(Our South Africa-born but Vietnam-resident NCS contributor Vizzah Harri decided to wade into a batch of seriously ear-worming music that generally isn’t as harsh on the ears as much of what we, and he, typically traffic in. We hope you’ll still enjoy what he presents here, as well as the enthusiastic presentation.)
If you follow this page diligently and try keeping up with each post and release, you’ll have more diotic islands of dreams at your disposal than the hours you delude yourself of having woken. Here are 6 new(ish) offerings of divergent persuasions.
I’ve got an authentically fiendish cornucopia of un-listened content in my meta saved folder as well as other bits I haven’t gotten even a second’s worth of ear-time towards because for a long time the only solace I had was the receding sound of foam expanding in the acoustic meatus neighboring my eardrums. Earplugs to drown out the near-constant barrage of construction, horns from flower delivery drivers, and the steel factory next door that works odd hours of the night. I moved recently though, and plugging in the external hard drive full of ‘golden oldies’ has really helped. As well as an insane YouTube wormhole researching a highly acclaimed album from them retrogressive prog ‘upstarts’ of death that I’m yet to finish writing.
Just as the underground digs up to the surface, and just like with the internet being as good a source of facts as it is of sewer sludge, the cheapening of art paradoxically by the monetization of it proliferating is something I think about sometimes. About selling the soul. One can sometimes feel that the essence of what good art is sometimes gets systematically flayed and slushed over the floors and walls of the gutter where dying dreams wander in our brains. The artists contained in this article have given their blood, bones, and souls to music and to the community, so we thought we’d try to give them just a little bit of a bump.
Glass Beams (Melbourne, Australia)
Musical wormholes can be fun if you run into massive symphonic gong sounds and other peculiarities like this insanely good gagaku cover of Stairway to Heaven by Togi Hideki. Someone mentioned ELP (Emerson, Lake and Palmer) as an influence to Bedsore, so I got stuck on Carl Palmer‘s drum solos for a while until more synth-based stuff led me to the birth of acid-house through Chanranjit Singh‘s 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat; and hence Glass Beams, who covered a track off it this year.
I might be on a spectrum but I do think I have at least a bit of musical spidey-sense seeing as that ‘History of the 303’ video linked above led me to what might be the inspiration or source for a lot of the ideas from The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land. But I digress.
Glass Beams hail from Melbourne, Australia. I’m quite late to the party because this is a band that is blowing up quicker than the hi-hat beat in “One Raga to a Disco Beat” – a cover of Chanranjit Singh‘s “Raga Bhairav” from way back in 1982. Founded in 2020 by Indian-Australian multi-instrumentalist and producer Rajan Silva, they delectably mix a subdued post-punk indie-pop acuity and jazz sophistication with muted acid synth and a wholly Eastern sensibility.
“One Raga to a Disco Beat” is not from their sophomore EP, Mahal, released by Ninja Tune in March this year, and of which there is a full live recording on YouTube. Like most everything you glean from this site, it goes without saying that it should be played loud enough to break a speaker.
This trio took the Daniel Plain(view) of vibe control, and their wicked plans for world domination are beginning to reap rewards because Billboard rated it as #5 in their Contemporary Jazz Albums chart and lucky number thirteenth in jazz albums. It’s easy to find out why; the track below slides so hard beyond earworm territory:
The music is at once hypnotic, invigorating, and sensual to an overloaded pheromonic level. They don’t do vocals other than the occasional whisper and electronically accentuated whimper, but I think anyone would agree that when instrumental music of the guitar variety works this well, one doesn’t even register any void for there being none.
Glass Beams seem to be very serious about their sound and auriferous aesthetic; Seattle’s KEXP radio is too and they hosted the band this year to play a set. As always it is gorgeously filmed and recorded, and a reminder that there’s probably a ton of bands and styles they’ve hosted that I haven’t experienced before:
Vaelravyn (Knoxville, Tennessee, USA)
“Retribution” is the first single of a new band called Vaelravyn which opens with a black metal attack that oh so nearly reminds one of a Veilburner riff. Then the atmosphere and – yes very clean – vocals (there are harsh vox too) kick in harder than the heroic dose you mistook for being micro.
The impulse is to use the word ‘fresh’, but this is more of just a breath amidst what can sometimes be the choking enormity of harshness that abounds in extreme metal. And man does Lizzy Livingstone give her full range for us to sit slack-jawed in awe of, for not just how versatile they are with their delivery, but how well the song’s been writ for instrumentation and voice to support each other in a unified relationship of what works best for the track.
