Posts Tagged ‘black metal’

Liturgy – 93696

Posted: 22 March 2023 in Albums
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Thrill Jockey – 24th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Wikipedia, and most other sources for that matter, will tell you that ‘Liturgy is an American black metal band from Brooklyn, New York’. The band’s own bio, which explains how their brand of ‘“transcendental black metal” exists in the space between metal, experimental, classical music and sacred ritual’ and that ‘The band is simultaneously a platform for fine art and theology’ is rather more illuminating in explaining how they have vastly expanded their horizons and those of the genre to create a form which is truly unique.

93696 is very much a concept-based work, which is best explained by quoting: ‘93696 is a number derived from the religions of Christianity and Thelema, a numerological representation of heaven, or a new eon for civilization. Hunt-Hendrix composed the album as an exploration of eschatological possibility divided by the four “laws” that govern her own interpretation of heaven, “Haelegen”: Sovereignty, Hierarchy, Emancipation, and Individuation. These laws constitute the four movements of 93696 which act as dramas all their own within the framework of the record.’

And what a record. ‘Epic’ barely touches it. It’s immense in every way, not least of all duration, with fifteen tracks spanning the best part of an hour and a half, this is expansive on a scale akin to SWANS (who they’ve previously supported). It’s also every bit as dynamically charged as latter-day SWANS albums, with tracks anything up to a quarter of an hour in length powering though a succession of crescendos, via sweeping choral soundscapes.

‘Djeennaration’ packs everything in early, presenting eight-and-a-half minutes of frenetic fretwork and thunderous percussion, over which vocals switch from angelic to demonic and back in the blast of a beat. It’s powerful, and quite bewildering in both its force and cinematic scope.

Done differently, this could feel overlong and pretentious, but the execution is so precise and the great ambition so focused on realisation that everything feels remarkably organic and despite making gigantic leaps between passages, changing tempo and tone here, there, an everywhere, it flows. Shuddering slabs of power chords that crunch like quartz while blasts off pure noise tear the air, but as ‘Haelegen II’ shows, with the incorporation of piano, there’s so much more texture and detail than plan fast-as-fuck fret attacks – then, from out of nowhere, things take a turn into folksy post-rock.

The savage squall of ‘Before I Knew the Truth’, released as a single a few weeks ago distils the potent force of the entire album into four and a half flooring minutes. There are some brief – and strange – moments of respite, such as the quavering woodwind tones of the brief interlude that is ‘Red Crown II’ and the delicate keys of ‘Angel of Emancipation’, and they’re most necessary, as the majority of 93696 is a force beyond nature.

The fifteen-minute title track is nothing short of an absolute monster, and as much as it’s n obliterative squally, it’s also a dynamic and wide-ranging sonic and cerebral experience, culminating in a vast orchestral sweep that’s nothing short of stunning.

This does feel very much like an absolute pinnacle and a definitive and exhaustive – and, it has to be said, exhausting – statement. Transcendental indeed.

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Listen: ‘Leðurblökufjandinn’ by Altari

Posted: 14 March 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Fire and brimstone from Icelandic Black Metal band Altari, as their volcanic new album Kröflueldar erupts via Svart Records on 14.04.23. Named after a series of eruptions that happened at Krafla in Iceland in 1975, Kröflueldar represents the constant threat of ash that Altari’s music lives under. Kröflueldar was a 9 year series of eruptions, and since the album took almost 9 years to create, Altari felt that it was a fitting title for their scalding and ferocious music.

Now the band have shared the Virus inspired new single ‘Leðurblökufjandinn’ with Óskar Þór commenting, “It’s the oldest song on the record and by far the strangest one considering the overall time pattern. I thank Virus for the inspiration, since it’s from the time I spent most of my listening time on Virus and Ved Buens Ende.

There’s not much to say really, other than the lyrics from that point on became more romanticized throughout the record. It deals with an entity bent on stealing your beauty, be it inner or outer whichever is preferred.

I can safely say that it deals with my past addictions, which prompted me to steal myself away from those closest to me.”

Listen to ‘Leðurblökufjandinn’ here:

Watch: ‘Tilbake Til Opprinnelsen’ by Mork

Posted: 10 March 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Following the first single of ‘Bortgang’, Mork reveal ‘Tilbake Til Opprinnelsen’ the second offering of Dypet.

