I had a decision to make that I knew would have a significant impact on how many new releases I could cover in this Sunday column. That decision is discussed in the intro to today’s last item. I made the decision in a way that forced me to cut down the total, and leaves a lot of other songs buzzing in the back of my head as if clamoring for the attention I didn’t give them.
But I better truncate this opening verbiage before I have to further truncate the selections. In short, I’m beginning with three singles, and then moving to a very long demo at the end.
SKALDR (U.S.)
The first single today is a song from this Virginia band’s new album Saṃsṛ (their second full-length overall). I’ve been meaning to include it in one of these columns for weeks, but one thing or another has kept delaying the follow-through on my intentions. The song’s name is “The Crossing.”
It seizes attention immediately, quickly creating daunting and raging sensations that conjoin grimness and grandeur. It’s hard-hitting and hard-charging, and vocally savage, but also mythic in its sweep, like a rendering of Ragnarok that’s both elaborate and fearsome.
The music also vividly swirls and skirls, almost jubilant in its mood, a kind of fierce and defiant joy in the midst of a vast and magnificent conflict that seems to tear creation apart.
Saṃsṛ will be released by Avantgarde Music on January 31st. It was mixed and mastered by the great Dan Swanö at Unisound Studio and features artwork by the great Adam Burke.
https://avantgardemusic.bandcamp.com/album/sam-sr
https://www.facebook.com/SkaldrOfficial/
STELLAR FOREST (France)
The second single I picked for today is the only song that’s now up for streaming on this French duo’s self-titled debut EP. All the songs are identified by Roman numeral, and this one is “IV.”
The music builds like a searing flame that expands to sweep the sky above a light-speed riot of blasting drums and throat-ruining screams and howls. The sound is almost all-consuming, yet in the midst of the blaze celestial voices seem to cry out in glory or grief.
When the first change comes, the music contorts, combining horn-like tones and caustic waves of tension to create a harrowing hallucination, then surprisingly joined by rapidly popping and thumping beats and flickering electronic pulses. The music swells to engulfing and seemingly world-ending proportions, and then the vast cascades again burn and become simultaneously ethereal as the drums and voices rip open again.
And so this song proves to be a fascinating amalgam of stylistic ingredients — and a very frightening and transfixing amalgam it is.
The EP will be released on January 10th, CD by the Transcendence label, and on tape by Weregnome (digitally from the band).
https://stellarforest.bandcamp.com/album/stellar-forest
https://www.transcendance-bm.com/
https://transcendance-bm.bandcamp.com/
JZOVCE (France)
“Jzovce is a black metal project inspired by abandoned houses, haunted forests and primitive times.” If you’ve been a regular visitor at NCS, you already know that because I’ve done my best to help spread the word about Jzovce‘s past music.
What you’ll find below is a video for “Satan Demain,” the frighteningly lunatic first single from a new Jzovce album. It immediately bursts open in a cavalcade of maniacally hammering drums and riffage that mauls and roils but also coldly heaves, melding shrill convulsions of torment with depth-charge throbs to create a grim and grievous assault on the senses.
The howling and shrieking vocals are no more sane than the music, which continues to swarm and broil the listener even when the drums steady. But the music also changes, beginning to eerily pulsate and squirm, suddenly converting into the sizzle of static around distant quarrelsome voices, and then clobbering and raging again.
It’s a demented and hallucinatory song, seemingly just as detached from sanity and the world as the video’s protagonist, who I assume is the person (Thomas Bel) behind Jzovce.
The title of the new album is La Ténèbre. It’s the first part of a trilogy and it will be released on January 25th by Distant Voices.
https://jzovce.bandcamp.com/track/satan-demain
https://www.instagram.com/jzovce/
SPECTRAL LORE (Greece)
It’s difficult these days to record a 45-minute album that’s solid from beginning to end. It requires significant talent and extreme dedication by the artists to get a listener through something that long in our attention-challenged age without them feeling let down at some point, or at many points.
There’s also just no reason to force the issue. Gone are the days when a band needed to create enough music to fill in the two sides of a vinyl LP because that was the only format available to them and (more importantly) to their record labels. Here in the digital age, anything goes, and EPs often work better because bands don’t need to force anything (or force their fans to wait for a longer release) and can instead trim the fat.
Of course, the history of metal includes albums by exalted bands that make 45 minutes seem like a dwarf recording. Reverend Bizarre had one that was more than two hours long, and so did Dream Theater, Swallow the Sun, Today Is the Day, and Dødsengel. Ayreon regularly exceeded 100 minutes, as did Priest on Nostradamus, and Maiden topped 90 minutes with The Book of Souls. You can probably think of other examples. But how often do you listen to those records front to back?
Well, you already know where I’m going with this. I’m going to Spectral Lore‘s “demo” that was released by surprise on the last day of 2024. The title is IV (Part 1). It clocks in at 90 minutes, and as the title tells you, it’s not the whole story; indeed, the last track of the 7 is named “A New Road Ahead” and is portrayed as a “bonus track from Part 2.”
