(written by Islander)
Today we happily help spread the word about Malevolent Lycanthrophic Heresy, the forthcoming third album by the Pennsylvania-based black metal band Luring.
For those listeners who haven’t yet encountered Luring‘s previous releases, the album’s name and cover art may point you in one direction of expectations, perhaps envisioning raw and racing lo-fi viciousness, perhaps laced with sounds of ancient horror that cause the skin to crawl.
Such expectations aren’t completely off-base, but the song we’re premiering today is proof that there’s a lot more to Luring‘s new album than those facets.
What “Born With the Devil’s Markings” reveals is a band capable not only of launching malevolent full-bore assaults, but also creating captivating melody, muscle-moving punch, and mood-moving atmosphere of an unearthly origin. Perhaps unexpectedly, there is (dare we say it) an elegance and refinement in key components of this song — as well as indomitable thrust and lycanthropic savagery.
Gleaming and glittering drifts of sound, both haunting and wondrous, announce the song, and they persist even after Luring crash into them with riotous drums, thunderous bass, sandblasting guitars, and scalding catacomb-screams.
The high end of that astonishing storm front still blazes and sweeps, but it becomes a frightening sensation, and the sizzling, swirling pulse of the lead guitar elegantly enhances the song’s increasingly ravishing and daunting atmosphere, complemented by the enormous pulse of the bass.
That magnetic guitar refrain also sounds stricken with sorrow, but it strives and surges through the torrential power of everything else (and digs into the listener ever deeper as it goes). Although the riffing and the shrieking vocals remain a dense and abrasive force, the rhythm then changes, moving toward a more head-nodding point on the compass, still powered by that mighty bass and neck-cracking beats.
And still, high above, the music’s deliriously swirling and sparkling tones, unearthly in their manifestations, continue generating a feeling of wonder, and somehow straddle an emoitional line between despair and yearning. It’s easy to get caught up by the melody again, while still viscerally caught up in the rhythm section’s muscular rocking grooves.
Malevolent Lycanthrophic Heresy will be released on December 13th (LP and CD) by Iron Bonehead Productions. The label’s publicist provides this further preview of what’s in store for listeners:
The trio’s third album features much of the same foundation as its two LP predecessors – rippling physicality fused with otherworldly texture, inspired by contemporaneously early Abigor and Gorgoroth as equally as turn-of-the-millennium Nocternity and Lunar Aurora – but here do LURING intensify the extremes of their sound….
Interestingly, half the album is given to instrumental tracks that aren’t strictly “ambient” in the usual black metal sense(s), imparting haunting / alluring atmospheres that thread seamlessly into Malevolent Lycanthropic Heresy‘s overall sensory experience; however, there are touches of true ambient within the other four, otherwise-black-metal songs.
More info about the release will be available at the locations linked below. And also below we’re including a stream of the first single from the album, “Dying Wolf Beneath the Stars“.
MORE INFO:
https://luring.bandcamp.com
https://www.ironbonehead.de
https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/ironboneheadproductions
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