Slated as atmospheric black metal, I’d reluctantly suggest they’re closer to the multifarious and borderless extreme metal umbrella genre. Exceptionally mixed and mastered with refined saxophone, lounge jazz-adjacent hushed percussive theatrics which is gusted in a thunderous rush of fury, and even some dissonance peering in from behind the curtains of cosmo-gyral effulgence prior to the blood-freezing chill of the gate to sonance chopping down.
As a primer on “Retribution” the vocalist and lyricist had this to offer on their media:
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And for me, that is fighting against ambivalence and depression by harnessing and transmuting those feelings into rage and action.”
Hailing from Tennessee, this Appalachian band effectively saunters and swells past easy genre stereotyping. The second track, “Firekeeper,” leads with percussive overabundance and vocals that fall into the Thy Catafalque school of clean singing, which are instant snares for my ears. There’s quite a few cool influences and layers to this track and the song seamlessly morphs into a multitude of agencies with an effortlessness that only gurus of their craft are able to accomplish. The vocals are enthralling, stirring, as unpredictable as the songwriting, and unrecoverably contagious. Meanwhile, the guitars take a hardcore bent between torrefying tremolo stints before reclining back into a mid-paced death-doom.
It’s fair to say then that this is not your usual debut fare. These are two debut singles by a band showcasing Mastodon-ian chops, seriously. These ravens of the slain found a cheat code too; they weren’t content with having just harsh vocals on the record, they went and got the cosmic loophole for vocal delivery in Lizzy Livingston. It’s not often that clean vocals work this well on the extreme spectrum, or are this unique, and I just had to steal what the band themselves describe as “witchy cleans and banshee screams.”
Also from their media:
“Firekeeper re-tells a familiar story to some, but with a new spin: the perspective of throwing away the idea of martyrdom. To allow oneself to live and fight instead of self-immolating.”
Vaelravyn are:
Johnny Arnold – Drums
Evan Norton – Bass
Tristan Howell – Guitars
Lizzy Livingston – Vox
Robert Livingston – Guitars
Sydney Warren – Saxophone
Cover painting by Zhandi Theunissen
Jean ‘Tunes’ Marais (Skelmbosch, South Africa)
There’s something that Jean Marais probably could care less about whether it was included in this article. He has a natural advantage and actually is a bit of an X-Man seeing as his hearing is on the level of certain bloodsucking nocturnes. The only blood imbibed on this artist’s behalf would be what’s licked dripping from their fingers postpartum.
Artists you see, whether x or y chromosome-d, know all too well that producing a piece of art is both like a birth and a death. There are labels one can tag onto a person of our subject’s disposition. Jean may be blind, but one thing I know for certain is that his sense of humor most certainly induced him to ironically serenade Korn’s first single with a shit-eating grin way back when it first dropped.
I’m also positive that he doesn’t find being called ‘that metal drummer’ funny anymore, seeing as he’s not been playing metal for a long time. He used to play in crossover bands like Antipathy and Belhamel, but these days his interests lay more in exploring African music.
However, this label-averse writer would lean towards the more apt boxes of multi-instrumentalist musician, businessman, teacher, writer, thinker, and visionary. A walking metronome. Drummers almost never ply their trade for just one project, and Jean is no different, but he made a choice long ago that music will be both muse and arbitrator of his reality.
“Kastige Vryheid” is a bit of a throwback to the times of the pandemic a few years ago, recorded as the final instalment of an EP titled Kayatunes. Translated from Afrikaans it means ‘alleged freedom’.
The last song to be completed for the collection and released quite a bit later, however, it was the first song I heard. All the instruments are vying playfully for space, and it is graciously granted. The guitar following the lead of the winds sounds so much like the wailing of a person lamenting the death of an era. “Kastige Vryheid” is a swansong for a time. It’s not saccharine much, but there is brightness and light, just overtone-d with a melancholy that only the sound of cicadas can really emulate and overture. Nearly disjointedly offbeat between the drums and strings, until the sax trumpet comes in to act as the glue. This is the kind of stuff that should win Samas galore. This is the kind of music that can only cut the chaff of the most ignorant.
Coupled with a surreally realist rendition of what seems like a female figure astride two trees that could act as curtains. As an accompanying artwork, Zhandi Theunissen took it to the next level by creating a piece that really draws one in and matches the music perfectly.
Supposed freedom, but ‘kastig’ also has a root of being closeted, being free in confinement. Even in the great outside. Synths here bathe the composition in an atmosphere that the piano and winds only with a knowing earnestness of ease inform us that we’ve been here before. The verse counterpoints a whimsy to the chorus’ nigh melancholic tones, yet it ends up being a catharsis. Taking a bit of a departure from the other songs from the EP, there is a definite wistful pensiveness present.
