Beats and yelling shorts, 6th July 24

Black Wound: Warping Structure
Out 31^st May on Chaos Records

It often amazes me the lengths some bands will go to cloak a lack of content. This new “blackened death/doom” outfit is anything but. They are essentially a sludge/noise/post hardcore affair with the occasional off-the-shelf death metal riff thrown in to garner followers from the extreme metal camp, who, in their current state, will gladly lap this up lest they be accused of not being able to stomach abrasive music. Why does it matter what genre we call this? It doesn’t…in and of itself. It matters insofar as this is music almost without substance. There is nothing to comment on at the compositional level, and therefore no guiding principles to draw on in order to establish genre. This exercise in turn helps us identify where Black Wound believe artistry lies, namely at the level of vibes, aesthetic, sensation, with no regard given to a substantive musical dialogue undergirding this. The listener checks out, brow beaten by meaninglessly distorted chords, obvious drum patterns, and surplus vocals. But rather than leaning into this as a noise project, Black Wound still court a traditionalist audience with the odd half formed death metal riff giving way to some three note sludge barrage repeated as long as Black Wound think they can get away with it.

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Void Moon: Dreams Inside the Sun
Out 7^th June on Personal Records

Clear and crisp melodic doom metal replete with bounce and pomposity despite the basic set up. Void Moon are essentially a back to basics heavy metal band, with no thrills, keyboards, or flashy theatrics to distract from a showcase of longform melodic riffing, narrative lyrics told through soaring metal crooning, and unapologetically showy guitar solos. The production, despite its austerity, is almost too sharp for its own good. No portion of the mix is lefty murky or obscured for the listener. Every note hits with the utmost clarity. One gets the feeling that, despite their precision, the drums are holding back for the sake of creating space within each track. Despite the music being on the slower side, the pacing and energy is kept up, even on the folk ballad sections of numbers like ‘Season out of Season’. The modesty of this presentation gives Void Moon an edge over their headline grabbing peers within the current heavy metal climate. The soft, determined, patient building undertaken on this album, punctuated by brief bursts into the light signalled (rather obviously) by soaring guitar leads proves to be a rewarding ride for anyone amenable to this most traditional of forms.

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Windswept: Der eine, Wahre Konig
Out 21^st June on Primitive Reaction

Given that no single artist is more responsible for the unqualified embarrassment of blackgaze than Drudkh, it’s hardly surprising that this little side project is a confusing slog of indie rock redundancies. Despite Saenko showing some promise with his recent output under the revitalised Hate Forest brand, he apparently needs another outlet for this stripe of one dimensional, impotent positivity consisting of banal chord progressions, bouncy indie rock drumbeats, and vocals with considerable name recognition. Despite the cache of these guest appearances, curtesy of Tobias Möckl of Darkspace and Paysage d’Hiver fame, and Alexander von Meilenwaldwhich of The Ruins of Beverast no less, they do little to salvage this EP from being a saccharine slog. Riffs follow garden variety rockist circularity, oriented toward cheap emotional catharsis with none of the infrastructure to earn this release. Drums follow basic, linear patterns of simple blast-beats or jaunty indie rock rhythms, complete with wry accents and shuffles reminiscent of…*checks notes*…Bloc Party. Beyond this, there’s very little to add as far as this EP goes. Drudkh’s legacy may be lengthy, but it is not entirely without merit. Windswept quickly sweeps away any memory of these limited redeeming features. And in doing so reminds us of the blight this brand of proto-post metal has wrought on 21^st Century black metal as a whole, reducing it to domesticated trivialities, circular compositional reasoning, and trite emotivism.

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Crocell: Of Frost, of Flame, of Flesh
Out 28^th June on Emanzipation Productions

This is essentially extreme metal for the older, gainfully employed arm of the fandom, the metal-as-kitsch-homeware aesthetic for aging uncles with Slayer branded coffee mugs and a novelty Rammstein toaster.  Boring Northern European death metal with breaks into heavy metal euphoria presumably deployed to wake the listener up. This is populist extreme metal in every sense of word, echoing Belphegor, later Marduk, and Amon Amarth in its intent to give the listener an easily digestible buffet of punchy riffs and a spoonful of melodic sugar to help the atonality go down, all packaged within an extreme aesthetic to reassure everyone that this is at least purports to be a legitimate experience. Breakdowns could not have been more intentionally deployed to spark those fist pumping moments at Wacken, following easy 4/4 mid-paced rhythms designed to whip up the crowd. Everything hangs on achieving the next melodic lick, thumping backbeat, or soaring tremolo riff. All of which are placed as a series of centrepieces with no connection to one another. They function as showstoppers to engage the listener, create headlines, to give this music some kind of character beyond the excessively lazy plod of “blackened” death metal riffing that constitutes the real meat and potatoes of this album.

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Winter Eternal: Echoes of Primordial Gnosis
Out 28^th June on Hells Headbangers

Pleasing if obvious melodic black metal treats lyricism as an end in itself by guiding the central thread of each composition through a linear sequence of easy to follow hooks. Sparser tremolo riffs serve as link phrases, but again bear the shape of folky vocal melodies, keeping the contours of the melody alive. Bouncy, fast paced drumming underpins this with a strong sense of forward momentum. Despite the raw charm of individual vignettes, one cannot escape the overall pop orientation of this music, given that its chief appeal lies in articulating clear lyrical throughlines. This is treated as a replacement for any underlying architecture or compositional ambition. When there is a need to contrive some kind of weight or gravitas to the music, Winter Eternal lean on simple tricks such as switching to clean guitar, slowing the tempo, deploying a rocky guitar solo (as on the track ‘Two Heavens as One’). This is indicative of a clear limitation within Winter Eternal’s understanding of black metal. They are adept at achieving a surface level rendering of garden variety tropes, but the underlying mysticism usually achieved through fashioning some compositional identity is decidedly lacking from this album.

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Liminal Shroud: Visions of Collapse
Out 5 July on Willowtip Records

Uses black metal technique – namely tremolo strumming, blast-beats, raspy vocals – to articulate a form of drab stadium rock. Passages consisting of post rock filled with welcome dynamism are used to feed into “extreme” segments where everything looks aesthetically sound, but a cursory glance over the melodic offering reveals little more than cyclical hooks disguised as something more profound thanks to the greater indulgence of minor key. In this regard, Liminal Shroud mirror Enslaved in their desire to neuter extreme metal hardware into atomised self-help sessions, attempting to disguise this fact with “clever” technical or theoretical flourishes. In Enslaved’s case the so called progressive or psychedelic narrative they have built around themselves cheered on by the useful idiots in the metal “press” disguises the inheritance of emo and alternative rock. For Liminal Shroud it’s clever use of harmony, dynamic range, pacing, and an ability to tug at the heartstrings of an increasingly defeatist fanbase who treat inner emotional journeys as fashion statements. This release has nothing to offer listeners interested in metal as an aspirational form of macro level musical architecture and world building. One can’t help but yearn for this music to give up on extreme metal dog whistles and accept its true identity as sophisticated emo pop. At the very least this move would mitigate the need for us to keep having opinions on this dirge.