Beats and yelling shorts, 19th November 24

Auriferous Flame: The Insurrectionists and the Caretakers
Out 8^th November on True Cult Records/Stellar Auditorium Productions

“The album explores the theme of revolution and delves deep into the complexities of resistance and change, offering listeners an intense and thought provoking experience.”

Given the eagerness to share the complex subject matter that inspired this album, one might have expected a clearer vision expressed through the music itself. But true to form, as with the many projects now associated with the voice behind Spectral Lore, Ayloss lacks the attention span to carry ideas through to a conclusion. The result is three weighty tracks functioning as a history of extreme metal in riffs, accompanied by hysterical vocals that refuse to comply with any rhythmic pattern, an effective technique whose impact dissolves if used as the entire basis for one’s style. Musically, we get blackened thrash, dissonant black metal, post metal, death metal, heavy metal, war metal, and any other loose ends that take Ayloss’s fancy. I’m sure the intent – given the ambitious subject matter – was a broad narrative taking in many moods and themes along the way. But the lasting impression is an artist eager to prove his worth across multiple forms of metal – something he’s entirely unsuccessful at – to the detriment of any discernible artistic throughline. Each moment is enjoyable, but the wider contours of the album are completely missing beneath a needless safari.

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Grylle: Egrotants, Souffreteux, Cacochymes, Covidards
Out 10th November on Antiq

By the late 90s, when it became clear that metal artists had lost their creative will and sunk into the comfort of their childhood influences, or else left the genre entirely, and a new cohort struggled to replenish the genre’s vocabulary, there remained some reliable levers one could pull on to make otherwise stale material standout, the most obvious being novelty. For signs of the decadence this spelt, look no further than the proliferation of “genre” metal by the late 2000s, which usually meant the same concoction of well trodden riff traditions played by LARPers with folk instruments. Until we arrive at this becorpsepainted state wearing a beret, brandishing an axe, desperately trying to call attention to their very original take on our anomic age, cloaking the fact that they have no musical imagination and nothing useful to add behind a medieval aesthetic because “allegory” or something. The result is the usual blackened folk metal fare, with embarrassingly hammed up vocals, and a total absence of original ideas that no amount of “authentic” folk instruments (definitely not been done before) can disguise.

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Apothecary: Flaescwellere
Out 14^th November on The Centipede Abyss

Devolves the raw black metal format further by removing any logical rhythmic cadence or obvious administration of riffs. What results is more like noise wearing a black metal hat. Individual passages promise a stirring rally into some kind of melodic coherence, a soaring, tremolo riff harkening back to the bright power and hope latent within original Nordic second wave. But all momentum is dissolved from the picture before this image can truly take shape, leaving nothing but tantalising glimpses in their wake, and the lasting knowledge that all will succumb to illogical randomness eventually. There have been many attempts to create music beyond black metal over the years, reappropriating its mechanics in various forms of post rock, ambient, electronica, or indeed the meta commentary that continues to swirl around the genre itself in pseudo-academic circles. This EP more directly addresses how this process plays out at the grassroots level, conversing with the raw mechanics of the music itself, dispensing with atmosphere, vibe, or mood for the sake of an obsessive and brutal dissection of black metal technique, cutting the genre into pieces in arrangements that no longer make sense.

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The Mosaic Window: Hemasanctum
Out 15^th November on Willowtip Records

The Mosaic Window offer more of the same on their second album, learning no lessons aside from personalising the lyrical content, thus smuggling a therapy session under this taster menu of serviceable melodic black metal. What else is there to say? When not residing in the gutter of the dreaded track-by-track analysis, most reviews (including my own) fall into a broad survey of genre, influence, production, music theory, and an assessment of their success on those terms. The reason for this is simple. The majority of modern releases are so lacking in identity that they leave no lasting impact on the listener beyond a vague sense that we just had an experience, but one too vague to fulfil arbitrary word counts and flood column inches. I have literally nothing to say about this album. It sounds like modern extreme metal. A dictionary of techniques, music theory, and ideas we’ve heard unnumbered times before, the original meaning of which has been long forgotten. Reconfigured for personal fancy, to express a personal journey, for idol fun, or to merely stand out and catch some social media momentum. No guiding vision, no will or ability to develop the language. Just a community existing in a fugue state, generating the same old riffs because to do anything else would force us to confront the yawning chasm at the heart of metal’s creativity.

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Hjemsøkt: Om Vinteren, Pa En Sort Trône
Out 17th November on Purity Through Fire

Essentially another Darkthrone rip off with a more sophisticated melodic package. I looked them up, these musicians are a few years younger than myself, meaning they were born around or after the release of ‘Under a Funeral Moon’. That’s roughly thirty years ago. If musicians this age were making metal of a similar vintage in 1993, it would be impossible, because metal wasn’t a thing thirty years prior to 1993. This is the equivalent of kids in the early 90s playing…early rock ‘n’ roll, The Beatles? The Kinks? Sorry to single out Hjemsøkt as they’re hardly unique here, although they do proudly purport to have the “second wave running through their veins”, but is it any wonder that I can barely formulate a sentence about this album given the gaping voids of time now separating us from when this music was novel.

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Golgothan Remains: Bearer of Light, Matriarch of Death
Out 22^nd November on Dark Descent Records

Atmospheric death metal that at least demonstrates a consciousness of how and what it is trying to convey. Despite occasionally threatening a complete dissolution into sludgy, dissonant, caverncore hell, Golgothan Remains retain a clear melodic and narrative signature that salvages these tracks from complete incoherence and a drift to entirely texture and dynamics based thrills by way of compensation. Monotony threatens regardless, with a tendency to break up the limited range within the riffing through percussive atonality. Whilst both elements are garden variety in death metal, Golgothan Remains’ fail to cultivate an identity at either end of their stylistic range. This gives the impression that each passage is deployed to compensate for the last, until we are left wondering where the meat ‘n’ potatoes of the music went. Despite this not insignificant shortcoming, if one squints, an overarching vision begins to take form atop the indecision, making for passable if dull death metal of the gloomy, doom adjacent variety.