Representing a musical journey that reveals more as the track goes on, ‘Tilbake Til Opprennilsen’ begins with melancholic Black Metal tones that are accompanied by an eerie synth theme, which as Thomas Eriksen describes “is representative of the nerves running through the earth.”

The concept of regeneration is key to idea of the song which continues to gather momentum until the atmospheric breakdown which is a sonic representation of the beginning of the rebirth.

Eriksen mentions: “‘Tilbake Til Opprinnelsen’ is an epic track about the world as a whole regretting everything it has made and become, resulting in it erasing everything on its own to then rebuild it all from scratch. The breakdown represents the shift. where the world starts to retract everything and everyone. The high point is when the vocal choir sets in. That is when the oceans are filled, rivers are made, mountains are raised, and the moon is hung upon the night sky yet again. A fitting epic to finish off the album.”

Accompanying the single comes a visualiser created by Matthew Vickerstaff.

Watch the video here:

‘Dypet’ sees Mork create a miasma of grim and frost-bitten riffs and harsh vocal melodies, marking the next logical evolution to come from the brilliant mind of Thomas Eriksen. The album simultaneously pushes new ideas forward yet still retains the signature foundations of ice cold hypnotic Black Metal.

Eriksen comments “It is with great pride that I am able to present and experience the release of my sixth full length album. I put every single drop of myself into the process of shaping MORK’s music. Perhaps even more so with this new album. As the album title, which translates to “The Deep”, something from the depths has been brought to the surface, “Dypet” was inspired by my life over the last couple of years, the thoughts, feelings, passion and the evolving of creative free will. Dive in and let yourself sink into the abyss. “

The album also features a special guest appearance from HJELVIK, the former singer of fellow Nordic legends Kverlertak, on ‘Hoye Murer’. It also delves into the world of analogue synth’s adding a different but no less hellish soundscape to Mork’s palette.

‘Dypet’, Norwegian for ‘abyss’ promises to ring true to its name delivering eight brand new tracks that feature Thomas Eriksen’s signature Black Metal howls and caustic guitars. The album was once more performed, recorded and mixed by Eriksen with engineering assisted by Freddy Holm whilst mastering was carried out by Jack Control at Enormous Door (Darkthrone).

David Thiérrée also makes his return now on his third collaboration with Mork. His artwork that has become just as synonymous with Mork’s sound. The piece is inspired by the album’s theme of “Draugen/Cthulhu”; also featured within the art is a crest created by Jannicke Wiese-Hansen.

The inspiration behind the album’s title track lies in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos but with a Nordic twist. Using the Norwegian coastline as it’s setting, the artwork illustrates a mysterious cult that now worships the ‘Draugen’ (a mythical sea ghost in Norwegian lore) paying homage to the sea dwelling beast of Cthulhu.

‘Dypet’ is not a concept album and the themes of hatred, death, betrayal, inner demons and misanthropy will find fans of Black Metal right at home.

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Photo credit: Necroshorns

AGLO – Into the Maze

Posted: 16 February 2023 in Albums
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Gutter Prince Cabal – 16th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

There aren’t many guitar-based genres of music where one-man bands are particularly commonplace. Of course, I’m not talking about folk or acoustic-based music, but the kind of music where, on listening, you’d expect a full band. Industrial is something of an exception because early exponents like JG Thirlwell – aka Foetus – developed through the use of tape loops and studio experimentation, and the same is also true of later exponents like Nine Inch Nails, with Trent Reznor’s studio-based project evolving from being largely synthetic into a live proposition.

But black / death metal are genres unto themselves. One might joke that it’s because most of the people who make this kind of stuff have no mates or are too antisocial to form bands, although it may not be much of a joke. Either way, Melbourne-based Aaron Osborne is one of those one-man operations, handling all aspects of writing and playing to create the sound of several. And what a sound it is. If you want dark, dense, and sludgy, with bowel-loosening guttural vocals, then you’re in luck.

Into the Maze – a twenty-seven minute album – or mini-album – actually comprises two new songs plus four cuts previously released as the Collector EP.

You don’t listen to this stuff to be uplifted – but you do dive into it for escape, and Into the Maze brings that cathartic release.

