Sep 222022
 

For the second day in a row (and there will be a third tomorrow) it’s our pleasure to premiere a song from a forthcoming album on one of our favorite labels, the always distinctive I, Voidhanger Records. Yesterday it was Acausal Intrusion, and today the focus is the Greek black metal band Voak and their debut album Verdrängung.

The musical drive of Voak is fueled (as the label explains) by their concerns over “societies shaken by racial tensions, sexual discriminations and extremisms of all kinds”. They chose for the title of their album a German word that refers to the suppression of inner feelings and conflicts, which can lead to inaction in the face of wrongs. They write:

“The presence of our inner conflict shall trumpet over the mesmerizing melody of our comfort and fear of quarrel. To identify ‘Verdrängung’ as such, is a step to be taken in order to be able to fight among others, after fighting against the causes of our own inertia…. The oppressed and the ones struggling against the ‘Verdrängung’ may live in different prisons, but they are the majority… And in unity there is hope.” Continue reading »

Sep 042022
 

For this Sunday’s column I’ve included three complete releases and one from a forthcoming album. I venture to say that you’ll find the first two releases formidably frightening and the third one more head-hooking and heart-exploding, while the advance track is an amalgam that’s fiery, feral, and defiant.

ADAESTUO (International)

I’ve written with admiration about all three of Adaestuo’s previous releases — the 2016 debut EP Tacent Semitae and the band’s two albums, Krew za krew (2018) and Manalan virrat (2020). So there was no chance I wouldn’t make the dive into Purge of the Night Cloak, a new EP they released just last week, but which seems to consist of recordings conceived in 2016 and first made in 2020. They describe it as an effort “to bring the intrepid beholder into a more Faustian Gnosis”. Continue reading »