On Monday of this week we hosted the premiere of a song from Malevolent Lycanthrophic Heresy, the forthcoming third album by the Pennsylvania-based black metal band Luring that’s coming out December 13th on Iron Bonehead Productions. Luring is a member of “the Order of the Broken Sword,” a group of musicians who’ve apparently known each other for about 20 years. Another member of that circle, Azathoth’s Dream, released their debut album Nocturnal Vampyric Bewitchment on IBP last year, and we also hosted a premiere for that one.
And now we come to yet a third entity within the same circle, a duo who took the name Wuldorgast. They too now have a debut album set for release by IBP on December 13th, one named Cold Light, and today we’re again hosting a song premiere in support of the album. The title of this track is “Cold Light of Reason“.
When you listen to this new song and compare it to the music of those other two members of the Order of the Broken Sword, you’ll figure out that these three bands, while devoted to black metal, do not sound the same, and their lyrical themes aren’t the same either.
Some insights about Wuldorgast can be found in a recent interview of the band’s vocalist FS, who’s joined in Wuldorgast by instrumentalist Sceadugenga. In that interview, FS explains that the project “was meant as an exploration of existential themes, anti-modernity and humanity’s struggle against its own nature,” the “grappling with our need for more and what ‘more’ means in the modern sense, but all through a sterile and distant point of view”: “Technological advancement, loss of the self in a sea of 8 billion pestilential swine and a never ending misunderstanding of our relationship with nature and spirituality.”
What “Cold Light of Reason” musically provides is a multi-faceted, adrenaline-fueled riot of sound, unrelenting in its intensity but morphing in its moods and uncanny in its atmosphere.
The frenzied, barbed-wire riffage rises and falls like a warped siren while the drums fire like heavy-caliber automatic weaponry and the bass rapidly throbs in a fever. The vocals sound just as fang-bared and vicious as that wolf or attack dog on the album cover.
The music also brutally and coldly slugs like a jackhammer, with the drums chopping the listener’s neck like an ax, and the riffing also elevates, rising and falling in more expansive waves, pierced by wildly whirling leads, but the music sounds bleak and desperate when it does that — frighteningly frantic.
The song also seems to spin as if driven by dervishes on fire, feral and wild, possessed and glorying. Take a big gulp of air, and see for yourself:
That song is the second one to be revealed from Cold Light. We’ll also share a stream of the first one, a song called “Dawn of the Black Sun“. This one is slower and more swaggering, approaching like a hulking, predatory, head-swinging menace, though it doesn’t take long for the drums to ramp up to battering speed and a very heavy bass to launch its own gut-heaving throb.
This song also includes a piercing melodic riff that’s eldritch — gloriously sinister — and of course another dose of those crazed, lycanthropic vocals, plus soloing near the end that’s deliriously ecstatic.
Altogether, it’s a hellish, blood-pumping experience, but a diabolically catchy one. It also reinforces the impression from the song we premiered that Wuldorgast effectively straddle a line between abrasion and clarity, between heavy-weight punch and blizzard-strength scouring.
Iron Bonehead will release Cold Light on CD and vinyl LP formats. As usual, there will be no pre-orders, but you’ll find ordering opportunities on the appointed date via the first link below.
MORE INFO:
https://www.ironbonehead.de
https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/ironboneheadproductions