(written by Islander)
Greetings on another Saturday. I have another globe-hopping-and-genre-hopping selection of new songs and videos filtered from what I was able to check out over the past week.
At the end, I’m also recommending a pair of recent interviews published at locations other than NCS, not just because the bands are favorites of mine but also because the discussions are so interesting.
But we’ll start with the music….
GRAVE INFESTATION (Canada)
Last week Dark Descent revealed songs from two albums they’ll be releasing on February 28th. To help myself spread around our lavish patronage (lol), I’m only going to comment about one of them (you can listen to the other one, from Sepulchral Curse, here).
“Living Inhumation” is the opening track on Grave Infestation‘s new album Carnage Gathers. By turns, as the drum momentum changes and maddened howls erupt, the high-toned guitars create an experience that’s eerily glorious and gloomy, fiendishly squirming, viciously swarming, morbidly throbbing, and (thanks to spitfire soloing) freakishly ecstatic. A good way to wake the fuck up if you’re feeling sluggish on this Saturday.
The album cover is the work of Misanthropic-Art. This Vancouver-based band’s vocalist/guitarist Graham Christofferson explains it:
“Each song references a story of someone’s strange relationship to death, real or fictitious. The cover art is related to the track The Anthropophagus, it’s about a 17th century French cannibal hermit. That’s the cave he lived in. People called him the Anthropophagus, which means cannibal, but he was just basically starved to madness.”
The album will be co-released by Dark Descent and Invictus Productions.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/carnage-gathers
https://invictusproductions666.bandcamp.com/album/carnage-gathers
https://www.facebook.com/graveinfestation/
DARK MEDITATION (U.S.)
Before darting away to other geographic regions, I decided to stay in the Pacific Northwest for one more song, this one a second single off Dark Meditation‘s new EP Where the Darkness Bleeds (I gushed about the first single “Call to the Beast” here).
“I Am the Hunter” arrived last week with a video that features scenes of the band performing along with an assortment of occult and otherwise creepy imagery. The song also creates an occult and creepy atmosphere, though the hard-hitting drum-grooves will rattle your skull while the sinister and soaring riffage and the sinister and soaring vocals put the shivers on your spine. The song is also home to an exhilarating guitar solo that will cause clawed hands to happily hoist invisible oranges.
In all its aspects, it’s a very catchy song, and the clean-sung vocals (gasp!) are tremendous.
https://darkmeditation.bandcamp.com/album/where-the-darkness-bleeds
https://www.facebook.com/darkmeditation
SPIRITWORLD (U.S.)
Vegas-ward we go next with a new song and video from SpiritWorld‘s new album Helldorado. This one, “Oblivion“, includes guest performances by members of Black Braid and Rise Against.
With a name like “Oblivion“, it won’t surprise you to learn that the song eventually reaches a devastating stage. But first it opens with a swirling riff and a low-end punch you can feel in your bowels, and follows that with a burst of vicious jackhammering. Hair-raising howls, gang yells, and nasty growls join in, along with an exhilarating guitar solo.
The riffing grows more unhinged and dervish-like, and the strangled snarls more demonic as the rhythm section continue to slug like heavyweights — and the band break out the jackhammers one more time at the end. The song seems like a perfect representation of what’s signified by the album’s title.
Helldorado will be released by Century Media on March 21st.
https://spiritworld.lnk.to/Helldorado-AlbumID
https://spiritworldprophet.bandcamp.com/album/helldorado-24-bit-hd-audio
https://www.facebook.com/spiritworldprophet
ANCIENT DEATH (U.S.)
Leaping further eastward, I landed in Massachusetts and discovered the first advance track from a new album by Ancient Death. That song, “Breaking the Barriers of Hope,” takes us back into death metal territory.
At full speed, the song is a hard-charging fretwork freakout. In a slower lane, the mind-spearing guitar work is still freakish but the music is also dismal — and the roaring and screaming vocals could be described the same way.
In yet another phase the riffage feels like a sewing machine vigorously stitching some arcane pattern across flesh, while the lead guitar echoes and wails like a suffering ghost from another dimension and then explodes in another freakout. After that, the band lock into a highly headbangable pavement-cracking groove while the soloing continues, popping eyes and dropping jaws. It’s all absolutely electrifying… and fiendishly infectious.
Ancient Death‘s new album, Ego Dissolution, is set for release by Profound Lore Records on April 18th.
https://linktr.ee/ancientdeath
https://ancient-death.bandcamp.com/album/ego-dissolution
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063961366741
TYRANNOSATAN (Sweden)
Now we take a really big leap further eastward, crossing the broad Atlantic, induced by the name of the Swedish band Tyrannosatan, with whom I’ve had some good encounters in the past.
Their new song, the black-thrashing “Vemhir“, makes for a good companion to that Ancient Death madness, because it too is wild. The drums give it a surging but not entirely predictable gallop, while the bright-toned riffing is a delirious swirl that begins to sound like a seizure, and there’s nothing sane about the vocals or the bassist’s fleet-fingered romps either.
When the drums steady down, you’ll find a trippy guitar solo, and when they speed up again you’ll get brazen and blaring chords and then further knife-like whirlwinds, berserk screams, and one last burst of soloing insanity.
