SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: THE WEEK THAT WAS, AND MUSIC FROM NINE BANDS

Marcus Larson (1825–1864) Ocean at Night with Burning Ship (detail)

(written by Islander)

It has been a week in hell. I don’t mean the stuff you’ve seen every day in the national news reports, including the vile treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House yesterday (I’m addressing the 3 of you who can still bear to read the national news), but hellish events closer to home that impacted our putrid precious site.

Specifically, beginning last Sunday night and carrying into Monday the Puget Sound area of Washington where I live got walloped by lightning storms, heavy rain, and very high winds. Windstorms are fairly common during the winter months here, and the results are predictable: In the heavily forested island where I live, trees fall, limbs break off, and they hammer themselves into the power lines, all of which are strung above ground close to trees. And pop! The power goes out!

Which it did in the early hours of last Monday. And when the power goes out here, so does the internet, because my ISP’s local servers and routing stations apparently don’t have generators or human beings close by to keep them going. And when the internet goes out for everyone in my neighborhood (and this time for nearly all of the 30,000 people who live on the island), the strength of cell phone signals drops to borderline non-existent. I guess because everyone is trying to use their phones in place of the stricken net service.

Mask of Hands by Rivka Korf

In my particular corner of the forest, we were among the last two outages among more than a dozen on the island to be fixed. I know this because our power utility publishes a map on its phone app (which I could sporadically see when my phone sporadically worked) showing the location of the outages and providing updates on what the utility was doing about them. For most of the week, the update for my neighborhood was “Under Investigation.”

Our local outage lasted from early Monday morning until 2 pm on Thursday. There was no mystery about why the power was out. Just down the road from me and around the corner on a main thoroughfare (this being a relative term in this semi-rural area), an enormous tree had fallen across the road, leaning above the roadway because it was being held up (barely) by bowed power and phone lines it had shoved groundward. It didn’t even look like the lines had been cut by the fall, but that unexpected tension clearly pulled something loose somewhere.

By sometime on Tuesday a work crew arranged by the local government had cut up the tree to make both lanes of the road passable. I didn’t see this happen, just passed by the big stack of lumber on both sides of the road. The power remained out for days longer.

I’ve been living in this place and in these conditions since 1995. After a few years of getting by with a wood-burning stove and kerosene lamps, I graduated to a gasoline-powered generator which was big enough to keep a few vital circuits alive. After some more years, I plunked down a handsome sum of money to buy a propane-powered generator that would run every circuit in the house, and would start up automatically when the power went out.

Except this week the generator suddenly stopped working a few hours before sunrise on Wednesday.

Thankfully my wife had finished rinsing the shampoo out of her hair before everything went black. She finished packing by flashlight in preparation for her trip that morning to the airport and then onward to visit a sister in Nevada. By the time I got back home after dropping her at the ferry terminal, daylight was breaking and I could already feel the house starting to cool down.

So, no light, no heat, no internet, no way to boil water for coffee, no dependable cell connection, and nothing to do but get on the couch with blankets and give our short-haired cats a place where they could get warm. (As you might have guessed, after getting the big generator we eventually got rid of all the frontier-era stuff we used to use for heat and warmth – I’m a packrat and blame my wife for that.)

Later I got just enough bars on the phone to call the generator repair service. They had a long drive to get to where I live, but they did arrive and got the generator going again, about 5 hours after it had a stroke. Apparently the oil level was low and it automatically shut down. I was politely reminded that it’s a good idea to get the thing serviced after every instance of extended usage (like the one last fall). I will probably remember to do that, because it sucked to have that thing dead as a doornail.

a painting by Carl Blechen

Of course, one consequence of all this was that I had no way to get on my computer and do what I need the computer to do, including what I do for NCS, which included writing and posting two track premieres scheduled for last Tuesday and an album premiere scheduled for last Wednesday.

During one of my phone’s sporadic increases in signal strength, I was able to use it as a hotspot for the computer and e-mail the people with whom I’d agreed to do those premieres (I don’t use my phone for NCS e-mail, just the computer). Unfortunately, the signal wasn’t good enough for me to use the computer for anything else internet-related.

Andy Synn can get into our WordPress HQ and do things for the site, but premieres aren’t his responsibility, and anyway he was felled by the flu early in the week. We were fortunate that he had enough strength to lift himself off his sweaty sheets and write a thing for the site, but only the one thing until yesterday’s Synn Report. Maybe he shouldn’t have spent time playing a show with his band last week and hobnobbing with diseased fans and other miscreants.

The Well by M.C. Escher

But back to the main narrative (I know you’re on the edge of your seat): As the power company slowly fixed outages around the island, my cell phone’s signal strengthened, to the point on Wednesday afternoon when I could use it as a working hotspot for the computer.

