(written by Islander)
I had an attack of spring fever this morning. It’s definitely not springtime weather here in the Puget Sound (it’s quite cool and wet, the wind is howling, and if that keeps up our power will inevitably go out). I just didn’t want to do anything that seemed remotely like work, and compiling these roundups is remotely like work.
But the old obsession not to let any days go by at NCS without spreading the word about music eventually won out over laziness, though it may not win out over wind, and so I will attempt to be not too windy in what I write.
I thought about leading with some of the bigger names who have recently released new music in an effort to draw people toward more obscure names in today’s collection (I was thinking about the likes of Cancer, Gaahls Wyrd), Benediction, and Rivers of Nihil) but so many of the more obscure names are so appealing to me that I decided to just get right to them.
RALE (U.S.)
This morning my in-box included a Bandcamp alert about new music from Rale, which was like having a flash-bulb go off on an old camera about 12 inches from my open eyes. This North Carolina group have previously released a 2020 demo and a 2021 EP, and a 2022 single, and I spilled a bunch of super-enthusiastic words about all of those, so I was keen to find out what they’ve done now.
With the aid of some talented guests, what they’ve done now is a new EP (released today) named Spirit Death. It’s dedicated to the memory of Regina Gale Adkins Worz and Raymond Bunton III. Along with very cool cover art, it includes three songs.
The opener “Prayers Into the Abyss” is a savage dazzler, remarkably intricate in its instrumental adventures, unpredictable in its speed changes, kaleidoscopic in its moods as well as maneuvers, and utterly bestial in the vocal department.
Among the many surprises, it includes choral voices and a brief piano performance that draws out the more mournful aspects of the song, as well as a squalling guitar solo that’s close to a saxophone in sound and close to free jazz in its style, and a longer classical piano solo at the end that’s just marvelous (but increasingly distressing).
“Necrotic Spirit” and “Estrangement of Survival” (songs in which hair-raising screams also become prominent) are also dazzlers, the latter perhaps most of all among the three. They too show off the discombobulating technical skills and idiosyncratic adventurousness of each performer, and the deftness with which the band warp the moods and stylistic influences from minute to minute. They get proggy, they get jazzy, they get psychedelic, they get nasty and brutish, they never get dull.
I’ve always found Rale’s music to be mind-bending, but never more so than on this extraordinary new EP.
https://ralenc.bandcamp.com/album/spirit-death
https://www.instagram.com/ralencdm/
MONDOCANE (Sweden)
Here’s another band whom, like Rale, I’ve covered obsessively, witness the five articles and premieres I’ve posted since May 2022 which you can find through this link. In fairly short order, Mondocane has released three albums beginning in 2021, and now there’s a new single named “Grave Centuries“.
Mondocane has tended to wear different faces, but the face it wears here is as sinister, as supernatural, as magisterial as Hell’s throne. The drums rattle at a fast pace; the gritty riffing scathes like a dense sandstorm; elevated symphonic keys create sensations of terrible distress and terrible glory; the vocals crackle in sounds of hideous intensity.
Slowly wailing arpeggios deepen the music’s feeling of misery and hopelessness. Panoramic synths create soundscapes of wondrous desolation. The song blankets the mind with fear and futility, allowing no escape from its chilling realm.
https://mondocaneofficial.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/mondocaneofficial
JADE (Spain)
In line with today’s first two selections, here’s a third one from a band I’ve been hooked on for a while (and in November 2022 I had the privilege of premiering their debut album The Pacification of Death). Their lineup includes members of Foscor, Graveyard, White Stones, Vidres a la Sang, and Todo Mal, which should catch your attention even if you haven’t heard their previous music.
Jade have a new album named Mysteries of a Flowery Dream that will be coming out in May via Pulverised Records, and last week saw the release of a stunning music video for its elaborate and electrifying first single, “Shores Of Otherness“.
The song really does seem to transport us to shores of otherness from the first moments, as eerie, haunting orchestration and angelic wails drape the listener in grief and ghostliness. Crashing chords and slowly booming beats magnify the scale of the desolation, and the music’s calamitous intensity swells further through the advent of guttural growls and tones both deep and shrill that heave and writhe.
The music’s intensity continues building, with drums hurtling, vocals howling and wildly crying out, and the dense collage of instrumentation expanding like a sunrise on the world’s last day. The song also includes some potent jolting grooves, big gut-busting beats, and gloriously chiming and wondrously swirling melodies, altogether intertwining brutality and splendor, horror and heavenliness — and those wild cries are genuinely spine-tingling throughout.
Jade have themselves a real stunner here, a great come-on for the new album. The cover art by Adam Burke is a great come-on too!
https://www.pulverised.net
https://pulverised.bandcamp.com
https://emperorjade.bandcamp.com/album/the-sempiternal-wound-split-w-sanctuarium
https://www.facebook.com/jadestonemask
MINUTTI HULLUUTEEN (Finland)
Minuutti Hulluuteen (which might mean “Minute to Madness”) is the solo project of Finnish musician Lasse Laihola. Its debut release, which includes guest vocals by Mathias Lillmåns (of …And Oceans, Finntroll, and Dispyt, among others) is an EP on Inverse Records named Uni.
