Quarterly Review: Duel, Mastiff, Wolftooth, Illudium, Ascia, Stone From the Sky, The Brackish, Wolfnaut, Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships, Closet Disco Queen
Posted in Reviews on December 15th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Okay. Day Three. The halfway point. Or the quarter point if you count the week to come in January. Which I don’t. Feeling dug in. Ready to roll. Today’s a busy day, stylistically speaking, and there’s two wolf bands in there too. Better get moving.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
Duel, In Carne Persona
Duel seem to be on a mission with In Carne Persona to remind all in their path that rock and roll is supposed to be dangerous. Their fourth album and the follow-up to 2019’s Valley of Shadows (review here) finds the Austin four-piece in a between place on songs like “Children of the Fire” (premiered here) and “Anchor” and the especially charged gang-shout-chorus “Bite Back,” proffering memorable songwriting while edging from boogie to shove, rock to metal. They’ve never sounded more dynamic than on the organ-inclusive “Behind the Sound” or the tense finale “Blood on the Claw,” and cuts like “The Veil” and the particularly gritty “Dead Eyes” affirm their in-a-dark-place songwriting prowess. They’re not uneven in their approach. They’re sure of it. They turn songs on either side of four minutes long into anthems, and they seem to be completely at home in their sound. They’re not as ‘big’ as they should be by rights of their work, but Duel serve their reminder well and pack nine killer tunes into 38 minutes. Only a fool would ask more.
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Mastiff, Leave Me the Ashes of the Earth
Fading in like the advent of something wicked this way coming until “The Hiss” explodes into “Fail,” Hull exports Mastiff tap chug from early ’00s metalcore en route to various forms of extreme bludgeonry, whether that’s blackened push in “Beige Sabbath,” grind in “Midnight Creeper” or the slow skin-crawling riffage that follows in “Futile.” This blender runs at multiple speeds, slices, dices, pummels and purees, reminding here of Blood Has Been Shed, there of Napalm Death, on “Endless” of Aborted. Any way you go, it is a bleak cacophony to be discovered, purposefully tectonic in its weight and intense in its conveyed violence. Barely topping half an hour, Leave Me the Ashes of the Earth knows precisely the fury it manifests, and the scariest thing about it is the thought that the band are in even the vaguest amount of control of all this chaos, as even the devolution-to-blowout in “Lung Rust” seems to have intent behind it. They should play this in art galleries.
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Wolftooth, Blood & Iron
Melody and a flair for the grandeur of classic NWOBHM-style metal take prominence on Wolftooth‘s Blood & Iron, the follow-up to the Indiana-based four-piece’s 2020 outing, Valhalla (review here), third album overall and first for Napalm Records. As regards trajectory, one is reminded of the manner in which Sweden’s Grand Magus donned the mantle of epic metal, but Wolftooth aren’t completely to that point yet. Riffs still very much lead the battle’s charge — pointedly so, as regards the album’s far-back-drums mix — with consuming solos as complement to the vocals’ tales of fantastical journeys, kings, swords and so on. The test of this kind of metal should ALWAYS be whether or not you’d scribble their logo on the front of your notebook after listening to the record on your shitty Walkman headphones, and yes, Wolftooth earn that honor among their other spoils of the fight, and Blood & Iron winds up the kind of tape you’d feel cool telling your friends about in that certain bygone age.
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Illudium, Ash of the Womb
Another argument to chase down every release Prophecy Productions puts out arrives in the form of Illudium‘s second long-player, Ash of the Womb, the NorCal project spearheaded by Shantel Amundson vibing with emotional and tonal heft in kind on an immersive mourning-for-everything six tracks/47 minutes. Gorgeous, sad and heavy in kind “Aster” opens and unfolds into the fingers-sliding-on-strings of “Sempervirens,” which gallops furiously for a moment in its second half like a fever dream before passing to wistfully strummed minimalism, which is a pattern that holds in “Soma Sema” and “Atopa” as well, as Amundson brings volatility without notice, songs exploding and receding, madness and fury and then gone again in a sort of purposeful bipolar onslaught. Following “Madrigal,” the closing “Where Death and Dreams Do Manifest” finds an evenness of tempo and approach, not quite veering into heavygaze, but gloriously pulling together the various strands laid out across the songs prior, providing a fitting end to the story told in sound and lyric.