I really hated letting people down about those missed premieres and had gotten very anxious about it, so I spent many hours writing and posting the two missed song premieres and getting the missed album premiere ready to go by middle of the evening. I was able to post that one on Thursday morning, and also wrote up the two song premieres that were already on the calendar for Thursday.

Side note: the three missed premieres were arranged by publicists for the labels and bands, and they couldn’t have been nicer, much more concerned for me and my family than their premiere plans going into a ditch. Further side note: not all publicists are like this.

Mid-afternoon Thursday, the power and the internet resurrected themselves, and all was well again — except for Andy, who I don’t think is well yet.

a painting by a follower of Henry Pether (1800-1880)

I want to be clear about something: It did seem like a week in hell while it was happening, but it was more like one of Dante’s circles where the worst that happens is your ass itches instead of the one where a demon cackles while slowly ramming a hot spike up your ass.

In other words, in the grand scheme of things what happened to me was a minor annoyance, and really minor in comparison to the kind of suffering many other people in the U.S. and elsewhere have been enduring, a fuckload worse than having your generator temporarily disabled during a power outage and not being able to post about metal on the worldwide web. I feel lucky, and am glad I have the sense to see my good luck.

I also accept the reminder that even in the modern age we’re helpless in the face of Nature, no matter how much some people think we’re Masters of the Universe. If only more people understood that and acted on the understanding.

My wife is still out of town. Even after I wasn’t forced to, I kept the tv off. With no one around except the cats, it has been a very quiet week (the generator is far enough away from the house that I couldn’t hear it.) And for a big chunk of that time I couldn’t listen to music either, making everything even more quiet.

I’ve tried to do some catching up on new music since Thursday afternoon. But I’m not masochistic enough to try to carefully go through the 4-5 days of NCS e-mails I missed, or figure out what happened on music-related social media or elsewhere during the blank spots. That makes today’s roundup even more random than usual. These are a few things I spotted (well, more than a few) that I thought would be worth your time; they were well worth mine.

The first seven of the following nine new songs and videos provide a varied experience in metallic extremity. The penultimate one is still metal, but not as extreme. The final one is a curveball. Obviously, I quite like all of them and hope you will too.

 

LACABRA (U.S.)

In part because I live in the Seattle area, I’ve been able to follow the progress of Lacabra from their inception, and even before that when three of the members were in Locistellar, including being in the audience for live shows (which have always been killer). They’ve put a lot of effort into gigging and spreading the word about themselves, and it seems to have paid off because now Lacabra have a self-titled debut album coming out on May 9th via M-Theory Audio.

Last week we got a video for a single off the album named “Enemy“. Lance Neatherlin is a charismatic frontman, and the video gives a good sense of that. He’s also got a viciously commanding voice. As for what goes on around him, Lacabra deliver piercing, sinister leads, savagely swarming and feverishly bursting riffs, and gut-busting grooves. The song also includes devilishly good soloing that kicks the song’s already high adrenaline quotient even higher.

In short, it’s a very cool display of Lacabra’s hybridizing of blackened death metal, groove, and guitar-centric rock from many decades past (my head got flashes of Thin Lizzy and Maiden, but yours may latch onto something else).

This is the third single from Lacabra‘s debut album, which features metal-as-hell cover art by Nestor Avalos. I’ve included videos for the first two, “Fractured” and “Human Quilt“. We premiered the first of those here, and reviewed the second one here.

https://lnk.to/lacabra
https://lacabrametal.bandcamp.com/album/lacabra
https://www.facebook.com/lacabrametal

 

BORGNE (Switzerland)

The prolific Swiss musician Bornyhake is bringing us a new album under the name of his longest-running vehicle, the industrial black metal band Borgne. My next recommendation today is the first advance song from the album, “Ils me rongent de l’intérieur“.

Without pause, Borgne launches a rumbling and marauding attack elevated by sweeping keys and laced with wildly whirling guitars. Bornyhake snarls like a cornered beast, strangling but still dangerous. And the music sounds dangerous too, like a raging but glorious conflict among unearthly powers. One of the pulsating melody lines seems to channel despair and agony in the midst of the music’s sky-high incendiary tones and the full-throttle drive of the bass and drums.

Even the blazing guitars and sweeping synths begin to sound desperate as well, but as the grooves pound with earthshaking force we also get visions of imperious majesty. All in all, it’s quite breathtaking… until the song suddenly manifests another dimension, an eerily whispering and snarling void in which an acoustic guitar creates a somber but elegant presence.

Borgne‘s new album is entitled Renaître de ses fanges. It will be released by Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions in many formats on March 14th.

https://ladlo.bandcamp.com/album/rena-tre-de-ses-fanges
https://borgne.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/borgneblackmetal/

 

DISFUNERAL (France)

This band’s name sends a couple of intelligible signals. The “funeral” part connotes the presence of death (as in “death metal”, though it could also be interpreted as a signpost for funeral doom). And many bands that have “Dis-” at the front of their names are drawing the connection to the punk band Discharge and their many progeny. How accurate are these signals?

