Comprised solely of Mr. Fog, aka James Fogarty, the UK experimental solo-project Ewigkeit released its last album, Back to Beyond, in 2013. I’m assuming that what the PR wire means by “commercially available” in the info below is physically distributed, which is fair enough. In that case, it goes back more than a decade to 2005’s Conspiritus, which came out on Earache. What piqued my interest, aside from the phrase “sign with Svart,” which I almost always take as a sign that something is worth checking out, is the blend of influences Fogarty talks about in discussing the album’s range, from The Doors to black metal. Have to wonder what that all sounds like when brought together, and with the endorsement behind it that it has, it would seem to bode well for the realization to come.

Might be one to look out for, is all I’m saying. That’s all I’m saying.

From the PR wire:

EWIGKEIT sign with SVART for next album, features In The Woods… vocalist

Fresh from contributing vocals/guitars/keys to the recent, widely acclaimed In The Woods… album pure, James Fogarty is now completing work on a new album for his long-running solo effort Ewigkeit – the first commercially available release since 2005’s Conspiritus album, on Earache Records.

“I have been working on a collection of songs which has a wide-ranging inspiration from the past 45-50 years of rock/metal, from The Doors, Hawkwind, and Sabbath, through the NWOBHM era and the extreme metal of the ’90s, right up until today,” says Fogarty. “It’s the most guitar-centered material I have ever recorded, and certainly owes a lot to my all-time favourite bands, from classic rock through to black metal.”

Of the album’s themes, Fogarty reveals, “Lyrically, I have been greatly inspired recently by the literary works from the psychedelic underground – authors such as Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Dr Rick Stein. So, it’s basically a mish-mash of personal philosophy, scientific conjecture, stoned ramblings, and the schizophrenically esoteric, which, all in all, unintentionally, verges on the outrageously pretentious.”

To release the as-yet-untitled album, Fogarty has decided to team up with much-respected left-field and experimental metal label Svart Records of Finland. “For Svart Records to work with me on the new Ewigkeit material is great,” he beams. “This is a new beginning for Ewigkeit, and I am excited to be working on new material. They are the perfect label, owing to their embrace of the more experimental and psychedelic underground metal bands from over the last 10 years, and having a good understanding of music from the past, present, and future – that’s the new Ewigkeit material in a nutshell.”

The new, as-yet-untitled Ewigkeit album is nearing completion and will be released by Svart Records in the spring of 2017.

www.facebook.com/ewigkeitofficial
www.svartrecords.com
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Ewigkeit, Back to Beyond (2013)

UK space metal four-piece Enos aren’t kidding when they say they’re “taking their time with this one” below. I had thought the impending album, their third and yet-untitled, would be out sometime in 2015, but no dice, and as the band continues to experiment with a two-drummer setup moving past their 2015 split with Mangoo, we approach three solid years since their last full-length, All too Human, was released. Not an unreasonable amount of time — they’ve had a live record since then as well, which also resulted in a DVD — but they’re about due. Then again, I felt that way in January too, so who knows. Let them take their time. Planet Earth will still be here (hopefully, anyhow) when they get back.

Last I saw, vocals were started Aug. 28. Here’s the latest update from the band:

Enos: Recording Update and more gigs!

Well, it’s been a while since we last had an update! Needless to say Enos have been sitting on our collective arse (not all the time anyway). As well as playing shows at The Prince Albert in Brighton, WPC Summer Sizzler in Brixton and our first (and possibly only) show with two drummers (which incidentally was a fund-raiser for Cancer Research UK. Sam Dorrell, who some of you will recognise from his appearance as our second drummer on our recent Son Of A Gun/The Grey Belly split with Mangoo, raised over £1000!) we’ve also been busy working on our new album! Many days have been spent tinkering in the studio and getting things sounding just right, we’re taking our time with this one.

As yet we have no release date set so keep an eye out on the various social media sites and our web page for updates. This album is a progression on All Too Human and Chapter One and, like the others, is designed to be listened to back-to-back with the other records. There’s still a lot of work to do (all good things are worth waiting for!) but make sure you follow us on Facebook and Twitter for regular studio updates, including videos.

