I got a really good head-start on this column yesterday, so good that I thought I’d be able to post it much earlier today than usual. But of course the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.
This mouse forgot that Daylight Savings Time would go into effect overnight, springing the clock forward. And then this mouse slept for 9 1/2 hours. Put those two together, and the morning was well underway by the time I turned to finishing this. Oh well.
What you’ll find below is an alternating sequence of songs from forthcoming records and complete releases, most of them head-spinning in different ways, but with a more meditative and deeply haunting experience at the end.
AMALEKIM (Italy/Poland)
It doesn’t matter how avidly you listen and try to become exposed to music, there’s just no way you’re going to be exposed even briefly to many bands, because the universe of them is so large and ever-expanding. Still, I’m surprised I had never heard the music of these occultists until yesterday. After all, they’ve already released two albums, and the second one was on the Avantgarde Music label, whose releases I try to pay close attention to.
What I heard yesterday was the opening Chant on their third album Shir Hashirim, which will also be released by Avantgarde Music. When I heard it, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, or that Amalekim were.
“Ra’al Zorem” begins with sounds of menace and grandeur, a mix of grim and dismal abrasion below and celestial peals of sound above, backed by solemn ritual pounding and fronted by bestial roars and maniac screams. The music builds in intensity and frightfulness until the drums explode in blasting mode and the guitars sear and miserably writhe.
Delirious fretwork spasms occur, and the music also gloriously glitters, growing ever more cataclysmic, but the mind-trick is that it also begins to sound like massed horns are trumpeting grand and grievous fanfares in the midst of the world-eating turbulence and asylum-quality vocals. The combined effect is breathtaking.
Shir Hashirim will be released on May 2nd. The cover painting is by Igor Datkiewicz.
https://avantgardemusic.bandcamp.com/album/shir-hashirim
https://amalekim.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Amalekim/
DERNIER SOUFFLE (France)
As I’m sure most of you know, a soufflé is a French baked egg dish, famously puffed up and fluffy after being cooked. And dernier means “last”. So when I first saw this band’s name, I imagined someone breathing a sigh of relief at getting the last delectable desert at their favorite bistro.
But that really didn’t seem right for a black metal band, especially one who named their debut album Abyss. So after a bit of research (not being a French speaker) I found that the word souffle without the final accent mark means “breath”. You can understand how that word became the basis for a dish that’s “puffed up”, and now the band’s name makes sense.
Dernier Souffle‘s musical vision of the abyss is a bleak and brutal place, hostile and heartless, afflicted and mad, but endless and without horizon.
They often drive hard and fast, with a lot of booming and battering percussion and cold, groaning weight in the low-end, but what quickly seizes attention are the shrill fire-bright flurries in the upper range and the cauterizing effect of fanatical screams and gritty snarls.
With sizzling and frantically swirling guitar and expansive symphonic synths, they dramatically elevate and expand the scale of the terrors they create, and they do so with such elaborateness that they make a listener’s head spin.
On the other hand, they leaven these grand calamities with softer reverberating passages of haunting eeriness, a couple episodes of soaring choral voices, and music that bespeaks agony and hopelessness, as well as bringing forward sweeping orchestral overlays that channel torment and despair.
There’s nothing “cheesy” about the orchestration; it’s obvious that Dernier Souffle use it because nothing less could help them fully realize the daunting, titanic scale of their abyssal visions.
But they do that in other ways too, thanks to the ringing echoes of clean guitars, abjectly funereal in their feeling, and the humongous power of the low-frequency heaves and thrusts. Their musical abyss is an abysmal place as well as one where all existence seems to be violently coming apart. The vocals seem to be coming apart at all times in the shocking extremity of their rage and pain.
I also want to specifically call out the closing track, “Black Ink of Humanity.” Nothing on the album is more vast, frighteningly majestic, or doomed, and the immense melody line that heaves its way through the song (to my ears at least) has an exotic, Middle Eastern or Persian resonance, and it really burrows in.
