(After a bit of a break our Vietnam-based writer Vizzah Harri returns to our miserable halls with reviews of six albums that struck some chords in his head, and may have damaged them.)
On the 9th of October ominous news surfaced that a group of hackers decided to lay siege to an internet institution that can generally be considered as a universal good. It was universally seen as a dick move. The Internet Archive is a library of audio, visual and textual resources as well as old website archiving with the mission of providing a library with omniversal access to all knowledge.
Flummoxed at the stupidity, because 99.9% of hackers love this site, and unable to use the Wayback Machine (it is back up now so this link is not compromised as of this writing), I simply had to take a hard stare at my ‘Catching Up’ list. October has been another stacked month for releases and November still has some serious offerings before the end-of-year bonanza. The list of what we weren’t able to get to is not always a question about quality or subjective – or even objective – partiality, it’s the sheer volume of content out there.
With the year almost over, I took it upon myself to go on the ‘way back machine of metal’ and jump back 282 days to January 26th. On its own an insane day for metal releases, two of the releases below fell on that same day.
Here at NCS the list of bands that were covered for that particular day seems comprehensive; it includes the exceptional black witchery of The Infernal Sea, the technical and wrecking riff-packed Cognizance, Madder Mortem, Dripping Decay, Blood Red Throne, Ancient Vvisdom, Exocrine, not to mention the fantastic mind-warping release by Vitriol and the genre-bending theatrics of Unsouling.
What follows is a look back at releases that went under the radar, and some of them even did a bit of a time warp to still qualify as 2024 productions. We don’t have to go all the way back to the nascent days of post-plague unmasking for Whale Bone’s awesome EP Mauhtia either, cos Joss Allen, 50% of aforesaid baleen troupe, brought out an EP titled Dead Anyway under the name Corpse Forge on the 7th of September. A ripper, a shredder, a downright surgical wound stretcher.
Primordial Seed – Chaos Unbound (Colorado/Oregon, USA)
Released January 26th 2024
You might wonder if we’re going the (refreshing) route Autothrall has been tacking on From the Dust Returned by writing about releases from the heretofore. Why not cover Ysengrin’s one track fucking epic To Endotaton, or re-cover the one-man-black-metal band of all one-man-black-metal bands in Pandiscordian Necrogenesis? Maybe it’s just an excuse for me to name-drop cool shit I only discovered this year. Other things I did not know about was the fact that Haunter (Texas) moonlights as a country band called Calico Bonnet. Full on fucking country, and they’re good at it too.
Having missed me something in line with the Haunter, Wayfarer and Ulthar outputs of late, at least the latter two’s members have been busy with the stellar releases of Blood Incantation (Isaac Faulk), Black Curse (Steven Peacock) and Thanatotherion [(Shelby Lermo) a release so influential that it got two reviews!], so I delved into the archives for glimpses of what Haunter have been up to. Their bassist, Cole Tucker, has a side project in a duo named Primordial Seed. Their demo, Chaos Unbound, went so much under the radar that the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider seems like a blimp in comparison. And instead of bombing out, the album delivered a carpet bombing.
No one reviewed it, not even on Bandcamp. “Portal” barges straight in with a festering amalgamation of oozing intent and force. As much a harkening back as a statement of “sign us already.” Flickering leads, a delectable rhythm section, and primal grunts fill out a formidable album-opener. Insofar as references to the source material we know; the reverb is employed lavishly, there’s a satisfying offbeat-ness to the percussive insistence galloping with a fusion of buzzsaw rhythmically inflecting havoc amongst a pandemonic swirl of slaying spasmodic leads. And then just a beating into submission.
This is supposedly a mere demo, but songs like “Dragon Eagle” contain some of the most memorable riffage of a demo in recent memory. Blunt to the still wet periosteum exposed bone, a wound inflicted by scalpels held not by mere charlatans, but practitioners of prodigious intent.
By track 2 I wasn’t thinking where be the new Haunter album this year? I was content that I found Primordial Seed’s Chaos Unbound. And as a concept to write your album around, they did a pretty darned good job of explaining how to unbind whatever chaos it was that someone thought apt to tie up.
I mean, who’d wanna fuck with absolute entropy? Primordial Seed answers us in “Spasm Cross” as their vision truly comes to fruition. Getting elegiac on our asses by intermingling arresting buzzsaw stagecraft with Slayer-esque descants, in addition to a commanding drum performance and an austerely effective vocal delivery.
The 5 tracks on offer here clocking in just over 13 minutes coalesce as an extremely promising demo. Whatever this duo has brewing for the future is something you’d want to have push notified.
