Abduction – photo by Jack Armstrong
(written by Islander)
Bandcamp Friday would have been a better time for this roundup, but I couldn’t get it done in time. Yesterday was the last one of those for 2024, and it’s not clear if Bandcamp will keep it going next year. They announced the 2024 schedule on March 11th of this year, so it’s really too early to say. Obviously, a big horde of us hope Bandcamp continues the tradition.
Well, near misses only count in horseshoes and hand grenades, so my near miss with this roundup probably doesn’t count. Still, even with Friday gone, picking up the releases collected below won’t cost you anything more, even though less of the purchase money will go to the labels and artists.
Once again I resorted to arranging the music in alphabetical order by band name. To the extent there’s any musical through-line here, anything that explains why I picked these songs instead of the many others I considered, it might be that they all made me… uncomfortable… in different ways. And it turns out that the arrangement will throw you back and forth, tempo-wise.
ABDUCTION (UK)
The UK black metal band Abduction will have a new album out in February. Thematically, it’s described by vocalist A|V as a reaction to the bleakness of the current age — “the juxtaposition of this horrible post-truth era with its contradictions and the simple, metaphorical truths that began in ancient religions of the crumbling past. Somewhere between a biblical gospel and a Nietzschean nightmare.” It reflects “a particular terror in seeing all that our grandfathers built, physically and morally, being torn apart and reduced to a commodity and wondering what kind of world my son will inherit.”
A video for the newest single from the album was released last week. A|V explained it this way:
“‘Razors of Occam‘ is a celebration of the back breaking labour that our grandfathers and grandmothers endured over past century to build the houses and systems that maintain our (relative) safety and comfort here in the west. There’s more honour in the last gasping breath, spilled forth from a dying old man’s chest, than in all the seas of all the tears the younger can conjure. For with one wish, they’d give it all away.”
As you might now expect, the moods of “Razors of Occam” are diverse, but none of them cheerful. The music grieves, with singing voices raised, and it rages in torment, with drums furiously blasting and chopping, the riffage feverishly writhing, and the words expelled in gritty, vicious snarls.
The music also jolts and blares, slashes and sweeps like a brush fire, and brutally thunders. The band keep the intensity in the red zone until near the end, when grief descends again.
The forthcoming album, Existentialismus, is due for release on February 21st via Candlelight. Below I’ve also included Abduction‘s video for the album’s first single, “A Legacy of Sores“.
https://abduction.lnk.to/Existentialismus
https://www.facebook.com/abduction616
ANCIENT TOME (U.S.)
So far, L.A.-based Ancient Tome (which includes members of Civerous and Blood Sanctum) haven’t released an album, but on January 20th they will release their third EP, The Implications of Ascendancy. Chaos Records will release it, and offers this description:
“This deeply immersive record takes listeners on a journey into the darkest realms of existential dread, loss, and the search for rebirth. With its powerful blend of doom, death, and atmospheric black metal, The Implications of Ascendancy pushes the boundaries of heavy music and delivers an intense, narrative-driven experience.”
The 12 1/2 minute song “Lamentation” allows us to test that description. Abduction doused their song with accelerent, but Ancient Tome go in the opposite direction.
At first, they stagger and scream, flooding the senses with ruinously distorted tones that manifest like sonic gangrene, slowly and dismally eating flesh away. The drums begin to rhythmically tumble and snap; the riffing morbidly groans; and ghastly howls join the maddened shrieks, enhancing the song’s abysmal and terrifying impact.
Ghostly bass notes fill a silence with their eerie reverberations, creating a haunting interlude, dismal in a different and more miserable way. And then the band resume their crushing and degrading procession while again un-caging those hideous and horrifying vocals and adding a guitar line that seems to slowly wail in abject misery.
Look elsewhere for hope; none is to be found in this musical crypt.
https://chaos-records.bandcamp.com/album/the-implications-of-ascendancy
FANE (U.S.)
I always try to pay attention to e-mails sent our way by bands who are acting without labels or PR agents, and I’m very glad I paid attention to one we got last week from Fane, the Louisiana-based duo of Ryan Ashmore (vocals) and Trey Porche (instruments, programming). They linked me to their debut EP, Gallant Shroud, which was released on October 25th.
Six songs long, the EP is a changing experience. The first song, “Cathedrals,” opens the door to madness and fear, with bludgeoning and galloping drums, scarring riffage that sounds like frenzied seizures but also like punk chords, and explosions of rabid growls and unhinged howls. Before it’s over, the mood of the music grows more bleak through tremolo’d riffing that sounds needling and desperate.
From there, Fane continue interweaving strands of death metal, crust-punk, and black metal, creating sensations that are alternately despairing and feral, demented and doomed, fronted by more cavalcades of those utterly crazed and thoroughly bestial vocals, and backed by riotous and ruinous percussion.
But Fane also switch things up with “I Am the Ghost“, which begins with a frightening spoken-word sample, chiming notes, and head-moving beats, before it begins stomping and dragging the listener through a swamp of grievously moaning riffage (segmented with more of what opened the song).
“Granulated” might be the most violent and demented track (and benefits from rock-chewing bass-lines), while “Hands of Devils” slugs like a battering ram but also sounds fiendishly jubilant, and “Subservience” resembles the feeding frenzies of carnivorous insects but also brings in punk slashes and storms of destructive calamity.
Apart from the opener, all the songs are very compact, and they’re mostly fast-paced, hard-hitting, and adrenaline-fueled, and the dangerous riffs have hooks too. And man, those vocals are nuts.
https://fane-la.bandcamp.com/album/gallant-shroud
MONASTR (France)
Like Fane above, Monastr is a two-piece band who e-mailed us directly concerning their latest release, and thankfully I had time to check out the title song from it, “Of dust and bones“.
