(written by Islander)
You can tell I’m getting close to the end. How can you tell? Because I expanded yesterday’s entry to four songs and am doing the same again here in Part 21 today. Unless I collapse from writer fatigue, tomorrow’s final episode will probably include five. I’m trying to cram in as many songs as I can before I hit the February wall that will abruptly halt this list.
The four I’ve grouped together today are all high-speed, high-octane, high-intensity onslaughts on the senses, and they’re all mind-benders of a high order too. Obviously, I also think they’re all contagious. For reasons you’ll see, this grouping will also especially please my comrade DGR.
One more installment left ahead for tomorrow, and 20 other Parts lined up behind us for you to explore if you haven’t already, and you can do that via this link.
FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE
Opera is the latest extravaganza from Fleshgod Apocalypse, a band whose music we’ve been addicted to around here since their very early days release. DGR reviewed the new album for us, and then engraved it as No. 14 on his year-end marble tablet.
Before we knew everything that Opera would bring to the table, we were struck by the video for “Bloodclock“. It was dramatic and cinematic, a blood-drenched piece of pageantry. As for the song’s music, I quickly spilled out these words:
[T]hough it begins with a gentle and beguiling piano-and-harp instrumental, it explodes in a storm of thunder in the low end and an attack of incinerating guitar and keyboard intensity. Back and forth the song goes, raging and soft (with variations between furious howls and gasped words), eventually reaching heights of blazing intensity accompanied by sky-high operatic choral vocals and bestial roars, segmented by start-stop bursts of savagery.
But wait, there’s more! Veronica Bordacchini‘s solo singing, which pitches into the stratosphere; gut-busting grooves; a dramatic guitar solo; and the unfolding of epic expanses in the music, where the orchestration reaches its crescendo. All in all, it’s damned breathtaking.
And to quote from DGR‘s year-end writeup:
[T]he one pattern that did hang on for Opera is the positioning of the one gigantic ass-kicker of the album. Usually around song three or four of the band’s releases is one grandiose piece that they’re likely forever cursed to break out live, but it is also the one that can wind up carrying an album on its shoulders for me. In this case it is “Bloodclock”, which has spent an inordinate amount of time wedged into my brain and has since joined the ranks of songs like “The Violation”, “Sugar”, “The Fool”, and “Elegy” for me.
Yeah, it has stayed wedged into my brain too, so I’m wedging it into this list.
https://fga.bfan.link/opera
https://www.facebook.com/fleshgodapocalypse
VITRIOL
We’re actually a year and four days beyond the release of Vitriol‘s second album, Suffer & Become. As a January 2024 release it was so overwhelming that it helped blow away thoughts of the year recently ended, as if the door to a blast furnace had suddenly opened right next to us on a contemplative evening stroll.
Here again, DGR did the review for us, and here again he gave it a high place (No. 4 in fact) on his year-end list. Even a year ago I was pretty damned sure that something from Suffer & Become would be on this song list.
DGR made a pitch for album opener “Shame and Its Afterbirth,” and I was very happy to agree, in part because it allows me to embed a video that’s always a hell of a thing to see. It shows guitarist (and vocalist) Kyle Rasmussen and then-bassist Adam Roethlistberger pushing themselves to the limit in a song that becomes technically very demanding.
But even the song’s slow, glittering, and mesmerizing (yet sorrowful) overture is part of what causes it to get stuck in the head, even before the storm breaks open. The melody of the overture persists through the clobbering drums and beastly roars, but sounds an order of magnitude more anguished.
The song escalates further, elaborate in its crazed fretwork frenzies but also expansive in its calamitous sweep, and the vocals are every bit as crazed too, while the drumming is jaw-dropping in its speed and dynamism.
The music seems to wail and convulse, and the extended guitar solo is a ravishing spectacle all its own, brilliantly swirling in the midst of towering musical grandeur — and a pulse-pounding cataclysm awaits at the end.
https://vitriolwarfare.bandcamp.com/album/suffer-become-24-bit-hd-audio
https://www.facebook.com/vitriolwarfare/
DEFEATED SANITY
“Defeated Sanity are a jazz ensemble hiding in plain sight as a brutal tech-death band.” That’s how Vizzah Harri began introducing his interview of Lille Gruber which we published last August. That followed his review of Defeated Sanity‘s July show in Cape Town, South Africa, which included songs from the band’s new album that he said “pack a polychromatic punch with some gracious grooves to spare!”
