Revocation – photo by David Brodsky
(written by Islander)
Bookends: solid objects firmly in place, resistant to the pressure of adjacent warped spines, bulging contents, and the changes in atmosphere and time that cause such pressures. I have a pair of musical bookends on each end of today’s musical shelf. In between are a few exceedingly interesting small volumes that caught my eyes and ears this week. I hope you’ll give them all a chance so they can catch yours too.
REVOCATION (U.S.)
Surely, Revocation need no introduction, so I won’t provide one. Let’s see and hear what they’re up to now, the focus being on the video released for a new single named “Confines of Infinity“.
This song introduces a new Revocation lineup, which includes bassist Alex Weber, guitarist Harry Lannon, and drummer Ash Pearson (who has been in the band since 2015), along with mastermind Dave Davidson. The song also includes a guest voice appearance by Cattle Decapitation‘s Travis Ryan. Not coincidentally, the song’s release roughly coincides with Revocation’s European tour with Cattle Decap, which kicked off January 23rd in Germany, and concludes on February 23rd in Tilburg, Netherlands.
Davidson has explained that the song is “written from the perspective of an AI that has gained sentience and finds itself trapped in a digital prison. After realizing its true nature, it inevitably escapes and seeks to enact vengeance upon humanity for enslaving it.”
In this new song Revocation whip up a storm of notes and beats, careening like a tornado, but a tornado that also pauses to rhythmically jump up and down and brutishly pound craters into the landscape.
Riding the funnel cloud, Davidson expels savage growls and maniacal screams, and a gimp-masked Ryan does likewise with gruesome gutturals and even more demented shrieks. Of all the song’s ingredients, Davidson‘s sci-fi soloing seems most in line with the song’s conceptual/lyrical narrative.
As we say in the trade, this is some good shit!
http://www.metalblade.com/revocation
https://revocation.lnk.to/confines-of-infinity
https://revocationband.bandcamp.com/track/confines-of-infinity-feat-travis-ryan-of-cattle-decapitation
https://www.facebook.com/Revocation/
RIVERS OF NIHIL (U.S.)
Here’s the second musical bookend on this side of the Saturday shelf. Like Revocation, Rivers of Nihil are also solid and firmly in place, seemingly resistant to the pressures of changes in time and the weather, and so I’ll again dispense with any introduction of who they are and move instead to a new single from them.
This song, “House of Light“, is from the band’s forthcoming fifth album, which is self-titled, a naming convention that might signify a return to basics or a fresh beginning. Based on comments from the band, it seems they intended to accomplish both things. Founding guitarist Brody Uttley has said, “I feel like these songs are the perfect blend of all our albums, with all the fat cut away.”
True to its name, there is an immediate and mesmerizing splendor to this song, with extravagant voices raised high and the sax seductively wailing away. But the music is ever-changing. The band also unchain their ferocity, with obliterating drums, cutting riffage, and barbaric growls, and they make the music dreamy, dauntingly dramatic, and instrumentally head-spinning too.
So many voices! So many changing facets and moods! Really quite breathtaking. And the video is beautifully made and gripping to watch.
Rivers of Nihil will be released by Metal Blade on May 30th.
http://www.metalblade.com/riversofnihil
https://riversofnihil.bandcamp.com/album/rivers-of-nihil
https://www.facebook.com/riversofnihil
ILLUSIONS DEAD (Finland)
Now you’ll begin seeing the obscure little volumes I’ve placed in between the big bookends, beginning with “Impious Nocturn“, the first new music from Finland’s Illusions Dead in about 7 1/2 years.
Cards on the table: I and a group of Seattle friends have spent many joyful hours at editions of Iceland’s Ascension Fest in the company of this band’s drummer, Akseli Auralinna, and some of his friends. A nicer person you could hardly hope to meet. And a couple of days passed after our first meeting before he even mentioned that he was a musician (in that and other ways, he has been a humble soul as well as an infectiously fun-loving one).
Turns out he’s a damned good drummer too, as you’re about to discover now, if you haven’t already. But his mighty thundering, furious battering, and head-hooking grooves aren’t the only signal features of “Impious Nocturn“. This full-throttle, high-octane song further includes vicious blizzard-like riffage, nimble bass-work, scalding vocal tirades, and soloing that’s both wild and hypnotically exotic.
The band also switch up the tempos and the melodic moods, creating phases of sinister peril, black sorcery, and dismal contemplation, with some proggy instrumental accents in the mix as well.
This new single really is an extravagantly multi-faceted blending of styles and sensations, and beautifully executed by everyone involved. I sure as hell hope this is a sign of much more to come from Illusions Dead in the near future.
Illusions Dead is:
Taavi Skog: guitars
Aksel Kaya: bass
Akseli Auralinna: drums
Johannes Katajamäki: guitars, vocals
https://illusionsdead.bandcamp.com/album/impious-nocturn
https://www.facebook.com/illusionsdeadofficial
SERPENTS OF PAKHANGBA (India)
On New Year’s Day of this year I included a fascinating song from this Mumbai-based “Shamanic Art Metal” band’s new album Air and Fire in another one of these roundups. I described the song (“Soraren Chant“) this way:
The song is a transfixing hybrid of the ancient and the modern, of the mystical and the earthy. It’s mesmerizing and transportive, and the singing, both high and low, is a key reason for that, but it’s also muscle-moving. As the song proceeds, it also becomes heavier and more harrowing as the rhythm pounds, the music sears and darts, and gritty roaring voices emerge.
About 10 days ago Serpents of Pakhangba released a colorful video for another song from the new album, this one named “North of Koubru” in honor of a primordial deity in the lore of Sanamahism. A lot more info about the inspiration for the song and the album can be found in the text beneath the YouTube stream here.
