Beats and yelling shorts, 28th November 25

SAD: Fullmoon’s Bestial Awakening
Out 31^st October on Purity Through Fire

SAD continue their quest to appropriate generic second wave black metal sweet-nothings into what is essential punky rock ‘n’ roll. Despite the length of this album, and indeed the considerable girth of the tracks within, there is little to suggest they have expanded into a more ambitious entity. All is self-referential, superficial, empty gestures toward more substantive material that SAD are frankly incapable of matching. Individual segments taken in isolation are certainly inoffensive as far as a certain brand of poppist black metal wearing a lo-fi cape goes, but taken together there is little logic or purpose behind the arrangement and sequencing of events. All seems to be placed according to the dictates of a checklist, ensuring that specific types of fans are catered to at different moments. The result is back metal giving itself a hand job, the experience every bit as unpleasant as this implies.

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Ildaruni: Divinum Sanguinem
Out 7^th November on Black Lion Records

For a certain brand of highly orchestrated black metal this achieves a degree of clarity. Slick, melodic punches flow into one another, ministered by tight yet fluid blast-beats and a good grasp of how to transpose sugar coated licks into tremolo strummed riffs to give this poppy material at the least the guise of something extreme. Trivial harmonic interventions pose as complicating the picture, conjuring a notionally epic, cinematic feel almost from thin air. But if one stops for a moment to consider the material before us, all is accessible, obvious, populist in its eagerness to appeal to what the listener wants rather than present them with a challenge. Tired extreme metal histrionics complete the picture with vocalisations that could be found on a thousand other releases this month, lending the music a degree of theatrical professionalism in order to rope in that layer of casualised fans who otherwise shun the rigorous discipline required to digest more lo-fi material that is nevertheless more sophisticated at the molecular level.

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Degraved: Spectral Realm of Ruin
Out 14^th November on Dark Descent Records/Me Saco Un Ojo

Superficially another flat tour of retro death metal hallmarks delivered in dry, procedural episodes of generically gooey riffing. But what’s immediately apparent is that Degraved, despite their muted delivery, exhibit an internal consistency. But it seems the stronger material was saved for the back end of this album, recontextualising the dry, crowd pleasing material of the first few tracks as merely preparatory, setting the scene for the darker turn taken on side two. The riffs gain a dynamism that undergirds all with tension, possibility. Atop this shifting foundation haunting, drop keyboards lines decorate droning, early Darkthrone-esque chord sequences, breathing space and eerie confidence to proceedings. Degraved continue to churn through a variety of influences, all harnessed under the rather limiting bass throb of the guitar tone. But they show a degree of discipline given that, like all fresh faced acts, they have all of death metal history to draw upon. A pleasing if mixed bag, emotively more complex than 90% of their contemporaries, but one gets the sense that they felt the need to pander to the same audience which sometimes hamstrings the otherwise rich material into a dry bureaucratic slog.

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Lamp of Murmuur: The Dreaming Prince in Ecstacy
Out 14^th November on Wolves of Hades

Decorates melodic thrash with sugary keyboard lines whilst simultaneously attempting to elevate black ‘n’ roll material into something serviceable. The result is essentially a survey of the many and varied attempts to water down high black metal into a product fit for stadium rock. By the late 90s it was clear that the more popular Norwegian black metal acts such as Dimmu Borgir and Immortal were returning to the music they cherished before Euronymous had his way with the scene. The resulting menagerie observable across albums as diverse as ‘Enthrone Darkness Triumphant’, ‘Damned in Black’, and ‘IX Equilibrium’ is a case study in identity crisis. Here we see the recapitulation of this process echo through a younger artist clearly enamoured by the output of this era. Ambitious, slick, and with obvious talented, the exuberance of youth falls at the hurdle of gathering all his influences, designs, and flights of fancy into something resembling coherence. Materially indistinguishable from any melodic, symphonic black metal of the last twenty five years or so, with the same mortar of generic thrash riffing plugging the gaps, yet delivered with a greater sense of freedom, play, and emotive range than most. But the ultimate result achieves little more than a literary review, or rather a showcase of the things you love, laid out in a form just complex enough to feel substantive, an experience that collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

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Tzevaot: The Hermetic Way
Out 14^th November on I, Voidhanger Records

Eccentric black metal conveys esoteric mysticism at the molecular level through uncomfortable pacing, patient builds of tension, and genre blending that, in context work, but on paper make for odd bedfellows. Drawing on the theatrical strain of leftfield black metal in the likes Sigh, Necromantia, and early Absu, Tzevaot constantly threatens to collapse into incoherence, but somehow articulates an internal logic as a binding agent, coordinating the various moving parts into something that could make sense. Idiosyncratic as far as phrasing and structure goes, ‘The Hermetic Way’ does not flow like a normal metal album. Instead allowing streams of conscience, odd tangents, and the irresistible demands of high drama to mould each lengthy track together. Experimental in the sense that the flow of the music is exploratory, untroubled by whatever stylistic or tonal shift it must undergo in order to progress through the moment. But generalist thematic waves flow over each piece, dictating an overarching logic and telos that salvages the music from being mere random ejaculations.

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Moral Implant: Delusion
Out 14^th November on Caligari Records

Metal on the edge of solidity, a cumbersome guitar tone and limited drum mix set the boundaries for what this music can achieve. Beneath the relentless throb of noise is an industrially minded set of death metal riffs, informed by sludge and grindcore in equal measure. The problem with this release is not anything inherent to the writing itself, more the fact that it seems to have been deliberately hamstrung by the need to convey an aesthetic of abrasion. Some odd riff shapes are discernible beneath the fray, but they remained supressed and unable to develop for the sake of forcing the music to appear random, incoherent, capitulating to random bursts of guitar noise, outbursts rented from hardcore, or else serviceable but domesticated grindcore simplicity. Moral Implant are emblematic of modern extreme metal in its forever quest to find a new niche, mining aesthetic currents to short circuit its way to that end. What makes this artist stand out is a degree of potential, a germinal identity lurking beneath the overarching demand to appear abrasive at any cost.