You’ll get an answer from “Extremity in Morbidity“, the first advance track from their new album In Horror, Reborn. In part, it’s a big maliciously stomping death metal beast and in part a crust-punk slash-fest (also malignant), though as the drums snap like a metronome tremolo’d riffage also creates a vicious swarm. Crazed howls and scream add to the song’s ferocity, and ecstatically feverish fretwork give it a wild energy.

It’s only 2 1/2 minutes long, but Disfuneral pack a hell of a lot into that short run-time, including a gloriously spiraling guitar solo in the finale.

In Horror, Reborn will be released by Redefining Darkness Records on April 25th.

https://disfuneral-fr.bandcamp.com/album/in-horror-reborn
https://www.facebook.com/Disfuneral/

 

BRINGERS OF DISEASE (U.S.)

Bringers of Disease trace their origins to 2008, but we haven’t heard from them since an EP they released in 2011. Now we will hear them again, because after that long hiatus they’re releasing a new two-song EP named March of the Burning Tower. It’s the work of these people, and you should recognize at least some of these names from their work elsewhere:

Logan Madison – Vocals
Jason Phillips – Guitar, Vocals
Zack Simmons – Drums
Jeff Wilson – Guitar
Jon Woodring – Bass

The new EP’s title song is the one that’s available for listening now. It pounds and heaves forward like some titanic black-hearted beast, with swirls of eerily quivering melody around it that sound both miserable and supernatural. The beast has a scalding and screaming voice, frightening to the core of its derangement, as if the megaton low-frequency crushing and surreal high-toned quivering weren’t scary enough.

If you were standing, the song would put you into a full-body heave, lurching back and forth to its massive grooves, while the freakish and piercing soloing feels like psychedelics are being mainlined into the listener’s brain.

March of the Burning Tower will be released by Jeff Wilson‘s disorder-recordings on March 28th.

https://bringersofdiseaseoh.bandcamp.com/album/march-of-the-burning-tower
https://www.facebook.com/BringersOfDisease/

 

VENOMOUS ECHOES (U.S.)

In the spring of last year I got to premiere a song from the second album of Venomous Echoes, Split Formations And Infinite Mania. When I do song premieres here, I rarely have time to listen to the entire release, but in this case I did. I was so dumbfounded by the album as a whole that I attempted to review it in the context of that premiere. I found myself in shuddering but exhilarated agreement with the label’s summing up of that album as “an intimate and personal experience into a universal cosmic horror apocalypse”, and spilled a lot of words in an effort to explain why.

Now that same label, I, Voidhanger Records, has just released another Venomous Echoes album, this new one named Dysmor. How does the label sum up this one? “It’s a whirlwind of horror and physical and mental suffering, which once again affirms the superior beauty of darkness over light.”

To help spread the word in advance of the release, Venomous Echoes and the label released an astonishing video made by Corvin Film for the new album’s title track. The filmmakers state: “All props, makeup, and prosthetics were made by hand by Richard and Alice Corvinus. No Ai was used in this video.”

The video is surreal and scary as shit, and the music displays both of those qualities too. The dissonant and discordant sounds are brutish and crazed, sounds of ramming malice and contorting pain, sounds of frenzy and confusion. A trilling lead guitar also introduces wails of hopelessness and shrill spasms of lunacy. The bass sounds like it’s chewing through rock. The drum patterns change constantly. Sparkling organ keys create moments of enticing but still unhealthy mystery. A sax seems to add its sorrow at the end. And the wide-ranging vocals are themselves a shattering manifestation of hostility and torment.

Venomous Echoes is the solo work of Ohio-based Ben Vanweelden, who, as the label explains, “pours into music the frustrations and fears due to the body dysmorphia that afflicts him.” I haven’t yet listened to all of Dysmor, but will include the full stream after the video.

https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dysmor
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095607218571

 

EXTERMINATUS (Canada)

Vancouver, BC is home base for the Exterminatus quintet. Their third album, Echoes From A Distant Star Part I is slated for release on April 18th. As the title suggests, it’s a concept album, described by the band as follows: “If this album were a book, then each track is a chapter. The story is about our protagonist watching the creation of our universe; the cyclical and holographic nature of our existence, and a sinister revelation of the truth behind it all.”

The album’s first single, “The Signal“, is a high-powered, head-spinning death metal escapade. It’s a jaw-dropping technical fireworks display but also a bludgeoner. The soloing is electrifying but also flows fluidly and freakishly. The vocals sound like the barking of a big bear (if bears barked), growling the words almost as fast as the instrumentalists are flying.

