Posts Tagged ‘Doom’

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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FVNERALS – Let the Earth Be Silent

Posted: 7 February 2023 in Albums
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Prophecy Productions – 3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When I decided to strike out and create Aural Aggravation, the premise – at least in my head – was that I would write whatever I liked about whatever I liked, although the more detailed version of that was that I would pen essay-length reviews instead of the usual sub-three-hundred-word summaries that were, I suppose, about volume rather than depth. Equally, the idea at the time, back in 2016, was that it would be a vehicle by which to explore my relationship with music as much as the music itself. I haven’t always maintained this approach since: sometimes I’ve kicked out pieces simply chasing hits as the site has grown in its readership; others I’ve simply not felt like going deeper. And ultimately, I’ve thought ‘fuck it, my site, my platform’, and I have to say I’m comfortable with that. The quality of my writing is variable, and my typing and proofing even more so, but that’s part and parcel of keeping it real and with a view to the bigger picture that reviewing has to be – for me – about how I feel about the music I’m writing about. Because music isn’t something to simply be dissected clinically, assessed on technical merit. People listen to music because of the way it affects them, not because they’re on a battle of the bands panel critiquing like they’re judging Strictly.

You’d think that when things are unspeakably bleak and I’m facing struggles of a magnitude I find almost impossible to face, let alone articulate, the last thing I would want to do is wrap myself in a blanket of suffocatingly dark music, and that the last thing I could bear to listen to while in the process of arranging a funeral is anything by a band called FVNERALS.

But then psychology is complex.

I write to neutralise, to create distance. If it’s on the page, it’s not me, or my experience, it’s simply words. When I fell and broke my ribs some years back, I tore open the palm of my hand on landing. In shock, the first thing I did on arrival home wasn’t to clean the grit out and sterilize the bloody mess, but to photograph it. My wife asked why the hell I did that. It was a fair question. I hate blood, it makes me feel queasy, dizzy, faint. If it’s my own. A photograph of blood doesn’t bother me. So the photograph created separation. It was a hand, not my hand. If it had been my hand, I’d have probably passed out. A hand is just a picture, it’s just TV, like a movie.

I do not feel as if I am living in my own life right now. It doesn’t seem real. Having suffered a bereavement – expected, but at the same time unexpected – solace emerges from unexpected places. I’m not seeking comfort, and have no interest in exploring where I am on the journey of the five stages of bereavement. I am stepping back, and assessing the scene. It is not my life. And this is the soundtrack to my surveillance.

‘Darkness. FVNERALS have created an album that turns the emptiness of the void and the depth of the abyss into sound with their third full-length "Let the Earth Be Silent". The duo gives sonic shape to the silence of extinction that humankind brings to all life on earth and itself. Depression, isolation, and the despair that this existence brings ooze out of every note’.

Lead single and the album’s opening track, ‘Ashen Era’ sets the tone and is representative of the heavy, harrowing furrow the album ploughs, with warping, disorientating noise and disembodied vocals circulating in a mist around thunderous but muffled percussion. It’s all-immersive, dark, dense, and listening to it feels like being buried alive, but at the same time transcendental.

A crashing gong heralds the opening of the scene that is ‘Horror Eats the Light’, released back in November as a single. It’s a bass-dominated exercise in heavy, droning doom and ethereality.

The album’s song titles really do speak for the album as a whole: ‘Annihilation’, Yearning’, ‘Barren’. This is bleak and harrowing stuff. ‘Yearning’ begins brittle, before exploding into a landslide of crushing guitars bearing down. The beats – crashing a light year apar, paired with bass notes landing like detonations event minute or so, this is heavy, but a different kind of heavy.

‘Yearning’ pitches that kind of Swand circa ‘86 crawling dirginess with crushing weight paired with a sepulchral glooming ambience, while the album’s last track, ‘Barren,’ lives up to its title, presenting eight-and-a-half minutes of crushing gloom with ethereal vocals which ascend heavenwards like angels on a zephyr.