That album, the aptly titled Chronicles of Lunacy, finally saw release late last November, but not too late to get noticed in year-end lists. Our DGR put it on his, and I’ll excerpt what he wrote about it then:
A large part of Defeated Sanity‘s allure is that they’ve been kicking around for so long that they have become a fixture in the overall death metal scene. They’ve been consistent as well, with recent releases ratcheting up on the technicality side of things to where a release from Defeated Sanity is not just a brutal death fireworks show anymore but also committing a fair bit of subterfuge as well.
Watching someone try to headbang along with the band – much in the same way Wormed‘s sudden tempo changes do this – is an exercise in amusement because right when it seems like you’ve got it, Defeated Sanity flip the table over and get lost in these wandering instrumental passages, crazed free-jazz experiments on the drums, and occasional stuttering riffs that are somehow heavier than the sections that came before it. The amount of brain energy that must go into keeping track of where Defeated Sanity are in a song must be taxing when they’re on stage.
Well, I had to have a song from the album on this list. It’s true that trying to just steadily bang away to the music is a confounding exercise, but the new songs nevertheless do become addictive. DGR‘s pick was “Condemned to Vascular Famine.” I also strongly considered “Accelerating the Rot.” But I picked “The Odour of Sanctity,” because it has the bonus of being paired with a video that lets us see the band do the bamboozling things they do.
The song wastes no time inflicting a furiously bludgeoning and skull-rattling attack, like some massive demolition machine gone out of control and being fired upon by a phalanx of machine guns. But it’s also true that the song’s tempo repeatedly changes, and the fretwork of both guitars and bass, plus the drum patterns, constantly mutate and morph.
So on the one hand, the song inflicts a thuggish slam-wise beating, but on the other hand it will give your brain lots of swift, discombobulating spins, like the work of technically proficient mad scientists feverishly pursuing experiments in the midst of brute-force monstrosities doing their own pulverizing things. It really is amazing to watch the band doing all this in the video.
https://orcd.co/defeatedsanitythecroniclesoflunacy
https://defeatedsanity.bandcamp.com/album/chronicles-of-lunacy
https://www.instagram.com/defeated_sanity_official
https://www.facebook.com/DefeatedSanity
CONVULSING
For the third time among the four songs in today’s collection DGR hammered out the review for us, and for the fourth time he also put the song’s home-album on his year-end list. In the case of Convulsing‘s Perdurance, it landed at No. 19. Here’s part of his review:
Albums like Perdurance are always hard reviews simply because there’s nothing resembling a straightforward ‘single’ that you can point people to. The songs on Perdurance are just as much compositions about atmosphere as they are about rattling the listener’s nerves. They’re long-form ideas being dredged up and then dragged right back into the mud for an experience equally bizarre and ugly. The album is meant to be challenging and at times overwhelming….
Convulsing has a dastardly weapon of an album here, one that grows on you like a fungus, and even though you’ll often stumble in trying to pick out particular segments to explain why the album has its many-pronged hooks in you, you can’t help but want to spread it to other people to see how they take the experience.
Convulsing‘s music is definitely challenging, in the sense that it doesn’t conform to convention. Convulsing uses many of the standard building blocks of death metal, but disassembles and reassembles them so that the resulting mangled and warped configurations won’t leave your brain untwisted either. And yet I agree with DGR — it grows on you.
One of our readers urged “Shattered Temples” for this list, but in a close call I went with DGR‘s pick of “Gossamer Pall.” It’s thrillingly maniacal — blaring and swarming at exhilarating speed, punctuated by sudden stops and thudding atonal detonations, gruesome roars, haughty howls, and deranged screams.
Evoking the song’s name, it also includes a slowly swirling and gleaming guitar solo that sounds anguished (and is a big reason the song is on this list), as well as frantically skittering and brazenly blazing guitars backed by electrifying drumwork. But the music also takes on a dismal cast (another pall) and pulsates with a grim throb before undergoing a distressing seizure.
https://convulsing.bandcamp.com/album/perdurance
https://www.facebook.com/convulsing/
https://www.facebook.com/brndnsloan