Moreover, Ayloss has explained that the entire work, now artificially divided into two Parts, turned out to be 160 minutes long. He has stated that the writing for the entire work is finished, but that much more needs to be done in the production of what he’s calling Part 2, with the goal of finishing it in March or April. He has also stated that the work on what he’s calling Part 1 isn’t entirely finished either:
“Just bear in mind that it’s a little rough around the edges. It’s unmastered and I need to do some additional mixing, but I’m so close to finishing it that I thought it was a good idea to go along with the plan and present at least half of the album. So, treat this as something of a preview – those of you that want to listen to the absolute optimal version right away, you might want to wait for the release of the whole album.
“I’m going to reupload a version with some tweaks/improvements in the first one or two weeks of 2025 and then I’ll go right ahead to working on the second part and the final version.”
I thought about not listening to the version of Part 1 that Spectral Lore launched on December 31st. Why not wait for the version that’s finished, not just “close” to finished? And did I really want to spend 90 minutes of my time on one album, even though Spectral Lore has done well with long-form releases, given my hard-learned skepticism about albums that are only half that long?
I resolved the quandary this way: I thought to myself, I will know whether Part 1 appeals to me even though it’s unmastered and Ayloss still has some other tweaks to make in the mixing, and if it does appeal, then I’ll want to listen again to the final version, and will likely want to reassess it in the context of the entire 160-minute work whenever that comes, even though I’d probably have to take a few days off from the rest of NCS to do it.
So, I listened.
The lazy way to describe the album would be to try to trace its movements step by step, which is what I often do with records that continually change as much as this one does. But for a 90-minute record, that would result in the kind of linguistic tedium that would be coma-inducing among readers. Quotations like these come to mind:
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” — Mark Twain
“Beginning writers tend to be verbose. We can’t tell the difference between an essential detail and an inessential one. We’re like golden retrievers romping through Storyland, and pretty much every damn thing we see is a squirrel.” — Chuck Palahniuk
But it would take me just as much time to try to succinctly encapsulate this album, like a good reviewer could do, as it would to tediously map the journey. There are so many squirrels to be seen, and this hound wants to chase them all!
It’s not helpful to say that the demo ebbs and flows in its intensity and varies in its moods, because of course it must, if it is to succeed (which it does). Perhaps more helpful by way of preview is to note that the tracks vary significantly in length, but that all but two of them are themselves very long and thus create their own journeys — yet I won’t try to map even one of those as an example either.
Also perhaps helpful is to explain that the music reaches zeniths of speed, ferocity, and sweeping expansiveness that are breathtaking — and that part of what takes the breath away is the elaborate nature of even those blazing black-metal storms — and that in its more delicate phases the music draws upon a wide range of much older traditions and instruments, some of them folk and some of them classical, though more often rooted in the Middle Ages than later periods. Perhaps most breathtaking are the phases in which Ayloss brings the two together, creating a hybrid grandeur that’s exhilarating.
Along the way the music also affords experiences of mystery and intrigue (even sinister intrigue), sometimes accented by haunting female voices as well as old instrumentation, and it also softly and elegantly creates moments of somber contemplation or musing wonder that become spellbinding.
In most other respects the vocals are frighteningly intense, continuously startling in their harsh sounds of torment and fury. The contrast between those raw and unhinged sensations and the more ancient and elegant ingredients of the music is part of what makes the songs riveting.
Some of the albums I listed much earlier as examples of exceedingly long records consisted of gigantic batches of individual songs, many of them intended to stand alone, with greater and lesser degrees of success. Much of this new Spectral Lore demo is much more about the creation of atmosphere, about the accreting transportive effect of all the expected but still stunning ebbs and flows, and of all the time-traveling conjunctions of style and instrumentation. The combined effect is to make the music mythic.
Which brings me to another important observation about the demo: The lyrics are as stunning as the music. You can’t make out most of them when you listen, given the terrorizing harshness of the vocals, but you can read them at Bandcamp. They are also mythic, and also distressing (I should mention that in its changing phases the music also becomes very distressing and even depressive, including the classically influenced and very unearthly but very chilling instrumental called “Collapsing”). The poetic words can be understood as an ongoing narrative of tyranny and slavery, of old worlds crashing and new worlds born in pain, and perhaps as a metaphor for the challenges of our current age.
Could this have been shorter and yet still stunning? I think it could have been. But if it had been shorter, Ayloss might have left behind “Solitary Mirrors,” which at first is quite different from what precedes it; both musically and vocally it sounds more rooted in ’60s folk-rock and psychedelia as I hear it, before it begins to sear, batter, scream, and swirl — a different kind of hybrid but a wonderful surprise.
It’s not the only song in which the album takes a different kind of time-traveling trip. “The Waning/The Great White Fortress” does that too, in a segment that joins together singing voices and music that makes me think of some Rennaissance faire and then segues into a mesmerizing ambient drift, before bringing forward grim, slashing riffage and a bestiary’s maddened howls, with a finale of utter mayhem.
And there’s the rub: If Ayloss had made this shorter, much else would have been left behind, a paring away of marvels we’d never know we lost and that we’re better off having. I know it will mean even more to me when I listen again, after all the finishing touches have been made.
Well, I know I’m rambling, neither succinct nor as tedious as I might have been. But I hope in this in-between way I’ve done enough to encourage you not to be deterred by this album’s length but to give yourselves over to all of it. It’s a great achievement.
https://spectrallore.bandcamp.com/album/iv-part-1
https://www.facebook.com/spectral.lorebm