Dissimulator – Lower Form Resistance (Quebec, Canada)
Released January 26th 2024
Technical death thrash with sci-fi overtones. At least for me the first FFO would be Voivod as far as sci-fi thrash would be concerned. Dissimulator wears their warning label on their foreheads with “Neural Hack”. Whether you use the temporal lobe or occipital lobe when you listen to music, Dissimulator hedged their bets and hacked the lot.
If you like your off-kilter angularity inflected with groove, drive, and a pummeling zeal, Lower Form Resistance could be the album you’ve been lacking this year. The augmented vocals that sound like lysergically-distorted synths on the aptly named “Warped” are trippy as fuck before the song goes into a space-operatic scalping death overdrive.
Foreshadowing Oranssi Pazuzu’s arrival later in the year with “Outer Phase”, with a cerebral quote from Gunter Anders about our place in the future world of digitized robotic suzerainty. The lyrics are a poetic divulgence of the existential threat, disillusionment, and yearning for a finality. Harmonizing compositional complexity with a vigor and perpetuity of thrust and catchiness.
“Cybermorphism/Mainframe” opens with a soothing interlude of softer tones before loosening the fetters on an unstoppable force of staggering, startling instrumental theatrics resonating with the fecund lyricism of dissociative obsolescence and specter-infused machines.
The title song borders and then crosses the line into epic terrain with a brave addition of clean vocals which do tip the hat once more to Voivod-ian divergence.
With no fillers in hearing range, Lower Form Resistance is a complete composition of rousing corrosion compacted into 7 turbulent, intelligibly abstruse tracks of bellicose ardor and enthralling offbeat dexterity.
Perhaps saving the best for last in the title track, one could have guessed as to its portent lying in wait as the album closer. Even when the mid-paced bridge of a chorus lays down its Shai-Hulud-ian earworms of deliverance and renascence, the spectrophotometric freneticism on display induces a telekinetic neurological reflex hammer on the knees.
Featuring members from Beyond Creation, Chthe’ilist, and Atramentus and having gained some notoriety under those banners, with Dissimulator this trio of thrashing conjurers of serration incarnate teamed up with 20 Buck Spin Records for their debut. Lower Form Resistance is accompanied by the sinisterly stark cover artwork of Jesse Draxler (Annihulus, name, Sunrot and Yashira).
Spiter – Enter the Gates of Fucking Hell (Pennsylvania, USA)
Released May 24th 2024
Adding charry bits to any genre means my ears are the wool to its discharge.
Spiter’s opening title track rips Satan a new asshole. With riffs that swelter with opiate levels of addictive flare.
Consisting of members from Devil Master, Disjawn, and Shitfucker, Spiter stew together Heavy Metal theatrics with added blackened punk for spice. This time round they recorded as a 2-piece with Richard Spider on vox, guitars, and songwriting duties and Snake on drums; however they still tour live as a trio. This is no mere Midnight clone, whose 2024 album Hellish Expectations was mentioned in a Seen and Heard column back in February. You might just find yourself spinning this record into the witching hours.
With an EP following the “all killer, no filler” approach, Spiter remains true to their name by chopping down a guillotine before the 26-minute mark. Just long enough for that quick workout you’ve been skimping on. All the tracks clock in near the 4-minute mark with the exception of “666 on the Crucifix.”
This is a punk assault bordering on the thrash spectrum with a vocal performance that ranges from the isolated in a forest blackened howls to macabre zealotry, going for some real earworm chant-along material early on. There is nearly no pause in the percussive attack while the strings pulsate, buck, and roll with a glorious thunder.
If 2022’s alliterative and boisterous bop of Bathe the babe in bat’s blood was any indication as to Spiter’s intentions, then there could have been some foreshadowing, especially in the track from that album named as such. Music that takes the notion of putting all the extras on top of the order and to be consumed in one go.
Spiter offers succor for the riff-impoverished. Is it anything completely new? Probably not, but it’s a really fun record to scratch that blackened punk itch. If musical deprivation can cause aural instead of oral herpes, then I’d say this EP can serve as a temporary cure.
Hells Headbangers Records (Vinyl, CD, Cassette)
Verbluten – Goodnight, Goodbye, We Perish! (Germany)
Released Sept 25th 2023 originally, physical: May 31st 2024
Yes, this album is from 2023; the technicality I’m employing is their physical release pressed by Pest Productions was set for May 31st this year. I didn’t think I’d write about this because of its original release date, but it’s so goddamn good and I can’t find ANY reviews for it. Fuck yes, I was gonna exploit that physical release loophole.
Not only does it contain multiple tracks that I should’ve shoved into the guest infectious list earlier this year, it also therefore makes one think: how much music is really out there that is of high quality, is highly addictive, and not heard? Tons, for me. I’m sure Islander, Synn, DGR and the rest of the NCS core consume nearly 10 times the music I do on a yearly basis individually, but there simply isn’t enough time for everything, even as a collective.