Let the Earth Be Silent feels like the final shudders of a dying planet, the collapsing death throes of eternity. It’s a vast and at times quite overwhelming experience. The sound is immense and there’s something of a ceremonial feel about parts of it, but elsewhere it simply feels like the outpourings of grief and is hard to listen to under any circumstances. It chokes you up. There’s something final and ultimately funereal about the droning organ that hovers out to the end, and it leaves you to reflect on the idea – the end. It’s beyond comprehension. But on Let the Earth Be Silent, FVNERALS have created an album that paves the way towards acceptance.

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Listen: ‘Into the Maze’ by AGLO

Posted: 21 January 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Gutter Prince Cabal is proud to announce the release of Melbourne-based sludgy death-metal project AGLO new EP "Into The Maze", now set for release on February 16th on vinyl/digital download.

With ‘Into the Maze’, this one-man doom project created by Aaron Osborne unleash 6 filthy and crushing tracks that take the swagger and groove of Entombed’s ‘Wolverine Blues’ and infuse it with the tar-thick pull of doom. Lumbering like some slow-crawling and atrocious beast through the murk of a polluted swamp, AGLO seem to take pride in all that is rusty and ugly, delivering exceptionally murky and nasty riffs, slow and powerful drumbeats and tormented growls.

Today, AGLO unleash the title-track of the EP, check it out here:

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Fvnerals – Ashen Era

Posted: 7 December 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Prophecy Productions – 7th December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Following on from ‘For Horror Eats the Light’, Fvnerals bring more darkness for December with ‘Ashen Era’ from the forthcoming album Let the Earth Be Silent. And truly, it’s a monster, a sprawling seven-and-a-half-minute beast that behind dark, murky, atmospheric in a haunting, ethereal ambient sort of a way, before crushingly heavy guitars grind out colossal drone over thunderous percussion.

If it feels like the end of the world, that’s probably because that’s the intention. The band explain the song and is place in the album’s development thus: “Inspired by the deeply destructive nature and harmful presence of our species, ‘Ashen Era’ was the first song that we wrote for this album, which also established its foundation", singer and bass player Tiffany Ström reveals. “In our writing process, we used dissonant orchestral instrumentation coupled with eerie vocals to ritualistically build up from a chant of despair to a state of acceptance. It is moving from the overwhelming longing for annihilation as well as the anxiety and guilt of our existence, to finding beauty and peace in our own impending end.”

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Pic: Anja Bergman

This anxiety is something that’s been increasingly difficult to ignore, and it’s not just me and the sense of impending apocalypse that I’ve had for half my life: everything seems to be accelerating exponentially – climate change, consumption, population growth. The last few weeks have seen myriad news pieces on people complaining that Christmas markets have never been so busy and that traffic gridlock is suddenly no longer a rush hour or bank holiday thing, but from eight in the morning to nine at night.

In the wake of the pandemic, and with floods and droughts and fuel shortages and spiralling prices as demand for everything exceeds demand, as I’ve written previously, it feels as if we’re not only heading towards but already living in all of the dystopian futures featured in books and movies. That more writers and musicians are articulating these same feelings is cold comfort.

If one thing is becoming clear now, it’s that we have left it too late, and have almost certainly sealed our own fate, and now it seems that all we can do is make peace with this, and search for the ‘beauty and peace in our own impending end.’ It isn’t easy, if it’s even achievable, accelerating toward the abyss. But with ‘Ashen Era’, Fvnerals provide the perfect soundtrack.

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Watch: ‘For Horror Eats the Light’ by Fvnerals

Posted: 13 November 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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FVNERALS have released a video clip for the track ‘For Horror Eats the Light’, which is the first single taken from the dark doom duo’s forthcoming new album Let the Earth Be Silent, which has been scheduled for release on February 3, 2023.