We are very pleased to announce that we will be returning to France for two shows later in September! First up we will be playing at Stoned Orgies at La Scène Michelet in Nantes on Saturday the 26th. This will be our first time in Nantes and are looking forward to taking to the stage alongside Sunnata. Next up we’ll be heading back to Paris for Glad Stone Fest VIII at Glazart on Sunday the 27th.

Our first show outside of the UK was at Glad Stone Fest several years ago (also the first time we gave Another Solution from All Too Human a live outing) so we’re extremely pleased to be invited back. We’re also looking forward to returning to Glazart, if it’s anything like our show in February it will be superb. These are likely to be our last shows of the year as we will be heads down in the album from here on in. What a fantastic way to end the amazing ride we’ve been on since the release of All Too Human!

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Enos, All too Human (2012)

They can’t all be genius, right? The truth is most aren’t. No album is perfect, and most bands — UK four-piece Baron included — have things that work and things that don’t within their sound, style, whatever it might be. It’s so easy to get burnt out on stuff though, because a lot, a lot, a lot of it is quite good, so when something different and interesting comes along, it’s almost too easy to pass it up. I’m really glad I took a couple minutes out of my day to listen to Baron‘s new track, “Deeper Align.” It doesn’t represent the entirety of the UK outfit’s forthcoming album, Torpor, which is out Oct. 23 on Svart — who as far as I’m concerned have pretty much hit the I’ll-go-in-blind level when it comes to trusting their taste — but it’s the kind of journey that you don’t realize is underway until it’s over and you look back at how far you’ve come, and in that, and in its melancholy psychedelia, it represents the record well.

The problem with burnout is you run the risk of missing something special. Again, I’m very glad I stopped and listened to this one. You might be as well:

BARON set release date for new SVART album, reveal first track

“As soon as you think you know, you’re done for. You don’t listen and you can’t hear. If you’re certain of anything, you shut the door on the possibility of revelation, of discovery.” – Alan Garner

Today, Svart Records sets October 23rd as the release date for Baron’s highly anticipated Torpor. Torpor, the new album from the British rock four-piece, is the latest in a long line of imaginative works hailing from the British Isles that seek to link place and mythology – the wind-beaten rural landscape and the stories of magic handed down through generations of tellers. In this way, it takes many of its cues from previous generations of musicians and artists: Alan Garner and Mervyn Peake, Derek Jarman and Kate Bush – all explorers at one time or another of the potent mix of history, folklore, and landscape that lie at the heart of these Isles. It is a testament, then, to the sheer quality of Torpor that in this daunting company Baron should not feel ashamed.

Baron’s previous album, Columns, proved that they were a band filled with talent and vision, but Torpor takes the project to a very different level. This is nothing less than a fully realised masterpiece, rich in the same early-dawn melancholy that so marked its predecessor, but stronger and more resilient, marked with tangled thickets of electric guitar and organ and presided over by Alex Crispin’s unmistakable baritone.

While Baron’s choice of instrumentation could be seen as being “traditional” (guitar, organ, drums, even a recorder at points), Torpor is far from being some kind of revivalist “psych” album. What hits you at first listen is not the instrumentation being used, but Baron’s skill in evoking mood and nuance. The touchstones are similar to the ones evoked on Columns – Talk Talk’s sense of enchantment and The Blue Nile’s bleary eyed melancholy;,the airy crescendos reminiscent of Traffic’s late-period masterpiece When The Eagle Flies – but these influences are invigorated by Baron’s confidence and firm grip on dynamics, their ability to leap from a tear-stained hush to a raging crescendo without the join ever being noticeable (witness “Stry,” one of two tracks featuring Wolf People’s Joe Hollick on guitar, for a demonstration of their sure-footed approach). Torpor works precisely because it knows when and where to abandon its restraint. That it can do so without ever compromising its overall mood is a testament to the maturity of the musicians involved and their total knowledge of the story they are trying to tell.

