Liminal Spirit: Forfeiture Hymns
Out 6th November, self-released
Hot off the heals of last year’s ‘Unwell’, Liminal Spirit waste no time in expanding on their debut both musically and conceptually with this next offering, ‘Forfeiture Hymns’. All the same elements are in place. Meandering, microtonal guitar lines. Ponderous, faltering drum patterns, displaying an oddly freeform rhythmic centre belying their programmed origins. And the same tantalisingly agnostic approach to melody is deployed, as familiar, borderline lyrical lines emerge only to fade into anomic, tonal ambiguity. But there is a macro structure at work across these pieces, as rhythm and thematic emphasis gradually coalesce into their own logic that makes sense only in situ, requiring one to truly get one’s ear into the music to fully appreciate the systemic developments at work across each track.
‘Unwell’ centred on the character Phillip Hastings, consigned to a nursing home and living through his final days. ‘Forfeiture Hymns’ expands out to look at the various characters around Phillip and how their lives were impacted by him. But the same uncanny atmosphere haunts the music, a peripheral, indeed liminal atmosphere that anyone who has spent time in the non-spaces of hospital wards and care homes will be familiar with.
In terms of the overall presentation little has changed from the debut. The mix is clean and crisp, evoking the album’s subject matter in the sparse sterility of environments determined by medicalisation. The drums are oddly soft yet persistent despite their irregularity. Rhythm guitar adopts a heavy but crisply procedural tone, allowing for full articulation of each line as it transitions from busy chord punches to wandering melodic lines. The overall demeanour is meaty but lyrical as they articulate clear throughlines (it would be simplistic to call them riffs) that dance between tentative staccato sequences and droning, tangential sojourns up the fretboard that adopt the cadence of speech patterns or indeed groans of pain over any traditional melodic form. These are offset by a much harsher, almost alarmist lead guitar tone, which constantly moves from a place of conflict to harmony with the dense machinations of rhythm section.
Despite the clear continuity with ‘Unwell’, the debut adopted a much more meditative posture when compared to the often frantic ‘Forfeiture Hymns’. But the latter allows plenty of room for sudden breaks into stasis, the ambient noise of random spoken word samples, the hum of machinery, or decaying guitar lines that suddenly burst into frenetic activity once again. The same obvious touchstones remain in place stylistically, Voivod, Godflesh, the more melodically enquiring elements of early 90s death metal. But the comparison is perhaps limited to a footnote, a brief quotation or starting point before the music of Liminal Spirit begins to unfurl its own melodic language, here massively elaborated upon when compared to the debut, yet somehow delivered more concisely and assertively.
Nine Lands of Oblivion: The Outer Void
Out 31st October, self-released
Sparse dark ambience interchanges with light noise sequences to create an oddly cloying, intimate atmosphere that rides above the cavernous void that exists only by implication at the heart of this music. Pieces tend to evolve from a basic refrain played on a single keyboard tone, sometimes with more attack, sometimes saddled with droning inertia, but always clearly articulated, only to gradually decay as the liminal threat of entropic noise begins to manifest, and all dissolves into homogenous thrumming static, imposing for its measured, gentle encroachment to the foreground of the mix. Musical fragments float across this brume like ghostly deep sea creatures, emerging out of the blackness to briefly enchant before retreating back into their solitude. Tension, activity, conflict, all exist across this music despite their depleted state. This will usually be expressed through a simple progression of notes as they gradually eke out tension by unfurling discord in slow motion, like witnessing a piece of music stretched out until it reaches across eternity. There is also tension at the textural level, as musical tones appear constantly on the point of dissolving into atonal static, thus losing their ability to give voice to any emotive expression. A haunting, understated, and indeed uncanny trial of fragmented dark ambient episodes.
Necroseminal Spatter: Sick Ways to Sodomy
Out 31st October on Extremely Rotten Productions
Goregrind working with nothing but stolen valour. As basic and obvious as the riffs and ideas are, they are serviceable as far as caveman death metal is concerned. But they are arranged in the most obvious, predictable patterns imaginable, something that becomes apparent on one of the EP’s longest pieces, ‘Sexxx Butcher’, which pivots between the basic groove of a plodding verse passage and a simple repetitive up-tempo riff to give at the least illusion of motion, but as things cycle around the same few fragments it becomes apparent that little love or creativity has gone into this material. The packaging, the hyperbolic delivery, the obnoxious samples, the edgelord subject matter, all would be entertaining if Mortician didn’t exist. But Mortician, for all their limitations, are oddly hypnotic for their monomaniacal approach to songwriting and excessive use of samples that were, at the very least, atmospheric. Necroseminal Spatter (even the name gets eyes rolling) embody none of this charm, bearing all via the most obvious, one dimensional, and tired delivery mechanisms possible, hoping to get by on sheer enthusiasm and shock value.