The first impression anyone will get from the final chord in the coda is why it was over so quickly. River frogs and crickets of that particular crepuscular assonance bid us a temporary farewell.
The four tracks on Kayatunes are packed with so many ideas yet in a compressed neutron-star-spoonful finitude of just seventeen minutes and 32 seconds; one cannot but think: there must be more? Concentrated profligacy in composition yet it all flows together smoothly, not a note misplaced or an empty space wasted. You can find the links to the other tracks below the video.
Performers on Kastige Vryheid:
Jean Marais – percussion
Mark Ellis – strings
Lee Thomson – flügelhorn/sax
Riaan Nieuwenhuis – keys
The other tunes:
Tunes Studio Instagram
Skallabrak (Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein, South Africa)
South African music was alive and doing fine before Radio 5 came into being. There was, however, this massive chokehold on the nation out of caveman bigotry which meant that only white artists got air-time. That means that one of the biggest events in South African musical history and of sticking it to the man was when Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse got his song “Burnout” to be the first song by a Zulu to feature on Radio 5 back in 1984. DJ Alex Jay was able to slip it in without his producer’s knowledge. The song must’ve caused quite a hysterical stir seeing as it was the most infectious 5 minutes of Afro-pop anyone heard up to that point. It elevated being anti-establishment past the ceiling.
This leads us to another South African band, one firmly rooted in being anti-establishment since its inception. One more that has no superficial connection to metal, though more than a few threads tethered to the grandaddy of metal and rock in its essence and sound, the blues. Skallabrak is an amalgamation of the names of the two founders of the band, Schalk Maas and Hendrik Brakwater (if ever a folkier name for a bard exists, point me in that direction because Brakwater means Brackish water, or even ‘mutt water’ which is even grittier). Founded in London, UK, they’re not really from that ridiculously named actual place which translates to ‘Two-buffaloes-shot-dead-with-one-shot-beyond-shadow-of-a-doubt-fountain’.
L-R Deon DuToit, Hendrik Brakwater, Schalk Maas, Jean Marais(session drums), Altan Ungerer
I’m not sure if any of them were bricklayers like the late Sixto Rodriguez, but this song is the craft of a master. Skallabrak was not to my knowledge the first Afrikaans-fronted band to go against the grains of stunted convention, though there aren’t that many still around.
You don’t need a keen ear to realize that this track is not all that it seems. From the incrementally expanding ominous drone necromanced from a sepia-toned false memory of the initiation, to the anamnesis of deemed space in a developing city for production; this parodical lament of the quackademic authorities and ‘national’/folk ideals of pre-democratic South Africa is a masterful deception of layers.
Deon du Toit, the guitarist, apparently only got 2 words from Schalk Maas “Dissipline, roetine” (discipline, routine) and he wrote the whole song in an afternoon. The lyrics even take on the form of what they are satirizing in their minimalist yet superlatively astute paraphrasing. The lead tone that drops packs so much heft and the harmonica solo acting as consolidation of the vocals is sublime. And all throughout the ominous droning intensifies as that reverb layered on thicker than your grandmother’s wall-to-wall carpeting transports you right back to the 1980s.
My Afrikaans is not the best, but here is a rough translation of the lyrics for any that were interested:
“Routine and discipline/ the shibboleth of an old generation/ a cipher between friends/ willing and patient/ premeditated deliberation and repetition/ multiplied/ easily explained, difficult to understand/ hard to build up, easily spent/
discipline and routine, it’s routine and discipline/
desire and excess/ the one exists because of the other/ negligence/ peace and turmoil/ just like waves, the one after the other/ insecurity/ easily obtained, tough to keep/ difficult to hold on to, easily squandered/”
cover painting Painted by @un_sera_entier with logo and framing by @goulexdesign. The cover uses fantastic landscapes to convey feelings reality has no shapes for.
Tumbleweed Dealer (Montreal, Quebec, Canada)
You were warned about how much sucrose you were going to get with this helping of music. The opening tones on “Dark Green” supply that, and then some flavors otherworldly for a succor to a sonic absence you did not know you had. Fear not, as the title track of Tumbleweed Dealer’s new album implies, darkness ever looms in the shadows of the glades and edges of the forest clearings that the nascency of this next track and its accompanying video suggests, and it not so much as seeps but cascades forth at times.
Tumbleweed Dealer are now in their 4th iteration and Dark Green, the record, has been stewing for more than 8 years.
