(written by Islander)
It’s only Wednesday and the week has already seen the release of a lot of notable new songs and videos. Taking advantage of the fact that I only had one premiere on the calendar for today, I decided to pull together some of the new sights and sounds so that the usual Saturday roundup this week might not be as obese as the one I did last Saturday.
SCHAMMASCH (Switzerland)
Yesterday Prosthetic Records announced the sixth studio effort by the Swiss band Schammasch, and the second in their The Maldoror Chants series, which draws upon a 19th-century surrealist book entitled Les Chants de Maldoror. The new album is named The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean, and it’s set for release on October 25th. The themes of the album, based upon those texts, are captured in these words:
photo by Ester Segarra
“Old Ocean inherits an underlying sense of a longing; a longing to step outside of human society, to wash away the profanities and petty struggles – to dissolve into the unfathomable yet somewhat peaceful void of the sea, vanishing into the great unknown.”
Along with the album announcement the band revealed a fascinating video created by C.S.R/Eye of Saros for a song called “They Have Found Their Master“, described as follows:
“They Have Found Their Master is the looming of a tempest wave closing in, the destructive force of a monolithic wall of water, swallowing everything in its way to culminate in the melodic furiosity of classic 90s black metal towards the end, additionally embellished by Kathrine Shepard‘s hauntingly beautiful vocal contribution.”
Before the looming wave rises in the song, the band set the stage with a strummed acoustic harmony, feverishly pulsating and rippling notes, and big tumbling drums, collectively creating an air of mystery, wonder, seduction, and tension.
But then a crashing storm opens up, a deluge of glittering but sharp-edged riffing, thundering rhythms, and adamant howls. The flashing and chiming sounds and the tempestuous undercurrents create feelings of wonder and fear (which the video underscores).
This is a long song, and the band use its extravagant length to bring in sultry wailing vocals and to make the music more elaborate and mesmerizing but also more assaulting and ravishing — even more tempest-like, more vast, and more frightening, a true spectacle of epic proportions.
When Schammasch reprise but vary the song’s opening phase, the music becomes spell-binding again, with the wails this time sounding like a stricken angel.
https://linktr.ee/schammasch
https://schammasch.bandcamp.com/album/the-maldoror-chants-old-ocean
https://www.instagram.com/schammaschofficial
https://www.facebook.com/SCHAMMASCH/
DEFEATED SANITY (Germany)
Yesterday also brought us the lead single (and a video) from Defeated Sanity‘s new album, Chronicles of Lunacy. I’ll share this part of the press materials announcing the new album:
The band are revered for infusing old-school death metal with jazzy chaos and the technical precision of a classical composer. But when these four maniacs were thinking about their seventh album, the idea was to go easy on the brainteasers and get back to snapping necks.
Chronicles of Lunacy isn’t Defeated Sanity for dummies. Whether he’s hammering blast beats or springing between crash cymbals, founding member Lille Gruber never stops changing tempos during lead single “The Odour of Sanctity”. But this album does draw a jagged red line back to Defeated Sanity’s brutal origins.
True enough, “The Odour of Sanctity” wastes no time inflicting a furiously bludgeoning and skull-rattling attack, like some massive demolition machine gone out of control and being fired upon by a phalanx of machine guns. But it’s also true that the song’s tempo changes repeatedly, and the fretwork of both guitars and bass, plus the drum patterns, constantly mutate and morph.
So on the one hand, the song inflicts a thuggish slam-wise beating, but on the other hand it will give your brain lots of swift, discombobulating spins, like the work of technically proficient mad scientists feverishly pursuing experiments in the midst of brute-force monstrosities doing their own pulverizing things. Amazing to watch the band doing all this in the video too.
Chronicles of Lunacy will be out November 22nd on Season of Mist.
https://orcd.co/defeatedsanitythecroniclesoflunacy
https://defeatedsanity.bandcamp.com/album/chronicles-of-lunacy
https://www.instagram.com/defeated_sanity_official
https://www.facebook.com/DefeatedSanity
PAYSAGE D’HIVER (Switzerland)
This makes the third song in today’s roundup that was just released yesterday. Entitled “Urgrund“, it’s the first advance track from a new Paysage D’Hiver album named Die Berge (“the mountains”).
The album is described as “the last journey of ‘the wanderer’ in the realm of Paysage d’Hiver, a journey that “leads the wanderer’ to the top of the mountains in order to transcend into the next form of beingness.”
Brace yourselves, because “Urgrund” is 18 1/2 minutes long. Tempted as I am to linguistically map each step of this long journey, I’ll refrain. But I will say that the song does very much sound like a harrowing journey higher and higher up into jagged, hostile, ice-bound crags.
The lonely traveler, his heart thundering, encounters roiling torrents of frozen crystal that cut like knives, roaring and screaming his way forward in the midst of breathtaking gales that sound as vast as the looming peaks, and dodging the rumble of avalanche boulders coming down.
Caught in such a violent and unforgiving place, it would be easy to give up, but the traveler somehow forges onward, stomping upward in determination (along with the song’s jolting grooves and the pulsating wail of the lead guitar). The sweep and raw power and intensity of the music is essentially unrelenting, unceasing in its extremely harrowing and epic-scale sensations.
Even at the end, when the emotional quality of the music reaches a zenith of broken-ness and despair, and the drums drop like megaton bombs, it yields no relief — though it does leave me wondering what will happen next.
Urgrund will be released by Kunsthall Produktionen on November 8th.
https://paysagedhiver.bandcamp.com/album/die-berge
https://kunsthall.ch/
https://www.facebook.com/PaysagedHiver.Official/
MAN’S GIN (U.S.)
It’s been a long wait for another Man’s Gin album since the release of Rebellion Hymns in 2013, but at last the next one is on the way: On September 6th Profound Lore will release The Reprobate. As the label describes, it tells “a vagabond journey of desperation, despair, and dejection”.
Erik Wunder is of course again at the helm, but the list of contributors is extensive, and so eye-opening that I feel like naming them all:
Erik Wunder – Vocals, guitar, drums, percussion
Charlie Fell – Bass, drums
Sanford Parker – keyboards
Will Lindsay – Slide guitar
Bruce Lamont – Saxophone
Jarboe – Female vocals
Elise Wunder – Female vocals
Joey Marchfield – Piano
Robin Norman Wunder – Background vocals
Presley Show – Background vocals
The first single from the new album is “One Man Down“, and it turns out to be a slow build that escalates into remarkable intensity, and it’s also remarkably tough to get out of your head once you’ve heard it (well, that’s my guess about you, but a certainty in my case).
The dancing opening guitar melody rings and beckons as Wunder somberly chants the song’s title and the grim lyrics that follow. Just in time for the vocals to become a harsh cacophony, the song begins to hammer and blare, with the bass bruising the listener and those ringing notes growing more desperate and tormented.
Harmonized vocals enhance the song’s growing intensity even as it digs its hooks in deeper, and then begins to weave and become woozier even as the drums go off like a rapid exchange of gunfire in some urban canyon. The darkness and desperation in the music don’t relinquish their hold; if anything the experience becomes more expansive and vast. The bone-rocking grooves don’t relinquish their hold either — until the dismal and frightening spoken-word sample at the end.
https://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-reprobate
https://www.facebook.com/mansginofficial