AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ALIOTH BOREALIS — “THE MAUSOLEUM OF ALL HOPE AND DESIRE”

One of my tasks at NCS is to monitor the e-mails sent to our site. This is a tedious and terrible job. We get about 200 of them every day, at least half of which arrive because (perplexingly) we’re on mass lists used by some PR agents to promote non-metal music we have less than zero interest in. For other reasons many of the others don’t fit what we do around here (e.g., they’re “newsy” items or concern metal bands whose music isn’t in our wheelhouse).

Some days I don’t even have time to skim the subject lines. When I do, I try to pay particular attention to e-mails coming in from bands themselves, i.e., people who don’t have PR agents or labels backing them. I figure they need more help from sites like ours than groups who have some professional machinery behind them.

Of course, most musicians aren’t naturally talented self-promoters, and so (no criticism intended), a lot of band e-mails don’t set the hook quickly or effectively. However, the one I saw from Alioth Borealis definitely did do that. Check this out:

Alioth Borealis is atmospheric black metal from Cleveland OH with cosmic horror themes – 90’s Norway worship and an obsession with weird fiction and southern gothic literature.

Amidst a chanting circle of dark beings, a hooded figure recites from an arcane book, beckoning an ancient terror to alter existence. Shapes loom forth in a dimension without coordinates while strange new constellations appear.

And then I saw that the person behind Alioth Borealis (who goes by the name Vastarien) had enlisted Jesse Greenfeather (from Cloak, Burial Oath, Wyld Timez, and ex-Uada) as session drummer for the Alioth Borealis debut album.

So, the hook was set. And the more I learned, the deeper the hook went in.

For example, the name of the song from the album that we’re about to present in conjunction with Transmissions from the Dark — “The Mausoleum of All Hope and Desire” — refers to southern gothic author William Faulkner’s metaphor for the passage of time; as Vastarien wrote, “the search for certain hidden answers also surely ends at the gate of that same mausoleum”.

Here’s the passage from Faulkner‘s extraordinary novel The Sound and the Fury, a recollection by the character Quentin of his father’s words when the latter gave Quentin a watch:

“…I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire… I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

Last, I learned that the video for this song that you’re about to see was made by Austrian filmmaker Smara Kand. Shot in the Austrian Alps, it “tells a tale of a search for forbidden knowledge set against the dark majesty of the wilderness”.

I took in all of that before listening to a note or watching a frame. The hooks having been set, all that remained was for the song and video to reel me in — if they could. And obviously they did.

True to the band’s name, the music shines like glittering stars and wondrously shimmers and drifts like a borealis, backed by the warm hum of a bass and Jesse Greenfeather‘s steady but lively march and double-kick rumbles.

Shrill, piercing shrieks add shattering intensity, as if a soul is being torn like sheaves of paper, and the stratospheric waves of brilliant sound also begin to sound perilous and distressing. Those screams reverberate as if radiating from another dimension, and the music also sounds unearthly in more ways than the unearthliness of auroras and starshine.

There’s a nice brief surprise at the end, but one that is still in line with the preceding melodies, but I won’t spoil that for you.

As for the video, it’s beautiful and mysterious, and well-suits the music.

This is actually the second song to be revealed so far from the Alioth Borealis debut album. The first one, “Bone Colored Stars“, is elegant and sweeping, another elevation into cosmic brilliance and vastness, but is also more grim and gouging in the low end than the song we’ve premiered, and Jesse Greenfeather opens up the blasts and punches the pulse hard.

The song blazes and claws, drives fast and furiously, and the vocals are a raging torrent of knives, a shattering assault on the senses, yet still with a glimpse of the ethereal at the end.

 

 

The name of the Alioth Borealis debut album is Beyond the Stars / Below the Waves. It will be released in a physical format by Jems Label. One of the tracks features a guest vocal appearance by the shadowy Pittsburgh black metal master from Veska. In addition to performing the drums, Jesse Greenfeather also mixed the album.

For more info, check the links below.

https://aliothborealis.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/aliothborealis/
https://www.facebook.com/aliothborealis

https://jemslabel.bigcartel.com/
https://bandcamp.com/jemslabel
https://www.facebook.com/jemslabel