FVNERALS comment: “The track ‘For Horror Eats the Light’ is a lament about giving up all sense of hope, embracing the absence of light and a forced return to barren lands through devastation”, guitarist Syd Scarlet explains. “The song is about contemplating our lives coming to an end while accepting that nothing can save us and nothing should. It was written to include several movements that each mirror an emotional stage. The title of the song was inspired by a quote from Thomas Ligotti: ‘Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness’.”

Tiffany Ström adds: “The video was created by Simona Noreik, an amazing artist with whom we had previously collaborated on our live visuals”, the singer and bass player writes. “Simona’s artistic vision really complemented the apocalyptic nature of our song perfectly and she managed to portray desolation, extinction and nothingness with grace.”

Watch the video here:

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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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Thraa – Into Earth

Posted: 27 September 2022 in Albums
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2nd September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

UK duo Thraa consists of Sally Mason and Andi Jackson, whose bio states that ‘Working without the constrictions of a traditionally structured song, this duo improvise around meditative drones, combining Sunn 0))) influenced guitars with soaring vocals. Making single take recordings, they capture an organic sense of sound that has cavernous textures with minimalism at heart.’

In some respects, this debut EP brings us full-circle in terms of drone evolution, and it’s fitting in the most appropriate, and planetary sense. The most successful and celebrated purveyors of drone, Sunn O))) famously took their moniker as a reference to drone/ doom progenitors Earth, who will, in certain circles, be forever remembered for the tectonic grind of their epic second album, Earth 2, from 1993, which contains just three tracks spanning some seventy-three minutes, with nothing but guitar and bass feedback stretching out, crunching along at a glacial pace and carrying the weight of entire continents. It’s hard to believe that this release will ever be surpassed for all that it is, with two of the three tracks stretching out around the half-hour mark with no shape or form, only an endless, grating, grumbling grind. Into Earth connotes a return to base material, a slow collapse, even a decay into compost form, but also hints at a sonic slide toward this territory carved out by the original and definitive drone act some twenty-nine years ago.

Thraa intimidated at the shape of things to come in June with the release of ‘Move Among Them’, which is the first of the EP’s four tracks. It’s swampy, sparse, beginning with an awkward, gurgling, wheezing, a kind of tentative snuffling grunt in the bass region before soaring, sculpted feedback howls and churns metallic—tinged clouds of scraping ambience. It probably sounds like a contradiction on paper, but hear me out: the screeding layers blur into a whirl without definition and tumble into a vortex of abstraction, and in doing so, create the sound closest to that early Earth whorling wall I’ve heard from any other band.

The title track lacks even more overt form, spurs of guitar feedback screeching as it breaks loose from the dense, rippling wall of undifferentiated noise. There are strong elements of Metal Machine Music here, but it’s around the midpoint that a slow, rhythmic piano emerges, along with a haunting understated vocal from Sally that’s half-buried beneath the noise of explosions and / or tidal waves. It’s both dolorous and ethereal, and BIG | BRAVE comparisons aren’t out of place here, either.

Everything coalesces after the subdued scrape and low-end rumblings of ‘Elgon’ on the seventeen-minute finale ‘Over Warm Stones’. Nothing different happens as such: there is only more, in terms of duration, and in terms of atmosphere. The snaking, rattling notes that swell and shimmer provide a sparse, textured backdrop to a quivering, evocative vocal performance.

Into Earth may not offer anything new, per se, but does provide a strong contribution to the canon of emotive, evocative ambient drone / doom which features vocal, which in this instance are essential to the experience, and it’s an experience which is compelling, immersive, heavy as hell and at the same time heavenly, before it collapses into a landslide of feedback that stretches out to the horizon.

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Watch: ‘Crows, Sparrows and Cats’ by Blacklab featuring Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier

Posted: 17 August 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Doom metal meets dreampop on ‘Crows, Sparrows and Cats’ by Blacklab, the self-proclaimed ‘Doom Witch Duo from Osaka, Japan’. Featuring a lead vocal by Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, the Hawkwind riffs, motorik heavy stomp and fuzz fat guitars coupled with that cool pop vocal is a surprising combination that hits the spot.

