(written by Islander)
I’m afraid I have a self-imposed deadline to finish this weekly collection of music from the blacker arts so I can turn to other obligations, and so I’ll dispense with an introduction and dive right into all the quite varied music I’ve picked for your entertainment and edification.
DROUTH (U.S.)
To begin, here’s “False Grail“, a startling new song from a new album named The Teeth of Time by Portland’s Drouth.
Ominous and stalking at first, the song becomes a rhythmic hybrid of avalanche and earthquake, pierced by wildly roiling guitars and throat-rupturing screams. The wild intensity is near-overpowering, enough to blow the top of your head off, though it’s leavened first by the fevered surge of a more fierce and feral riff and augmented by haughty growls, and then later by a slow and staggering march in which the music groans and weeps, like a condemned man on the way to the gallows with his family rending their clothes along his side.
This song includes a viola performance by Eva Vonne. The fascinating lyrics are also worth reading; you can find them at Bandcamp. And in case you need further encouragement, here’s commentary about the song from another source, Machine Music‘s Ron Ben-Tovim, which I saw here this morning:
That rare breed of band that makes music that is as inspired and melodic as it is evil-sounding and horrifying. I’d put Woe and God’s Bastard (RIP Drew) here too. The soul exploding into a supernova of emotion that just so happens that the way in which said eruption takes place is blackened death metal. Or something. Very, very cool, regardless of my idiotic wording.
The Teeth of Time will be released on May 16th through Eternal Warfare Records. The incredible cover art was made by Drouth guitarist/vocalist Matt Stikker.
https://drouth.bandcamp.com/track/false-grail
http://facebook.com/drouthpdx
DĖMONOS (India)
In an earlier iteration of this column I highlighted a dynamic and tremendously powerful new song named “Polyhedra“, the title track off a new EP by the Indian occult/avant-garde black metal band Démonos. Now you can listen to the whole EP, and I urge you to do that.
Very much like the title song, the EP as a whole is an elaborate and changing tapestry of tones and traditions. Within the weave are of course the charging martial ferocity, dismal coldness, and terrifying screams of raw black metal. But also in the weave are ethereally ringing keys, mystical and mournful melodies that catch in the head, choral cries, the echo of wailing chants, strangled snarls, feminine singing that pierces the heart, and something like the spine-tingling howl of wolves.
In these respects the music braids together destruction and elegance, near-berserk malice and a haunting kind of spirituality. Though I’m far from an expert in Indian musical traditions, the melodies also have that kind of resonance which even I can detect, exotic and ancient to these western ears.
And there’s grandeur as well as dark sorcery in those strains, especially in “Dakini Rise“, which is both spellbinding and frightening — but also seemingly stricken with grief, or offering sinister peril, as the music slowly sways like a cobra above bursts of military percussion.
The closing track “Darwinian Hex” is yet another horse of a different color. It’s in the vein of dungeon synth, mystical and medieval, eerily chilling and unearthly, drawing influence from such ’90s manifestations as Vond by Mortiis. It includes yet another variation in the vocals, weirdly warping electronics, and primitive percussive throbs. As Démonos Obscurís explains, it provides “a meditative calming closure to the tumultuous sounds of the album,” and surprisingly seems to fit perfectly with everything else.
Polyhedra is available digitally and will be released on tape by Fiadh Productions, who share the opposition of Démonos to religious bigotry, racism, and misogyny.
https://demonosmuzik.bandcamp.com/album/polyhedra
https://fiadh.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/demonosmuzik/
SVARTA HAVET (Finland)
Prosthetic Records explains that Svarta Havet (Swedish for “Black Sea”) “were born from the Finnish DIY punk and hardcore scene, with the members bonding over a shared affinity for punk music and community-first ideals with a focus on antifascist, feminist, trans and queer politics.”
You’ll definitely see the DIY punk and hardcore aesthetic on display when you watch the next video of a live performance by the band. But when you hear the song, you’ll also understand why I included it in this column.
Most notably, the blood-spraying screams of vocalist Lotta in “Alla sover” (“everyone is sleeping”) are frighteningly intense, and the dense whir of the riffing is dire, even though segmented by frantic fretwork pulsations (distressing in a different way).
The song also turns out to be quite multi-faceted. Though the drums gallop and blast, they also rumble and rock. The big bass-throbs are nimble but punchy. The guitars writhe and wail as well as cut like a scythe. And at its lowest ebb, the music slowly drapes the listener in the heavy cloth of misery and anguish, though the vocals still sound like a panther fighting for its life — until they gasp at the end.
I’ll also include Lotta‘s explanation about the song’s themes:
Alla sover portrays a sort of grotesque party on a speeding train at the potential end of the world.
“Fill up the champagne glasses, let us toast to the final hour!”
It is about most things being pretty firmly on the road to ruin, no climate targets are being met, over 70 000 tons of explosives have been dumped on Gaza since October of 2023. Alla sover describes the feeling of being a privileged citizen of today’s world – someone that has never known true strife because of the luck of being born into privilege in the Global North, but who instead has to live with the fact that we and our lifestyle are a large contributing factor to how the world looks today. Alla sover deals with this feeling of complicity and powerlessness. The song ends in some sort of collapse where the protagonist lays down on the rails after the last train of partiers has left, making a last plea to the birds to keep singing.”
