Le Morte: Midnight in the Garden of Tragedy
Out 31st October on Darkness Shall Rise Productions/Feudal Soil Records
Clumsy absurdity. The miserable dirge of Le Morte is certainly a drab curveball. ‘Midnight in the Garden of Tragedy’ takes the corpse of Autopsy and smothers it in black lipstick and nail polish. Melodic content, obscene in its simplicity, rented from early Scandinavian death metal, is draped in a dignified gothic flair. The audacity of austerity is almost amusing. One guitar, bass, a drum machine, and comically guttural vocals reach for a tragedian theatre. At times the music chugs along in such a predictable, rudimentary form that the lack of activity provokes frustration. But as the pieces evolve, it becomes clear the grey sluggishness under which Le Morte operate is the entire point. Idiosyncratic proto melodies pose as lead guitar refrains, extending the boundaries of microcosmic pockets of sonic information. Simplicity boldly pushed to its very limit. Summoning Celtic Frost by crossbreeding dark romanticism with a recklessly straightforward riff offering may look playful, whimsical even, but equally sinister in the determination to never tip too far into pastiche. A rare and most welcome oddity.
Kato: Abyss
Out 24th November, self-released
A swirling mass of organically fused modernist black metal extends the expressive range of Kato for their second EP ‘Abyss’. Works with the very familiar toolkit of contemporary metal. The production is rich yet organic, more befitting of the dynamic range required for post metal forms than the feral abrasion of black metal. That being said, the compositions fleshing out this textural landscape are alive with mild dissonance, unique melodic tangents, and shadows of traditional metal tropes in the form of chugging atonal rhythm guitars. Despite the polished, cinematic sheen, it lends moments of dramatic finale or revelation greater power, reliant as they are on the culmination of layers of guitar noise, anything more lo-fi would lose the subtlety of Kato’s craft. Moments of drab lead guitar supplement the dissonant nihilism with moral purpose, even if the overarching emotive impact is one of abstract despair. Kato play with forms that behave as if they should be anthemic, but studying its tonality and direction reveals an orientation toward darker colours. This, alongside the warmer production values, results in an uncanny, warping experience of intelligent black metal.
Beyondition: Abysmal Night
Out 1st December on Chaos Records
Sparse, austere, direct death/doom with a rich textural palette up its sleeve deployed to lend longevity to laboured moments of funereal plod. The meaty, bottomed out mix is nuanced, earthy, cinematic, accommodating a wide range of voices from fragile keyboards to chunky guitars. The riff language populating said mix however, whilst at times elegant in its intuitive simplicity, has a tendency to rely on rock trappings to create hook based central nodes by which to bind a track together. Rather than take the Asphyx route of presenting a dirt simple riff and breaking it down to axiomatic certainties before building back to a place of complexity via gradualist harmonic material, Beyondition tend to bind these tracks around foot-stomping grooves or Metallica bro metal showstoppers. They are capable of communicating in a darker, more sophisticated language, but the goodwill they acquire in this regard is squandered due to an apparent inability to tie an entire piece together without relying on the “hook” or conventional rock verse to get by. Despite this shortcoming, there is promise in this debut, if Beyondition would only dispense with the need for content for its own sake and focus more on the identity they are actually trying to communicate beyond a strong aesthetic offering.
Malicious: Merciless Storm
Out 1st December on Invictus Productions
Chaos and chromaticism are the order of the day as far as Finland’s Malicious are concerned. Where the debut offered much the same, it supplemented this rampant barbarism with the atypical character of their Finnish forebears in a Demilich or Demigod. For ‘Merciless Storm’ we see Malicious hone in on the explicitly anarchic element in their style. Much like Profanatica’s ‘Thy Kingdom Cum’, each microcosm is outrageous in its simplicity and near lawless approach to chord sequence construction, from moment to moment there is no logic to be had. But Malicious pack these tracks with such a density of riffs that a meta complexity supervenes atop the underlying disorder. Drums frame the guitars, matching them for utter disorder as tempo shifts and accents are deployed almost at random. Paradoxically, if one takes the bird’s eye view, an achingly slow development of theme becomes apparent, as ideas are transferred from moment to moment, riff to riff, until a shadow of meaning emerges from the noise. Echoes of a more considered, meditative message looms like a shadow behind the bright veneer of brute aggression sitting at the heart of this EP.
Abyssal Rift: Extirpation Dirge
Out 1st December on Sentient Ruin
Despite the strictly administered aesthetic, this album touches on a breadth of genres and moods throughout. The most conspicuous element is the production as it pivots on overly medicated caverncore. The guitar tone is juiced up to absurdity, bolstered by reverb drenched guttural vocals, and deep, earthy drums. But closer inspection reveals a band at times playing refreshingly basic blackened thrash, at others complex Lovecraftian death metal, or mournful death/doom. Abyssal Rift occasionally threaten to descend into vulgar lurchcore al-la Undergang, but any reference to the mechanical and tediously predictable mid-paced chugging of latter day OSDM is supplemented by an intimate understanding of riff history, working in unexpectedly elaborate tangents when it counts. What at first poses as a basic, linear journey of garden variety cavernous death/doom will quickly take a left turn into labyrinthine riff complexes referencing Suffocation or Demilich, only to pull back from such esoterica and move into sinister funeral doom dirges complete with confident solos lifted straight from heavy metal, here recast as mouthpieces for violence. It’s unlikely that a bait-and-switch was Abyssal Rift’s chief intent, but one cannot help appreciate it when expectations are subverted for the better.
Abduction: Toutes Blessent, La Dernière Tue
Out 1st December on Finisterian Dead End / Frozen Records
Tight if contrived melodic black metal, fostered under the guise of neoclassical intent, but perhaps hampered by an overly emotive vocal delivery paradoxically due to the distorted style as opposed to the clean chanting which – despite the catchy energy – retains a dignified spiritualism. Abduction are clearly capable of taking simple melodic threads and expounding upon them through a complex of hyper fast, bracing black metal. A glaring reliance on repetition is compensated for by clever use of vocals, or deployments of simple lead guitar counterpoint. Development occurs in modest yet pleasingly gradualist evolutions. New material is articulated tentatively, as if to not upset the balance of themes as they are introduced. A third weapon in the armoury is a break into acoustic instrumentation. Melodic black metal has a tendency to overwhelm the listener with information. There are number of ways to bypass this vice. Interludes that create room for emptiness and softer instrumentation are perhaps the most obvious, but they have a tendency to interrupt the flow of hard earned momentum. A pronounced medievalism works as a backdrop to the melodic shapes, but again, as if to emphasise this influence, they are often introduced with clean guitars before breaking into distorted tones. Despite the adeptness in execution, one cannot help but feel spoon fed by this tendency. But for all the blemishes on the canvas, they are just that, blemishes on an otherwise highly agreeable slab of nuanced and studied melodic metal.
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