That parts of the album were surreptitiously (and not entirely legally) recorded at Purton Green, one of the last surviving medieval halls in the UK, makes a lot of sense in this context. It is precisely this mix of daring and tradition, of the lure of the landscape and the ability to reconfigure it in one’s own image, that marks Torpor out as an outstanding album, and which pinpoints Baron’s position as the latest addition to an imaginative lineage that stretches back as far as the language itself. Hear for yourself Baron’s unique brand of magick HERE with the Torpor track “Deeper Align.” Cover and tracklisting are as follows:

Tracklisting for Baron’s Torpor
1. Dragonfly
2. Mark Maker
3. Wild Cry
4. Dark Down
5. Stry
6. Sleepless
7. Deeper Align
8. Albedo Dei

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Baron, “Deeper Align”

It’s a pretty rare phenomenon, but every now and again somebody gets in touch who feels strongly enough about a release to send it to me even though they’re not affiliated with the band in question, not part of any record label or promotional effort or anything like that. Just a fan of a work who thinks I’d be better off hearing it enough that they’re willing to put their postage where their mouth is and actually send it. To that end, I offer thanks and kudos to Anthony Brown of Guildford in the UK who saw fit to shoot a copy of Enos‘ 2010 debut, Chapter 1, across an ocean on my behalf. Even before I went to the post office and picked it and the XII Boar demo he also sent up, it was an effort I appreciated.

I’ve had some past experience with Enos, and pleasant experience at that. The band played the pre-show at London’s Desertfest last year (review here) supporting 1000mods that I was fortunate enough to attend, and while there, I picked up a copy of their 2012 self-released outing, All too Human. The band, who are named for the first chimpanzee launched into orbit, also work with space-program themes on the five tracks of what would essentially be a demo if it didn’t sound so cohesive over the course of its 34 minutes. It’s not hard to pin a narrative arc to the five tracks, “Launch,” “In Space,” “Floating,” “Transform” and “Back to Earth,” so to coincide with the professionally crisp production, they seem to have started out with a firm grip on the concepts driving their creativity. All the better across the songs, really, since “Launch” embarks with a countdown of cymbal wash and explodes with a vibrant pulse into the riffing of Chris P. Rizzanski and Sean Cox, which emerges as the dominant force in a nonetheless well-balanced mix thickened by George “Bungle” Cobbold‘s bass.

Rizzanski also handles vocals in semi-melodic, echoing shouts that sit smoothly alongside a psychedelic impulse, though when “In Space” is at its most chaotic, following a brief acoustic stop when Sparky Rogers kicks back in on the drums and the guitars are going full-force, he seems to shift more into a throatier approach that in another context I’d probably attribute to a Neurosis influence. Even looking back after All too Human, Chapter 1 finds Enos refreshingly individual. Yeah, there are the post-Kyuss riffs and some of Rizzanski‘s delivery reminds of Orange Goblin‘s Ben Ward — an impression I got less from the subsequent outing — but if Enos are making anything clear on these tracks it”s that what they’re in the process of developing is theirs specifically, and as “Floating” lives up to its name with the transition into the more raucous “Transform,” the shortest song on Chapter 1 but a barn-burner at 4:26, the work they’re doing seems well worth undertaking, the two guitars showing some lead interplay in the bridge over the solid rhythmic foundation of the bass and drums.

As it was no doubt intended to do, the nine-minute closer “Back to Earth” provides a neat summary of the 2010 outing — which, if you’re looking for a marker of its era, you might find in the MySpace link included on the back liner of the jewel case — gradually building a psychedelic opening progression to an airy mid-paced push and forward to a grander, louder, larger apex that consciously answers the call of the first four cuts for resolution prior to its long fadeout. Knowing they’d put out All too Human two years later and build on the accomplishments here feels a bit like cheating, but does nothing to diminish enjoyment of Chapter 1 as it is. The band’s latest release is the 2013 live album The East Slope, which is sold-out on CD, but still available digitally through the Enos Bandcamp, and there are still a couple copies of Chapter 1 out there as well. I feel fortunate to have been given one and having sat with the album and gotten to know it better, am all the more able to understand why Brown felt so strongly about it in the first place. Thank you, sir.

