Summer has come to an end, all swallows have left the north, and autumn is already knocking on doors and windows with gusts of wind and rain. When the first leaves are falling, it is also time for melancholic tunes. WHISPERING VOID has the perfect offer for this darkening season: the eponymous song that gave the collective of renowned musicians from Norway’s west coast their name. ‘Whispering Void’ is taken from their forthcoming debut album At the Sound of the Heart, which has been scheduled for release on October 18, 2024.
WHISPERING VOID comment: “Lyrically, ‘Whispering Void’ combines all the elements of this album”, vocalist Kristian Espedal reveals. “The slow, gracious movements of the music evoke the innocence of natural beings moving through a forest, as acted out by the vocals in the verses. This song also features our third ‘outside’ collaborator, Matias Monsen from the band DROTT is playing the cello.”
The collective of renowned musicians from Norway’s west coast known as WHISPERING VOID is releasing the single ‘Vinden vier’ (‘The Wind Sanctifies’) that features ABBATH guitarist Ole André Farstad. The track is taken from their forthcoming debut album At the Sound of the Heart, which has been chalked up for release on October 18, 2024.
Hear ‘Vinden Vier’ here:
AA
WHISPERING VOID comment: “This song began to form when I repeated the words ‘Vinden vier’, which is kind of a play on words”, vocalist Kristian Espedal explains. “This can mean ‘The Wind Sanctifies’ but it can also be read as: ‘The Wind Unites’. As the lyrical loop goes on, it also becomes ‘Vi er vinden’, which means ‘We Are the Wind’. Then Lindy added her wonderful vocals in a 70s or even 60s style. At first, she just sang the ghost vocals, but once we had set the lyrics for the song, she also gave her voice to them. We all felt that this song also needed more of an Eastern energy, which is the very reason as to why we invited Ole André Farstad to play guzheng and Indian slide-guitar. This has added even more of that late 60s vibe to the song and I really like the result.”
With every movement of American Standard, Uniform peels off a new layer and tells the story inside of the one that came before it. It’s Uniform’s most intimate work to date, tackling themes of self-destruction and with a particular focus on vocalistMichael Berdan‘s lifelong struggle with bulimia nervosa. His lyrics sink down into the core of the innermost self, the small human being crushed in the grip of sickness. His bandmates join him, applying majestic droning that becomes both mechanical and omniscient. As the rhythms continually pulverise, Uniform gives themselves over to the grinding gears of an uncaring universe.
The thematic content behind American Standard can be divided down the middle into two distinct sections. While the A-side of the record deals with an individual who exists in a purgatorial state of physical and psychic crisis, the B-side serves to address how a lifetime of dealing with an eating disorder has impacted those around him.
“Permanent Embrace,” available today, is the album’s final statement. Berdan tells, “It touches on a facet of the disease that I’m incredibly wary of facing. Built on a narrative foundation laid out by author and lyrical collaborator Maggie Siebert, the song revolves around the idea of a person holding a loved one as an emotional hostage. Seeing perverse beauty in a story about a car crash, the narrator relates the analogy of two automobiles twisted together to that of his last standing relationship. As he has broken down over time, so has the one who continues to stand by him. The object of his manipulative guilt trips remains locked in a hopeless situation, terrified of what he may do to himself if they were to finally leave.
The music reflects the psychic violence of the lyrics, as riffs and rhythms that wouldn’t feel out of place in the Unsane catalog careen into giant synth melodies before collapsing into itself. This is kind of our misguided interpretation of what Faith No More were doing on ‘Angel Dust’, and we hope that our tip of the hat to those masters of madness can hold a candle to their horrific splendor.”
For “Permanent Embrace,” Uniform teamed up with director Sean Stout on the single’s compelling visual. Stout tells, "Without sounding trite, when we first read Mike’s lyrics to the record our reaction was extremely visceral. They are brutally introspective and beautiful at times and we wanted to try visually to convey that range of emotion in a sequence of single images that unfold narratively and potentially shift their own meaning over time. Our concept was to intertwine images of an outer world-overgrown, rusting and moving on in its decay-with an inter-world that is largely going through the same process as a result, but is markedly separate as well. We never see one observe or interact with the other, yet they are the same and of the same world."
Watch the video for ‘Permanent Embrace’ here:
AA
Uniform wants to find what’s underneath. And what’s underneath the underneath. And what’s under that. American Standard begins with a shock. A voice, a room, a face in a mirror. In the mirror stares a visage, doubled and staring back. Each line comes back to him: reflected and refracted in the unsympathetic glass. Forget for a moment that Berdan has been destroying his throat in Uniform for over a decade. Forget his highly stylised delivery on the band’s acclaimed collaborative work (alongside experimental doom titans The Body and Japanese heavy rock powerhouse Boris). Forget the entire tradition of abrasive vocals in aggressive music. Look for what’s underneath the songs, the form, and the style.