Hyperion: Elysia
Out 6th November on Willowtip Records
Simple music trying to disguise the fact through the sheer speed at which they deliver juxtaposing ideas and emotive vignettes. At its core this is an attempt to recycle the most sugary sweet elements of melodic death metal into a symphonic black metal setting, attempting to work some more intricate medieval melodic signatures into the mix to give the veneer of sophistication (as if they are aware of the Disney-by-association risks that come with this territory). But Hyperion are incapable of maintaining compositional unity for more than a couple of minutes, a severe handicap on tracks that demand a longform structure if they are to appear credible in front of this genre’s fanbase. As a result ideas are picked up, run with, and incongruously dropped as new material is introduced with little preparation. Jarring transitions can be a powerful compositional tool, but here they occur with such frequency – two or three per track – that it becomes clear that Hyperion are incapable of doing anything more than parroting their more talented influences. Finding the core of this style, what motivates it and how to construct original sentences through it appears to be beyond them.
Cerebral Curse: Abominant Incarnations of Sepulchral Depths
Out 13th November on Rotted Life/Night Terrors
Attempts to revitalise the corpse of cavernous death/doom by leaning into longform song structures in a manner reminiscent of Anatomia. Whilst they are not entirely unsuccessful in stringing these much longer paragraphs together into coherent narratives, Cerebral Curse tend to lean a little to heavily on obvious, linear accruals of momentum before pulling back to a doomy miasma, rinse and repeat. The approach makes sense from a logical perspective, but becomes predictable once the hand is shown and no divergence is forthcoming. The push to extend the shelf-life of garden variety Autopsy riffs does result in some intriguing outlier riffs, and good use of repetition to hammer home particular themes makes for a welcome contrast to the sparser drone elements. But one can’t help noticing the factory settings approach to arrangement, with the intention behind each transition in tempo being too clearly signposted to bring the material to life. The result is an album of grammatically neat but artistically trivial music.
Graviton: Graviton
Out 13th November on Skepsis Recordings
Whilst Graviton make a decent showing of it here, they appear out of step with the quality of contemporary thrash metal, which is undergoing something of a renaissance in the 2020s. This album brings things back to the era of The Haunted, Evile, and even those dark days when Lamb of God or Killswitch Engage were the genre’s foremost acolytes. It’s a strange brew on offer here. Part quality thrash clobber, part melodic metalcore, part basic groove metal, with some showy guitar virtuosity thrown in for good measure. Graviton feel like a stark reminder of being in your first band, where each member gets their “moment” on a track, and each draws from related but highly distinct genres that they can never quite mesh together into a coherent statement. The result is playlist metal, an aggressive thrash foundation intercut with a spectrum of supplementary vignettes drawn from the pop metal oeuvre of the last twenty five years or so, with no interconnecting thread to bind these quotations together.
Vindalf: Through the Fires of Black Ascension
Out 16th November on Signal Rex
Although this presents as frantic, melodic, proto symphonic black metal, somewhere between Abigor, Gorgoroth, and Taake, materially this is much sparser than it first appears. Ideas flow in clear logical sequences and themes are given room to develop uninterrupted. But all is performed in such a way as to give the illusion of motion, the delivery is frantic, urgent, histrionic, pregnant with significance. Tentpole riffs are kept in place for longer than is typical for modern black metal, given extra shelf life through the light touch approach of simple harmonic development or shifts in pitch. It’s this back to basics approach that gives what would otherwise be rather stale material a new lease of life. The atmosphere and character of this music feels refreshing, tentatively evoking in the mind of the listener those early encounters with the magic of black metal, the hidden universes implied by the music, awaiting discovering. Vindalf are working with roughly the same raw materials as any garden variety black metal outfit. But with them and through the simple art of thoughtful arrangements, performative conviction, and an austere yet intelligent compositional mindset, they have produced a work active with life and possibility.
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