The title track is monster slab of downtuned darkness. There are some guitar screeches which emerge from the relentless trudge that call to mind Fudge Tunnel, but this is denser, slower, doomier, and somehow less organic-feeling, like early Pitch Shifter but with live drums, and passing a nod to how they take ‘the swagger and groove of Entombed’s Wolverine Blues and infuse it with the tar-thick pull of doom’. But against Wolverine Blues, it’s half the pace and the lyrics are unintelligible grunts, so it’s very much an example of taking an influence and steering it in a different direction. And this is a good thing. The production is perfectly dingy and oppressive, and over the course of just short of half an hour it really grinds you down in just the way it should. In all, it’s pretty bloody brutal. I dig.

Oh, and that’s one hell of a logo.

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Watch: ‘Sullen’ by Austere

Posted: 1 February 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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AUSTERE have unveiled a sinister video for the epic opening track ‘Sullen’ as the first and only single taken from the black metal duo’s forthcoming new full-length Corrosion of Hearts. The band from Wollongong in Australia’s east coast state New South Wales will release their third album on April 28, 2023.

Watch the video here:

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AUSTERE comment: “The first single ‘Sullen’ is also the first track that we wrote for Corrosion of Hearts and it has an interesting background”, guitarist and singer Mitchell Keepin explains on behalf of the duo. “The main riff theme within the track was actually also the first song written for an album that we started working on directly after ‘To Lay Like Old Ashes’ was released, 13 years ago. For various reasons, that album never came to fruition. Yet the main riff, whilst slightly different at the time, survived. Although it carries a different feel to our previous work, it is a good starting point to pick up the pieces that were left behind so long ago when we decided to rebirth the band. Corrosion of Hearts, as an album, reflects the opportunity to write additional melodies that we didn’t have the time for during the recording of our previous album. This allowed us to deliver a bigger soundscape carried by epic melodies in an atmospheric way. it feels great to be able to expand further and venture into new waters. ‘Sullen’ is an important track for us as it was the catalyst for Austere to reigniting the flames that are burning within us.”

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Pic: Stefan Raduta

Listen: ‘The Green’ by As Light Dies

Posted: 4 January 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Almost ten years after their impressive and critically lauded third full-length The Love Album, Volume I, Spanish avantgarde black-metal armada As Light Dies now return with their most complex and multifaceted album in their whole career, The Laniakea Architecture, Volume II, due for release on March 9th via Darkwoods. 

Just recently, the Spanish group revealed the leading single titled ‘The Green’. Hear it here:

Produced by mastermind NHT aka Oscar Martin The Laniakea Architecture is an exceptionally ornamented compendium of intertwined extreme metal genres, with long and multidimensional songs containing a myriad of small elements that you will discover, little by little, as you dig deeper into the album…

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Tchornobog / Abyssal – Split

Posted: 10 November 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Lupus Lounge – 25th November 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s catharsis and there’s catharsis. Extreme times heighten the tension and anxiety, and increase the urge to purge. This split release from Tchornobog and Abyssal – a truly international effort, with Tchornobog hailing from Portland, Oregon, and Abyssal representing the UK with their brand of Death/Black/Doom Metal that explores, according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, themes of oppression, and decay.

Tchornobog take this approach to catharsis and purging completely literally. As the press summary notes, ‘Any track opening with a multi-layered recording of a number of vomiting sessions is bound to continue on the darker side of the musical spectrum.’ And so it does, delivering on the threat / promise that “The epic song ‘The Vomiting Choir’ delivers 24:08 minutes that form a descending spiral into a bottomless pit filled with a mostly dissonant sonic miasma of pure negativity and surprising complexity.”

The sounds of regurgitation, guttural coughs and choking and spluttering echo on for a good minute and aa half before the band piledrive their way into an extended workout that finds them burrowing deep into the thick sods of the earth towards the molten pits of hell.

It’s relentless and brutal, and proper old-school: the lyrics are impenetrable and so are the guitars, as a thundering, grey blast of impenetrable distorted guitar blasts away hard and fast and dark and heavy against pummelling percussion, and delivered at a breakneck pace, there are rasping, dead walker noises. There are tempo changes, and mood shifts. And there is deep, dark, anguish and throbbing pain. ‘The Vomiting Choir’ is dark, dark, dark, heavy, and oppressive. Thirteen minutes in it feels like an eternity has passed, an entire album’s worth of anguish squeezed into an excruciating document of torture. But no: there is more, much more, as the next wave and the next movement crash in. For a moment, around the 14/15-minute mark there’s a feel of Joy Division being covered by a black metal band, and the piece drives on and on, ever harder, ever darker, toward the piece’s crushing conclusion with a heavy, throbbing riff of swirling hypnoticism.