To help peel away this narrative of eating disorders, self-hatred, delusion, mania, and ultimate discovery, Berdan sought assistance from a towering pair of outsider literary figures. Alongside B.R. Yeager (author of the modern cult-classic Negative Space) and Maggie Siebert (the mind behind the contemporary body horror masterpiece Bonding), the three writers eviscerate the personal material to present a portrait of mental and physical illness as vividly terrifying as anything in the present-day canon. The result is an acute articulation of a state beyond simple agony, capturing the thrilling transcendence and deliverance that sickness can bring in the process.
American Standard is surely Uniform’s most thematically accomplished and musically self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, forming something idiosyncratic and new. There’s a grandeur, due in part to the addition of Interpol bassist Brad Truax alongside the percussive push and pull of returning drummer Michael Sharp and longtime touring drummer Michael Blume, marking his Uniform recorded debut here. However, this magnificence is most clearly attributable to the scale and power of guitarist and founder Ben Greenberg’s arrangements, matching ever elegantly to the intense lyrical subject matter.
Underneath it all, what remains is trust. A record of this range and depth, a piece of art so far out on a ledge, can only be attempted with an extreme and almost foolish amount of understanding between collaborators. American Standard stands firmly on the bedrock that Uniform’s two original members, Michael Berdan and Ben Greenberg, have been building on for over a decade.
In Greenberg’s words, “When we started this record, Berdan told me: ‘I trust you to come up with a solid foundation for this, however you envision this thing. I want you to realize it completely, because I believe in you.’ So I wanted to write something overwhelming and all-encompassing for Berdan to lead his narrative through… because I trust and believe in him.” For an album to defy simple genre exercises and become a work of art, the musicians behind it must push themselves so far beyond the frayed ends of an established comfort zone that they might never return. Without a shred of doubt, American Standard is a work of art, agonising in its honesty and relentless in its pursuit of sonic transcendence. It is hideous. It is beautiful. It is necessary.
Press Photo By Joshua Zucker-Pluda & Sean Stout Pictured: Founding Members Ben Greenberg (Guitar), Michael Berdan (Vocals) Not Pictured: Mike Sharp (Drums), Brad Truax (Bass), Michael Blume (Drums)
WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN (WAWBARC) is the new quartet of Mat Ball (BIG|BRAVE), Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Jonathan Downs and Patch One (both Ada). On NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER they present six modal lullabies drenched in seared distortion, slathered across striding electronic pulses.
Ball and Menuck began creating music in and for the bleakest moments of Montréal winters: “We’re honoring that idea of winter, when you come inside and your house is warm, a place that only exists because of how cold it is outside,” says Menuck. They later recruited Downs and Patch to flesh out their initial ideas—Menuck met first them in 2015 when recording Ada’s final self-titled album at Montréal’s Hotel2Tango, the same studio where WAWBARC convened to make this record.
The album is out September 13th on Constellation. Meanwhile, you can hear the title track here:
You want epic? Look no further that this. As the press notes set out, ‘Over the course of 4 tracks in 76 minutes, SUMAC presents a sequence of shifting movements which undergo a constant process of expansion, contraction, corruption and regrowth.’
Four tracks. An hour and a quarter. And then we have the context, and the content of ‘the thematic nature of the record – narratives of experiential wounding as gateways to empowerment and evolution, both individual and collective.’
The emotional weight may not be immediately apparent without this context, but the sonic heft crashes down the doors with the opening chord, a low-down, distortion-heavy heave. The dynamic is one of a lumbering lurch rather than a forceful blast, a long, slow spew, a ruined speaker flapping a sigh in devastation. And then the bass grinds in, so slow, so dark, so heavy, like an emptying of the guts – a slow, painful Dysenteric purge. Around six minutes in, drums and vocals enter the mix and the picture – a scene of the most ruinous pain beyond imagination – is complete. ‘World of Light’ is either the most ironic or misleading song title going: it’s twenty-six punishing minutes, with extended passages of droning feedback in between riffs more brutal than crucifixion. This one track alone isn’t only the duration of some albums, but contains everything necessary.
Comparisons are references are easy and abundant, but, equally, futile: The Healer is a singular, monumental work. It would be an oversight to comment only on the brutal, crawling riffs and gut-shredding density when there are passages of haunting elegance and quite touching beauty. Solo guitar ripples and eddies like a small, quiet stream, and there are moments The Healer of calm, of grace. And the consequence – apart from rendering this post-metal – is a strong dynamic, meaning hat the bulldozer blast gave more than double impact when they hit. And hit they do.
During the gut-churning ‘Yellow Dawn’, you feel yourself hollow out, slumping inwardly following a punishing display of power. It’s hard, it, heavy, it hurts. The final track, ‘The Stone’s Turn’, is again twenty-five minutes in duration and it’s a punishing, pulverising sonic assault.