If you’re looking for uplift, look elsewhere. This does seem to be an imagining of humanity’s last breath. If you’re looking for an experience in darkest pageantry, welcome aboard. (I think you’ll also see why I closely followed Amelekim‘s song with this album.)
Abyss was released on February 14th and is available for a minimal price at Bandcamp. Dernier Souffle is a duo consisting of instrumentalist Alastor (ex-Glorior Belli and Temple of Baal) and vocalist Nico (Sin of Wrath).
https://derniersouffle.bandcamp.com/album/abyss
FRYKTELIG STØY (Australia)
Fryktelig Støy is Norwegian for “Horrible Noise”. It’s the solo work of Em Støy, formerly a member of the Australian black metal band Thrall and still a member of Oligarch. In her guise as Fryktelig Støy she released a debut album (Disappointment) through Gutter Prince Cabal in 2023, and will now follow that with a second album on I, Voidhanger Records.
The label provides a very evocative description of the album at Bandcamp. Here’s just a part of it:
Incandescent… is a contemplation of upheaval, death and motherhood refracted through a muscular blackened doom lens. Weaving multiple themes and influences into her vision of ignition in darkness, flight and witchcraft, Støy refuses to be bound by the restrictions and conventions of genre. Borrowing heavily from black metal, doom and post-rock, subtle and overt references to magic, transmutation, Satanism and existentialism permeate her Dionysian fury and creative ferment.
The opening song “Black Swan” is what comes next in today’s column. Like the album’s name, it’s incandescent. It’s also a vast calamity, monumental in scale and sweeping in scope, while berserk in its vocals. Like the first two selections in this column, the stratosphere of this dire song is orchestral in its magisterial breadth and power, and the vocals shattering in their wild extremity, holding nothing back.
Along with that, the song brings viscerally powerful drum-and-bass work, heavy and hurtling in its impact, and only one brief chance to catch your breath.
The new album Incandescent will be released by I, Voidhanger Records on April 11th.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/incandescent
SHEOL BLANC (France)
I’ve written about the music of Sheol Blanc on five previous occasions here, from 2018 through 2023, and it has never not astonished me. All those years ago it was Rennie Resmini (starkweather) who first introduced me to Sheol Blanc (through the debut album Solitaire dépravé), and I thank him again now for tipping me to a new one released just two days ago, even before I saw a Bandcamp alert based on my previous purchases.
The new album is plainly titled Depression, a condition that has evidently plagued Sheol Blanc‘s sole creator for a long time (he says he created the project “in 2016 while being hospitalized in a psychotherapeutic institute”). No one would blame you for categorizing the music as DSBM, but, as was true of past releases, there is so much more to the new album than what that label usually signifies.
You may need to get used to the screaming and wailing vocals, or maybe you’ll never get used to them. Adjectives like “unhinged”, “berserk”, and “freaked out” come to mind. They sound like the flooding-out of painful things kept dammed too long; rarely, they also vent the words in monstrous growls.
And as for the music, it’s probably not what you would expect from more conventional DSBM. The guitar melodies are piercing and ringing. Nearly clean but scratchy enough not to be entirely polished, they penetrate just as deeply as the madness of the vocals, in greater and lesser phases of intensity. They jangle and ripple and catch in the head fast, and they don’t go away easily.
And here again, we have a band who finds time to create sweeping expansiveness through orchestral or “big band” movements (I’m describing the effect, because I don’t know for sure whether synths were used to create the sounds of horns at all), though just as often a pitifully lonely guitar is the only instrument we hear, and at times (e.g., in “Confusion“) it sounds like a riot in progress.
Though the voice and the guitars seize attention the most prominently, the drumming is sharp in sound and constantly dynamic and variable, and the nuanced bass performance, while subtle, deserves attention as well. In all respects, there is a kind of elaborate elegance in the way all the pieces of the songs were conceived and plotted, even when the music is at its simplest.
