psychosis and psychedelia, backed by a rhythm section that occasionally provides some compulsive grooves and some furious blasting, but is usually off on their own peculiar and sometimes even funky adventures.
The tempos and instrumental changes are constant, and constantly head-spinning and mind-broiling, even though the band occasionally throw in some good old heavy metal riffs to briefly steady things.
Beehive Revolt do infiltrate each song with differing stylistic ingredients and moods. One of the biggest changes occurs in “Cavernous Psalm,” which is comparatively slow, hallucinatory, and dismal — as well as demented. Another big change comes in the long, closing title song, which is heavy on the use of both electronica and industrial motifs — but, yes, still demented, especially when it undergoes a couple of instrumental grand mal seizure.
And so, even with all the variations considered, it’s fair to say that asylum-strength madness reigns throughout the album. I can’t think of another album I’ve heard this year which is this bizarre, this fascinating, and this well-executed, given its aims.
I’ll close by including a statement left on the album’s Bandcamp page by Nuno Lourenço (of Salqiu, 0-Nun, and Thermohaline): “It’s not only the brand of disso-Black Metal that is stellar, it’s especially the fact that, sometimes, it seems I am listening to a BM Voivod from a parallel dimension…and that is just gorgeous.”
https://beehiverevolt.bandcamp.com/album/hvsk
https://www.facebook.com/bhvrvlt/
EDEN RAYZ (U.S.)
Rennie Resmini (starkweather) pointed me to this next album, with this message: “this will be in your wheelhouse… death obsessed Boston cellist/composer with black metal bent.”
Yes indeed, it’s in my wheelhouse. Partly that’s because it involves an instrument that became prominent about five centuries before anyone put the name “metal” to music. Mainly it’s because of what Eden Rayz does with that instrument, and how many chameleonic sounds she coaxes from it, in layers.
The album, released on December 15th, is named The Cemetery Tapes. It includes two long songs, “ASM: May 18, 2024” (11 1/2 minutes) and “Lux Astern” (30 1/2 minutes). If you’re hoping for, or dreading, the presence of long, repetitive, droning passages, there really aren’t any. These two compositions establish motifs which serve as backdrops, and then proceed to weave changing sonic tapestries around them.
“ASM” is mysterious and haunting, a dark but curious spell crafted from bowed and plucked strings, eventually augmented with sudden, daunting blows and bursts of abrasively sizzling and frantically squirming tones that create moods of sinister menace and madness.
“Lux Astern,” almost three times as long, is at first more chilling, conjuring hypnotic visions of dark woods, strange birds, and wailing wraiths. Gradually, the music creates moods of tension and peril, but then briefly changes, with rapidly rippling tones hinting at wonder and primitive percussion hinting at ritual.
“Lux Astern” never sounds earthly, but always surreal and supernatural. Distant clattering sounds emerge, as do the meanderings of something like a thumb-played kalimba and big tumbling booms and percussive crashes. Eventually the sizzling tones briefly grow more abrasive and predatory, like a metal riff, and distorted spoken words echo (they don’t sound earthly either).
Bird song surfaces through ghostly shimmers, but the creatures sound disturbed. Further in the distance, there are a few beats and strums. The beats become rhythmic; the cello begins to meander, then to convulse and wail, conveying its own disturbance. The layers accrete, adding ugly gnawing sounds, avalanche-like percussion, and a tormented shriek.
At the end, a collage of softer things brings a chill — and then there’s enthusiastic applause! Mentally, I joined in.
https://linktr.ee/edenrayz
https://edenrayz.bandcamp.com/album/the-cemetery-tapes
https://www.facebook.com/EdenRayzMusic/