I used to be turned off by anything that gets too much hype, and that’s probably why I find myself digging for what could be deemed extremely obscure releases that no-one else seems to be covering (like everybody else on this blog). It’s not that some albums don’t deserve the hype; this year had a fair few releases that lived up to and surpassed expectation, but everyone likes an underdog story, right?
We’re overtured into ’90s era Offspring before something I hate happens. You’re not the only one thinking the first track resembles many a track you might know but that just somehow evades your recognition elusively? There’s a section in the slower melodic bridge that sounds so much like something else I know, yet someone who’s had less concussions than me might be able to pinpoint it.
Verbluten’s drummer Nik Reichhardt seems to have a few extra limbs in “Powdered Death.” The skittering febrific percussion over the repeated main riff near the 3-minute mark is one of many highpoints that serve to cement this album’s replay value.
“Scalp Hunter” pays an adjacent homage to Leviathan-era Mastodon re-imagined by Darkthrone’s latest output. Have I mentioned that I love the drum sound on here? In the bridge for “Scalp Hunter,” every note of every instrument is clearer than a winter morning in the mountains just after the migraine cleared. Blackened hardcore with the cloned voice box of Tom Waits spliced with a reanimated Marlboro man.
Described on their Bandcamp page as “100% true-to-its-roots and brilliantly written Old School Black Metal: Bathory-inspired ruthless riffs meets a hybrid half-Hardcore, half-depression-haunted-alcoholic-Beat-Poet attitude — with a lyrical theme similar to their German DSBM peers, yet way nastier and more unrestrained — almost a candid diarial account of the ugliness of one’s mental landscape through pure Black Metal Worship.”
There are other influences that range from Lifelover’s haunting yowls and predilection for melodicity and razor-sharp tonal affinities, so too a hardcore essence, and a post punk and old-school black metal ballading bass to spare. With vocals that delve into the very viscera of emotional expression, predacious on the predicate of the collateral and direct effects of the existential turmoil of an urban reality.
When the band goes into full fury, it feels like there is no easing up, no stopping their vitality of furor, and even when the guitars do drop a gear in outright pace, the drums rarely have an inclination to spare a moment’s breadth for a breath or surcease. There does appear a formula, a sonic theme or sound stamp, almost like there is one singular scorching impression they attempted to convey in multiple takes.
The surface of this cauldron steeped in blackened oozing bile afflicted by the human squall of Verbluten is broken only in the finale. A brooding atmospheric atomization of expurgation attained. Better go and revise those lists of yesteryear.
Lammoth – Tales of Treachery (North Carolina, USA)
Released July 12th 2024
With imagery, a moniker, and themes all paying homage to Tolkien, it is inevitable that somewhere along the line someone will compare Robert Sanford’s work to Summoning. I’m much more of an Erikson fan, but the aforementioned and their sonic adherents in Caladan Brood that brought out the epic Echoes of Battle in 2013 regaling The Malazan Book of the Fallen, certainly did set the bar for epic melodic black metal with fantasy themes. Lammoth here, are treading their own path.
The opening drowned-out salvo of drums before the eeriness is washed over by the first taste of tremolos could have you thinking that this is just another mid-paced epic folk black metal band with no desire to provide anything new to the table. The cover might even fool you too, that we have here a band that is making hobbit metal, end of story. A slow diffusion takes place about halfway through “Ungoliant’s Child”, with a realization that patience is the highest of virtues and that one must verily take heed and read the cautionary token presented thusly.
When the music hits the inciting moment of the album’s 1st act, it is immense and sweeping. A symphony of elevated spheres of being in the orchestral mix that takes to the fore, drums down in the moat with the guitars defending the gate on a bridge assailed by synths carrying effigies of mutilated elven remonstrance.
If “Ungoliant’s Child” didn’t usurp your preconceptions, then “Lunar Tales” will rip the suture right off the unsuspecting burn lacerated by the full arsenal Lammoth has to offer. Reaching planes of the epic, blending in symphonic ascendency, positively galloping and ferocious instrumentation with a melodic affection. There is a coziness in the atmospherics on display, but this is juxtaposed with riffage of a malevolent mastery which is truly satisfying to behold.
“Ascending the Steps to Minas Morgul” vaults in with no holds barred. The switch to the trip-hop ambient break (you read that right) before shooting into cosmic cacophonous levels of maximalism is smoother than the first taste of mead around a campfire post-journey. And as if they felt like the song needed more frenzied elevation, the riffage nearing the 4-minute mark is cause for concern for the players’ finger ligaments. I imagined fingernails and streaks of blood spattering across the studio as that bit was recorded. Rips preconceptions to shreds.