Hot on its heels comes a new video, featuring Hanaka the thirteen year old daughter of Blacklab drummer Chia, who creates her own dance routine for the track whilst footage (from their recent stay in London) is projected ‘Liquid Len’ like, for full psychedelic overload.

Watch the video now:

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‘Crows, Sparrows and Cats’ is taken from their latest album ‘In A Bizarre Dream’ which is out this Friday (New Heavy Sounds).

Their debut ‘Under the Strawberry Moon 2.0’ saw them taking Sabbath inspired doom, mashing it with a Japanese sensibility and a fuzzed-up groove. It certainly caused a stir, but only hinted at their potential.

Album two ‘Abyss’ added to the mix. A Stooges like squalor to the riffs, dollops of lo-fi hardcore punk and loose riffing, pointing the way towards a signature sound.

So what of the ‘difficult’ third album? Not so difficult at all it seems.  ‘In A Bizarre Dream’ ups the ante considerably, to let rip and define what Blacklab are about.

The combined talents of Jun Morino on production and Wayne Adams (Big Lad, Green Lung, Pet Brick, John, Cold In Berlin) on the mix have conspired to produce a towering beast of a record. A real step forward for the ‘Doom Witch Duo’.

The drums have a humungous ‘Fugazi’ like welly, and the guitars are a boiling maelstrom of fuzz dense riffola and warped psychedelics, with added synth. Yuko’s throat shredding snarls are as mean as a pissed off Satan, and melodious, often within the same song.

This is doom meets hardcore punk, hooky melodies, and killer riffs, all cranked up to the max. Japan has always had a special take on ‘noise’ and ‘heavy’ and with ‘In A Bizarre Dream’ Blacklab add their own spin to that tradition.

Gone is the lo-fi approach, here is Blacklab in full effect.

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Watch: ‘Old Spirit’ by Lucid Grave

Posted: 29 July 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Dark heavy psych/doom group Lucid Grave has unleashed the “Old Spirit” music video, made by Dóri Halldórsson and Amanda Jensen. “Old Spirit” serves as the second song from the Copenhagen quintet’s debut album, Cosmic Mountain, which came out on 15 July via Electric Valley Records digitally and on four versions of vinyl (Test Press, Solid Yellow, Transparent Red Splatter Black Vinyl, Ultra LTD “Cosmic Edition”).

Lucid Grave Informs: “‘Old Spirit’ is a heavy psych rock song with influence from the early ’80s punk. The song is about a fast spacy universe in-between two worlds. The song is inspired by the lead singer’s days in the high desert in California. The desert heat is hard on everything and everyone. And the wind still tells stories of the Native Americans, the legends of desert rock, and the military base in the unforgiven sun.”

Watch the video here:

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Lucid Grave is a dark heavy psychedelic band with stoner-doomy tendencies from Copenhagen, Denmark. Sonically, Lucid Grave is a boiling pot of heavy fuzz rock like Black Sabbath/Coven/Hawkwind and ‘80s punk like Black Flag/The Nuns/The Gun Club, all wrapped up in a nice blanket of modern heavy stoner rock and doom. Honoring the howling occult cinema of the ‘80s, Lucid Grave finds inspiration in everything that’s heavy, filthy, and free!

They emerged from the underground communal house and punk venue Ungdomshuset in the dying days of 2017. A few months later, in 2018, they released a self-titled demo and spent the next few years playing shows around Denmark with bands such as High Priestess, Cities of Mars, The Gates of Slumber, and Heathe, while making more materials as well. In 2020 Copenhagen label Virkelighedsfjern released Lucid Grave’s EP called Goddess of Misery, a venture seriously disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak — which meant no shows for a while. That time was instead spent on writing materials for their first full-length album. In 2021 they released a single called “Surfer Bat,” an upbeat ‘70s heavy Rock song with a twist of gothic punk vibes and a dash of Latin music. It caught the attention of the Italian heavy psych label Electric Valley Records.

