Two years ago the long-running Israeli black metal band Arallu, whose roots go back to the late ’90s, released their latest album under the imposing title Death Covenant. And the music is also imposing — ferocious, heavy, often vast and towering — but it’s also complex, dynamic, and exotic (for want of a better word) in its seamless incorporation of Middle Eastern folk melody and instrumentation.

It’s a striking example of how a style of extreme music born in the cold regions of northern Europe can be reconfigured and reborn to suit the terrain and traditions of a dramatically different world. And its changing musical manifestations and elaborate songcraft make it an album that rewards careful and extended listening in addition to firing up the blood and casting spells on a first spin, the kind of record that reveals new discoveries with each journey through its 10 songs.

One of this writer’s favorite songs on Death Covenant is the penultimate track, “Empire of Salt“, and so it’s a real pleasure to host the premiere of Arallu‘s transfixing video for that song today — especially since we’re doing it on a Bandcamp Friday, a good day to pick up records like Death Covenant. Continue reading »

This makes the third time we’ve done a premiere for the Israeli black metal band Arallu. The first time was about six weeks before the release of their 2017 album Six. The next time, roughly two years later, it was a song from their most recent full-length, En Olam. And today it’s a video for a song that’s… more than 20 years old!

It was 1999 when Arallu released their debut album, The War on the Wailing Wall, following an initial 1997 demo with the same title. In the decades that have followed that release, the band’s music evolved in dramatic ways. As we wrote about their most recent record, “the songs capture archetypes of violence and bloodshed, defiance of orthodoxy and devilish supremacy, but they also become spells,” and, as they had done before, the band augmented the metal “with the tones of ancient instruments, among them Saz, Oud, Kanoon, and Drabukka”, which were used to enhance the strong influence of Middle Eastern melodies.

Turning back the clock to the 1999 debut album, you can perceive the seeds that would grow into what the band has become today. But apart from the historical significance of the record, it turns out to have withstood the test of time very well. And so it’s not surprising that, at last, the album is being reissued on vinyl for the first time, complete with new vinyl mastering by Patrick W. Engel at “Temple of Disharmony”. And it’s one of those 1999 tracks that we’re bringing you today, accompanied by video of Arallu, as they are today, performing the song. Continue reading »

It’s not uncommon to hear wisps of traditional Middle Eastern music in extreme metal — or at least what most of us in the West would identify as Middle Eastern music based on some kind of passing experience (putting to one side that Middle Eastern music spans an enormous breadth of territory and cultures, from Morocco to Iran).

In many instances, the incorporation of such melodies by Western bands seems intended to create an exotic atmosphere (or at least exotic to Western ears), or in some cases a sense of ancient demonic forces looming in the shadows, or a feeling that the listener is in the presence of pagan rituals or arcane forms of mysticism that pre-date today’s dominant forms of monotheism by millennia.

But very few metal bands go as far as Arallu in making Middle Eastern musical traditions the beating heart of their compositions. You will hear the extent of their dedication in the song we’re premiering today, the third track from their new album, Six, a song called “Adonay“. Continue reading »