NINE (ISH) SONGS I LIKED THIS WEEK IN LIST FORM – APR 14 – APR 20
Hey. Check out the beautiful Ultio premiere that streamed through my body-electronic this week. Haunting, vicious black metal done right. Keep safe.
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1. Dosigteloch – "Miasmic Disease Absolution," from Never Ending Nightmares... (Death/Black Doom Metal – Independent). Funnily enough this "come out of nowhere" gem from the metal hub that is somehow Michigan was basically the album I had spent the most time with this week. And I actually don't feel like I have that much to say about it. Just that it's the kind of music that defies idea like song length and excitement. The songs are long, and there isn't that much going on. But every little thing, from the way the drums echo emptily in the room to the meandering melodies, is fascinating and, dare I say, magical. I have very little doubt I'm going to bang this "Bandcamp find" a lot this year. A lot. FFO: Xasthur and dying a slow death inside.
2. Replicant – "Shrine to the Incomprehensible," from Infinite Mortality (Prog/Tech Death Metal – Transcending Obscurity Records). In a rare moment of honesty (you wouldn't believe how much I lie on here), I didn't really like anything I've heard from Replicant so far. The whole tech angle can be quite tricky, at least for me, and I just felt like some of the older stuff fell on the side of "bands I don't check out anyway for people who go to the gym a lot." But this new album is not only good, it's great. No, not just great, easily one of the best death metal albums or albums in general of the year. So much cool shit happening, so many weird moments, and that sense – which I think I failed to detect in earlier albums – that it all lives under one, unified and very strange umbrella. Fucking amazing. FFO: Umbrellas.
3. Malconfort – "Rage (Indulgence)," from Humanism (Avant-Garde Black Metal – Transcending Obscurity Records). This is going to be a short one. Here goes: Ved Buens Ende being played by Eastern European jazz musicians strung out on heroin. FFO: Hard drugs and potato-based foods.
4. Nimbifer – "Ruinen," from Der böse Geist (Atmospheric Black Metal – Vendetta Records). What I had thought was just an OK black metal album turned out to be a pretty awesome black metal album of the "atmospheric black metal as performed by hardcore musicians" variety. Big feels (feelz, even), great performances, and the sense of being recorded in a room with no air. Music that attacks you and wakes you weep. FFO: Woe, Argwaan.
5. Yavanna – "Peregrination, from The Purity of Winter (Acoustic/Doom – Independent). A person playing around with their acoustic guitar in some bedroom somewhere creating music that could pass as both Medieval Movie Soundtrack Music as well as Someone Being Butchered in a Creepy Way Type Music. Very quiet, very basic, very beautiful, and quite unnerving. Also, it seems like the person behind this is looking for a band so somebody be their band, please. FFO: Balmorhea.
6. Shroud of Despondency – "Nebular Collapse: The Dissolution of Order and Meaning," from Shroud of Despondency / LanzerRath Split (Black Metal – Northern Spire Productions). To Michigan we improbably return with this cool-looking split. A track from each side is available right now, and I was quite taken by the bizarre orthodoxy of this track from Shroud of Despondency. Evil-sounding and sinister and kind of brainy (and proggy!) at the same time. Cool shit. FFO: Black metal I guess.
7. Hevrat Ha'Hashmal – "גירויים חשמליים // Electric Stimulations," from באנו לעבוד – Banu La'avod (Post Punk/Industrial – Independent). A new album from these aggressive, antsy, creative folks who came out a few years ago as a force of fresh-yet-respectful-to-its-noisy-forebears post-punk (pretty sure I wrote about that EP here, can't find it). A cool take on a cool tradition, which for the most part feels like super-raw Gang of Four demos with groove. As a side note, their name means Electrical Company in Hebrew and given how much time and money I spend paying those monopolistic motherfuckers my money there's a certain charm in Googling that name not to pay too much money for what should be a base-line social service but to pay for music made by people with too many Fenders. FFO: Gang of Four, Wire.
8. Sunken Basilica – ״Saeculum," from As Above So Below (Neo-Classical Dungeon Synth or something – Grime Stone Records). If Yavanna was medieval soundtrack music then this gorgeous new track from Sunken Basilica, part of a four-way split with Bright Old Betyl, Toad Blood, and Piyakdu – is music for a medieval wake only it's in outer space because medieval times are now in the future. Which kind of makes me think Sunken Basilica (Edward Longo of Skin Tension, Primeval Well, Spinitria, SkyThala, etc) should be tasked with composing the soundtrack to the next Dune move. Someone call Villeneuve. FFO: Space death.
9. Mamaleek – "Vileness Slim," from Vida Blue (Experimental Noise Rock – The Flenser). It's quite the trip Mamaleek has embarked on, from black metal crazies to "Tom Waits auditions for the Jesus Lizard." And not everyone would have been able to pull that off, but they seem to, mostly because they've never been anyone other than themselves. And when that's your angle you have the freedom to do whatever the fuck you want, that's just how that works. What I find interesting about the way Mamaleek has shifted is that it feels like whatever it was about them that felt personal, all that rage and weirdness, has magnified to overshadow almost anything else. At this point this is the strange, dysfunctional diary of people both growing older and, via the magic of nostalgia and past-deconstruction, younger. Beautiful. FFO: Pondering your mortality with musical instruments. Also, for no good reason, the title of this track made me think of this legendary song from Chemlab.
FIVE MORE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW
ONE: Blood Incantation put out a spaced-out video for "Luminescent Bridge."
TWO: New Julie Christmas album coming, with one other single out aside from the one that she released a while back.
THREE: Interesting proggy/weird black metal from American project Discorporate.
FOUR: Interviews take a long time to both set up and write up but it's almost always worth it, and more. Working on a big one (size-wise) now, that's really been helping me with a lot of how I deal with my own writing. That's the best when that happens.
FIVE: Apropos of nothing, the entity formerly known as Mystiskaos (Dissociative Visions) put out a statement regarding upcoming releases and BOY OH BOY does it have some gems there (new Wormlust, people).
ONE LAST THING, PROMISE: Enjoy Roadburn, you Roadburn-enjoying-while-I've-never-been heathens.