The song is the first single from Svarta Havet‘s forthcoming sophomore album, Månen Ska Lysa Din Väg (“The moon will light your way”), which Prosthetic will release on May 9th.
https://svartahavet.bandcamp.com/album/m-nen-ska-lysa-din-v-g
https://www.facebook.com/svartahafvet
LUX INTERNA (U.S.)
New Wilderness Gospel is the forthcoming fifth album by Lux Interna after a decade of silence. It’s described by the Auerbach Tonträger label as “a fever-dream of haunted Americana, apocalyptic mysticism, and cinematic folk noir” — “a spectral tapestry woven from the deep twang of desert blues, the ghostly echoes of Appalachian folk and gospel, the eerie shimmer of psychedelia and post-punk, and the raw intensity of American Gothic balladry.”
All of that may or may not be alluring for you, but either way, you’re probably wondering what a song from that new album is doing in this column at this site, especially when I tell you it’s a ballad, a love song. Maybe when you see the words in the lyric video for “Like Wolves” you’ll understand.
Mainly, I was entranced by the music and the words. It all got caught in my head. Rather than go further with my own description, I’ll just leave you with the extensive and eloquent reflections of Lux Interna‘s Joshua Levi Ian:
“Like Wolves” is an invocation of hunger, wildness, and transformation – a spiritual howl in the dark. Both a love song and a battle cry, it prowls the liminal space between sainthood and savagery, where the sacred and the profane tangle together in the fever of the desert night.
Written on a restless road trip through the Mojave, the song channels the energy of its vast expanses and all-night dives. Headlights cut through dust; a neon cross flickers in the distance; static-soaked blues haunt the radio waves with warnings from the past. “Like Wolves” swaggers forward with a warped vision of reverbed 1960s surf guitars, soaring strings, lurching Shangri-Las-esque basslines, and hypnotic rhythms, swerving recklessly between darkness and light, desire and devotion, before converging in an ecstatic embrace of a truth beyond all dualisms.
This song is about learning to look unflinchingly into the fiercer face of love learning to be truly alive. While wandering the high desert, we spent time with a company of wolves at a rescue shelter. Though exiled from their native lands, they remained untamed – ferociously alive, alight with something far wilder than mere survival. Looking into their eyes, we saw the same fire we sought to feed within us.
This song translates sparks of that fire into sound. When your world starts to fall apart, you’re forced to make a choice – capitulate or create. Either submit, or bare your teeth and let the wild in. But first, you have to find the space within yourself that is still feral, still free.
http://lnk.spkr.media/luxinterna-gospel
https://luxinterna.bandcamp.com/album/new-wilderness-gospel
https://www.facebook.com/luxinternamusic
AASH (Germany)
I will explain in a moment why I think this next song by the German one-man band Aash is worth your time, but honestly, it’s the imagery in the accompanying video that pulled me in. You’re looking at an example of it above.
Some of the images repeat, and then some of them begin to move, and new images are interspersed. They’re creepy and unsettling but it’s really hard to look away. I would also say they’re NSFW (do people still bother with that warning?), even though there’s only a moment of nudity, especially if you work for the U.S. federal government and haven’t yet been fired.
As for the music itself, it’s a vicious storm of feverish riffing that wildly rises and cruelly falls, backed by head-snapping beats that both fire like fusillade flurries and pop like metronomes. In keeping with the music, the vocals rabidly scream and maliciously roar the words.
The riffing evolves, and eventually slows, as a prelude to a vividly darting arpeggio and choral singing which together sound witchy and seductive, something unexpected and welcome. But then Aash loose the demon horde again, and the guitars go wild again, but as wild as they are the riffs are catchy too.
https://aash-band.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/timo.ehahn
MRAKOMOR (Czechia)
To conclude, I’d like to recommend World of Dying Muses, a late-February EP by the Czech band Mrakomor –“An EP about how a world where you have to wear masks to survive sometimes kills the muses…” Four songs long, the EP ranges in its sounds, but elaborates a consistent emotional theme in which joy plays no role.
The opening title song fashions a slow and ringing instrumental harmony, though harmony might be too exaggerated a term, given the piercing dissonance of the more shrill and wrenching half of the melody. Either way, the song’s sadness is inescapable. You might be tempted to call it dark neo-folk if the sounds weren’t so abrading.
The follower “Sad Faces Empty Phrases” is a different aural experience, primitive and scarring, head-moving but harrowing. It’s dominated by a deep and distorted riff, like the growling grief of a leviathan beast, though again that shrill instrument from the opening song sticks its needles in the ears again.
The bass drum delivers a weighty slug to get things moving a bit faster; the snap of the snare hints at post-punk; and the riff becomes more feverish, more distraught. The vocals, equally distorted, are equally distressing, a collage of ragged screams, cracking cries, and woozy moans.
“The Essence of Decadence” backs off a bit at first, returning to the brittle and scalpel-like tones of the title song, a solitary mourning. But then it moves into the sounds and moods that inhabited “Sad Faces Empty Phrases“, with the brutally distorted instruments moaning and whining in extremis and the kick-drum kicking like boots on a man down. The vocals are as tortured as before, and the music, while again scarring, again gets stuck in the head like a gouging spike.
The EP concludes with another instrumental, “For the Poets“. It still sizzles with distortion, still joins together the low-timbre and high-timbre instruments from the opener, still painfully tugs at the heartstrings like the vanishing of someone or something you knew well and treasured.
The extremely cool cover art was made by Forgottenlogos V.