In yesterday’s installment of this list I mentioned that I had a certain logic or organizing principle in mind when I grouped songs together in most of the remaining Parts of the list. Today’s feature is evidence of that.
All three of today’s songs are brutalizing experiences, but they’re also head-spinners, especially the first two. And both of those aspects are key reasons why I think the songs turned out to be infectious.
For those of you who might be stumbling into this list for the first time, you can find the preceding 13 installments via this link.
BRODEQUIN
Two days ago I intended to include a different song from Brodequin‘s 2024 comeback album instead of the one you’re about to see. A week or two before that, it was yet another song. I really have had trouble making up my mind. Though I’m pretty content that I finally chose the right one, even if tomorrow I might choose a fourth one.
The one I’ve picked (for now) is the album’s title track and last song in the running order. Like all the songs on the album, “Harbinger of Woe” deploys high-speed, heavy-caliber drum munitions, which are a reason why so many of the songs are infectious, along with madhouse assaults of feverish skittering and maliciously swarming riffage, monstrous gutturals, weird wails, and sinister spoken words.
But it’s the song’s big jackhammering and lurching grooves, including the off-kilter one in the final minute (and all the strangeness accompanying it), that led me to pick it for this list.
(To get an assessment of the album as a whole, if you haven’t heard it, you can find our Andy Synn‘s review here.)
https://brodequin.bandcamp.com/album/harbinger-of-woe
http://www.facebook.com/brodequintn
WORMED
I can understand if some of you can’t fathom how a Wormed song could make a list like this one. Their music is so persistently unpredictable and brain-scrambling, to the point of being brazenly bizarre, and so fast and instrumentally pyrotechnical, that it doesn’t jump to mind when you’re thinking about head-nodders and toe-tappers, or other songs that you find yourselves replaying in your head at odd times.
But in the case of the song from their latest album Omegon that I’m including today, the infectiousness derives from those very same qualities — plus the brutish, thudding blows that segment all the madly squirming, spasming, blurting, and blaring fretwork, and the bursts of hyper-speed, hyper-focused drum mania. It turns out that all the crazed and constantly mutating motifs that make up the song have an addictive quality.
(And for an overall assessment of Omegon, I’ll point you to DGR‘s review here.)
https://wormed.bandcamp.com/album/omegon
https://www.facebook.com/wormed
KONKHRA
“Sad Plight of Lucifer,” the final song in today’s installment, isn’t quite as pyrotechnical as the first two, but it’s definitely a brutal piece of work, and I dare say has the biggest hooks of all three. It delivers body-slugging, neck-snapping death metal laced with eerily darting and frantically screaming fretwork and fronted by truly monstrous growls from deep in the belly.
As I’ve written before, the track is a big, hard-charging muscle-mover, with jabbing and jolting fretwork that proves to be addictive. It’s capped by an exhilarating black magic solo that spins up to ravishing heights, and further includes heroic chants and top-shelf drumwork.
The video that helped present the song also gives us great views of Konkhra‘s performances, and makes an electrifying piece of music even more electric. An easy pick for this list.
(The song is the title track to Konkhra‘s 8th album, released last year by Hammerheart Records.)
https://konkhra.bandcamp.com/album/sad-plight-of-lucifer
https://www.facebook.com/konkhraofficial