Beats and yelling shorts, 6th September 23

Cvinger: Doctrines by the Figures of Crnobog
Out 25^th August on Nocturna Records

Cvinger try to do a number of things almost immediately with this album. They want to maintain the liminal mysticism of classicist black metal via that oddly cloaked, veiled mix that makes the music feel once removed from our plain of reality. But this trademark packaging material fails to fully cloak an active changeling, an impatient, staccato driven, riff based solution of controlled explosions, brief confrontations, unpredictable tangents, and ambitious traverses through the history of metal theory. The result is unfocused but attention grabbing. They give us a window into what 1349 could have been – sans infantile posturing – by filtering this template through the ferocious assault-metal of a Cirith Gorgor. A diverse vocal delivery – pitched at both ends of the distorted range supplemented with plenty of clean chanting – does nothing to help bring this album into stylistic focus. The results are entertaining regardless. A peripheral spiritualism via refined neofolk/ambient interludes provides an effective commentary on what is ultimately rather mechanistic black metal. For all its choppy interchanges and trills, at heart this album is a complex array of cogs grinding out surplus information for an amenable consumer.

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Wooden Throne: Eternal Wanderer of the Night Sky
Out 25^th August on Purity Through Fire

Wooden Throne make a ploy for music that looks spiritually enriching, with results falling somewhere below the trivial. Where Lustre functioned as a distant, faded echo of the Summoning format by stretching basic rock cadences into spacious ambience flavoured by simple, cyclical keyboard lines, Wooden Throne accept existence within this already fairly limiting blueprint with such obvious frivolity that it’s remarkable we are expected to receive it with sincerity. Keyboard melodies flow in waves of tedious ascents and descents, with each sequence rounding off in painfully predictable resolutions. Chord sequences circle round the same generic package of flat, directionless sentiment, sprinkling poppy licks on riffs so lazily conventional that their shape is buried in the psyche of anyone even casually acquainted with Western rock convention of the last fifty years. Vaguely depressed tempos do little to cloak a total absence of activity. Each track slogs past at the same plodding tempo, throwing out nothing but stuff in the hope of accidentally stumbling on the expression of something, anything. Meditative or spiritually enriching music is arrested by the base tedium of each achingly banal measure.

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Belial’s Throne: Forgotten Land of Lost Souls
Out 1^st September on Spread Evil

Hits on themes that look heroic, but in failing to take them beyond the doorstep, ends up with a frustratingly static product with very little substance to impart. Empty speed thrills and modest harmonic commentary prove inadequate to the task of bringing any sense of forward motion. Obvious cadential shapes borrowed from the rock industrial complex fill in the gaps left by musicians who seem unsure of what to do with themselves. A slick but cold production, competent mid-range vocals, and flowing drum work, all do little to disguise the fact that Belial’s Throne have no grasp of how to motivate black metal beyond the conversational. The result is less a journey and more a tedious cycle around the same dry ideas with development offered as happenstance. Any self-conscious drive to push the music beyond killing time is found wanting.

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Undergang: De Syv stadier af ford​æ​rv
Out 1^st September on Dark Descent /Me Saco Un Ojo

Never has so much praise been poured upon so much content with so little cause. Such is the state of modern death metal. Undergang are exemplary of this new form. A move beyond mere old school worship. Death metal is realigned into a collection of events to be freely combined, mixed, and stitched together at will. Include some or all of them, regardless of the order, logic, telos, or any degree of artistic premeditation, and you’ll likely drum up a respectable but utterly meaningless noise of online praise. “Dirty riffs”, “gore drenched guitar tone”, “rotten vocals” and any number of hyperbolic drivel allows no room to consider what all these elements might actually be doing. Assembled to generate applause from a calibre of listener who does little more with music than move down a checklist of signifiers they conflate with some sort of artistic process, before moving on to the next trope dump of warm diarrhoea. Being an established act, Undergang barely have to lift a finger to secure a brief frenzy of mindless consumption as people desperately tie their identity to death metal’s commodification, thus clogging up the airwaves with yet more disposable sludge before the next vapid engorgement.

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Egregore: Synchronistic Delusions
Out 1^st September on Sentient Ruin

Gets at the joy of chromatic grindcore via some well place Autopsy informed slow passages, bringing a playfulness through repetitions punctuated by fragments that look like they should be providing traditional melodic commentary, but end up haunting the outer borders of this music with a profoundly inverted logic. The basic fury of early Discharge is refiltered through the precision drilled mechanisations of Terrorizer, creating an experience bearing all the rage fuelled hallmarks of its antecedents, but an oddly stilted uncertainty interrupts the flow of this album, bringing it screamingly up to date with our current psychosis of near terminal anomie. Fragments of spectral melody form barbs of the horrific, serving as the ideal counterpart to the militant urgency of the workmanlike atonality making up the backbone of ‘Synchronistic Delusions’. Vocals attempt to redress this balance by adopting a joyful revelry kept at bay by the haunted rationalism of Doctor Jekyll, forever trying to relate back to the process and purpose of all this activity, but ultimately failing as the desperate snarl of aggression slowly devolves into a wanton despair. As with the vocals, so with the music, as the unfocused emotive slog of doom metal melts motivation down to a series of random actions with little cause or purpose beyond the need to expend energy.

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Valravn: The Awakening
Out 8^th September on Primitive Reaction

Valravn – not without success – interpret black metal as a stream of pure melodic consciousness. Intensity is relative. Despite Valravn maintaining a straining flow of high drama, free of dynamic or timbral interplay, they toy with gradations of density. The result is prima facie monotonous, but segmented within this constricted flow are revealed layers of conversation, opinionated interchanges, and brief moments of conflict. What’s noteworthy about this topography is the pure melodic form it takes, with tempo, vocals, and strumming technique being almost incidental to this unadulterated current of information. Despite the garden variety packaging, and occasional drop to half tempo – a common tactic in modern black metal deployed to give the illusion of heightened intensity but ontologically achieving very little – the razor sharp focus of Valravn marks them out as masters of an otherwise bland interpretation of the form, finding modest yet novel pastures onto which are grazed all manner of engaging riff exchanges and curiously formed waves of energy.