To follow up on yesterday’s personal report: The food cooked deep underground turned out extremely well. Our fire continued to roar. The beer and wine didn’t run out. The forecast thunderstorms and hail didn’t arrive, though ominous clouds constantly raced across blue skies, and in the late afternoon they paused long enough to provide a brief drenching.
That did put a literal damper on our outdoor picnic, followed by scenes of people warming their backsides next to the fire bowl, with hilarious sights of steam coming off the butt-side of wet jeans. Not long after, people started going their separate ways just before sunset.
So, what might have been another late night for me turned into a relatively early collapse into bed. Yet I listened to no music yesterday other than vibrant songs from Mexico and Guatemala pumping from a boom box, with lots of marimba, accordion, and tuba in the mix. Today is also Father’s Day.
With all that, today’s collection of metal like yesterday’s isn’t as extensive as I’d like, but still worth your time (I hope you’ll agree). I’ve launched it with a trio of mind-benders,
OCCULTA VERITAS (Italy)
I decided to begin with a couple of head-spinners that come our way courtesy of I, Voidhanger Records. The first of them is a song from the debut album of Occulta Veritas, a project created by Noise Trail Immersion guitarist Daniele Vergine (accompanied on the album by bassist Gabriele Ponziano).
On “The Sacred Horizons of Totality” Vergine‘s vocals are the kind of crazed screaming tirades you might think capable of boiling the paint off your walls. While he shrieks like a madman, the complex and dissonant guitar maneuvers sound equally mad but also bleak — writhing and chiming, mewling and convulsing in shrill arpeggios, burrowing like frantic worms and grimly scraping like an iron file.
Meanwhile, the drums eject vivid blasting bursts and off-kilter snare rhythms, and the bass throbs and rumbles from miles below.
A fascinating and discombobulating song, one likely to leave you wondering what the hell just happened.
The album is Irreducible Fear Of The Sublime, and I, Voidhanger will release it on July 19th. The cover art was painted by Vama Marga.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/irreducible-fear-of-the-sublime
https://www.facebook.com/OccultaVeritas/
TODESSTOSS (Germany)
If you can imagine it, the next song is even more discombobulating than the first one in today’s collection, in part because this one (“Antirobotid“) is several minutes longer. It’s from Das Liebweh-Dekret, the first album in seven years by Martin Lang‘s Todesstoss project (a name that means “Deathblow”), also set for release by I, Voidhanger on July 19th.
Once upon a time (almost 9 years ago) I described the music of Todesstoss as “a phantasmagoric and chaotic experience,” “like being pulled into the whirlpool of a disintegrating reality — or sucked through a wormhole into an entirely different dimension.” Fundamentally, the surreal experience of “Antirobotid” leaves me feeling much the same, though it’s generally more downcast.
One thing you’ll notice pretty fast are the striking percussive tones that leap from the speakers in the midst of the dense roiling riffage with a fuzzed-out tone, the strangely mumbling and musing bass lines, and the scorching screams. But you’ll also soon notice the despairing nature of echoing clean pronouncements and singing, and the dismal moods explored by the layers of worming and jabbing guitars.
The song is hallucinatory and sinister as well as depressive, and theatrical in its presentation, especially in the vocals, which seem to manifest as a dialogue among different demented and possibly diabolical characters. By the end, the singing seems like a supernatural choir, and the bass rises in lonely grief as the surrounding music reaches a pinnacle of distress.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/das-liebweh-dekret
MOUTH OF CEDAR (Int’l)
I have one more mind-bender for you before moving on to other things. The most mind-bending of the three, it comes from a multi-national collective whose participants are also members of many other groups, some metal and some less easily defined as metal. Among them are Nuno Lourenço from Salqiu and the prolific Jared Moran (e.g., Cave, Acausal Intrusion, Occulsed). For this new band they’ve taken the name Mouth of Cedar.
The band’s debut album, In the Garden of Earthly Delights, is described this way by The Centipede Abyss label, which plans to release it on July 11th:
Allow yourself to be consumed by Surreal machinations, deceptive and shapeshifting scenes, morphing sensations, that pulsate from the garden of earthly delights…. FFO Lychgate, Bach, Emperor, Scrambled Defuncts
Judging from the first advance track, “Ushered Out from the Plane of Existence“, Mouth of Cedar‘s mission is an experimental one, leaving naught but perplexed questions about how in the world they conceived, planned, or executed their collaboration, unless it was all improvised, as it might have been.
In some respects the music is brazen and blaring, but in others freakishly twisted, peppered with glittering tones thrown at the listener like dream-spears that rapidly mutate as they fly. It’s accompanied by a crazed cavalcade of diabolically macabre harsh vocals, a constantly fluxing and frequently jaw-dropping drum performance by Moran, and a bass that seems persistently off on its own jubilant frolics, just as the guitars are.
I found myself riveted by the song, in part because of the eye-popping technical skill of the instrumentalists and the sheer madness of the vocals, but also because their bizarre escapades became strangely entrancing.
