Atavistic Passage: Demonstration Two
Out 9th October on MoH Creations
Ritualistic dark ambient collides with raw black metal, creating a sense of occasion through simple melodic refrains reduced to drone form, onto which are added basic harmonic development. This gives the music a feeling of opening out, of creating space from a place of restriction, an effect achieved by pulling at the simplest of levers, rudimentary writing tactics that in context bring about dramatic consequences. Galloping rhythms and relentless vocals call to mind early Behemoth circa ‘And the Forest Dreams Eternally’ reinterpreted through the lens of raw black metal. Although the style is explicitly lo-fi, mournful, and obscurantist, there is an undercurrent of brightness to many of the refrains, a teasing sense of hope articulated through the subtle contouring atop an explicitly basic riff language. What sounds like keyboard string tones put through a distortion pedal work in unison with the guitars, marginally broadening the textural offering and allowing the music to extend into space, conjuring atmospheric intent in spite of the restrictive premise drawn out by the central guitar tone. An effective if brief exercise in the marriage of intentional composition with textural experimentation.
Irr: Remains Remain
Out 24th October on Monastyr Records/Berggeflvster Records
Walks a tightrope between muscular, epic black metal and hardcore trappings, the latter of which is expressed through dull, slam adjacent breakdowns and a barked, aggressive vocal style. The result is an album that feels in conflict with itself. On the one hand we find a restrained, competent work of epic black metal infused with an active, immediate death metal undercurrent. On the other it attempts to elevate post hardcore/metal/emo by transferring this ephemera into an extreme metal setting, relying on accessible rhythmic grooves and punchy staccato exclamations to conjure a sense of contrast and conflict. When Irr consolidate their sound into a coherent statement of driving, purposeful extreme metal the results can be effective, achieving a clear balance between cinematic scope and lyrical intimacy through the guitar’s strong melodic currents. But one gets the sense that compromises were made in the writing process resulting in a thematically confused experience despite the music’s obvious strengths.
Precious Blood: False Prophets
Out 29th October, self-released
This curious blend of early speed metal, basic doom, flashes of punk and even some early Greek black metal in the form of Varathron teeters on the edge of believability. A rough and ready mix, sloppy but serviceable performances (not least the wobbly vocal takes), and straightforward delivery cloak a deceptively experimental work of fusion metal. Verses delivered at plodding mid-tempos create a laboured, journeying framing device, with galloping blasts serving as link phrases to a more panoramic, epic heavy metal lilt. The music echoes pre ‘His Majesty at the Swamp’ Varathron in its ability to string out episodic developments into a larger, cohesive narrative. Drab but effective melodic material takes on a lyrical, freeing guise atop the simple, power chord battering of the rhythm guitar. An odd blend of distorted and clean vocals create uncanny corridors of unsettling, leftfield whimsy at once comedic and eerie. That the packaging is so basic only further demonstrates that these experimental traits come from an organic, natural place arising from the artistry itself, its need to range between styles and moods to convey its otherworldly message. This is in contrast to imposing these features top down as per the genre blending imperatives of modern avant-garde metal.
Kvad: Sort Skogsmesse
Out 31st October on Purity Through Fire
Sits somewhere between the alienating abrasion of Les Legions Noire and the melodic aspirations of early Nordic black metal. The brainchild of one Peregrinus, an individual with more projects than is warranted for his creative calibre, Kvad is not as focused as the superior but largely inaccessible Unholy Craft, but the project still offers a tight, engaging work of grim black metal played with more conviction than 99% of the modern genre. Whilst the tone and form are decidedly drab, the music achieves energy and motivation through purposeful repetition of refrains onto which is hung developmental material, alongside simple but driving rhythms. The latter of which has a chaotic, offbeat, energy expressed through the execution itself and its liability to cut out and return at unexpected moments, thus injecting a degree of tension into an otherwise futile landscape. Drawing on early Burzum, the album maintains an immersive, other worldly quality despite its obviously derivative identity. The magic of simple, world building black metal recaptured if not developed.
Funeral Harvest: Malum in Se
Out 31st October on Amor Fati
Draws on the polarities of mid-period Gorgoroth, an era defined by the high melody of Infernus giving way to the imperative for intensity at all costs. Although Funeral Harvest deliver a more cohesive offering than something like ‘Destroyer’, one has to burrow beneath the veneer of an overzealous impulse toward extremity that tends to cloak the underlying message behind each track. But coming at this from a different angle reveals an effective exercise in tension, as vast melodic threads are stretched across pulsing rhythmic blasts, undergirding the music with muscular assuredness. Passages ring with the confidence of black metal at its most warlike and proactive. The contrast between base violence and cerebral reflection brought to bear through the slick production and performances exercised across this EP. At times tilting too far into histrionics, at others lacking in focus and leaning on repetition as a result. But as an exercise in fraught, violent black metal with a distinctive melodic signature this remains a rarity in the modern landscape for its cohesion whilst still expressing a liberating sense of play.
Abominator: The Fire Brethren
Out 31st October on Hells Headbangers
Against the current crop of “black/death metal acts” that really just play recycled speed metal offcuts with some early Morbid Angel licks thrown in, veterans Abominator stand ahead of the curve for injecting some actual black metal vocabulary into their riff language. In its immediacy the experience is relentlessly monotonous, refusing to let up in speed and intensity, with no bar left unfilled, no chord left ringing, and no variation from the frontloaded aggression of the guitar tone. But peeling beneath the obnoxious service level reveals a push and pull between the aimless freneticism of war metal, the unforgiving structuralism of speed ridden death metal, and a more considered melodic current pivoting between surrealist chromaticism and the literalism of traditional tonality. The result is an album that works against its own aspirations, insistent on aligning itself with the performative barbarity of war metal (or black/death metal as many still refer to it) whilst simultaneously forcing out spaces for more extended narrative threads begetting a certain internal logic.
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