The Healer leaves you feeling hollowed out, sapped, sucked to a husk. It’s also a work of ambitious enormity. Immense doesn’t come close.
Anglo-Finnish progressive metallers Wheel recently announced the release of their much-anticipated third studio album Charismatic Leaders on the 3rd May 2024 (InsideOutMusic). The album was meticulously crafted to meet Wheel’s ever-heightening benchmarks and recording with engineers/co-producers Daniel Bergstrand and Fredrik Thordendal (Meshuggah) stretched from August to December 2023. The end result, mixed by Forrester Savell, has consolidated all the gains of what came before: singer/guitarist James Lascelles, lead guitarist Jussi Turunen and drummer Santeri Saksala’s third album represents their heaviest and most conscious music to date.
Today they launch the albums third single, ‘Disciple’, and you can listen now here:
The band will be celebrating the release of their new album with their first ever shows in Australia (supporting label-mates Caligula’s Horse) as well as their first ever North American headline shows. Later in the year the band will return to Europe for further headline dates, and you can find the full list below:
31st October – Olympia, Tampere, Finland
1st November – Sawohouse UG, Kuopio, Finland
2nd November – On The Rocks, Helsinki, Finland
7th November – Lutakko, Jyväskylä, Finland
8th November – Finlandia-Klubi, Lahti, Finland
9th November – 45 Special, Oulu, Finland
15th November – Logo, Hamburg, Germany
16th November – Melkweg Up, Amsterdam, Netherlands
17th November – 013, Tilburg, Netherlands
19th November – Rebellion, Manchester, UK
20th November – Cathouse, Glasgow, UK
21st November – Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, UK
22nd November – 1865, Southampton, UK
23rd November – Underworld, London, UK
24th November – Thekla, Bristol, UK
26th November – Kavka, Antwerp, Belgium
27th November – Luxor, Cologne, Germany
28th November – Colos Saal, Aschaffenburg, Germany
30th November – Backstage, Paris, France
2nd December – Komplex, Zurich, Switzerland
3rd December – Legend, Milan, Italy
4th December – Backstage Halle, Munich, Germany
5th December – Analog Music Hall, Budapest, Hungary
Get lost in Blood Incantation’s interstellar new video‘Luminescent Bridge’ – available today ahead of their performances at Roadburn Festival. ‘Luminescent Bridge’ pivots to the introspection of infinity. Created entirely in the studio, the nine-minute track plays out like a dying star—ominous, forlorn, yet hopeful of rebirth.
Blood Incantation tells, “Originally conceived as an acoustic interlude in the tradition of ‘Meticulous Soul Devourment’ and ‘(Mirror of the Soul)’, ‘Luminescent Bridge’ quickly became something entirely different upon entering Rocky Mountain Recorders in March 2023. Compelled by a tangible air of creativity, we forwent acoustic instruments entirely and ended up implementing several spur-of-the-moment ideas – such as drums, grand piano and even trombone – to create a vast, dynamic tapestry of textures both alien and familiar, yet remaining quintessentially Blood Incantation in feeling and atmosphere. Drenched in analog and digital synthesizers, multiple tape echoes and soaring electric guitar, this intended outro to a subsequently abandoned 7” EP became a towering landscape of otherworldly sonics, earning its place as the title track for our latest maxi-single release.”
“With this expansive energy in mind, we knew the eventual music video would similarly have to be something completely new for us, further evolving our imagery and aesthetic into new realms as we make our way towards our imminent third album. Thanks to the masterful VFX and cinematography of our friends Miles Skarin and Alex Pace who also worked on the music videos ‘Inner Paths (to Outer Space)’ and ‘Obliquity of the Ecliptic’, and the ‘Timewave Zero’ live Blu-Ray, respectively – we are able to present to you the official video for ‘Luminescent Bridge’."
Of the video, director and visual effects artist Miles Skarin says, “When the Stargate Research Society asked us to help visualise a recent extrasolar communication they had received, we knew this would be a project of epic proportion. The data packet they sent to us from Colorado contained footage of Blood Incantation’s interstellar expedition to a distant star system. What we saw after decompressing the video stream blew us away, not only had they captured a beautiful cinematic exploration of the exoplanet’s sand dunes, but we can see their journey across the expanse of space was successful. Alex Pace’s cinematography from this location was stunning and provided us with everything we needed. Due to the solar radiation exposure, the data from the interstellar voyage was difficult to decipher, so we have used our artistic abilities in VFX and 3D animation to reconstruct the visual of crossing the Luminescent Bridge, first depicted by the artist Steve R Dodd."
Watch the epic video for ‘Luminescent Bridge’ here:
German psych-rock collective Ornamental have just unveiled a new song off their first studio album Verwandlung Im Schlaf, which is scheduled to be released on April 11th via Pink-Tank Records.