Cosmic Mountain, the debut LP of Lucid Grave, is a journey through your favorite drugs of life, the highs, and the lows, being chased through the desert and fighting a haze of demons. The album was recorded live and over-dubbed in just three days at the beginning of 2022. As it was with the previous single, “Surfer Bat,” Patrick Fragtrup was again behind the mixing board for the session, and it is clear that there has developed an understanding between him and the band as this record sounds both huge and fierce without losing any clarity or energy from the group. The project was finished by Shane Trimble of High Reeper at his California studio.

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Friend – Champion

Posted: 3 June 2022 in Albums
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Human Worth – 3rd June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Because being in several awesome bands simply isn’t enough for some people, various members of Lump Hammer, Lovely Wife, Penance Stare, Möbius, Plague Rider have another band, the soft-sounding Friend. They’re practically a scene unto themselves, and you can pretty much guarantee that anything noisy emerging from Newcastle will feature one or more of James Watts, Tim Croft, and Skylar Gill – to the extent that the involvement of any one of them is essentially an assurance of quality. Putting the stamp on that assurance is the fact that Friend’s debut is being released by Human Worth, the London label that has, in a very short time, racked up an outstanding roster of new and established acts, all of a noisy persuasion, without a single weak release in their rapidly-expanding catalogue. And Friend’s Champion is a worthy addition.

It’s a proper gnarly take on the classic power trio format with driving riffs dominating from the opening bars. ‘International Top Bloke’ crunches in and batters away hard with a simple, cyclical riff reminiscent of Blacklisters; Tim’s guitar is so dense and dirty it sounds like guitar and bass all in one, while Gil’s drumming is megalith-solid, pounding away, nothing fancy, just all the heavy. And there, low in the mix, Watts gargles and gurgles tormentedly, sounding as if he’s being throttled by Satan’s very own flaming hands. As guttural growlers go, he is exceptional when it comes to channelling all shades of anguish by means of throat alone. But for all that, there’s a flicker of joy – or, perhaps more accurately, a cathartic release – which emanates from Champion.

The pitch is that they’re ‘pulling from influences ranging from Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins and Failure to Old Man Gloom, Floor and The Abominable Iron Sloth’ and while on paper it may seem an incongruous combination, in practise, it not only makes sense, but absolutely works.

‘The Beast’ is appropriately titled, for it is, indeed, an absolute beast. It begins with unexpected delicacy, a brittle, chorus-tinged guitar picked is as much The Cure as it is ‘Black Hole Sun’, but then the drums and distortion pile in and it’s a huge, throbbing surge of overloading sound that threatens to damage the speakers.

Whatever Geoffrey’s done, it must be pretty bad, as they rear through five minutes of bludgeoning brutality. There are some gritty, cyclical riffs reminiscent of Bleach-era Nirvana beneath it all, but the production is so dark and dirty the end result is wonderfully nasty sludge metal, then there’s ‘Dungeon Master’ that sounds like… well, it sounds like downtuned grinding hell. Not so much Sunn O))) as a total eclipse. Watts’ vocals aren’t the focal point: they’re another instrument (of torture) in the band’s arsenal or aural abrasion. If ‘Wellness’ seems to offer some light, some respite, it’s a pale, sick sense of hope that glimmers as Watts sounds like he’s writing through his last moments of torturous, gut-ripping pain.

The last two tracks – the eight-minute ‘Uncle Tommy’ and ten-minute ‘A Reminder’ combine to deliver a devastating finale. They’re so much more than heavy noise, too, with texture, tone, gradual builds and even moments that feel truly uplifting – even if they are blown away by bulldozing distortion. The former is a surprising blues / glam stomp, while the latter feels like an album’s worth of riffs of heavy metal thunder packed into a single track. It’s not only intense, but finds Watt’s deliver some audible lyrics, albeit briefly.

The word ‘friend’ may connote comfort, company, companionship, even cuddliness, and while the band offer none of these things, Champion does offer a kind of awkward solace through monster riffery and outpourings of angst. An album worthy of its title: proper champion.

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