Impious Throne: Suffering
Out 11th April on ATMF – De Tenebrarum Principio (originally released in 2024)
Despite the brevity of this album, one can’t help but wish for some heavy handed editing. Frantic, riff centric, immediate black metal succeeds in conveying a tragedian gravitas and sense of occasion. But Impious Throne are forever saddling themselves with an excess of content that the message is often lost beneath surplus tangents or demonstrations of unnecessary technical feats. For black metal that is predominantly derived from the frantic mid-90s Swedish style, Impious Throne at least deserve credit for leaving their presentation largely raw, unadorned with excessive studio administration. The drums are tinny but clear, the guitar tone close but heavy, the rest of the mix largely untouched by reverb, additional keys, or extended interludes. This allows us to regard the interaction of riff undistracted. And in this sense, ‘Suffering’ has a lot to offer in terms of direction, forethought, and – albeit needlessly tangential – development. It succeeds in carrying forward a legacy of an old, proto melodic black metal and reinserting a degree of violence, chaos, and darkness, eschewing the melodic metal euphoria of many comparable black metal releases over the years. For that reason, in theory if not necessarily in execution, this album warrants some attention.
Ukakuja: Kobi no gishiki
Out 15th April on Centipede Abyss
Absurdist noise jazz featuring the infamous Lori Bravo on vocals. Essentially an exercise in the limits of coherence, as each instrument, vocals included, throw their own projectiles into the direction of each track, only sporadically linking up with one another to create precious moments of clarity. Guitars outline proto melodies before dragging themselves into random scale runs or complete nonsense. Drums veer wildly from persistent builds of blast-beat momentum only to recoil at the notion of such purpose, dissolving into stilted warmup exercises and random beats fading off into the night. Bass perhaps sticks to the jazz metal format the closest, offering dense, jagged rhythmic lines that communicate a twisted logic of sorts over and above the acute anomie swirling above. Other interjections of random piano lines and synth noise complete the picture of desperate confusion, one only enhanced by Bravo’s unhinged histrionics. The signature of her distorted range familiar to fans of Nuclear Death barely discernible beneath the more emotive, melodramatic, and varied beast found here. One much more comfortable with deploying clean lines that occasionally link up with a melodic intention only to collapse into random howls, moans, and throaty distortion. Fundamentally, this makes for a welcome addition to the death metal adjacent jazz of the Centipede Abyss roster, proving to be a more dynamic fit for these random cacophonies than a more typical guttural growl found on other releases from this label.
Wulkanaz: Luftuz
Out 18th April on Helter Skelter
Basic, vintage psychedelic rock wearing a black metal aesthetic. Riffs are little more than trivial re-runs of early 70s heavy rock, played with metallic intention – occasional blast-beats, a nod to the 80s via Celtic Frost or Bathory – beefed up with hazy synth noise. Hawkwind being an obvious reference point were it not for the fact that Wulkanaz display no desire to communicate anything beyond playing with rented imagery. The idea of a standard lo-fi black metal framework being applied to an equally linear earlier space rock influence could have been interesting, but only insofar as the compositional projects bear many similarities. Wulkanaz appear uninterested in these aspects, instead engaging in another trivial project of retro play, marketed at a black metal audience because of a guitar tone and sporadic blast-beats. Any intriguing ideas that are conveyed go underdeveloped for the sake of keeping things light and carefree. The result is little more than a child playing with the ornaments on the parents’ mantlepiece with little understanding of their significance.
Dormant Ordeal: Tooth and Nail
Out 18th April on Willowtip Records
I was once asked to describe what “Wacken metal” is. Allowing for some variations, it’s essentially this. A collection of the most accessible elements of death and black metal lifted from roughly the late 90s onwards, as Immortal shifted gear, Behemoth and Belphegor started gaining currency, and a plethora of folk and historical cosplay became industry standard for bands headlining larger festivals and appearing on magazine covers. Dormant Ordeal want to play at being a death metal band. But because they understand the form as an outgrowth of rock music, their interpretation remains limited by a poppist sensibility. Songs must rally around anthemic show stopper moments. Each passage must be adorned with lyrical hooks and obvious cadential framing. Aggression and violence must be met with emotion and catharsis. Blast-beats must be met with infectious grooves (gotta get the crowd to fist pump at regular intervals). Essentially it’s trying to use the raw materials of accessible extreme metal to create a theatrical display, one that conveys a range of emotional and technical dexterity, but is conscious of meeting the listener on their terms, their expectations about standard rock song phrasing, never challenging their artistic hygiene. Everyone goes away thinking they’ve experienced something, no one learns anything or gains a new perspective, the combative potential of extreme metal is left unexamined, we can all rinse and repeat tomorrow.
Serpentes: Desert Psalms
Out 18th April on NoEvDia
After a beautiful vocal melody opening the album, we get five minutes of meaningless dissonant drone and a chap yelling “I accept my fate”, this eventually comes together into a rather dry, confused barrage of industry standard modern black metal with a dissonant undercurrent. I actually get pretty baffled at the hubris of some modern musicians. I get the impression that some artists seem to think that if they convey enough drama, pain, theatre, or if the lyrical concepts are esoteric and deep enough, then the music will largely take care of itself. The result is utterly painful to listen to. Not because of any abrasive feature in the music itself, but the lack of forethought, ambition, intentionality, just endless drab bratcore we are expected to applaud because “tortured artist” or something. With such a dearth of actual content to sink the teeth into there’s very little to say.
Pásmo: Pásmo
Out 18th April on Sentient Ruin
Oddball EP moving between crust, metal, and post punk and attempting to mine a similar sense of late Cold War exhaustion and pathos. Vocals attempting to strike a balance between old school goth clean tones and light distortion hit their mark in terms of resurrecting the downbeat, off key defeatism of Joy Division. Unusual synth lines sprinkle each track with latent retro futurism, the last vestiges of hope that tomorrow might be better than today. Basic, linear punk rhythms undergird all this symbolic play with a sense of certainty, reliability. Guitars move between basic proto metal runs and pure punk, both styles delivered with lackadaisical, sluggish vigour, any urgency arising from the drums and vocals if it comes at all. ‘Pasmo’ is an unusual stylistic package. Despite the obvious lineage of this EP, the execution is oddball enough to transcend the obvious 80s vintage of the aesthetics and techniques deployed. I’d hardly call it revolutionary. But in the context of modern post punk, it’s refreshing to a see a band link up with its early proto metal roots via the crust of Amebix and early industrial of Killing Joke.
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