(written by Islander)
Another Sunday arrives, and with it another brain-wrecking task of making choices for this column, a task made even harder than I was expecting when I woke up to find that Rennie Resmini had climbed back into the starkweather Substack with a bunch of new recommendations I hadn’t already discovered (more on that later).
It’s obvious (maybe painfully obvious to some of you) that I am prone to great enthusiasm about music. I know I’m less critical than lots of other listeners, and even other writers at our putrid site. I still use my own kind of filter, but it seems more porous than those of others. Or maybe I see more clearly just how much fucking creativity and talent continue flowering in the metal underground, week after week!
(Somehow my enthusiasm for music is unabated even though the country where I live is rapidly going down the shitter.)
Here’s a severely cropped snapshot of what’s enthused me in recent days from the blacker realms.
VERHEERER (Germany)
The German band Verheerer (a name that aptly means “Devastator”) are coming back to us with their first new album since 2019’s Monolith (which I scribbled about here). The first advance track is a blast-furnace scorcher fueled by fury, and also an intense rendering of suffering and despair.
If “Totenvolk” doesn’t get your own blood boiling damned fast you may be part reptile. It’s blazing fast, with riffing that maniacally whirls and sears, drumming that furiously batters and booms, and throat-stripping vocals that explode with rage. The soloing (piercing in tone) is even more crazed, though it’s also enticingly quirky.
The song does mutate, as the pacing lurches and the guitars dismally slash, chime, and quiver. No one poured any water on the vocal flames, but we do get spoken words as the soloing ripples a melody that sounds anguished.
In the past Verheerer have demonstrated an ability to elevate their music into fashionings of tormented majesty, and they do that here too, but they don’t sacrifice the absolutely burning intensity of the music’s fury and pain.
The new album is named Urgewalt that will be released on April 4th, embellished by the artwork of Misanthropic-Art. The band says this about it at Bandcamp:
URGEWALT is dedicated to those who rose and stood strong against oppression and fascism and those who continue this fight day by day – You are the voice of the dead!
Divided we stand ~ United we fall
https://verheerer1.bandcamp.com/album/urgewalt-2
https://www.facebook.com/verheerer/
OSGRAEF (?)
I got a press release about the new Osgraef album, and since it’s from the Amor Fati label I put it on my list of things to check on. Before I did check, I saw recommendations of the music from both the fore-mentioned Rennie Resmini at the starkweather Substack (who has returned to that platform this month after leaving it alone for the last 9 months) and Ron Ben-Tovim‘s Machine Music site. I’ll quote them first:
Rennie: “Osgraef come to thoroughly destroy and employ a more deathly bent of the two [Amor Fati album previews]. Manic drumming, savage screams bellowing from a cavern that serves as a portal to hell. Looking forward to what comes of this.”
Ron: “The debut from black metal project Osgraef is basically the most black metal thing I have heard in a long time. Black metal that isn’t cringe, of course. Riffs that come at you like fire ants, a crystal-clear production that manages to maintain the required heft of the occasion, and some of the most insane drumming this side of Kevin Paradis. Aggressive, assertive, adequately haunting, and fucking awesome. Keep your eye on this, ye fans of ‘straight up black metal.’ A gem.”
They were both writing about an Osgraef song named “Magick Wound“. Need I say more? No, I really don’t, but of course I will.
Prepare for haughty growls and strangled screams sprung loose from sanity, for a swarming blizzard of scathing notes, for jet-fueled drumming that follows no straight line, and for moods of madness, mayhem, and morbidity.
The song is from an album named Reveries of the Arcane Eye, which Amor Fati will release on March 21st. I haven’t seen any pre-order links yet.
http://www.amor-fati-productions.de
https://amorfatiproductions.bandcamp.com/
ANCINE (U.S.)
I thought you might need a few minutes to settle your breathing after the first two songs above, but the next song won’t settle your mind much. I mean, shit, the words alone (visible in the video) will keep you awake at night all by themselves (I won’t spoil the twisted tale they tell).