It’s a substantial piece, 10 1/2 minutes long. The opening riff is strange and squirmy, immediately uncomfortable, and it carries through in equally discomfiting fashion even after the band brutally harmonize it and then start stomping, braying, and screaming.
Monastr throw in an apocalyptic vocal sample and then slow the pace, staggering forward with sensations of moaning and groaning agony, topped by the berserk vocals. To break up that putrefying death/crawl, the weirdly pulsating main riff rears its ugly head again, along with some unsettling electronics and additional vocal samples, also unsettling.
A desolate wailing guitar also surfaces, interrupted by depressive strummed chords, and even more vocal samples, and then a final dose of mutilating musical misery.
Monastr call their music “sludgy crust/doom”. It might be best not to listen to this song if you hope for a brighter tomorrow.
The Of dust and bones EP will include that song and one other (“Millions“), and it will be released on a one-sided vinyl LP, with a silkscreened B side.
https://monastr.bandcamp.com/album/of-dust-and-bones
https://linktr.ee/monastr_band
https://www.facebook.com/monastr666
MONTE PENUMBRA (Portugal)
The always impressive Monte Penumbra have a new album named Austere Dawning that will be out on December 13th on the NoEvDia label. Once again the band’s Portuguese mastermind W.uR (also a member of Ab Imo Pectore and Israthoum) was accompanied by Icelandic drummer extraordinaire Bjarni Einarsson.
The song from the album that’s now up on Bandcamp is the closing track, “Stamen of Barrenness“. Here, Monte Penumbra go hell-for-leather immediately, with drums pumping like overdriven pistons and the riffing generating a dense swarm of dismally writhing and stricken, siren-like sensations.
Crazed howls add to the music’s startling and disturbing intensity, and prominent bass-lines create intrigue within the swarms of musical illness and dementia, with multiple inventive variations in the drumwork constantly threatening to steal attention away. The riffing eventually becomes less frenzied and more chimelike, but no less disturbing. Some cancers aren’t fast-acting either.
https://montepenumbra.bandcamp.com/album/austere-dawning
https://www.facebook.com/noevdiaofficial
PHRENELITH (Denmark)
From what I’ve seen, Dark Descent‘s announcement yesterday of a new album by Phrenelith has produced a Vesuvius-like response of enthusiasm. How fitting that the brilliant cover art is also volcanic.
Along with that announcement Dark Descent opened up an album track named “Stagnated Blood“. Of course, this being Phrenelith, there’s nothing stagnant about the music. Instead, it’s a wild musical extravaganza, thunderous down below and elaborately swirling and swarming in brilliant tones way up high. Also up high, grand fanfares go off, like massed horns.
The vocals are monstrous, providing a contrast to the exhilarating guitar work, which reaches its zenith in wild, rippling, dervish-like soloing that spirals up through percussive avalanches and ebulliently swarming riffage. Only at the end, when the song shifts into an eerie ambient phase, does the track allow any room for deep breaths.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/ashen-womb
https://www.facebook.com/phrenelith/
RELICS OF HUMANITY (Belarus)
I had to smile at the name of the new album from Minsk-based Relics of Humanity, though the album’s overarching theme is nothing to smile about:
“Absolute Dismal Domain is a nine-act conceptual record. The story told across these nine tracks is about absolute ubiquitous annihilation of light, both spiritually (god) and physically (sun and stars).”
It appears that the annihilation of light in the first sense is the subject of the album’s first single, at least based on its name, “Smoldering of Seraphim,” and the words that appear in the lyric video.
As you may know, Relics of Humanity play brutal death metal, but as displayed here, they do it with dynamism and noticeable technical flair. The fretwork is sometimes fast and insectile, albeit ruthlessly stripped of melody, and the snare rapidly pops like a nail-gun on sheet metal.
But the song also converts into a primitive hulking beast, though no less beastly than the vocalist’s ghastly gurgling gutturals, and the guitars also slither like serpents and squeal in ecstasy. Let’s call it ugly music for an ugly age.
Absolute Dismal Domain is set for release on January 31st through Willowtip Records.
https://bit.ly/add-willowtip
https://relicsofhumanity.bandcamp.com/album/absolute-dismal-domain
https://www.facebook.com/relicsofhumanity
VIOLET COLD (Azerbaijan)
It’s almost impossible to predict what Emin Guliyev will do from one release to the next under the name of Violet Cold. It’s often difficult to predict where the music will go in a single song. Violet Cold‘s new single “Violenciaga” is a very good example of that.
Obviously, I enjoy trying to describe music (and am equally challenged by the effort). One drawback is that sometimes the descriptions spoil surprises, and that will be true here. So I guess I should give you a Spoiler Warning: If you would prefer to be completely surprised, just skip down and press Play now.
In its opening, the guitar shines and slowly meanders, backed by softly shimmering tones, dreamlike and enticing but also melancholy in their combined effect. That just makes the surprise even more shocking — when the music suddenly stomps like some earth-shaking leviathan and pierces the ears with screaming and searing waves of sound.
It’s a crushing and cataclysmic event, and there’s no singing here, only throat-ruining screams, just as unhinged as the shrill flickering tones that flash in the song’s stratosphere. But while the vocals are never less than shattering, the music does soften and glisten again, backed by vibrant rhythms. When the music brilliantly sweeps and sears again, the throbbing grooves go faster, and this time it all sounds glorious, and breathtaking.
“Violenciaga” was just released on December 3rd.
https://violetcold.bandcamp.com/album/violenciaga-single
https://www.violetcold.com/
https://www.facebook.com/vi0letc0ld/