Beats and yelling shorts, 9th September 25

Mortalha Negra: Necromante
Out 18^th June on Helldprod Records

Essentially a thrash metal rendering of ‘Under a Funeral Moon’. Excitable yet austere, riffs reach through the old school filter, reinjecting archaic speed metal elements into an unambiguously black metal setting. The latter elements of which are deployed as developmental material. This in turn injects the music with a degree of telos, a sense that we are being taken on a journey. This feature alone is enough to elevate ‘Necromante’ above being yet another scrap of retro fodder. The riffs may be derivative, the performance so-so, the production and overall presentation generically authentic. But compositionally there has been a degree of thought put into how to give these tracks a signature, how to evolve the piece beyond mere box ticking into a living statement of intent. In that if nothing else this brief EP offers cause for intrigue.

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Putridity: Morbid Ataraxia
Out 27^th June on Willowtip

Simplistic but energetic brutal death metal offers determined atonal blitzkriegs of linear energy, which are in turn diverted at frequent intervals by micro refrains notable only for their brevity. Despite the amorality implied by these chromatic interchanges, a latent darkness cloaks the album, aided by some well placed samples (good to see Pink Flamingos crop up in the world in brutal death metal) and linking intervals of arpeggiated threnodies. Despite the multi directional flow of these tracks, the tempo remains high, any divergence into rhythmic ambiguity being brief, almost accidental, giving the music a drunken, lilting flow. A welcome deviation from the mechanistic precision common to this style. Where Putridity succeed is through achieving a sense of spontaneity and organic recklessness, thus achieving a latent complexity above the at times one dimensional compositions. There is no over production of material here. All the elements are exactly where they need to be and rendered efficiently. In this they are above par for modern technical death metal.

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Beleth’s Trumpet: Chapel of Bones
Out 1^st July on Korpituli

A wealth of confidence and theatrics at the performative level cloaks a dearth of imagination at the material. Beleth’s Trumpet have done the required reading, learnt the mechanics of form, and understood how to string a serviceable piece of violent yet epic black metal together. But as a result they achieve little more than the bare minimum, plugging the gaps with bells and whistles at the presentational level. Cinematic production values, a muscular guitar tone, raw yet powerful drums, confident performances, effective but trite harmonic development. Peel beneath the veneer of the fireworks and one finds little more than a template.

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Lyuaoien: No Sanctuary
Out 3^rd July on Centipede Abyss

In some ways, the final form of experimental dissonant black metal in that it doesn’t even make a pretence of being music. No gesture toward familiar phrasing, recognisable compositional norms, the contours of form are eroded away leaving little more than absurdist conversational guitar refrains completely detached from their rhythmic base. Akin to hearing multiple circus noises approaching from different directions, everything is stripped of context, reason, or purpose. Noise sits in the backdrop, a lurking menace threatening to grip what little remains of the music as the clarity of guitar lines ebb away, random drum patterns and fills the only remaining semblance of sonic familiarity. Despite the reckless anomie demonstrated across these tracks, they achieve a liminal sense of momentum through subtly interweaving energies as instruments link up and coalesce in spirit if not in any recognised musical tradition. The process occurs almost at random, but frequently enough to provide the listener a compass by which to navigate the morass.

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Eminentia Tenebris: Whispers of the Undying
Out 4^th July on Antiq

Forces the medievalist melodic euphoria of Obsequiae through a one dimensional filter of modern power metal. The result is a monotonous slog of trivial melodic material, motivated by little more than a desire to exist. Drums, tasked with building the drama lacking in the instrumentation, are forever switching to half tempo to signpost what should be moments of significance within the narrative, the problem being that this technique occurs at such frequency that no pattern or reason can be discerned. Guitars force industry standard modern metal refrains through various techniques and styles to cloak just how repetitive the music is. Guitar lines are layered up to create a sense of orchestration and size, achieving the musical equivalent of a Hollywood film creaking under the amount of special effects forced into every frame. A laborious and no doubt time consuming process, but one that achieves less than the sum of its parts as the music is left without any centre of gravity. A confusing and meaningless array of statements lifted from context.

Sunken Monolith: Demo
Out 4^th July on Prehistoric Sounds

Tortured, dirge ridden blackened grind achieves a sense of arcane mysticism through relentless droning chords battered by aggressive but loose blast-beats like waves crashing on the rocks. In effect this lifts the disorientating chasmic haze of ‘Ordo ad Chao’ back into an older black metal influence via Beherit, VON, or Blasphemy. The melodic signatures, when they do arrive, are surprisingly conventional, yet they express an overwhelming sense of power and darkness akin to Demoncy. In this sense, there is no need for any complexity through riffing, they achieve exactly what they need within their context. The space they have been granted within both the mix and the compositions is limited, but their effect is lasting. In the interim, Sunken Monolith deliver a tense, abrasive array of percussive and textural nihilism lifted from a dissonant black metal tradition, but here somehow taking on more thematic import due to the unpredictable, tortured flow of these pieces. Space and intervals are leveraged as powerful weapons for achieving an underlying sense of threat within the music, an implied power and age so much more compelling than any obvious gesturing that would have been achieved with a more polished mix.