Listen to this new seven-and-a-half beast of a track titled ‘Methastasis’ here:
Combining elements of heavy, psych-rock with 80’s influenced synthesizers, the quartet sound like the Germanic counterpart of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Verwandlung Im Schlaf takes listeners on a exciting journey through various musical landscapes, and sometimes during the duration of just one song. ‘Esoteric Warfare’ for instance, send us on a drive through a desolate and monochromatic desert, while ‘Maelstrom’ sweep us off the road and transports us straight to space.
Originally formed as a solo project of Sidney Jaffe (Arcane Allies, Burnpilot) the band transformed into a power quartet with Jonas Hehemann (Burnpilot, Tv Strange) on bass, Rouven Bienert (Tv Strange, Ruins) on Guitar/Synth and Lennart Uffmann (Brandmann) on the drums.
It begins with a yawning, wailing drone, before thunderous bass, drums, and a rolling piano crash in tempestuously. But if you think this is just another heavy doom-leaning record with a dash of theatre, the arrival of Amber Gardner’s vocals changes everything. She brings an antagonistic, nihilistic punk vibe at first, but then, as the song transitions into a grand, sweeping expanse, reveals a softer side. And so it is that ‘White Noise’, the album’s eight-and-a-half-minute opener is a real shape-shifter, sliding back and forth between crushing weight and spellbinding atmosphere. But when it goes heavy, it’s utterly pulverising, and the sustained crescendo which occupies the last three minutes is gut-wrenching, annihilative, a rare exhibit of raw, chest-tightening emotional heft combining with the most punishingly brutal instrumentation, which leaves the listener feeling wracked, drained, ruined.
It may sound strange, but it’s often more difficult to write about albums which really hit you, which have the most impact. To scrabble for an analogy, it’s like being kicked in the chest and left lying breathless on the ground then being asked to describe the experience while still barely able to draw oxygen. It’s like… like… It leaves you stunned, numb, dazed, and at a loss. Regeneration is one such album. It’s all well and good clutching and comparisons and scratching for similes, but no words can really come close to articulating the spectrum of sensations which engulf your very being when faced with something so intense, so close to overwhelming. Yes, it’s dancing about architecture. What you want to do, more than anything, is to forcibly sit people down and say “listen to this! No, really, listen! Feel that!”
New York-based GUHTS (pronounced ‘guts’) declare themselves to be an ‘avant-garde post-metal project, delivering larger than life sounds through, deeply emotional music’. It’s the emotional aspect that hits harder than the punishing power chords, but it’s the combination of the two which really is the killer here.
The album’s seven tracks are incredibly ambitious in scope and scale, and in terms of balancing emotional depth and sheer brutal force. For the most part, the compositions extend beyond the five-minute mark, but are confined to under eight, and are effectively doom/goth epyllia – expansive, dense, cinematic. The prominence of piano – particularly notable on the slower, intensely wrought and dynamically varied ‘The Mirror’. One of those songs which sustains a surging sensation from the very beginning, it’s truly worthy of the ‘epic’ descriptor.
‘Till Death’ has hints of Cranes about it in Amber’s ethereal vocal delivery, but it’s paired with megalithic guitars of absolutely crushing weight, while the shortest song on the album, ‘Handless Maiden’ is monstrous in its unyielding heaviness. Gardner brings another surprise with her rabid howl, which is utterly petrifying.
There isn’t a weak track here, nor a single second that doesn’t feel utterly vital and doesn’t crackle with intensity, and Regeneration is an immense and powerful album. ‘Generate’ rolls into graceful shoegaze territory, with rolling drums and chiming guitars which wash and ripple mesmerically, gradually building to a sonic tsunami.
There’s something inevitable and completely perfect about the way it all leads the way to the ten-minute ‘The Wounded Healer’, which comes as a truly monumental finale. And what a finale! It begins delicately, ringing xylophone or glockenspiel chiming out mellow tones, before a grinding low-end grinds in and from here, the build is slow and inexorable. Gardner traverses the sonic space, shifting mood and tone in a flicker. The guitar twists and spins, tense and serpentine against the ever-swelling wall of booming bass and by only halfway through, you’re drowning, the air pressed form your lungs… and then… then… Christ. Gardner is possessed, and the guitars pulverise and you feel your skull beginning to compress. Finally, around the seven-minute mark, there is levity. Clawing for aa comparison, I arrive at Amenra, although it’s less than half the story of a song, and an album, which is utterly peerless and completely beyond spheres of comparison.
Regeneration is special, hard-hitting, unique. Really. Listen! Feel that!
Well. Bloody hell. If you’re up for a powerful video – one that really hits home and makes you feel strong and wide-ranging emotions – accompanied by a bold, anthemic song, you need this.
Aural Aggravation 