(written by Islander)
It’s the last day of January and therefore I’ve reached the end of this list. It’s still likely that Andy Synn or DGR, or perhaps some other NCS writers, will chime in next week with songs I failed to include, but my work is done, other than compiling the usual wrap-up post listing all the songs in one place, with links to where they can be found.
Approaching the conclusion has increased the internal agonies. There are so many songs I didn’t want to leave out, so many difficult decisions to make, even with a list as long as this one turned out to be. That explains why there are five songs today instead of three or four.
As for why I grouped these five together, it’s because I decided to conclude with variants of black metal, which over time has become my favorite extreme genre. Maybe it’s because I listen to a lot of such variants in organizing my weekly SHADES OF BLACK column, but my list of candidates for this list has been heavy on the metallic black. These five have their own personalities, but I’ve found all of them exhilarating, memorable, and highly likely to spin your minds like a centrifuge.
I’ll save concluding thoughts about this list until the forthcoming wrap-up post. Onward to the music!
LOSTRÉGOS
To begin this final segment I have a song I got to premiere. It floored me when I first heard it, and still makes my head swim. You can tell that my head was swimming when I first heard it based on what I wrote at the time (edited here so you don’t drown in the words):
AUGA – Ondas Serpeantes” is a rare combination of care, calculation, and exuberant adventurousness. It unfolds like an elaborate musical tapestry rolling past our vision, intricately woven with colors both brilliant and dark.
Or you might also think of it as a ravishing piece of musical theater, ornately costumed and rapidly moving from scene to scene, with each performer assuming different guises and roles, providing a thrilling escape from daily life, which seems poor and drab by comparison.
This is also a long song, which as I’ve said before is a relative rarity among music I think of as infectious (probably rare for you too). I probably have more really long songs on this year’s list than ever before, though that wasn’t by design. In the case of this one:
There’s so much to take in over over these nearly 11 minutes, none of it ordinary, that listening more than once, even as long as it is, proves irresistible. It’s one of those songs that really does reveal something new with each new encounter, though even on a first listen you can detect the emergence of new patterns (or characters) and their reappearance in a later swath or scene….
[T]he intensity of the music continues to ebb and flow as the band change tempos and moods but continue creating intriguing and wondrous musical and rhythmic filigrees, repeating some of the patterns and revealing new ones, maintaining the thrill of what has already been an edge-of-your-seat experience.
I really couldn’t leave this one off the list. It’s from the 2024 album of Lóstregos, entitled Nai.
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/nai
https://www.facebook.com/lostregos
Ὁπλίτης (HOPLITES)
Let’s begin this next introduction with an excerpt from Andy Synn‘s review of the album from whence it came, all the way back in mid-January of last year:
Whereas the band’s previous records have drawn comparisons to the likes of Serpent Column, Suffering Hour, and Converge (the former especially), Παραμαινομένη‘s increasingly complex combination of outlandish extremity, off-kilter unpredictability, and eagerness to smash through genre-boundaries situates the latest evolution of Ὁπλίτης somewhere between the visceral violence of Anaal Nathrakh and the avant-garde experimentalism of Sigh…. Παραμαινομένη will go down as one of the best, and most blisteringly bizarre, releases of the year.
I certainly can’t quarrel with that, nor with Vizzah Harri‘s urging that this list include the fifth track on the album, “Συμμιαινόμεναι Διονύσῳ Ἐλευθέριῳ,” which shares the name of the fourth track.
It’s a big surging monster of a song, a massive bulldozing attack that fires high-caliber weaponry as it crushes ahead. But it’s also packed with crazily darting, swirling, squirming, and weirdly screaming fretwork; fast jackhammer-blasts; maniac drum-fills; mad-beast vocals; some damned catchy rising riffs; and a madly dancing calliope-like solo that might be the most mind-blowing surprise in the whole song.
https://hoplites.bandcamp.com/album/–8
CANTIQUE LÉPREUX
Last March I wrote a regrettably short review of Le bannissement, the third album by the Québec City black metal band Cantique Lépreux. It was short enough that I think I can get away with quoting nearly all of it here:
As you already know if you’re familiar with this band’s past works, they’re formidably capable of whipping up raging vortices of assaulting drums, frantically swirling riffs, and thoroughly vicious vocals, and they do that again in these new songs. But as you also may know, and as they do again here, they’re equally capable of creating sonic edifices of ancient grandeur….