I’m sure some other people won’t find it entrancing but may race for the exits; I’d nail the exit doors shut if I could, but then there’s the fire code to worry about….
https://centipedeabyss.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-garden-of-earthly-delights
https://www.facebook.com/mouthofcedar
HORNED ALMIGHTY (Denmark)
I think after that opening trio, and especially the last song, it’s time to re-set the day (to borrow a phrase from Edge of Tomorrow), and what better way to do that than with yet another song off the forthcoming seventh album from the mighty Horned Almighty.
This new one, “Gospels of Sickness“, arrived with a video that uses the band’s fearsome corpse-painted visages to enhance the sinister fearsomeness of the music.
True to its name, there’s a feeling of dread illness in the slash and moan of the opening chords. The disease soon propagates much faster as the drums bolt loose and the riffing begins boiling, accompanied by nimble bass maneuvers.
After an extended roar, the riffing slithers and swarms, backing hellish screams (and more roars), intercepted by thrashing bursts and chime-like guitar-wails. When the pace slows, and the vocalist dons a mask, it feels like plague has come, dragging its pestilent claws across miserable masses.
Horned Almighty‘s new album is Contagion Zero. It will be released by Soulseller Records on July 5th.
https://soulsellerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/contagion-zero
https://soulsellerrecords.aisamerch.com/
https://www.facebook.com/hornedalmighty
https://www.instagram.com/hornedalmighty
SÓLSTAFIR (Iceland)
I’m happy to report that Sólstafir have recently released a new single, perhaps as a precursor to a new album on their new label (Century Media) that will follow 2020’s Endless Twilight of Codependent Love, and that it arrived with a video set in a mossy and decaying old cemetery shrouded in wafts of smoke.
At first, the music of “Hin Helga Kvöl” (“The Holy Torment”) is itself haunted and mist-like, but there’s something ominous about the heavy pounding of drums that joins in, and the chords then begin channeling sinister moods as the drumming starts rumbling and tumbling.
What will come next? Because with this band you really can’t know. Happily, I can say that what comes next are racing tremolo’d riffs with a desperate air, pummeling drums, and savage screams and wails, i.e., a blaze of distressing black metal, propelled to mystical and epic heights by Addi Tryggvason‘s glittering, whirring solo.
Again the music races, but continues to gleam, like some wildfire not entirely of this world, but you’ll also get to rock out and bend your neck as Addi wails the words before a final gale of exhilarating intensity.
“It is a song about dying,” he says. “It is about the realization that you will die sooner than later and consciously witnessing the end of your own world. It is one’s own personal idea of Ragnarök – or Armageddon. What happens afterwards? Are we reborn or are we simply food for the worms…”
https://solstafir-band.lnk.to/HinHelgaKvolID
https://www.facebook.com/solstafirice/
HEXEN HOUSE (U.S.)
I have an enormous pile of interesting new EPs and albums I want to hear in full, including new records from bands whose past music I’ve greatly enjoyed. But the one I picked to end today’s column is Retributiones Maleficarum Mallei, the debut of a band named Hexen House from the North Bay Area of California.
I was pulled into the EP by the intro track, “Invoking The Witches Hammer”. The EP is described as one “delving into the sacred history of the witch trials and fervor and depravity that inspired their cruelty”. That investigation is presaged by the spoken-word sample in the opener, accompanied by mysterious orchestration and haunting piano keys.
From there, Hexen House launch into “Exhumed Tetrad”. With the words viciously spewed by grating snarls ugly enough to shiver the spine, the band start and stop, hammering and slashing, and then boil over in a twisted miasma of whirling and darting minor-key fretwork, undergirded by big bass-lines and constantly changing drumwork.
The music morphs constantly, softening the experience with a glittering, shimmering, and humming mid-section, and then building toward a phase of piercing guitar delirium that accelerates across the channels into even greater delirium as the drums blast away.
Over the next three songs, Hexen House continue to prove the elaborate dynamism of their songwriting and the technical impressiveness of their execution, while also creating a changing atmosphere that’s sinister and supernatural, beckoning and beguiling, mad and magical, albeit with those vocals always adding the kind of fanged ferocity that conjures images of a vicious beast tugging at its chains.
In keeping with the EP’s conception, they also bring in moments of soulful misery (e.g., “The Hag”) as well as racing onslaughts of barbarism (“Keeper of the Sacred Flame”). And at the very end, in the introductory phase of “Buried Names”, they move well outside the bounds of black metal with an instrumental opening that’s seductive, soulful, and sad (with even a hint of “Up Where We Belong” in the ringing guitar melody) — until those rasping snarls and scratchy guitar tones remind us where we are. Later that song becomes much proggier and hallucinatory as it whirls and cavorts before reaching a dismal end.
In short, this has proved to be a very impressive discovery and one I’m very happy to share with you.
https://transylvanianrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/hexen-house-retributiones-maleficarum-mallei