TD 4.0 is from left to right:
Seb Painchaud – Bass & Guitars
Jean-Baptiste Joubaud – Synths & Programming
Angelo Fata – Drums & Percussion
That’s a dangerous amount of time to give a walking musical compendium, an overqualified studio hermit, and a polymorphic cephalopod to progressively add more layers to what must already have been a filthily alluring genesis. From their Instagram:
“JB has been working with us since the first album, recording and mixing, but has joined on as a full-time member contributing to the creative process. Angelo came in early in the writing process of the new album and his innovation and energetic style has contributed a lot in shaping our new direction.”
We live in a time of exponentially ramped-up change, a transition into our final dystopian form, and if you talk to people working in the field of climate change, things can seem pretty bleak, but the same experts would have you know that progress is being made. Tumbleweed Dealer’s new album is an attempt to portray the quintessence of mother nature’s ire towards the hairy apes swarming its expanse and laying waste to its riches.
Might one have had no prior knowledge of Tumbleweed Dealer before hearing this new offering, one listen to “Dark Green” would be enough to deduce that they do have some metal chops. If somehow you missed the double bass and tremolos, then take a jump on the way-back machine and experience Unquintessence, a now defunct black metal project of the bassist that delivered some mind-warping-ly vehement black metal.
Founder Seb Painchaud has been in the scene for a long time, having also played in the brutal death metal project Withdraw, melodic/tech death band Winter Bestowed, black ‘n’ rolling Vatican, tech/death inspired metalcore band The Last Felony (whose final album, Too Many Humans is quite the popular moniker, for if you try searching it in Bandcamp you’ll get to this project with that name and which is closer to the modern iterations of Painchaud’s musical partialities – more on that later), blackened death metal project Nefastüs Diès (perhaps the reason why Painchaud doesn’t do music with vocals anymore), mathcore project Ion Dissonance, and melodic/death/metalcore project Adenine.
Enough background, a note or two about the single: If there was no video accompanying this majestic track then images of forests and jungles time-lapsed and sped up were the first that came to my mind. Just as you supposed you stumbled on a heath, your sonic limbs sink into a fen’s peaty soil, never bogged down, but with the knowledge that you tread in fuel fit for a conflagration; for the terrain you roam has surreal properties with augmented physics. The music video is suitably psychedelic and edited beautifully around the movements of the music.
This is one of those compositions that requires total immersion. Clean singing, bah who needs singing at all?! Recorded with finetuned care so you can hear all the little fret squeaks before they ramp up the ambience straight from a John Frusciante record. With synths and other keys that chameleon-ize said maestro’s voice, later emulating the sound of a backing choir that then morphs into church organ.
“Dark Green” first got premiered on Decibel where the band shared these thoughts on how the title track acts as the cipher or linchpin for the whole album (There are more cool thoughts from the band in that premiere if you appreciate a good metaphor, so follow the Decibel link too):
“The title track of the album, ‘Dark Green,’ represents the duality of the title. The first half is like moss covered post-rock while the second is a bleaker voyage with twists and turns and unexpected plot twists that re-contextualizes everything you’ve heard up until that point. Between the vintage keys, double bass drums and saxophone solo, we touch upon the different influences in our sound, both modern and retro, while filtering it all through our unique melodic pallet.”
“It’s a great introductory point for the album, and its quest to marry opposing musical forces to evoke surreal feelings within the listener. ‘Dark Green’ is the pent-up hatred of the forest, thickets, and swamps towards mankind, but it is also the loss of individuality most of us feel deep within ourselves when something shakes us to our very core.”
The promotional artwork by @goulexdesign is too good not to include
When the atmospherics basking in the background saunter forth, the darker shades of green start to realize and the track enters the domain of prog royalty. As a double kick is racing the throbbing-for-the-last-gasp procreative releases of the bass before flamenco-picking a Morricone lick ghosted into a pregnant silence to just nod for the memory of a note that enticingly lures like an anglerfish with, “you ready for more?”
The timestamp at termination is 4:51 but this is some form of dimension-manipulating chronomancy because the track feels like it is over quicker than Napalm Death’s “You Suffer.” That means I’m either suffering from THC-induced crapulence or my favorite drug just happens to be music; and when it’s layered this well, with so much to encounter on repeat listens, it can truly have the magical property of transcendental transportation.
“Dark Green” is fittingly multifarious for a person with interests as far-reaching as Seb Painchaud. His face will pop up if there was an encyclopedia entry for eclectic music taste. Haha. You should therefore not miss his end-of-year list which is one of the more diverse and unpredictable lists NCS hosts every year — including the one for this year.
“Dark Green” features Guest Saxophone by @zach_strouse_music (Rivers Of Nihil, Burial In The Sky) & Vintage Keys by @antoinebarilmusic (Augury, Obliveon) and is out on February 7th 2025.