The rest of the song is also unsettling. It’s like some kind of bluesy Appalachian dirge rendered through a warped prism, with macabre results. Acoustic guitars (and maybe a banjo?) clang and mourn; a distorted harmonica (or something like it) miserably wails, and maybe that’s a steel guitar wailing too; and deep croaking vocals caked with grit claw and cry out, maybe like Johnny Cash if he’d been a worse criminal and a heavier drinker.
I wouldn’t have guessed this project came out of Boston but it did. Here’s the backdrop provided at Bandcamp:
Morose, raw, and dark. From the land of Lovecraft, Hawthorne, and the birthplace of Poe, Ancine delivers Gothic Americana with a decidedly New England focus. Mixing delta blues, dissonant goth rock, and just a bit of Nashville twang, Ancine’s sole member, Michael Holgrave, has created a visceral, yet hauntingly beautiful form of American roots music with a deep admiration for the macabre.
The song I wrote about, which surfaced 11 months ago in that lyric video below, is “Barn of the Naked Dead.” It was on a February 2024 album named Death Hymns: Book of Desolation. But Ancine has a new album set for release later this month called Death Hymns II: Book of Tribulation. There’s one song from it now on Bandcamp, an 11-minute opus named “At the Summons of Crow Call.”
I won’t try to map out all the varying instrumentation and everything that happens in that one (including the presence of even more monstrous vocals), but will instead try to describe the sensations and moods — creepy and haunting, devilishly sinister and damp with gloom, occasionally jarring, and eventually louder, frighteningly jubilant, violently insane, and monumentally ominous.
https://ancine.bandcamp.com/album/death-hymns-ii-book-of-tribulation
http://ancine.info/
http://facebook.com/ancineblues
THE BLOOD MOUNTAIN BLACK METAL CHOIR (U.S.)
A couple of weeks ago I decided to give Bluesky a try (my handle there is @islanderncs.bsky.social). One of the people I followed there is the man who goes by Ayloss in Spectral Lore, Auriferous Flame, and many other bands.
One of the first posts I saw from him was a recommendation of three records in the vein of RABM. So far, I’ve only gotten to The Blood Mountain Black Metal Choir (the other two were from Rampancy and Tower of Silence). Since then, I’ve seen other people whose opinions I value also pushing The Blood Mountain Black Metal Choir (hereafter, “TBMBMC“).
This appears to be the solo project of a Georgia-based person, self-described as “One-man antifascist black metal from Appalachia.” Metal-Archives says the creator is also behind Wounds of Recollection and Isleptonthemoon. At Bandcamp he describes the inspiration for the first TBMBMC demo (entitled Folklore), which was released on January 8th:
The Appalachian Mountains are best known for its deep and rich folklore surrounding mythical creatures and ominous happenings throughout its magical rolling hills. But the true story of the region is much less fantastical and much more despairing. The region has a long and painful history of exploitation of natural resources, abuse of labor rights, genocide of indigenous peoples, addiction, and a plague of predatory evangelism. This 5-track demo seeks to address some of the pains of the place I call home.
These five tracks will strike a chord with people who relish Panopticon, though I don’t mean to suggest that there’s any kind of cloning going on here, because TBMBMC does have its own distinct personality.
The songs meld together a variety of sounds and sensations. The very first one, “Blue Ridge“, vividly shows that, beginning with a gentle and haunting piano melody and then erupting in a black metal storm that sounds both violent and vast. The song also jolts hard and fast, giving even more free reign to its fury, though the piano resurfaces along with sweeping stratospheric melodies that seemingly strive to capture the beauty of the place that spawned it.
“3:19” opens with ringing and rippling acoustic guitars and a humming bass, but it too surges, this time like a harrowing tide. The harsh snarls and screams are as shattering as before; a lead guitar flickers through the ravishing riffage like fire; the drums catch fire too; and the music seems to roil in despair — but this song will also give your spine some vigorous jolts, and it too scales to sweeping heights before becoming somber and sad.