Abyssal offer no relief whatsoever, not that you’d really want them to. ‘Antechamber of the Wakeless Mind’ could well be summary of my lifetime as an insomniac. There’s no chance of sleeping through this twenty-four minute barrage of jolting, jarring metallic rage, where everything blurs in a blizzard of fretwork and drums faster than an industrial knitting machine.

It’s a truly exhausting experience; after just five minutes of busted-lunch growling and wheezing against a screeding backdrop of mangled guitars and beats that explode like machine-gun fire, the experience is exhausting – but also exhilarating in the most primitive, purging, cathartic fashion. It’s an extended release, one that’s punishingly intense and physical as well as cerebral.

As a pairing, this split is truly harrowing, mentally and physically draining, dragging its way through the darkest depths.

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Ensanguinate – Eldritch Anatomy

Posted: 8 September 2022 in Albums
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Emanzipation Productions – 2nd September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

From a certain perspective, all aspect of life can be seen to exist as one vast intertext, whereby everything connects and intersects with something, everything, else, by some devious and circuitous route. So the title of Ensanguinate’s debut long player actually makes me think of The Sisters of Mercy, whose singer, Andrew Eldritch, devised the band’s ‘head-and-star’ logo by ripping off one of the illustrations from Grey’s Anatomy – the medical textbook, not the television series. And of course, an inescapable aspect of life, which diagrams for dissection plainly remind us in the most clinical of fashions, is the inevitability of death.

I’ve sat myself down in my office to compose this review under circumstances very few would have predicted only this morning, whereby here, in Britain at least, this morning has become an evening of mourning with blanket coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. I need to simply switch off from all of it, what will likely be the start of a month of commentary, with endless shots of palace gates and cavalcades while the rest of the world is on pause.

The best escape always lies in something completely different, and in strange or difficult times, pure catharsis invariably tends to be the best remedy. Ensanguinate are the very essence of catharsis, distilled to optimum potency. Their bio describes the band as ‘Slovenia’s putrid entry into the death metal grimoire of old. Leaning heavily on the genre’s occult beginnings, the band stands out by distilling Possessed, Morbid Angel, and Grotesque into a searing death/thrash assault that deviates from today’s run-of-the-mill death metal’.

The tiles are great, and speak for themselves, with the likes of ‘Cadaver Synod’, ‘Perdition’s Crown’, ‘Lowermost Baptisms’, and, my favourite, Gaping Maws of Cerberus’ perfectly summarising the music itself – snarling, subterranean, satanic guttural utterances barked against a fast and furious backdrop of guitars charred and blackened like burnt offerings strewn around the opening to the pits of hell.

The hell-for-leather riffing and frenetic drumming is all-out from the first bar, with ‘Hunted’ packing in the darkest, dirtiest sonic carnage into under four minutes, and still shoehorning in a truly frenzied guitar solo.

Ensanguinate really do work the epic solo, and while there’s a certain element of genre cliché and absurdity about it, this kind of gnarly metal is the only context where solos aren’t only excusable, but one hundred percent necessary, essential even. The slower intro on ‘Ghoul Presence’ lumbers into showy, almost symphonic territory, before it goes all-out obliterative pace and raw-throated growling.

Eldritch Anatomy is the sound of a band revelling in excess, with everything louder than everything else, and everything is dank, murky and dripping with the dirtiest distortion. It’s full-fledged filth, bowel-shaking nastiness dragged up from satanic swamps that steam so hard you can picture the sweat running down the walls as the band whip themselves into a furious frenzy.

The album’s final track, the seven-minute ‘Vile Grace’ begins altogether more delicately, with some gracefully picked clean but chorused guitar before the power chords crash in hard and slow and build to a thunderous chug. It’s hard and heavy and offers a condensed rendition of all of the album’s main elements, albeit at half the pace and so with added weight and sledgehammer impact. In doing so, it rounds off an album that has it all in terms of texture and dynamics, and delivers every note with an unstinting ferocity that’s admirable.

