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INFERNO FESTIVAL 2012 – DAY 2 – AGALLOCH, TSJUDER, ABSU, SOLSTAFIR, AUTOPSY

Apr 122012

(Here’s Andy Synn’s review of performances at the second day of Oslo’s Inferno Festival. For his review of the first day’s inferno, go here.)

Day 2, and far more refreshed after a night’s proper sleep, we turned up at the venue a little before Agalloch’s set, allowing us to wander round the various stalls, tattoo showcases, and other assorted gubbins that act as an annex to the main festival. Highlights included some impressive tattoo work, a random assortment of rare/hilarious special editions (including a hugely over-priced and hugely amusing mega-box edition of the new and deplorable Morbid Angel album), and the none-more-metal selection offered by the infamous Neseblod Records stand. To top it all off we were even offered the opportunity to buy some of ICS Vortex’s old leathers. Truly the stuff legends are made of. But all these wonders were mere distractions set against the night’s impressive musical line-up.

Right from the start, Agalloch set out to reclaim and redefine the term “epic” with their tense and scintillating sound, expanding to fill the massive venue with a wall of sonic majesty, roots and branches reaching up to the heavens and penetrating deep into the loam of the earth. Cherry-picking the best tracks from The Mantle, Ashes Against The Grain, and Marrow Of The Spirit, the quartet painted the venue with sound and light, washing over the audience in tidal waves of lush, transcendent noise and focussed power – in particular, “In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion” was both utterly haunting and emotionally exhausting. Even some temporary technical problems were dealt with in an almost seamless manner, the rest of the band maintaining the pulsating heartbeat of ethereal ambience while frontman John Haughm dealt with his misbehaving guitar.

If you’ve never seen Agalloch live, I implore you to do so at any costs; they conjure an atmosphere as intense as any band I have seen (equaling, though not competing with, that of Triptykon on the previous night), but in a manner wholly unique to themselves. It’s the music of nature and nurture, layers and layers of melody and complexity that subtly, and unexpectedly, combine into something overwhelmingly heavy yet effortlessly organic. Continue reading »

AN ICELANDIC TAG TEAM: SOLSTAFIR AND DIMMA

Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 16 Responses »

Feb 292012

I’m going to do to you what I did to myself last night, and I hope you get the same charge out of it that I got. It will take more time than it usually takes to zip through our posts here, but even if you choose to stay with me for only part of the journey, I think it will be worthwhile. It starts with Solstafir, it continues with Dimma, and it ends with both of them, in the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a live tag-team performance by two bands.

SOLSTAFIR

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve written about Sólstafir and their brilliant two-disk 2011 album, Svartir Sandir. They’re only a borderline metal band, but the borderland they occupy is a place I go to live in my mind quite often. There’s a song that ends the second disc called “Djákninn”. It’s a jam that’s nearly 11 minutes long, and I get lost in it every time I listen.

Listening is like getting behind the wheel of a car with some muscle under the hood, starting from a standing stillness and patiently shifting through the gears as it builds speed on an a climbing open road with some curves ahead. You hear the engine begin to purr, and as the throttle opens up in stages, it begins to roar, and then you’re really cruising like there’s no tomorrow, with the wind rushing through the open windows under a blue sky with not another care in the world. Continue reading »

SOLSTAFIR: THE “FJARA” VIDEO

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 4 Responses »

Jan 172012

Solstafir’s “Fjara”: One of the most beautiful, most memorable, most emotionally piercing songs I heard during 2011. Not “extreme” enough in its sound for me to include on our MOST INFECTIOUS SONG list, but I gave it an “honorable mention”. I should have put it on the fucking list anyway.

Today, Metal Hammer premiered the official video for “Fjara”. It suits the song: scenes of the dramatic Icelandic landscape; water falling, surging, receding; a beautiful woman dragging a coffin, the symbol of a loss she cannot escape (shades of Gojira’s “Vacuity” video); the hulk of a dead U.S. bomber; ghosts and spirits . . .

It’s beautifully made, like the song. Watch it after the jump. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2011’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: “HONORABLE MENTION”

MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011 6 Responses »

Jan 142012

It seems like many “best of the year” lists include a category of “honorable mentions”. I don’t know how artists feel about being included in an “honorable mention” list. I would guess they feel pretty meh about it, or maybe even worse than that. The list-maker is sort of saying, “this was good, but not as good as the 10 or 20 albums that I thought were the best.” Thanks a fucking lot, you douchebag!

I have an honorable mention list to accompany our list of 2011’s “most infectious” extreme metal songs, which I finally finished rolling out yesterday. But this isn’t the typical “honorable mention” list. These aren’t songs that I omitted because I didn’t think they were quite as good as the ones on my list. They were on my “master list” of candidates, and I omitted them only because I decided I couldn’t honestly say they were “extreme metal songs”. Maybe some of you will think I already violated that rule with other songs on the list and I’m therefore acting inconsistently. Could be.

Anyway, consistent or not, here are four songs from the master candidate list that I thought were mighty infectious and mighty good, but not extreme enough to make the final cut.