The following track “Folklore“, which flows seamlessly from the preceding one, is an entirely acoustic and instrumental piece of folk music, and it’s sublime. Of the following two tracks, “Televangelism” is more in line with the first two.
Arguably the best of this bunch, it scorches, jolts, and sweeps, though it also includes a mesmerizing and yearning melody that slowly rings through the center of the storm, and a beautifully sad acoustic/folk interlude. And the demo closes with “Closing,” a heart-aching piano instrumental.
I found this Folklore demo to be entirely captivating, and though each of the songs could stand on its own, this is a release that really is best heard from beginning to end, straight through. Bring us more please!
https://thebloodmountainbmc.bandcamp.com/album/demo-i-folklore
https://www.instagram.com/thebloodmountainbmc/
OFNUS (UK)
Next I’ll turn to the two songs now streaming from Valediction, a forthcoming sophomore album by the Welsh band Ofnus. The album is described as “a conceptual endeavour that weaves an audial narrative of the stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression & Acceptance each represented through volatile and evolving sounds, along with a precursory trigger track & alternate ending for those unable to find solace.”
“The Shattering“, which arrived with a video, is presumably that precursory trigger track. It immediately races and rattles, but also immediately elevates and expands, providing cascades of swirling splendor as well as ferocity. It includes a roaring and shrieking vocal tandem that underscores the ferocity, and elegantly ringing melodies that amplify the distressing splendor.
The music’s wholly enveloping intensity remains mostly in the red zone, but the band change the moods, creating sounds of greater desperation and more heart-piercing grief. When the hell-for-leather pacing does briefly slow and rocking grooves emerge, the music stays dark but we get reverent singing instead of vicious tirades.
For the finale, when the tirades and the rapidly rumbling drums return (along with dramatic percussive detonations), we have symphonic strings that create melancholy magnificence.
The other song available now, “Throes of Agony“, is within the stages of grief. Once again, the band combine hurtling and harrowing black metal intensity with elevations of symphonic magnificence, though the emotional content of everything is calamitous, like anguish writ large. Bombs drop in this one, too, and tones of a cathedral organ drive the anguish even deeper, while the vocals are utterly blistering.
Valediction will be released by Naturmacht Productions on February 28th.
https://ofnusnp.bandcamp.com/album/valediction
https://www.facebook.com/ofnus
OBRIJ (Ukraine)
I fear for the fate of Ukraine, more so than ever. It’s entirely predictable that the Putin-loving Trump will sell them down the river, and it’s not clear that even with other allies holding strong, they’ll be able to paddle fast enough to avoid the falls.
The Ukrainian band Обрій (Obrij) must be having similarly grim thoughts. They’ve just released a new single named “Сад Гетсиманський (The Garden of Gethsemane)“. They provide an explanation at Bandcamp, which includes this English translation:
“The Garden of Gethsemane” – After the brief period of Korenizatsiia (“nativization”), this policy was halted, and imperialistic practices of total Russification were reinstated. A number of creative intellectuals were exterminated as a result of this political shift. If the Holodomor was a major blow to the Ukrainian rural population, the Executed Renaissance had a fatal impact on the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Although it is difficult to imagine what the victims of these repressions endured before their deaths, The Garden of Gethsemane, a novel by Ivan Bahrianyi, provides us with a certain picture of it.
Ii wasn’t familiar with the events described above, but they concern a period of cruel Soviet repression in the 1930s that devastated the lives of millions of Ukrainians. I’ve read that the theme of Bahrianyi‘s novel is “that resistance to evil is necessary even when it seems there is no point in fighting further.” You can read more about “the Executed Renaissance” here.
As for the song, the drums go off like gunshots as barbed-wire riffing severely abrades the mind, scraping and writhing, and the words come in tormented, scraped-raw howls of spine-tingling intensity. The song also chugs like a big freight train and hits like a high-octane battering ram. It sizzles and swarms in frenzies, it bleeds agony, and it fights back.
https://obrij.bandcamp.com/album/the-garden-of-gethseman
https://www.facebook.com/obriymetaluzh