Uni‘s track list includes 8 songs. They add up to a hair over 9 minutes of runtime. You can do the math. They are advertised as taking listeners “to different levels of nightmare.”
The video below runs you through all 8 nightmare experiences. Based on the track lengths you might be expecting grindcore, but what you’ll get instead is a musical spectrum that ranges from melodic death metal with lots of interesting and even quirky riffing, to black metal of varying shades and what I’m tempted to call gothic metal.
The songs bring ever-changing tempos and moods, and a mix of deep speaking, guttural growling, and hellish screams. The moods range from ebullient viciousness to macabre experiences in haunting and hallucinatory peril, but as you move from track to track it really does seem like moving deeper into a very dark nightmare.
It’s a strange kind of experiment, because every one of these 8 tracks sounds like an excerpt from a longer song, or a song that should be longer, because the excerpts are so damned good. In that sense, the EP is a 9-minute tease, and though no one really likes to be teased, I’ll take it.
(Thanks to Ed. S for tipping me to this EP.)
https://minuuttihulluuteen.bandcamp.com/album/uni
https://www.facebook.com/minuuttihulluuteen
SLUDGE KEEPER (Italy)
Figuring out what kind of music Sludge Keeper make shouldn’t be mentally taxing: It’s right there in the name they chose, isn’t it? But it turns out the music on their recently released demo (which is self-titled) isn’t sludge metal at all, or at least it’s unlike any variant of sludge I’ve ever heard.
The opener “Denial of captivity” is high-speed instrumental insanity with grisly death growls, and it remains bizarre even when the band slow down a bit. You can tell these people all really know how to play, and could play all kinds of music if they so chose, but what they chose here is high-wire weirdness with labyrinthine progressions.
That opening song is so fascinating, so jaw-dropping in its free-wheeling compositional experimentalism and head-spinning execution, that you might wonder if they keep it up. And they do! One song after another they create wild carnivals of sound, each one intricately packed with puzzlers and pyrotechnics (and sometimes psychedelics).
Even when they slow their fingers and limbs, even when the music becomes spell-like and chilling (as in “Canine of the summit“), the music is still head-spinning as well as strange.
“Avant-garde” is such a nebulous term, but I don’t have a better one for this unconventional escapade. I might call it “avant-garde death metal” or “avant-garde prog”.
Oh, did I mention that the EP closes with a cover of Mastodon‘s “Slickleg” (a real throwback!)? In hindsight, that choice makes perfect sense. Sludge Keeper‘s original songs do have a kindred spirit with the Mastodon that made “Slickleg“, and their cover is just as much deranged fun as the original.
Okay, maybe we can call this “progressive sludge”?
This new demo follows a 2020 debut album on Selfmadegod Records named Slough of Despair. At that time Sludge Keeper was the solo work of Andrea Tocchetto (Inverted Matter), but on the new demo he’s joined by new member Federico De Bernardi di Valserra, whose drumming on the EP is truly eye-popping.
https://sludgekeeper.bandcamp.com/album/sludge-keeper
https://www.facebook.com/p/Sludge-Keeper-100094188965670/
THAT GODFORSAKEN WRETCH (U.S.)
I didn’t forewarn you up-front that today’s collection would include a closing curveball, but it does. And there’s really no better way to describe the following new album from That Godforsaken Wretch. The pitch floats in and drops steeply, right out of the zone and right into the underworld.
I found out about the album because it’s the work of a person (the godforsaken wretch) who, unbeknownst to me, was involved in the nightmarish cover recording of “Transylvanian Hunger” by the Ancine project, whose equally curveball music I spent some time describing about a month ago.
The musical ingredients in the new album Beware Of God are fairly simple: vintage-sounding keyboards, sometimes like a cathedral organ, sometimes like a calliope, sometimes like a Hammond organ, sometimes like a theremin; humming bass thrums; and drums in simple rhythms that sometimes make me think of oom-pah tuba music (but sometimes boom) — though in “Leprosy Jesus” the instrumentation also sounds like the sinister lilt and twang a banjo or some other old folk instrument.
But the main ingredient is the voice of That Godforsaken Wretch.
The keyboards create an atmosphere of gothic infernality (is that a word?) and horror, in keeping with the album’s gleefully blasphemous themes. Depending on where you are, the music waltzes and sways, it does resemble polka music (if made in Hades), and it proceeds like a stately coronation march for the ascendance of a demon queen or king.
But the vocals… they’re even more out of this world. They sound like a hellish convocation — singing in strident wailing and eerily quavering tones, screeching like horned and bat-winged things, snarling like Cerberus, croaking like a bullfrog with a multitude of warts.
It’s all very campy and sinister in all ways, and it made me smile like a fiend all the way through too. Maybe it will do that for you too.
https://thatgodforsakenwretch.bandcamp.com/album/beware-of-god
https://www.facebook.com/ThatGodforsakenWretch/
https://www.instagram.com/thatgodforsakenwretch/