Bathing us in the ambient theremin-augmented synth-bath of the opening of “Brandywine Memories” is a welcome reprieve. Ever conscious of their end goal in treacherous sonic administration, the closer morphs into the wildest genre-bending exercise on the EP. More akin to a Bone Tomahawk than a Jackson production, and that’s exactly what makes it work.
Don’t get distracted too long by the fanciful yet beguiling cover art, or that they’re essentially a hobbit metal band. This is a very good black metal album, unassumingly so, deceptively so, and there the album title starts making sense, treacherous to their bones. Lammoth is apparently a region in Middle-earth and which translates roughly to “The Great Echo”, but also named after a great cry of anguish from one of the main antagonists in the lore. Echoes it does, with majesty in surplus.
Tales of Treachery is not available anymore as a cassette on Fiadh Productions’ Bandcamp, however you can still buy the digital album below.
ODIOUS SPIRIT – The Treason of Consciousness (NY, USA)
Released September 20th 2024
With some of the additions dating back more than the time it took to bear a child, it was only apt to include one that surfaced more recently. ODIOUS SPIRIT is the brainchild of James Obskarbski from upstate New York who dabbles in post-industrial with his project 8 Hour Animal and partakes in earhole flensing with his grind project Execrable. ODIOUS SPIRIT is neither industrial or grindcore, though there are elements that filter over from those ventures.
“Long Stretch of Bleeding Light” enters with one of the most memorable album openers for a riff that propels you into what the embodiment of what an ‘odious spirit’ would sound like in hissing gargles of growling ire. The Treason of Consciousness departs with jagged guitars that continually flirt with perfidious heights and a ponderous atmosphere of unsettling and off-kilter madness.
“Hissing Pyre” blasts forth yet again with an opening riff that bores a hole right through the skull. Scabrous, trance-like, though the antithesis of soporific. The experimental box is firmly checked with a darker shade of ink for the music attaining a demented air of patient buzzing distress interspersed with headbanging accoutrement, although never swaying from its intent of bludgeoning you into submission. Cullen Gallagher supplied session bass duties and Daniel Torgal did the same on the drums. A mammoth feat to keep up with the compositional conflagration and at times contrasting frantic hypnosis incanted by the barely penetrable ether of the strings.
“Illuminations” succeeds in raising the hair on the back of the neck with an eerie insistent choral corral that laces into keys and then melds further into what I only realized is a mid-album interlude halfway through. Disconcerting is one way to describe it for its hypnotic qualities, even with unconventionally lacing its minimalism in a methamphetamine-manipulated sonic wave of digitized degeneration.
“Gnawing the Fabric of Time” has to be up there with some of the best song titles this year; funny that it is the shortest song on the album. Good thing that, seeing as it reaches a feverish delirium before even the 2-minute mark passes before treading more measured ground.
When the loose ties to reality have been unbound by the back half of “Unbending Follicle, Unending Blight,” and the twilight zone is truly entered sonically, the true nightmare fuel only really arrives when the assault ends for the attachment one comprehends in its absence.
Whenever I get frustrated by the fact that I, Voidhanger’s Bandcamp write-ups are better in their compact form than anything I could come up with on even the umpteenth listen of an album that hits me, I need to remind myself that that ship is helmed by Luciano Gaglio, a seasoned music journalist (some sick recommendations from even further back) that got fed up by the stubborn lack of innovation in what he was covering before starting up his own label. His acumen with the pen is as astute as his ear is for sound; have a listen while you read this masterpiece of a paragraph:
“Wrapped in a majestic cover painting by Martín Riveros Baxter, The Treason of Consciousness is characterized by Obskarbski’s dense intertwining of guitars, capable of creating cosmic psychedelic vortices that engulf everything and which are often pushed towards heights of paroxysmal violence, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Almost as if it were a sort of inner rumination, a mantric death metal growl adds depth to the music, punctuated by the suffocating ultra-heavy rhythms of Cullen Gallagher (bass) and Daniel Torgal (drums), but what makes ODIOUS SPIRIT‘s debut a surprising album is the vertiginous guitar work. The philosophical themes of the lyrics are refracted in its fractal folds, centered on concepts of space/time, repetition and decadence, thus describing an infinite cycle of creation, transformation and destruction of which we are unaware prisoners.”
One Response to “A TRIP ON THE WAYBACK MACHINE: SIX MORE ALBUMS FROM EARLIER THIS YEAR YOU PROBABLY MISSED”
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So glad to see someone giving love to Lammoth! I love that album, and Verbluten is a very cool recommendation.