I’ve hinted at the moods of the music, but to be more explicit: The moods range from forlorn to bewildered, from wistful to wrathful, from hopelessly agonized to a kind of resistance against agony (when the music occasionally seems to dance and even frolic), though defeat often seems to be waiting right around the corner.
One final word: This is a long album, in part because the last song “Justice“, the 10th one in order, is almost 21 minutes long. It’s extravagant in more ways than its length. It pulls together in one place all of the many phases and moods scattered across the preceding 9 songs. In that sense, it’s “more of the same” of what you’ve already heard at one time or another.
On the other hand, if you’ve already been won over by those 9 preceding songs before this one begins, you’ll welcome this additional abundance.
https://sheolblanc.bandcamp.com/album/depression
KEXELÜR (Chile)
I was lured into this next song based on descriptions of this Santiago-based trio’s music as a trip down “a rabbit hole of dissonant raw BM mixed with jazz, death, progressive metal/rock and psychedelic elements.” They have a couple of fairly recent demos and a split under their belt, and are now building upon that foundation with a debut album named Epigrama de un pasado perdido.
The first song published from the album, which is the opener, makes me want to listen to the rest of it. “Vestigios del enajenado por la antracita” is a head-spinner of a high order, a strange but relentlessly dazzling musical labyrinth. Around the sharply turning corridors, the music moves from foreboding in its mood to delirious, from darkly majestic to maniacally assaulting and oddly peculiar.
Around some of those turns, the music is surreal and trippy, indulgences in avant-garde lunacy. The music discordantly bounces off the walls like ball bearings or woozily weaves. Around some of them, demonic screams and crazed yells give way to drunken singing and bestial bellows.
The whole experience is mind-blowing, not only because of how wild the songwriting is but also because of how jaw-dropping the execution is. Technically, it’s as much a tour de force as it is a madcap adventure.
The album will be released April 18th on CD by Sun & Moon Records.
https://sunandmoonrecords.bandcamp.com/album/epigrama-de-un-pasado-perdido
https://kexelur.bandcamp.com/album/epigrama-de-un-pasado-perdido
https://www.facebook.com/p/Kexel%C3%BCr-100082704733993/
AKVAN (Iran)
And now to ease you down before we leave you, but not too easily.
I’ve mentioned before that the Iranian band اکوان (Akvan) is one whose releases I will always check out, and so when I got a Bandcamp alert on March 6th about a new one, I made time for it quickly. It’s just a two-song EP named for the second song, “A Time for Drunken Horses / زمانی برای مستی اسبها“. The first song is named “Turtles Can Fly / لاک پشتها هم پرواز میکنند“. Akvan‘s creator Vizaresa describes what brought them about:
The tracks featured on this release are inspired by two poignant films directed by Bahman Ghobadi: Turtles Can Fly and A Time for Drunken Horses, and were composed in the modes of Dastgāh-e Šur and Āvāz-e Afshāri, respectively.
I didn’t recognize those names at the end, but found articles about them here and here. They appear to be standardized musical systems or modes in Persian classical art music. I also was unfamiliar with the films, but read about those too, here and here. Both have won awards and have been lauded by reviewers here in the U.S. (for what that’s worth).
Traditional Persian music has always played key roles in Akvan‘s black metal, but in these new songs Akvan leaves the black metal ingredients in the wings as observers only, observers to a thoroughly spellbinding experience.
Both songs are sublimely beautiful and unearthly, even though inspired by tales of earthly horror and tragedy among Kurdish communities in Iran and Iraq. Like those tales, the music is also very sad, an elegant and heartfelt sadness. And Vizaresa‘s union of a rippling tar strings and shimmering keys becomes the voice of angels.
https://akvan.bandcamp.com/album/a-time-for-drunken-horses
https://www.facebook.com/akvanblackmetal/