(written by Islander)
I found enough time enough to pull together another mid-week roundup of new songs and videos. I picked all of these on Monday and started scribbling about them then, hoping to post this collection sooner than today. In the meantime, a lot of other new things have caught my attention, but those will have to wait ’til Saturday.
The first two of the songs and videos below are heart-pounders and neck-wreckers of different kinds, and then the music begins to twist and turn in increasingly bizarre directions. By sheer coincidence, none of the bands is from the U.S. By design, I again threw a curveball at you with the final selection.
CREST OF DARKNESS (Norway)
This veteran Norwegian band has a ninth album on the way this month, and recently released a video for a second single from it. That’s my first pick for today.
“The Ultimate Truth” is the album’s final song, bringing to a close a conceptual ritual portrayed over the course of the record. The band’s founder and sole remaining member Ingar Amlien is the frightening star of the show, both in the black-cloaked video and in the song — though he’s ably aided by his bandmates.
The song’s opening drum-rumble vividly sets the hook, and the turbulent energy flows through into the feverishly drilling and writhing riffage and Amlien‘s scorching screams. It’s a vivid and vicious experience, but also segues into more dismal and degraded phases in between the fiery bursts of neck-chopping and gut-roiling ferocity.
Near the end, without pulling back on the song’s livid energy, the music seems to wail and expand, channeling desperation, as Amlien shrieks. At the very end, it softens, mysteriously simmers, and becomes haunting.
“The Ultimate Truth” is from the album My Ghost, which will be out October 18th on My Kingdom Music.
https://shorturl.at/mqf9L
https://song.link/COD_truth
https://www.crestofdarkness.com/
https://www.facebook.com/crestofdarknessofficial
https://www.instagram.com/crestofdarkness
SLECHTVALK (Netherlands)
Almost 8 years have drifted by since we last wrote about the music of Slechtvalk (in the context of their album Where Wandering Shadows and Mists Collide), and for good reason: They haven’t released any new music since then. But they’re about to close that big gap.
On October 31st, MDD Records will release Slechtvalk‘s sixth studio album, At Death’s Gate, and their official video for the album track “Death” is today’s next selection.
In this one, Slechtvalk lean hard into their thrashier interests, flying fast and furiously with fire-borne riffing, piston-like drums, and throat-cutting snarls. It’s completely electrifying, like being swept into a gale-force conflagration, made even more electrifying by the visions of these barbaric-looking musicians charging through the music.
But don’t forget, the name of the song is “Death“. And so the music, while fiery, also sounds distressing, as are the other visuals in the video. The music also soars and expands toward epic heights, accented by solemn chants, but also softens as the guitars sorrowfully ring.
The musical feelings of grief cascade, leading into another titanic eruption of volcanic fury, a big headbangable segment, and a closing melody that sounds mysteriously exotic and sinister, and grief-stricken as well.
https://mdd-shop.de/search?search=slechtvalk
http://www.slechtvalk.com/
https://www.facebook.com/slechtvalk.metal
DOEDSMAGHIRD (Norway)
Last year Dødheimsgard released their widely acclaimed album Black Medium Current, but it turns out that the band’s main man Vicotnik (Yusaf Parvez) had something else brewing as well, i.e., a debut album from a different project, one in which he collaborated with French multi-instrumentalist and Dødheimsgard live guitarist Camille Giradeau. The name of that band is Doedsmaghird, and their first album is Omniverse Consciousness.
The video below is for a song from the album named “Heart of Hell“. Vicotnik describes its meaning:
“The ascending leads to a finite outcome in this narrative, so the subject aims to descend and uncover roads and outcomes that can omit and perhaps surpass the previous outcome. Like the video portrays, this person is depicted in the very heart of hell, and by the options present it is actually easier for the subject to move down rather than up.
“Downward on this scale can also translate moving towards less coveted ideas and a separation from common conception of values. As in culture, choosing this lifestyle over a lifestyle with more materialistic focus pertaining to profession and monetary means or reaching for a god, can seem like aiming for a lesser and much more unsafe state of being, but in turn it might yield a deeper sense of understanding existence and the nature of your being”.
The lyric video captures these ideas through the descending movement of an escalator, overlaid by imagery of what might be Dante in his own guided descents through Inferno. Meanwhile, after an unsettling and hallucinatory overture in which choral voices wail, the music maniacally broils and roils, batters and brawls, as Vicotnik voices the words in crazed timbres, like a person possessed.
The music sounds exultant and unhinged, but also becomes weird and wondrous, infiltrated by warbling and pinging electronic tones and sweeping fanfares of symphonic and choral sound — though the song’s surging and throbbing drive remains viscerally pulse-pounding, and the vocals are never less than spine-tingling (even when they convert into ragged demonic growls and chilling song).