Dax Riggs (Lafayette, Louisiana, USA)
Dax Riggs of Acid Bath fame’s new album set for release on January 24th 2025 has two singles out, and the first one, “deceiver,” has got a positive ear-drill for a chorus vocal melody. This next track needs not a disclaimer, it needs not a warning sign or label, it should be designated as a Keter (maximum containment) class by the SCP Foundation(a collaborative and ongoing sci-fi project).
If you were ignorant of the existence of When the Kite String Pops, then you’re one of the lucky few to experience the majesty of Dax Riggs’ pre-solo career for the first time, and damn, how varied this guy’s contribution has been to the universe of music. You have to click on that link and listen to it asap if you’re a streamer, because it gets taken down systematically by the establishment for sporting (if ever there was a bad choice of word) cover art originally painted by John Wayne Gayce – a self-portrait of the serial killer dressed up as his alter ego Pogo the clown.
There are heroes sans cape that upload it every time it goes down almost as metronomically sustained as the wizards who cast/code doors in the still-running cult favorite MUD (multi-user domains) of Ancient Anguish. You might get through the first song before it disappears but in essence that’s all you need. They wrote “The Blue” predicting that this would happen with a prescience detectable in the manic songwriting that spans more genres than Quick Ben had warrens to draw from. A warren being a magical conduit wizards from the Malazan Book of The Fallen could use depending on which flavor of magic they leaned towards or were disposed to. And enchanting, invigorating and positively timeless it is.
There’s a lot going on nearing the culmination of the year-end bonanza, so much to consume and to do, see, and find out and hear. Don’t be deceived however. There’s only one song that needs no vying for attention once you hit that first note. Here’s how the Bandcamp page describes the music:
“Dax Riggs is a musical exorcist, blending roots rock, doom and Southern gothic. He’s known for his otherworldly lyrics, folk metal ballardry and a gift for capturing the beauty in darkness. From the teenage death sludge of Acid Bath through the country punk garage folk of deadboy and the Elephantmen he has risen. ‘7 Songs for Spiders’ is Riggs’ third solo record and his first release in 15 years. It’s inspired by world music, gospel, hillbilly and proto metal sounds with an undercurrent of rebellious joy. Put on your face and laugh. Take off your mask and sing.”
The king of sludge took all the best and most virulent pop beats, put them in a blender sprinkled with grit, and the most purple fuckin bass sound. Recorded withIN a bass amp. Fuck this needs to be played loud. Hook upon hook upon hook. It’s good not to be dead yet in a time that music keeps reconstituting in such ecstatic ways. Dax was like, “what if I made a song that escalated in hook intensity the way the universe is expanding?” An inverted Russian doll of ensnarement.
It should be illegal to stack hooks this well-spaced. There is “I gotta take an explosive diarrheal discharge right quick” kind of driving, then there’s spontaneous-sneezing driving, and then there’s driving while “deceiver” is blaring its sultry ministrations through your speakers. No-one is allowed to have a bass/guitar-tone and a vox tenor this good and then drop a melody-bomb that hefty, and that’s before the chorus even hits. The setup is so unsubtly yet nondescriptly executed. “Maybe I’m a demon but you just don’t see me,” Dax croons, well, that’s the rhythm section for you.
There is only one way to listen to this. Loud enough to wake your comatose neighbor living 13 blocks away out of their slumber. Loud as all fornication. Don’t take any uppers though. It just keeps building. Your heart might just burst through your ribcage.
If you haven’t listened to clean singing for a while, then this here might just be the right fix for you. I can’t get past the fact that I have to warn people about how insanely infectious “deceiver” is. Boys and girls and everyone in between and surrounding, this is how you write a catchy tune. An exponentially ascending one that is. You’re gonna be like, “now I know” Dax is the greatest deceiver of all.
Bringing you right back down to earth is the second single on the album, “Even The Stars Fall.” “Got myself tangled up in a song” is like the lyric narrating my listening experience for the umpteenth time. They’re not mixed as a couple on the album, there’s a song sandwiched in between, but it feels like they could go together. By the time the stereo mix gets all binaural on your auditory cortex you won’t be thinking of anything other than hitting play again. The guitar tone is perfect with a buzzy background resonance and a deceptively tasty bassline as base line, and it gets hallucinatory without necessitating reality enhancers.
Lineup:
Dax Riggs – vocals / guitar / synth
Lucas Broussard – guitar / synth
Kane Cormier – bass
Scott Domingue – percussion
With additional guitar on both singles by Jerry Businelli and electronic wind instrument and fiddle by Jason Harrington on two yet unreleased tracks.