SOLSTAFIR: “FJARA”

This band’s 2011 two-disc album Svartir Sandar has blown up their profile far beyond the shores of that place of ice and fire they call home. In a word, the album is amazing. It’s full of ice and fire, too, but it also includes slow, melancholy, emotionally powerful songs like “Fjara”. Continue reading »

THE TOP 10 LIST OF TAMÁS KÁTAI (THY CATAFALQUE)

Listmania 11 Responses »

Dec 192011

(Tamás Kátai is the man behind a Hungarian band called Thy Catafalque, whose fifth album Rengeteg is one of my favorite recordings of the year, for reasons I’ll be explaining in a forthcoming review. Also, a song from that album will appear soon on our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. So of course, as part of our Listmania series, I asked Tamás to contribute his list of the year’s best albums — and here we have it.)

10. Baaba Kulka – Baaba Kulka

A Polish band with early Iron Maiden covers up to Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son album. Why it’s interesting and worthy of note is that they handle the task with exceptional freedom and taste. My faves are the trip-hopish “Aces High” and the beautifully low-key “Flight Of Icarus”. True Warriors Of Heavy Metal keep out!

EYE-CATCHERS: SÓLSTAFIR AND KIM HOLM

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Oct 292011

Over the last two weeks we’ve had a couple of posts about an Icelandic band called Sólstafir and their new album on Season of Mist, Svartir Sandar. The most recent post (here) included a great video of the band performing a song from the album called “Fjara” on Icelandic television. Sólstafir has also nearly finished filming an official music video for the same song. I have no doubt we’ll be posting that at NCS as soon as it premieres. But for today, we’re focusing on album art instead of Sólstafir’s music.

Svartir Sandar is a two-CD album. The first disc is called “Andvari” and the second is titled “Gola”, and each of them includes six songs — 12 in total. I don’t yet have a physical copy of the album, but it apparently includes a booklet with artwork for each of the 12 songs. One at a time, Sólstafir has been adding the art for each song to their Facebook albums, and today they uploaded the last one.

I’ve been watching as these pieces of art have gone up on Facebook, and now that they’re all there, I’ve collected them in this post. For reasons I doubt I could articulate, they suit the music. Even standing alone without the amazing music, they’re very cool. All the art is by a Norwegian cartoonist named Kim Holm. Take a look at all 12 creations after the jump (and listen to a Sólstafir song while you’re doing that). Continue reading »

SÓLSTAFIR: “FJARA”

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 8 Responses »

Oct 222011

About 10 days ago, I put up a post about the forthcoming album by this Icelandic band, which had then just started streaming on a Finnish metal site. I also featured one song from the album, which had simply floored me. That song drew an extremely positive response here at NCS. I just discovered that two days ago Sólstafir appeared on Icelandic television, with a live performance of another song from the album called “Fjara” (Icelandic for beach) and it’s now up on YouTube.

This is clearly fated to be an atypically mellow day at NCS, with that new Devin Townsend demo and that William Basinski track included in our last post. At least for the day, we may have to adopt Andy Synn’s tongue-in-cheek re-naming of the site: “No, Clean Singing!”

“Fjara” is a slow, doom-y, song that’s quite beautiful and, to me, quite arresting. Just like the first song I heard from this album, it made me stop, pay attention, become fully drawn into the music, and start playing it again as soon as it finished. I have no doubt it will follow me around like a ghost the rest of this day.

The black-and-white video really suits the music, too; you can tell that the band members were emotionally invested in this song to the hilt when they played it. Do check it out after the jump. Svartir Sandar is out now on Season of Mist. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could watch bands like this on American TV? Continue reading »

SOLSTAFIR STREAMING

Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 22 Responses »

Oct 112011

Sólstafir is an Icelandic band whose fourth album — a double CD — will be released by Season of Mist on October 14. Andy Synn has made passing reference to them in a positive way in a few of his NCS reviews of other bands’ music, but until this morning I’d never heard what they have to offer. But we now have the promo of the new album, Svartir Sandar, and at the same time I discovered that the Finnish web site Inferno began streaming the album in full today (and for one week hereafter).

So, while doing something else I went to Inferno and began streaming the music. The first song on the stream is called “Ljós í Stormi”. It’s more than 11 minutes long. It stopped me dead in my tracks, almost immediately. I ceased what I was doing and just drank in the riveting music. I suppose one could call it post-black-metal, for lack of a better short-hand, but that seems so vague and, frankly, kind of dull — and the music is anything but dull.

After an almost two-minute instrumental intro that’s slow, cold, and hypnotic, the song explodes in rush of crashing chords and convulsive rhythms, supercharged by Aðalbjörn Tryggvason’s vein-bursting vocals. The pacing eases back, with echoing guitars introducing a dark, melancholy melody, accented by strange pieces of electronica, and those slow passages trade off with a distorted rolling gait. It’s both icy and fiery, otherworldly and passionate, as much prog-rock as metal, and worth your time.

GO HERE to stream this album on Inferno, and if I can’t persuade you to do that, at least go past the jump and check out “Ljós í Stormi”. We’ll have a review of this album in the future. Continue reading »

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