The music does quickly begin to sound like the hyper-accelerated machinations of off-planet cyborgs furiously constructing something unfathomable to human eyes. And although the song seems to fade away as it approaches the 2:30 mark, it doesn’t end but instead transforms. We seem to enter a mysterious cosmic void, though grand and grieving chords can be heard at the outset and electronic bursts at the end.

https://exterminatus.bandcamp.com/album/echoes-from-a-distant-star-part-i
https://linktr.ee/exterminatus
https://www.facebook.com/exterminatusband

 

TETRAMORPHE IMPURE (Italy)

Tetramorphe Impure hail from the Alpine north of Italy. The band is the creation of Damien, a former member of Mortuary Drape. On April 18th, the Aesthetic Death label will release the band’s debut album, The Sunset of Being. The album consists of four songs, and one of them is streaming now.

In part, “Night Chants” follows a funeral doom aesthetic, slow in its momentum, ponderous in its significant weight, but also glittering with strange and enticing sonic lights. Like a dying beast, the music also miserably heaves in the low end, and those sparkling lights begin to sound bereft.

But what begins in a way reminiscent of funeral doom evolves. The vocalists serrated-edge growls begin to sound more furious. The drums begin to rumble and then blast. The riffing becomes feverish, like a dense and violent swarm. The pattern of ebbing and flowing continues, and as the pacing slows and accelerates, the band bring in other ingredients, including psychedelic guitars and glimmering synths, and the vocals diminish to gritty and sinister spoken words and infernal chants before roaring again.

The song is thus an amalgam of spectral and near-hypnotic eeriness, pulverizing heft, and oppressive gloom, perhaps plausibly summed up as “atmospheric funeral death doom”. Thoughts of Evoken come to mind….

https://aestheticdeath.bandcamp.com/album/the-sunset-of-being
https://www.facebook.com/tetramorphe.impure
https://tetramorpheimpure.bandcamp.com/

 

CICONIA (Spain)

What’s the most fun thing about this next video is a close call — watching the three players in Ciconia perform the song “Burning Red” or listening to the sounds they’re making.

It is indeed a lot of fun watching this trio do their things, shrouded in smoke and completely focused and absorbed in their execution. And they need to be focused, because the music is intricate and fast-changing. It’s also an enthralling combination of lead-weighted bass-grooves, neck-popping drumwork, and exhilarating high-pitched guitar solos that sound jubilant, like swallows in flight (the soloing almost sounds like rippling keys, but you’ll see that it isn’t that).

There’s one instrumental ingredient in the music that isn’t being performed in the video — a piano. It appears suddenly (like every other sudden change in the song), providing its own lively elegance near the end, and making the song seem even more joyous. (There’s no clean singing in Ciconia‘s music, nor vocals of any other kind, but I don’t think you’ll miss them.)

The song is from the band’s new album Synaesthetic Garbage. It will be released by Art Gates Records on March 14th. You can listen to two more songs at Ciconia‘s Bandcamp page.

https://bfan.link/burning-red-1
https://artgatesrecords.com/store/en/ciconia
https://ciconia.bandcamp.com/album/synaesthetic-garbage
https://www.facebook.com/ciconia666

 

LORSQUE LES VOLCANS DORMENT (France)

As you know if you’ve come slumming around this place in the past, I often enjoy ending these roundups of new songs and videos with a curveball (baseball season will soon begin yay!). And this is one of those times.

The main reason I stayed with this video and song was because I was so intrigued by the faces of all the people on stage and the varied instruments they were playing (if I’m being honest, I also became particularly spellbound by guest vocalist Aline Boussaroque‘s bare midriff). I mean, the music, though entrancing (including Aline‘s singing), was far, far away from what I intended to spend my time absorbing in preparation for today’s column.

But I was even happier I stayed with it when it reached the 4:00 mark. You can feel something building even before then — and then you realize, kind of astonishingly, that Aline can do something else with her voice beyond crooning with great emotion, and the band crank up the intensity too.

I think that’s all I’ll say about that — better for you to be surprised, and hopefully as captivated with the entire experience as I was.

The song, lyrically inspired by Charles Baudelaire, is “La Chute du Pélican” and it’s taken from the self-titled debut album of this feminist post-rock collective (which includes members of Bank Myna and Skinsitive), set to release on March 14th via Voice Of The Unheard Records. You can pre-order it here:

https://lorsquelesvolcansdorment.bandcamp.com/album/lorsque-les-volcans-dorment

This is the second single and video from the album. The first one, “Monstruations“, is also worth hearing and watching. It features a different vocalist, Sélia Louise Château, and it’s groovesome and glitchy, buoyant and mysterious, and like the second single it intensifies (and the video brings its own bloody surprises).

https://www.facebook.com/lorsquelesvolcansdorment/
https://www.instagram.com/lorsque_les_volcans_dorment/

photo by Frederique-Mariot