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Trauma Bond – The Violence Of Spring

Posted: 5 July 2022 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 15th July 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

In a world where there’s so little that you can rely on, knowing that there are some labels that can be taken as a measure of quality provides a much-needed reassurance that not absolutely everything is shit. Panurus is one of those labels, along with Cruel Nature, Bearsuit, and Human Worth, that provides an unwritten guarantee that if they’re releasing it, it’s worth hearing. And what’s particularly pleasing with all of these labels is that they’re not genre-specific. Human Worth may lean toward guitar-driven noise, while Bearsuit favour genre-straddling avant-gardism, but ultimately, these little labels put out stuff that they like and find interesting, and this is healthy, in that it provides a platform for a diverse range or acts and fans to connect.

Trauma Bond’s The Violence Of Spring is in fact a reissue, having been originally released by Digital Destruction in the US just over a year ago, in a limited run of twenty-five hand-stamped pink neon tapes. Panurus have retained the original design, but rotated the image to replicate the band’s own digital release, which makes more sense when you study the flows off blood down the face. It’s not a pretty over, but it does very much provide a fair visual representation of the ‘raging grindcore/powerviolence/noise onslaught’ it houses.

As their biography summarises, ‘Trauma Bond is the conception of Eloise Chong-Gargette & Tom Mitchell – blending a shared love of violence, noise and metal to concoct a visceral exploration of aggression’. I mean, who doesn’t love violence, right? I am being sarcastic and, indeed facetious, and should perhaps reiterate here that both makers and fans of the most brutal music tend to be among the gentlest, most docile people I’ve encountered. The music is the outlet for everything they aren’t in the every day. With the exception of Marilyn Manson and Genesis P. Orridge, it’s the bland indie types who are more likely to be the real scumbags, and likewise their fans. This is the long way of saying that there’s violence, and there’s violence.

The original notes pitch ‘a furious onslaught of razor-sharp, disorienting grind; that darts between blasting intensity, to dirge, to industrial noise, and back again before you’ve realised what you’ve been hit by.’ And that’s exactly what The Violence Of Spring delivers, packing nine brutal sonic assaults into twenty minutes.

It all begins with an ominous roll of thunderous rumbling, the fifty-seven-second ‘O.C.B.’ building a tension and suspense that’s devastated with the explosive treblefest of ‘the title track, where everything piledrives in at a hundred miles an hour, from the flurry of guitars, the machine-gun drumming and screamy vocals, and from hereon in there’s not much let-up. There are samples galore – seemingly of panic-stricken crowds and people in streets where accidents, explosions, and shootings have just taken place. And The Violence Of Spring is simultaneously a drive-by and a hit-and-run that concludes with a suicide bombing.

They swing into black metal on ‘Total Fermentation’, and this is a dank brew, unfiltered and thick with sediment, and headcrackingly potent, while on ‘Daddy Do’, it’s more barking, guttural grindcore than anything else, and fuck me, it’s savage. One of the album’s two longer tracks, ‘Double Denim Dissociative Disorder’ which runs past the four minute mark against the usual minute and a half, is a grating wall of distortion, a churning landslide of sludge that slowly sinks into a spent crackle. Sandwiched between this and the finale, the overloaded tempo-shifting blast of demonic fury that is ‘Syndrome Imposter’ is ‘Little One’, a pained blast of metal anguish that’s delivered with remarkable and unexpected clarify, particularly in the vocals.

Nothing about The Violence Of Spring is gentle, but it hits all the harder on account of its comparative range. Yes, it’s all metal, but The Violence Of Spring is all the metal.

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Listen: ‘Tyrant’ by Thrall

Posted: 24 April 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Having been away from the recording studios for nearly seven years, Melbourne-based black-metal collective Thrall appeared to be relegated to the fate of “cult act”, especially considering they vanished after releasing their most accomplished and critically lauded album Aokigahara Jukai.

Back with an enlivened recorded line-up that features members of Gatecreeper, Noose Rot, ex-Extinct Exist, Förfalla, Slothferatu, ex-Ruins, Mar Mortuum and Myotragus, the group picks up where they left off, merging some primeval and heinous black metal, with a ferocious thrash metal attack, a raucous crust and miserable doom atmosphere.

Ripping, engaging, and despairing, new album Schisms shows a vast number of guests joining Thrall in studio and hopefully will cement Thrall position as one of most interesting and creative bands from the current Australian extreme metal scene.

Listen to ‘Tyrant’ here:

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