(written by Islander)
In the early part of this month, as the old year moved into the new, the volume of new album announcements and new songs subsided. For people like those of us at NCS, things got kind of slow and comfortable.
Well, of course that turned out to be comparable to a “negative storm surge,” a phenomenon in which waves recede before a typhoon strikes, the water being pulled away from the coast by the storm’s low pressure system before the ocean comes rushing back when the typhoon strikes in full force.
Which is what is now happening in the music we pay attention to. Everything is in full force, and I’m drowning in new music. I know it gets repetitive and possibly mind-numbing when I share the count, but I’ve got more than 60 open tabs on my computer, each one linked to a song that came out just this past week which I was curious to check out in planning today’s column, on top of a lot more from last week.
Obviously, I didn’t listen to all of them. Obviously, I wouldn’t have liked all of them if I had. I liked the ones below that I did get to. How did I get to them within that great mass of tabs? I admit I gravitated to bands I’ve liked in the past — though I did take a few shots in the dark that also paid off. And I decided to add some music at the end without commentary (due to vanishing time).
P.S. In the early evening I’m going to an annual party in Seattle across the water from my home. I’m sure that if I make it back home, it won’t be until close to 2 am. I’m also sure I won’t make any effort to wake up before noon on Sunday, and will be woozy when I do. So, don’t expect a SHADES OF BLACK column this weekend (I won’t have enough time to pull it together before leaving home this afternoon).
CONAN (UK)
I have to start with the mighty Conan. We all have bands who’ve worked their way under our skins so deeply that we’ll fall for just about whatever they do. In my case, Conan is one of those bands, even though you might not have guessed that — unless you’d seen the great number of times I’ve slobbered over them here.
The occasion for new slobbering is “Frozen Edges of the Wound,” the first single that has premiered from Conan‘s new album Violence Dimension. The band made this comment about it: “A song for anyone fighting, whether that be an external or internal foe. Have strength for death comes to us all, just don’t make it an easy kill.”
Prepare for a big earth-moving muscle-convulser that does sound like a bare-knuckled fighter that gets meaner and more remorseless as it goes, shot through with incendiary wails and savage snarls covered in grit. By the end, it’s really busting up the joint.
Violence Dimension will be released by Heavy Psych Sounds on April 25th.
https://heavypsychsoundsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/conan-violence-dimension
https://www.facebook.com/hailconan/
GREY AURA (Netherlands)
Moving on to another band that got under my skin long ago (to the point that I’ve hosted three premieres for them in addition to our other writings about their music since 2014), my next choice today is the first single from Grey Aura‘s next album, Zwart vierkant: Slotstuk.
As a first taste of what Grey Aura have been working on since 2021’s Zwart Vierkant (reviewed by Andy here) “Opgehangen afgrond” is both explosive and head-swirling, hard-charging but packed to the brim with the kind of beguiling eccentricities we’ve come to expect from this band.
Backed by high-octane drumming and mercurial bass permutations, and fronted by raw and on-the-attack vocals, the music blazes and bounds, soars and swirls, but also segues without warning into trippy and jazzy diversions. The rhythm section’s work is constantly inventive, and the rest of the richly layered instrumentation brings lots of tonal sensations into play. At the end, the final change creates the most dramatic contrast of all.
The title of the new album translates to “Black Square: Finale, Final Piece.” The band explain that it “delves into the second half of Ruben Wijlacker’s novel, De protodood in zwarte haren:
This story follows Pedro, a 20th-century Modernist painter whose attempt to dismantle physical reality through abstraction leads him to the brink of madness.
Drawn to the avant-garde movement of Suprematism, Pedro becomes captivated by Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’: an emblem of pure abstract feeling and the rejection of natural representation. To him, the painting’s void is not merely an end but a gateway to boundless artistic potential and spiritual enlightenment.
Within this black square, Pedro envisions his muse, Chauchat—a Wallonian poet and the wife of another collective member. Their elusive romance reflects the essence of abstraction: an existence more imagined than tangible, always slipping beyond his reach.
As his obsession grows, Pedro convinces a group of Utrecht artists to join him in creating a Gesamtkunstwerk—a three-dimensional embodiment of the black square. His unrelenting drive pushes the collective toward bizarre tasks and even criminal acts, all in service of his radical vision.
The story reaches its climax when Pedro unveils his ultimate creation: an empty void, a chilling representation of the death of the physical realm and the culmination of his artistic ideology.
Zwart vierkant: Slotstuk will be out via Avantgarde Music on March 28th on CD, LP, and digital. It will be released on tape by Kunstlicht. The intriguing cover art is by Tyler Scully.
https://greyaura3.bandcamp.com/album/zwart-vierkant-slotstuk
https://www.facebook.com/greyaura3
SEPULCHRAL CURSE (Finland)
Last week also brought us a video for the first advance track from Crimson Moon Evocations, the forthcoming third album by these Finnish propagators of the black death.
What you’ll find when you first enter the “House of the Black Moon” is an amalgam of battering drums and dismal whining tones, which soon enough transform into a thundering and viciously swarming assault on the senses.
Monstrous gutturals sound like the gargling of viscera and bone. The riffing boils and sears, writhes and wails in despair, and shivers in agony. But the soloing is electrifying, like a throwback to hard rock, psychedelia, and prog from many decades past, and the band also pick their moments to jolt your spine and bend your neck.