Grand piano chords and sizzling swaths emerge, along with celestial singing and other sonic visions of beauty — but the closing moments do remind us we’re in hell.
Omniverse Consciousness is set for release on October 11th by Peaceville.
https://Peaceville.lnk.to/Doedsmahgird
https://www.instagram.com/dodheimsgard_official
https://www.facebook.com/dodheimsgard
[4672] (Poland)
I continue following the ever-surprising output of [4672] even though the Metal-Archives overlords still refuse to admit them to the Encyclopaedia Metallum. And I am happy to report that these bracket-obsessed Polish mavericks have gone wilding again in a new album named [Ołów] that’s set for release on November 5th.
The album includes 17 tracks, unless the band make a last-minute decision to add or subtract. I’ve had an advance chance to hear it, and hope to provide more thorough impressions eventually, but for now will just say that it includes more hair-raising and head-exploding twists and turns than a high-end roller-coaster.
Two days ago [4672] released a trippy video for one of the album tracks, “[przemilczenie]“. Google Translate says that Polish word means “concealment”.
The song doesn’t last long, but long enough to twist and tumble your head and leave it whirling but bruised. You’ll encounter strangely throbbing electronics and glittering frenzies, trumpet musings and clarinet-like screeches, murmuring low tones and gut-gouging bass incursions, bone-busting drum upheavals and (just when you think the song has ended) a few seconds of brute-force atonal pounding.
As mentioned, [Ołów] will be released on November 5th. To pre-order and pre-save, check the links below.
https://4672.bandcamp.com/album/o-w
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/4672/ow/
https://www.facebook.com/4672x
BULLHEAD (UK)
The “Rampaging Sludge” band Bullhead from Birmingham e-mailed us in an effort to put their new EP Methcrush on our radar. Curious about two of the songs’ names, I wrote them back to ask what those were about. In retrospect I should have asked about all of them, but these two descriptions from the band will give you some idea about the musical horrors you’re in for.
“Alabama Dry Socket is about smoking meth; dry socket is a condition that you get when your teeth fall out and smoke dries out the empty socket, which is extremely painful.”
“83 Days of Sodom is about the Tokaimura nuclear accident, where Hisachi Ouchi was exposed to extreme levels of radiation and although he was begging to die he was kept alive in hospital for 83 days while sadistic doctors performed experiments on him.”
I did some reading about the awful case of Hisachi Ouchi, and wish I hadn’t. If you have masochistic tendencies, you can learn more about what happened to him here or here.
Bullhead obviously love to sing about horrible and gruesome things — though I use “singing” loosely, given that the hideous words are expelled in lunatic, larynx-bursting screams and enraged snarls. The music is damned gruesome too, and more than a little demented.
Whatever is making the low-end of the music (it must be a mutilated bass) is a distorted, heaving, lurching, and undulating thing, massive and mauling and a dominating presence. Its macabre, blood-congealing movements do give the songs blood-crusted hooks.
You’ll also notice right fast just how riveting the drum-work is too – riveting because it changes constantly and often seems like it’s off on its own ingeniously demented frolics but somehow also turning those into grooves.
There are other sounds in the songs too — backdrops of shrill and sizzling sonic acid, convulsions of what might be a tortured guitar (or a keyboard having its fingernails pulled out with pliers), blaring tones resembling mangled trumpets, other spasms of electronics, and (in the final track) a “BULLDÖZING BASTARD BALALAIKA”.
It’s all deliciously mad and mangling, and not quite like anything else I’ve heard this year,
Methcrush was released last Friday by Pyrrhic Defeat Records, and it’s available on CD and digitally.
https://bullheaduk.bandcamp.com/album/methcrush
https://linktr.ee/bullheaduk
https://www.facebook.com/BullheadUK
GRUZJA (Poland)
Almost exactly one year after releasing their last album Koniec wakacji, these inveterate hurlers of knuckle curves from Poland have thrown another one at our heads, in the form of a new single named “Nielegał“.
What a wild thing this is. The music blasts and blurts, sizzles and squirms, pulsates and pings, swings and swirls, jolts and jars. The drum patterns and tempos change frantically, along with everything else. The vocals are a mix of goth-y chanted words and extravagant singing.
Unexpectedly, this crazy thing turns out to be catchy too — until the end, when a few grim piano chords and dancing harpsichord-like tones maneuver amidst static, like a needle on a very old record.
https://open.spotify.com/album/3CJ8ezM8NLW9GBZO8DslQc
https://gruzja.limitedrun.com/
https://www.facebook.com/gruzjabandofficial
https://www.instagram.com/gruzja_official