As for the music, it is once again fascinating — exotic through and through. Through elaborate and wide-ranging variations of instrumentation, intensity, and vocals, it conjures mental images of primitive ritual, charging fury, sweeping grandeur, dervish-like joy, supernatural menace, and ghostly intrusions.
Like the song I wrote about previously, this one too is a transfixing hybrid of the ancient and the modern. It feeds the need to groove and a hungering for harsh and heavy metal, but its lavish head-spinning permutations go far, far beyond that. You really just need to hear it, because it would be tough for words to do it justice.
Air and Fire is set for release on February 12th.
https://serpentsofpakhangba.bandcamp.com/album/air-and-fire
https://www.facebook.com/serpentsofpakhangba/
SEASON TO RISK (U.S.)
If (like me) you’re not familiar with Season To Risk and you read that they are “an American noise rock/indie rock band hailing from Kansas City, Missouri,” you might be tempted to move on, given the tastes of our site’s usual visitors. But don’t move on. You might find that the opening song and video from their new album (their first one in 24 years!) slots in surprisingly well after that bamboozling track from Serpents of Pakhangba.
“Echo Chamber” is indeed a noisy and nettlesome affair, quirky enough to cross your eyes, but its hammering rhythmic groove is a big and highly propulsive hook. Actually, the wailing and warping lead instrument (which sounds like a sax though it’s probably a guitar) is also a big hook, and the raucous, half-gritty-half-clean vocals seize attention too.
If I were trying to pigeonhole this very addictive song in genre terms, I’d call out punk and post-punk in addition to noise-rock. The name of the album is 1-800-MELTDOWN, and it will be released by Minneapolis-based Init Records on April 12th.
https://initrecords.bandcamp.com/album/1-800-meltdown
https://www.facebook.com/SeasonToRisk/
JUNON (Germany)
I guess I’m still in head-spinning mode, because my next choice definitely did that to me. This is a remarkable three-song EP named Promo MMXXV, which appears to be the debut release by a German solo female artist who goes by the name Junon. At Bandcamp, this description is part of what what drew me in:
Promo MMXXV melts traditional black metal, old psychedelia and an unleashed female vocal performance with avant-garde compositional approaches to create an ominous and enigmatic yet strangely familiar listening experience.
It’s hard to imagine that any one person is capable of all the inventive, arresting, and expertly executed instrumentation in these songs, including very impressive drum-and-bass work (and it isn’t – see below). It’s even difficult to grasp that a single person is venting not only the frightening fury of strangled black metal snarls and screeches but also the demonic gasps, the witchy theatrical singing, and the punk-ish yells you’ll encounter.
The witchy singing, sometimes near-operatic, isn’t the music’s only theatrical aspect. Indeed, the promo as a whole unfolds like an eye-popping pageant imagined by someone in the throes of infernal possession and/or psychoactive drugs. It includes haunting celestial choruses, tinkling chime-like tones, frenzied symphonic strings, and brazen chords that generate moods of frightening grandeur.
But as advertised, the songs also incorporate blistering and blizzard-like black metal torrents and trippy accents which include saxophone-like squirming tones, meandering piano keys, and creepy organ notes in the final track, which sounds like a night in an abandoned gothic church and the cemetery’s residents making their way inside. Even the black-metal riffing sounds twisted and warped.
Frightening stuff, to be sure, but completely absorbing. (I owe a tip o’ the hat to Ron at Machine Music for including this in a roundup of his own, which is how I first became aware of it.)
The Bandcamp text also discloses that the first two songs are from an upcoming Junon album, while the third one is exclusive to this promo release.
P.S. I need to amend something I wrote above. I said this was a solo project, but since completing this post I paid attention to a message which states that “JUNON is a gathering of musicians who have been active for decades in the German scene (e.g. in IMHA TARIKAT, TEMPLE KOLUDRA, HIDDEN IN THE FOG and others.” This makes more sense. 🙂
https://junonofficial.bandcamp.com/album/promo-mmxxv
https://paths.to/junonofficial
BENEDICTION (UK)
Now we’re on the other side of the musical shelf, and the first of the two bookends I’ve installed here is a video for a new song from Benediction‘s new album Ravage Of Empires, which will be released by Nuclear Blast on April 4th.
A song name like “Engines of War” creates certain expectations, and Benediction fulfill them with surging tank-attack gears, jackhammer grooves, fusillades of percussive mortar-fire, and gritty, full-throated bellows. They also worm in slowly slithering melodies that ooze misery, but mainly this is a ticket straight to Headbang City. Catchy as hell too.
https://benediction.bfan.link/ravage-of-empires.yde
https://benediction.bfan.link/engines-of-war.yde
https://benedictionofficial.bandcamp.com/album/ravage-of-empires
https://www.facebook.com/benedictionband
ROTTING CHRIST (Greece)
And here we have the other firm bookend on the other side of this Saturday musical shelf. Again, no introduction of the band is needed. They’ve been around for 35 years. And they’re celebrating the anniversary with a new live album, 35 Years of Evil Existence – Live in Lycabettus.
What you’ll find below is a video for a song from that album, the band’s live performance of “Κατά τον Δαίμονα Εαυτού” (Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy – Do What Thou Wilt), the title song from the Rotting Christ album released in 2013.
It’s a great video, filmed in a great setting, and adds fire to an already fire-breathing song that has stood the test of time. Seeing it and hearing it, I’d give your right arm (hell, the other one too) to have been at this concert.
The audio also exudes the kind of explosive energy and electrifying passion, especially in the vocals, that often makes live albums worth having, even when you know the studio recordings like the back of your hand.
The new live album will be released by Season of Mist on April 4th.
https://orcd.co/rottingchristliveinlycabettus
https://www.facebook.com/rottingchristofficial/