Enos, Chapter 1 (2010)

Enos on Thee Facebooks

Enos on Bandcamp

It’s entirely possible that UK four-piece Grey Widow‘s fucked-up barrage of monstrous tones and vicious screams will make you feel right at home. Seems like every time I post about a band who make a point of being abusively heavy, someone has to step up and say, “Well I don’t think they’re that abusively heavy.” If that’s you, then congratulations ahead of time on working on a different standard than the rest of the universe, because the way I see it, Grey Widow are maddeningly extreme in their approach, and whether it’s the slow oozing riffs of “I” — which I’d call the title-track of their self-released full-length debut, I, but for the fact that all the other songs follow suit in Roman numeral fashion — or unbridled snare-count-in black metal pummel of “IV,” they’re bound to be a test of sonic endurance which many listeners won’t pass. No doubt that’s the point. Weed ’em out quick and then kick the living shit out of the rest. Grey Widow seem to have a pretty solid idea of what they’re doing on these eight songs.

But for a few cleaner shouts on “II” or in the punkish second half of “VII,” vocals stick to growls and screams. Those aware that Grey Widow boasts former Dopefight guitarist Owen Carty (also members of The Ergon Carousel, Thread and Parole) won’t have to strain to hear some of that band’s sludgy take, but Grey Widow are a different entity almost entirely, darker in there atmospheres and more metallic in their brutality. There’s plenty of groove in “III,” in the chaos-build of “V,” and in the consuming end section that begins with “VI” and runs through “VIII” — comprising about 25 of the album’s total 56 minutes — but nothing so stoner on display here, nor does I want for it, its tidal tonality captured by Slabdragger guitarist Sam Thredder late in 2013 at The Cro’s Nest Studio. Rather, Grey Widow commence and carry through an assault of their own, easing the listener into their sundry terrors the way one imagines being tossed off a cliff as “easing.” The Roman numeral titles only make the album more obscure and hard to get a bearing on, but this also seems to be on purpose, the band’s focus not at all on meeting halfway or making overtures toward accessibility.

In the fertile UK heavy underground, Grey Widow‘s debut positions them well on the more extreme end of the scene, and while that will invariably alienate some who might attempt to take on I‘s violent cycle, no doubt just as many other heads will turn in their direction precisely because they’re so unyielding. Particularly as I approaches its finish in the last three tracks, coming to a grisly, excruciating culmination on “VIII,” Grey Widow‘s approach feels terrifyingly solid for being the band’s first time out, and they’ve set themselves up to affect any number of atrocities they might choose in the wake of the genre-spanning cruelties unleashed here. You wanna have the heaviest, most extreme taste in the room? Okay. Meet Grey Widow and prepare to be outclassed.

Listen to I now as part of the 24/7 streaming rotation on The Obelisk Radio and grab a sample of Grey Widow‘s disturbing wares via the player below, snagged from their Bandcamp page.

Grey Widow, I (2014)

Grey Widow on Thee Facebooks

Grey Widow on Bandcamp

Tartarus Records, now in its second year with its 20th and 21st cassette releases coming, sends word of a forthcoming tape from Brighton, UK, punk grinders War Wolf. Crushing the Ways of the Old is available now for pre-order in a limited edition of 100 that I can’t imagine will last very long.

War Wolf boasts drummer Ant Cole and bassist Paul Hale, formerly of Dopefight, alongside guitarist/vocalist Oliver Heart of doomers Sea Bastard, and Crushing the Ways of the Old follows their split with Sob Story and their Riding with Demons demo, for which they toured earlier this year.

