(written by Islander)
Here we are again in the very early part of another new year. In these dawning new days with a long stretch of more days looming ahead I’ve thought about why I continue toiling away on this blog after so many years despite the mental pressures and time demands it imposes. I think there are two main reasons.
The first is a continuing fascination with the music we cover and how it has changed and continues to change. If all the numerous sub-genres had stagnated, boredom would have set in. Repeatedly listening to newer generations of musicians doing basically the same thing as older generations might not have been completely fruitless, but I doubt I would have wanted to keep writing about it.
The second reason is the challenge of the writing, the challenge of not saying the same kinds of things over and over again. Repeating the same methods of describing audio sensations would also have become boring. Falling into a rut and not trying to get out would have been easy; trying to do better is frustrating, a mission of only incremental gains beset by recurring feelings of failure and backsliding. But so far, that mission has seemed a better alternative than just giving up.
These thoughts have been on my mind today because I decided to devote this Sunday’s column mainly to a small group of complete releases. Writing about entire albums or EPs is harder for me than introducing individual songs — a bigger challenge. And on the other hand, I thought the records I chose represent, in different ways, a resistance to stagnation.
PLAGUEWIELDER (U.S.)
If you listen to Plaguewielder‘s first album Succumb to the Ash and then their new one In Dust & Ash, you wouldn’t say they sound like entirely different bands. The bleak challenges of working class life in “the economic wasteland of southeastern Ohio” (their words) still weigh on their musical shoulders, like backpacks filled with lead, and in their music and lyrics they still meet misery and often greet it with defiant rage. In many ways all is still ash, as the title reflects, but the 10 years between those two albums have also produced some obvious changes in the music.
The new album still provides musical torment and fury, most notably in the blistering intensity of Bryce Seditz‘s screams and occasional roars, but also evident in the hurtling drums, the magma-like bass, and the grim rasp and boiling tumult of the guitars.
But on the new album ash falls in new and different ways. Shimmering and organ-like synths and bright yet melancholy post-punk melodies play important roles, and post-punk beats and rocking grooves do as well. (The Bandcamp tags also include “deathrock” and “gothicrock”, for good reason, though to my ears post-punk seems to be a somewhat more dominant non-metal influence.)
Seditz‘s screams also transform into cries very close to singing (but still heated enough to scald). I for one am happy about the juxtaposition of the harshness of the vocals and the more “accessible” nature of the music. It may bewilder listeners who are firmly on one side of the lines Plaguewielder straddle on the album, but that makes me even more proud of what the band have done.
The backing riffage is often moderately abrasive, but the lead-guitars and keys often ring clear and ripple. They seem to express yearning as often as they do dismay and downfall; there is poignancy in the music as well as ferocity, agony, and compulsive propulsion.
Speaking of propulsion, the rocking rhythmic grooves will get heads moving and legs bouncing, even when the mood of the music is distressing. And the riffs and melodies are full of big hooks — again, even when the moods are mangled — and that’s a big reason why I don’t think this album will wear out its welcome.
The album also sounds great, probably the best production quality of a Plaguewielder album yet, and it suits the way the music has changed.
I do have a couple of favorites — “Sadness” and “Wallow” (the latter being one of the songs on the album that includes outbursts of feverish hard-rocking riffage) — but there aren’t any throwaways on the album, at least for listeners (like me) who are willing to embrace the band’s fairly dramatic hybridization of metal and not-metal styles.
https://plaguewielderoh.bandcamp.com/album/in-dust-ash
http://www.facebook.com/PlaguewielderOH
FROSTNATT (Russia)
Next I’ll turn to Den Evige Vinters Rike, an EP released by Frostnatt on December 25th and introduced this way by the project’s alter ego Alex Evensen:
This EP was decisive in the organic transformation of Frostnatt. From the usual Instrumental Atmospheric Black Metal, I move to something newer and more original. In this release, I tried to improve and multiply the musical ideas that I first laid down on Den Russiske Tomheten. This year Frostnatt turned five years old, and with this release I begin a new chapter in the history of Frostnatt.
Alex Evensen‘s own words reflect a resistance to stagnation, at least in intention. Sometimes we’re the worst judges of our own accomplishments, but these five songs successfully turn intention into reality.
