Adorior: Bleed on my Teeth
Out 27th September on Dark Descent Records
The long awaited return of Adorior fails to pick a lane, and in doing so offers an experience more akin to a series of medleys than a coherent sound document. Melissa Gray’s vocals are a delight to listen to, boasting one of the most expressive voices you’re likely to hear within extreme metal, but the lack of a solid foundation, blackened thrash or otherwise, gives the impression that the music is configured simply to prop up her performance. Disruption and disorder are baked within the DNA of blackened thrash, particularly one tinted with hardcore and grind as Adorior are wont to indulge in. But the pacing of ‘Bleed on my Teeth’ is such that one comes away with the impression that the band were simply unable to settle on a style or even specific riffs before shifting gear. One can practically hear the compromises being made in the writing process. There remains a latent joy in the sheer chaos of the performances, an overwhelming malevolence is returned with interest. But any binding vision or intent behind this album is sadly lost in the mire.
Zvylpwkua: Abode…
Out 4th October on Centipede Abyss
A senseless melting pot of death metal’s raw materials. Collective memories, shared symbols, familiar shapes and forms, all are dissolved into absurdist nonsense on the latest album from Zvylpwkua. Drums veer from determined blast-beats to staggering rhythms and random fills, as if someone recorded Jared Moran warming up in the rehearsal room and attempted to set music to it. Guitars flow in currents of static. It’s almost redundant to describe it as dissonant for the simple fact that riffs and melody are absent, instead the instrument is deployed to wash out the sound with noise, a textured barrage of interference navigable only through shifts in intensity and pitch. Random scale runs race across this backdrop, mimicking a frantic and ultimately directionless conversation, interrupting the sluggish, guttural vocals with their urgency. The overall experience is hardly pleasant. But one can’t help but feel a sense of catharsis in the way ‘Abode…’ articulates the odd detachment one develops in a content saturated era. A sensory overload one is longer able to process, ending with scrap material rearranged into nonsensical configurations.
Seid: Hymns to the Norse
Out 18th October on De Tenebrarum Principio/ATMF
Seid continue feathering their nest of vaguely folk driven homages to early Enslaved. ‘Hymns to the Norse’ makes for a tense listening for the simple fact that we’re waiting for Seid to fuck the job up. But no, they carry it off without a hitch, resulting in a pleasingly immersive if rather modest furnishing of austere, repetitive, galloping Nordic black metal. If the intent is to offer a laid back, ethereal, atmospheric experience, then Seid have succeeded. That being said, the compositions are at times so flat, sparse, lacking in any topography to speak of, that we are left wondering what the purpose of all this is, something that the melodic offering does little to compensate for. We are given a framework, competently rendered and ripe for populating. Hints and whispers of more bracing, epic, narrative storytelling are scattered throughout, but fall short of elevating this rather safe material.
Funeral: Gospel of Bones
Out 18th October on Season of Mist
Straddling the border between modern funeral doom – which leans toward orchestration and grandiosity compared to earlier, grimmer iterations – and gothic doom (which will inevitably get compared to My Dying Bride), the latest offering from Norway’s Funeral is an intense listen. Not least because the album is furnished with a trained baritone opera singer on lead vocals. This, alongside the use of the Harding fiddle supplementing lavish keyboard accompaniment with a sense of intimacy, brings the overall presentation closer to darkwave with a doom metal backdrop in its unapologetic melancholia. It’s a long album, frontloaded with vocal and folk driven melodrama, but as the pieces unfold guitars are brought to the fore, eking out rich melodic lines calling back to Candlemass on a bad day via the lingering shadow of English gothic doom. The absence of distorted vocals, the foregrounding of folk and lyrical threnodies sidelining riffs in the process, all distances ‘Gospel of Bones’ from traditional metallic fare, but one is willing to submit to the experience. This marriage of folk and classical with metal is more successful than most in the field, the process feels organic, unforced.
Emasculator: The Disfigured and the Divine
Out 25th October on New Standard Elite
Brings technical death metal back to first principles via a straightforward barrage of percussive riffing, disjointed chromatic inflections, and rhythmically tight distorted vocal patterns. Emasculator are adept at driving a particular theme through several seemingly random deviations whilst keeping the underlying narrative current intact. The EP is kept at boiling point throughout, but certain refrains find repetition at ever more frequent intervals, as if the music is urgently signalling at one point within the frame despite the surrounding distractions of disruptive, entropic noise. The mix does a good job of balancing the elements as required for such dense music. Drums cut through well, offering a snare richer than it is tinny. This, alongside a crisp, clear distortion allows the listener full view of the mechanisms at play behind the music. The result is promising if generic tech-death harkening back to the genre’s peak at the turn of the century.
Sedimentum: Derriere les Portes d’une Arcane Transcendante
Out 25th October on Me Saco Un Ojo/Dark Descent
Superfluous cavernous death metal aping off the vibes based order of bands like Spectral Voice and Grave Miasma. Whilst there’s nothing overtly worthy of criticism across this EP, the fact that it adds nothing new to the conversation gives the impression that Sedimentum have missed the bus with this one, chasing a trend that is by now some five years past its peak. If this were an anti-trend statement one would at least expect Sedimentum to bring something new to the table. But if anything this regresses recent evolutions in death/doom back to the primary source material once again, a derivative of Incantation with more organic production and atmospheric flavouring. Not that there’s anything desperately amiss on this EP. Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose, that is not a weakness, that is caverncore.
Hate Meditations 
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