The song is the opening track on a new EP named Babylons Skräck, set for release on April 2nd.
https://tyrannosatan.bandcamp.com/album/babylons-skr-ck
https://www.facebook.com/tyrannosatangbg
ARV (Norway)
I guess I’m kind of zig-zagging now, moving northeast from Gothenburg to Oslo. To hell with fuel efficiency, because I wanted to pair up that Tyrannosatan song with the one from Ancient Death, but I also don’t want to sacrifice the attention that Arv‘s new song deserves.
This new one, conjoined with a good video of the band, is “Victim“. It’s a spine-jolter and a head-smacker, heavy on the grooves, but also a blazing and searing breakout with larynx-stripping screams. The tremolo’d guitars boil around hardcore beats, creating a mood of distress and desperation, and seem to cry out in anguish.
Eventually, in this multi-faceted yet relentlessly intense song, the drums start blasting, and the riffage feverishly swarms before the feverish jolting returns. (Shout-out to the bass-work as well; you can feel it in your bones.)
The song is from Arv‘s debut album Curse & Courage, which will be released by Vinter Records on May 2nd.
https://www.facebook.com/arvband
https://www.facebook.com/vinterrecords
EXILIUM NOCTIS (Greece)
I decided to begin pursuing a southerly trajectory on the globe, with a strong taste of Grecian black/death metal thanks to a new song from Exilium Noctis.
“God’s Demise” begins with a towering and ominous introduction, as gigantic drums boom, guitars ooze misery, and funeral bells toll. And then we found out how God met his demise — in a hurricane of wildly swirling and violently swarming riffage, full-fury drum blasting, and imperious but savagely caustic howls.
The music seems to portray violent conflict on a sweeping scale, indeed like war in the heavens, but the waves of whirling fretwork are also penetrating and catchy. Glittering bursts and glorious blasts of synths add to the music’s frenzied and ferocious grandeur.
Be ready, because after that intro section, this song allows no room to breathe. It’s from an album named Pactum Diaboli that will be released by Black Lion Records on May 9th.
https://exiliumnoctisblacklion.bandcamp.com/album/pactum-diaboli
https://www.facebook.com/ExiliumNoctis
PRIMORDIAL BLACK (Tunisia)
Still moving south, but going back westward, I’m going to close today’s music with a lyric video for a lavish song from the Tunisian band Primordial Black.
“Mater Lacrimarum” is the song’s name, which translates from the Latin to “Mother of Tears.” As the name suggests, there are elements of anguish in the song, perhaps especially in the words, but if you’re expecting slow and gloomy music, think again.
Instead, the song is a rumbling and raking marauder that also accelerates into a hurtling charge, with vivid swirls of lightning-flash guitars. Meanwhile, the vocals vent the words in unhinged howls and malignant roars.
But, as foretold by the title, the music does suddenly transform, becoming gentle and lonely, and then it fluidly flows with a dark, vaporous, dreamlike melody above head-hooking beats. The music’s intensity gradually elevates again, though that melody becomes even more heart-breaking as the change occurs.
At full speed again, the music sounds tormented and tortured — but it slows again too, and the vocals there are even more shattering than before. It’s such an elaborate song, and even more changes are still to come, including long, slow, mournful horn-like tones and riotously flickering strings. Though the drums really race at the end, there’s no escaping the music’s deep sorrow.
The song is from Primordial Black‘s forthcoming debut album Dark Matter Manifesto.
https://primordialblackband.bandcamp.com/track/mater-lacrimarum
https://primordialblack.wixsite.com/primordial-black
https://www.facebook.com/primordial.black.band
INTERVIEWS
[4672] (Poland)
Looking back at our archives, I see that I have written about individual songs or complete releases by the constantly surprising [4672] nine times since 2019. But for as many times as I’ve studied the music and spilled words about this project, I now realize that I only scratched the surface. That realization dawned as I read a new interview by Ian Chainey (aka Wolf Rambatz) with the band’s founder Artur Ostrowski.
Both Chainey‘s description of the music’s evolution and the fascinating insights provided by Ostrowski about his inspirations and intentions made me want to go back and re-listen to the entire discography. For people who are already ardent fans of [4672], the interview is indispensable. For people who have yet to investigate the music, it’s an excellent launching pad into a unique sequence of discoveries. You can find the interview here:
https://plaguerages.substack.com/p/truly-unique
A CD version of [4672]‘s latest album [Ołów] became available through [4672]‘s Bandcamp yesterday:
https://4672.bandcamp.com/album/o-w
THE BLOOD MOUNTAIN BLACK METAL CHOIR (U.S.)
What I wrote above about the new interview of [4672] also applies to an interview of The Blood Mountain Black Metal Choir recently published at Machine Music. If you don’t know about their first demo Folklore and want some kind of introduction to it, I gave it a review here about two weeks ago. The interview is an even better introduction to a project that has already received a lot of attention in underground circles and deserves more.
The questions sought the Georgia-based artist’s thoughts about albums other than Folklore, and the answers are very interesting, though you probably wouldn’t expect many of them based on what Folklore delivers. The last band mentioned in the interview is one I’ll be saying something about in tomorrow’s column.
You can find the interview here:
You can listen to the music here:
https://thebloodmountainbmc.bandcamp.com/album/demo-i-folklore