As in the case of Plaguewielder above, Frostnatt has incorporated instrumentation that sometimes shimmers and rings, here in mysterious and seductively beckoning ways, but also in ways that create daunting wonder. Even the vibrant trill of the lead guitar glitters, augmented by the piercing trill of a flute or whistle and the sizzling whirl of the backing riffs.
Frostnatt also brings in enormous booming beats, which together with the nature of the music and its more ancient instrumentation, pitches the atmosphere of the songs back into an age lost to the eons, as if summoning primitive myths and pagan legends. On the other hand, there are moments when Frostnatt dials up the distortion in hostile ways (I’m thinking mainly of what happens in “Vintersorg“).
The effect of all this on a listener is transportive. It can take you out of yourself, out of the world we know. Those big crashing and stomping beats are primeval; everything else casts a sequence of spells.
https://frostnatt.bandcamp.com/album/den-evige-vinters-rike
https://www.facebook.com/frostnattofficial/
SAMIARUS (U.S.)
“BESTIAL SONIC UPHEAVAL.” That’s the description this largely anonymous Oakland-based quintet provide for their first demo, plainly entitled Demonstration. It includes one original song, a cover of Absu‘s “Descent to Acheron” (from that band’s 1997 album Barathrum: V.I.T.R.I.O.L.), and a recording of a live rehearsal.
It would be difficult to find a more jarring contrast of sound than what you’ll encounter if you listen to the mysterious acoustic ticks of Frostnatt‘s final track and then move right into the full-blown war-zone of “Eradicating Wind,” which opens Demonstration.
Following a radiating shriek of feedback, the song drenches the senses in a dense storm of ruinously abrasive riffage and brutishly hammering drums. Yet torrid cries and beastly growls manage to escape the maelstrom, and within it you can also detect big bass-throbs, maniacal lead-guitar convulsions, and shrieking string-tortures.
The cover song is even more apocalyptic, even more hopeless in its grievous sensations. It brings battering rams to the gates of your skull, surrounded by the dismal writhing churn of caustic riffage and fronted by imperious roars and broiling cries, with demented drum clatters and squealing guitars urgently breaking through the ruinous melee.
The final track, the live-rehearsal recording, is much rougher in its sound (if you can imagine that), and therefore even more ruinous to hear, but it’s a further demonstration that although the music of Samiarus is stunningly hostile, ruthlessly destructive, and frighteningly deranged — indeed cacophonous — it’s more elaborate than you might be expecting, like filigrees and diabolical symbols being furiously burned and carved into a whirlpool sea of still-thrashing corpses while munitions storm.
I’ve read that the band’s lineup includes members from such acts as Meth Sores, Abnutivum, Mentor, Flesh Dungeon, Fentanyl, Abstracter, Atrament, Ash Prison, and Doomsday. I’ve also read that this spring Samiarus plan to release a debut MLP.
SCHATTENFALL (Ukraine -> Germany)
Time to flip the switch again. Now I’m turning to Oh Wind, mein Bruder, the latest EP from Schattenfall (which is the solo project of Ukrainian artist Vladimir Bauer, who has lived in Germany since 2017).
It includes three songs, and all the lyrics are drawn from poems by Ukrainian poets Ivan Franko and Volodymyr Sosiura. Bauer has described the songs as “a sad, depressing journey into the winter cold, but still with hope for internal warming.”
The music here could be said to occupy a place in between the music of Samiarus and that of the first two bands in today’s collection. Mysteriously ringing and wailing notes have a place, as do deep, somber recitals of the words, but so do waves of searing and harrowing chords and utterly shattering screams. Beleaguered marching beats play a role, but so do bracing gallops.
In their moods the songs are broken, more emotionally broken than the first three records above. The music is often piercing and penetrating, and at its zeniths the riffing becomes a wild whirl, but even in those zeniths it sounds like despair.
The melodies also seem to draw upon ethnic or regional folk-music traditions far older than our current age, including the continuing presence of balalaika-like trills and of beautiful but mournful pipes in the elegant closing song, as if drawing upon and preserving memories.
Even in its pain, the music also seems to strive and sometimes even to surge, and it can become mesmerizing, especially in the beautifully rendered but heart-aching closing instrumental, despite how shattered all the songs sound. There’s no denying the passion in this EP, despite how distressing it is.
https://schattenfall.bandcamp.com/album/oh-wind-mein-bruder-ep
https://linktr.ee/schattenfall
https://www.facebook.com/SchattenfallOfficial/
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