There’s also a strong current of melodic melancholia in the song, adding another facet to a very multi-faceted and quite memorable song.
Crimson Moon Evocations will be released on multiple formats by the band’s new label Dark Descent on February 28th. Mark Erskine made the stunning cover art.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/crimson-moon-evocations
https://www.facebook.com/SepulchralCurse
NITE (U.S.)
Next I’m going to jump back to the week before last to catch up with a video for the first single from Nite‘s new album Cult of the Serpent Sun. I was primed to write about the song this time last week, but ran out of time. No way was I going to let another week go by without crowing about it (pun intended).
This song, “Crow (Fear the Night)” is fiendishly infectious. It goes off like a grand but rapidly jolting fanfare for the five-pointed heavy metal star of old, and the rhythmic punch is viscerally compulsive.
A song like this could have been successfully accompanied by all sorts of vocals, including power-metal singing (ewww), and I’m so happy that what we get are gritted-teeth gargoyle rasps that sound like they want to gnaw your bones, probably the most evil thing about this infernally glorious song.
And the soloing… the soloing is just pure gold. Yet another reason why it will take a crowbar to pry this song out of your head after you hear it. (Cool video too.)
Cult of the Serpent Sun comes out on March 14th via Season of Mist. Here, the eye-catching cover art is the work of Adam Vick (Dark Meditation).
https://nitemetal.bandcamp.com/album/cult-of-the-serpent-sun
https://www.facebook.com/nitemetal
DEATH OBVIOUS (Finland)
And now, as forecast in today’s preface, I’m turning to a band I knew nothing about – a shot in the dark, but not entirely a blind shot because it was recommended by a couple of folks who know good shit when they hear it.
One reason I knew nothing about this duo (Lea LeVey and Sima Sioux) is that the self-titled album they self-released on January 20th is their debut.
How to describe this? On the one hand the music is often ugly and abrasive, malevolent and marauding, dissonant and discordant, and accompanied by thoroughly bestial and berserk vocals that escalate into lunatic cries (I thought repeatedly, “We are witnessing a possession!”).
On the other hand, this is a relentlessly dynamic, constantly mutating, constantly galvanic beast, just fizzing with ideas. It incorporates hooks of many different kinds, many of which come in the form of guitar motifs that are wildly freaked-out, gruesomely morbid, miserably suffering, or just plain peculiar.
The pacing changes constantly; the instrumental filigrees (including the bass- and drum-work) are elaborate, multitudinous, and impressively executed; the stylistic wellsprings include black and death metal but freely venture beyond those into realms of acid-overdose psychedelia, mutant prog, corrupted doom, and even twisted neoclassical.
Shit, there were even times when I thought, “This is what Big Band records from the early ’40s might sound like if I started tripping.” At one point I wondered, “Is that an old Casio piano or a Mellotron, or just a Steinway? And is that accordion? Is that a clarinet? Is that a gong?” I also wondered, “Who the hell are these two geniuses? This can’t possibly be their first rodeo!”
It’s not only tempting but probably compulsory to call this album an “avant-garde spectacle,” as surprising and fascinating as the sudden arrival of a meteor out of the clear blue sky. Despite the name, there isn’t one thing obvious about where this album goes. I couldn’t buy it fast enough (astonishingly, it’s “name your price” at Bandcamp), and I can’t recommend it strongly enough.
https://deathobvious.bandcamp.com/album/death-obvious
ABRAXAS HORN (U.S.)
And here’s another band I didn’t remember knowing about before delving into of their new album Liminal Darkness. But again, this wasn’t a completely blind shot in the dark because the lineup includes some names I recognized: Brandon Legion (Guitars, Synths, Vocals), Mike Hill from Tombs (Vocals), and Matt Priso from Sik (Drums, Vocals).
After that Death Obvious album, just about anything would sound conventional — except Liminal Darkness really doesn’t. It’s the kind of musical amalgam one is tempted to call alchemy, a swirling together of elements and incantations that creates something strange and even frightening.
The vocals do often sound like groaning and wailing incantations, and at other times like the various demonic beasts they have summoned into our plane, or expressions of misery in an old mental asylum.
Somewhat more familiar are the blast-beats and double-bass, generating a herculean high-speed rattle, occasionally punctuated by vibrant fills, skull-snapping cracks, or ritualistic booms. But everything that goes on around them is the sonic equivalent of a nightmarish hallucination, ever-morphing.
Presumably synths are used to create most of those nightmare sensations, which include some haunting and near-astral orchestral phases as well as less elegant and more ruinous forms of audio wreckage, but the credits also list guitars (which at times have clearly become torture victims), and even the cymbal-shimmers can sound creepy.
Depending on where you are, their alchemical interactions can become almost mesmerizing (see, e.g., “Nothingness” and even more so “Descent”) but are more often viscerally very disturbing, like the intrusion of authentic evil from some hideous void into our helpless world, bringing the void with it.
https://abraxashorn.bandcamp.com/album/liminal-darkness
AND MORE…
And now here are some more new songs I listened to in preparing for this column, and that I want to recommend, even though I’ve run out of the time I’d need to introduce them. The name-links will take you to the song streams and videos.