At many times, even in the midst of gut-rumbling and skull-cracking drumwork and fanged vocal hostility, the band weave audio tapestries of elegance and even romantic nostalgia. The music can seem to whirl and spin like a jubilant dance, with flickering and whistling musical fires spiraling high, backed by nuanced bass-work. It can also seem to burst open like a sudden sunrise, almost blindingly brilliant and breathtaking.
In fact, feelings of jubilation and glory are almost ever-present in the music (how else to interpret the magnificent soloing in “Rivières rompues” or the sheer exhilarating vibrancy of “Par la gueule des fantômes“, for example?), though the music does subtly shift into moods of longing, even when the sense-surround sweep of the richly layered music remains wholly consuming and the drums continue flying like bats out of hell….
The completely immersive music often rolls like vast tides, crashes like a tempest, whirls in exultant delirium, or soars with the sun.
This is yet another album that made such a strong and lasting impression on me that I felt compelled to include a song from it on this list. The one I chose, “Rivières Rompues,” displays a great deal of what I was trying to describe about the album as a whole… and man… that guitar solo!
https://cantiquelepreux.bandcamp.com/album/le-bannissement
https://ffm.bio/cantiquelepreux
https://www.facebook.com/cantiquelepreux
MEFITIS
The last two songs on the list both came from albums released late in the year, and coincidentally on the same day (November 29th). Conceivably, this may be a case of recency driving primacy, because I still vividly remember both albums, yet I’m guessing the memories will still be vivid even a year after their release date.
The name of the late-2024 album by Oakland-based Mefitis is The Skorian // The Greyleer. As its title suggests, and as the band themselves stated, it’s a work of two halves. In my review, I delved into what I thought that might have meant (because it’s not entirely obvious), but whether I guessed correctly or not, the song from the album I picked for the list is clearly in the first half, because “Vire’s Arc” is the album opener. Part of what I wrote about what I guessed was the first half of the album applies to this song:
At peak wildness, which tends to coincide with peak speed, they spin the listener’s head in ways not many bands can do, not only because of the riotous inventiveness and diabolical exuberance of their songwriting but also because of their jaw-dropping talents as musicians. When less wild, the music is still elaborate and head-twisting but more sinister and surreal….
For an album so lavishly ingenious and stylistically kaleidoscopic that it attracts the label “avant-garde,” it’s actually also loaded with fiendish melodic and rhythmic hooks – one more reason why it’s easy to stay rooted in place, in addition to all the constant marvels.
“Vire’s Arc” provides both a great introduction to the album and a great example of what makes it such a head-spinner (including the mad-scientist drumming). It also gives a first taste of how wildly variable the vocals are. Highly contagious too, of course.
https://thetruemefitis.bandcamp.com/album/the-skorian-the-greyleer
https://www.facebook.com/MefitisRising/
BEEHIVE REVOLT
December 29th was the day when I completed and posted my review of Beehive Revolt‘s 2024 debut album HVSK — so, its impressions on me are very recent for sure. But again, the album proved to be so astounding that I think I’d still be writing about it now even if it had surfaced last January. To excerpt some of that OTTP review:
The vocals include demonically rabid snarls and screams, extravagantly theatrical singing, and spoken words that are alternately menacing, ugly, and brazenly deranged. The music is usually convoluted and crazed, like an explosive yet intricate intersection of psychosis and psychedelia, backed by a rhythm section that occasionally provides some compulsive grooves and some furious blasting, but is usually off on their own peculiar and sometimes even funky adventures.
The tempos and instrumental changes are constant, and constantly head-spinning and mind-broiling, even though the band occasionally throw in some good old heavy metal riffs to briefly steady things.
[E]ven with all the variations considered, it’s fair to say that asylum-strength madness reigns throughout the album. I can’t think of another album I’ve heard this year which is this bizarre, this fascinating, and this well-executed, given its aims.
And so HVSK was another album I just couldn’t walk away from in compiling this list, especially because I thought the music would fit so well with the first four tracks presented above. The song I chose, “The Quiet Death of Samuel Perkins,” is the album opener.
In the collection of wild and even bizarre songs that I’ve assembled for this final installment, it more than holds its own on the wildness scale, providing a high-speed tour through a dazzling and demented carnival. And if you’re like me, you won’t forget it.
https://beehiverevolt.bandcamp.com/album/hvsk
https://www.facebook.com/bhvrvlt/