In the late spring of this year the Belarusian raw black metal band Pa Vesh En released its fourth album Martyrs. Ever-prolific, Pa Vesh En is already returning with a fifth album, this newest one named Catacombs, and it’s being released today by Inferna Profundus Records.
What Pa Vesh En does from album to album is never entirely predictable, but one can predict that whatever variations might be introduced, the results will still be frightening, and so it is with Catacombs. Continue reading »
Even on Sunday mornings my paying work can rear its ugly head and steal away my time (world leaders looking for advice on how to clean up the shit they’ve made tend to be impatient). This happened to me today. The result is a more abbreviated roundup of blackened tonalities than I had hoped for, but I’m still enamored of all of it. You’ll see that it’s all pretty adventurous as well.
IFRYT (Poland)
Doom metal bands don’t have a monopoly on 10-minute tracks. Sometimes black metal bands make them too, especially when the bands are inspired by a bushel-full of music from well beyond the traditional boundaries of black metal, as Ifryt clearly is.
After releasing an 11-minute demo on Christmas Eve, 2017, this Polish solo project (the creator is Bartosz “Kuna” Mokr) now has a record named Płuca (“Lungs”) set for release on May 12th via Godz Ov War Productions. The first song to be revealed is the 10-minute “Straszne Rzeczy” (“Terrible Things”). It’s so utterly wild that if I had any sense (which I don’t), I wouldn’t even attempt to describe it. Continue reading »
An evocative title, this one: “In the Wood of Hanged Men“. If you let your mind dwell upon it, you might imagine a nightmarish experience, a vision of rotting flesh descending like pendulums from gnarled black branches, swaying to the movement of their own ghastly clockwork or simply gazing down with hollow eyes from the angles of broken necks. Maybe you can imagine their own terrors… maybe you can still hear them scream….
It’s a chilling vision, and a fitting title for the music itself, which is itself profoundly unearthly and terrorizing. What you might not expect is that this diabolical, ultra-disturbing, creation by Pa Vesh En is almost capable of simultaneously creating a fugue state, an appalling spell that somehow radiates through the shattering violence and becomes arresting. Continue reading »
Ritual Moon
Especially after yesterday’s humongous round-up it probably wasn’t smart for me to follow it with another one, but that’s what I’ve done. As you’ve probably figured out by now, careful thinking and reflection never have much to do with my NCS contributions. Impulse and enthusiasm tend to rule the day.
RITUAL MOON (U.S.)
I had intended to fully explore this L.A. band’s January 2021 debut album after listening to an advance track many months ago, but never got back to it until my comrade DGR recently posted about it. He figured it would be up my alley. It definitely is. Continue reading »
In the fall of last year we premiered the unnerving debut album, Church of Bones, by the Belarusian black metal entity Pa Vesh En. To borrow from the review that accompanied it:
“As the album’s title might suggest, these seven tracks sound as if they were recorded in a vast sepulcher far beneath the surface of the earth, all the shuddering and shattering tonalities drenched in reverb, the music profoundly haunting and deeply oppressive in the weight of the desolation it conveys. The album is sweeping in the scale of its apocalyptic grief and shattering in the intensity of the pain it channels into sound — an expression of emotional collapse so profound that it begins to seem majestic, an intense and immersive experience so all-consuming that it swallows up the listener, as if engulfed by the maw of a leviathan.” Continue reading »
As explained in Part 1 of this post yesterday, I made some especially difficult choices about what to cover this week because I had found so much I wanted to recommend. Splitting the column into two parts in order to include more music helped some, but wasn’t a complete solution. The task was further complicated when I discovered even more yesterday. The first selection below is one of those late discoveries, but it turns out that it fits very well with the music of the first three bands I’d originally chosen to begin this Part 2, and that now comes after it.
MEPHORASH
Yesterday Mephorash released an official video for the third track to surface so far from their fourth opus, the 74-minute Shem Ha Mephorash, which is based on the Kabbalistic 72-fold explicit name of God and now has a release date of April 18th. Before yesterday the band had revealed “777: Third Woe“, which was released as a single last year, and “King of King, Lord of Lords“, which was disclosed last August. We’ve provided reactions to both of those, and now to this new third piece. Continue reading »
Many of the more adventurous and steel-nerved among you will have already discovered the terrible wonders to be found in the music of Pa Vesh En. After all, in 2018 alone this remarkable black metal project from Belarus has already released through Iron Bonehead Productions the Dead Womb demo, a two-song 7″ named A Ghost, and a split album with Temple Moon. But all of those recordings were preludes to what you’re about to hear, a debut album named Church of Bones that Iron Bonehead will release on October 12th.
As the album’s title might suggest, these seven tracks sound as if they were recorded in a vast sepulcher far beneath the surface of the earth, all the shuddering and shattering tonalities drenched in reverb, the music profoundly haunting and deeply oppressive in the weight of the desolation it conveys. The album is sweeping in the scale of its apocalyptic grief and shattering in the intensity of the pain it channels into sound — an expression of emotional collapse that’s so profound it begins to seem majestic, an intense and immersive experience so all-consuming that it swallows up the listener, as if engulfed by the maw of a leviathan. Continue reading »