They’ve got a handle on some thickened hardcore punk, and they’re plenty pissed off as you can hear on “The Upper Hand” below. Dig it:

War Wolf cassette now available for preorder

TAR020 War Wolf – Crushing The Ways Of The Old

Finally the debut full-length album of War Wolf is upon us! This is the third release after their first EP ‘Riding With Demons’ and the split tape with Sob Story. Twelve tracks of pummelling Hardcore/Doom from Brighton, UK. Taking influence from the likes of Dystopia, Nihilist and Brainoil. Lyrically they express their hatred for Religion, Homophobia, Racism and Sexism.

This Cassette is a co-release of Tartarus Records and Dry Cough Records. (Vinyl version is being released by Tadpole Records, Atomsmasher Records and Headless Guru Records.)

Edition of 100 grey tapes
Comes with a War Wolf guitar pick!

http://tartarusrecords.com/album/crushing-the-ways-of-the-old

War Wolf, “The Upper Hand” from Crushing the Ways of the Old (2013)

If the “ex-members of Dopefight” doesn’t get you, the repurposed nod to “Symptom of the Universe” that launches headfirst into grinding punk probably will. Brighton-based trio War Wolf, who will release their Riding with Demons debut 10″ on Headless Guru Records early in 2013, are not shy in their intent, and their intent is bludgeoning. As someone who was genuinely bummed at the demise of Dopefight earlier this fall, to see two out of the three members emerge with new material so quickly is like they hardly missed a beat. I haven’t done a side-by-side comparison with Dopefight‘s last demos, but War Wolf definitely has their own personality.

That personality? More punk, more abrasive vocally, less stoned, more given to fits of grinding like the one noted above, which comes early into Riding with Demons on the track “Stench of Death.” More mosh-ready hardcore. But there remains a propensity every now and again to slow things to an excruciating crawl and bask in sounding as fucked up as possible, which is nothing if not consistent. Riding with Demons is short, but it’s a bold mission statement nonetheless, like what earliest Hatebreed might have been if it ever put on a Vitus record, or like a drunkard’s Napalm Death.

Either way, it’s fucking heavy and the trio find room to work a political bent as well, sampling former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair talking about the start of the Iraq War on “Liberation” before nailing the d-beat on closer “Slain Deity,” which is positively sprawling at 2:18. I’m about the least-likely proponent of hardcore-based anything you’re going to find, but with the sense of extremity underlying most of Riding with Demons, War Wolf prove they’re not going for any kind of tough-guy pose-out, and they’re a little too reckless to tie completely to one genre or another. Let’s hope they stay that way.

War Wolf is on Thee Facebooks here, and here’s the stream of Riding with Demons, courtesy of the War Wolf Bandcamp:

There’s an old saying in the UK I learned on my recent visit that I’d like now to share with you, having since proved its validity. It goes like this:

“Dopefight will fuck you up.”

And it’s true. Dopefight, a trio based in Brighton, will indeed fuck you up. Their songs (as audible on MySpace as anything ever is), are short bursts of weedian anger, carrying stoner riffage into a darker, more aggressive place than it usually goes. Sometimes instrumental, sometimes not, the material is unpredictable and volatile in equal proportion. One imagines it’s a chemical concoction which, if not balanced just right, could blow up the whole damn neighborhood.

They’re a photo-not-available type band, so don’t expect much in the way of biography, but if Dopefight‘s music is left to do the talking, it does so with all the subtlety of scar tissue. I’ve been knee-deep in “Hound” and “Hijos de Fumar” for a couple days now and have no regrets whatsoever. “Saviour” and “Widows Smoke” should likewise serve anyone well who’s looking for a little boot in their ass.

Their four-track demo — featuring “Hijos de Fumar,” “The Thrall,” “Somnia” and “Widow’s Smoke” — is out on Corruption Recordings for anyone who wants to track it down, and Dopefight also has a split out with crusty London doomers Dead Existence that I haven’t heard yet but is bound to be worthy fodder for a scorching of the eardrums. For anyone too lazy to check out Dopefight‘s MySpace page or the aforementioned split, here’s a video of the band doing “Saviour” filmed at this year’s Loud Howls festival in London on April 11. Killer. Special thanks to Chris West for turning me on to these dudes.