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Ascia, Volume 1
Ascia takes its name from the Italian word for ‘axe,’ and as a solo-project from Fabrizio Monni, also of Black Capricorn, the 20-minute demo Volume 1 lives up to its implied threat. Launched with the instrumental riff-workout “At the Gates of Ishtar,” the five-tracker introduces Monni‘s vocals on the subsequent “Blood Axes,” and is all the more reminiscent of earliest High on Fire for the approach he takes, drums marauding behind a galloping verse that nonetheless finds an overarching groove. “Duhl Qarnayn” follows in straight-ahead fashion while “The Great Iskandar” settles some in tempo and opens up melodically in its second half, the vocals taking on an almost chanting quality, before switching back to finish with more thud and plunder ahead of the finale “Up the Irons,” which brings two-plus minutes of cathartic speed and demo-blast that I’d like to think was the first song Monni put together for the band if only for its metal-loving-metal charm. I don’t know that it is or isn’t, but it’s a welcome cap to this deceptively varied initial public offering.
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Stone From the Sky, Songs From the Deepwater
France’s Stone From the Sky, as a band named after a Neurosis singularized song might, dig into heavy post-rock aplenty on Songs From the Deepwater, their fourth full-length, and they meet floating tones with stretches of more densely-hefted groove like the Pelican-style nod of “Karoshi.” Still, however satisfying the ensuing back and forth is, some of their most effective moments are in the ambient stretches, as on “The Annapurna Healer” or even the patient opening of “Godspeed” at the record’s outset, which draws the listener in across its first three minutes before unveiling its full breadth. Likewise, “City/Angst” surges and recedes and surges again, but it’s in the contemplative moments that it’s most immersive, though I won’t take away from the appeal of the impact either. The winding “49.3 Nuances de Fuzz” precedes the subdued/vocalized closer “Talweg,” which departs in form while staying consistent in atmosphere, which proves paramount to the proceedings as a whole.
Stone From the Sky on Facebook
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The Brackish, Atlas Day
Whenever you’re ready to get weird, The Brackish will meet you there. The Bristol troupe’s fourth album, Atlas Day brings six songs and 38 minutes of ungrandiose artsy exploration, veering into dreamtone noodling on “Dust Off Reaper” only after hinting in that direction on the jazzier “Pretty Ugly” previous. Sure, there’s moments of crunch, like the garage-grunge in the second half of “Pam’s Chalice” or the almost-motorik thrust that tops opener “Deliverance,” but The Brackish aren’t looking to pay homage to genre or post-thisorthat so much as to seemingly shut down their brains and see where the songs lead them. That’s a quiet but not still pastoralia on “Leftbank” and a more skronky shuffle-jazz on “Mr. Universe,” and one suspects that, if there were more songs on Atlas Day, they too would go just about wherever the hell they wanted. Not without its self-indulgent aspects by its very nature, Atlas Day succeeds by inviting the audience along its intentionally meandering course. Something something “not all who wander” something something.
Halfmeltedbrain Records on Bandcamp
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Wolfnaut, III
Formerly known as Wolfgang, Elverum, Norway’s Wolfnaut offer sharp, crisp modern heavy rock with the Karl Daniel Lidén mixed/mastered III, the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Kjetil Sæter (also percussion), bassist Tor Erik Hagen and drummer Ronny “Ronster” Kristiansen readily tapping Motörhead swagger in “Raise the Dead” after establishing a clarity of structure and a penchant for chorus largesse that reminds of Norse countrymen Spidergawd on “Swing Ride” and the Scorpions-tinged “Feed Your Dragon.” They are weighted in tone but emerge clean through the slower “Race to the Bottom” and “Gesell Kid.” I’m going to presume that “Taste My Brew” is about making one’s own beer — please don’t tell me otherwise — and with the push of “Catching Thunder” ahead of the eight-minute, willfully spacious “Wolfnaut” at the end, the trio’s heavy rock traditionalism is given an edge of reach to coincide with its vitality and electrified delivery of the songs.
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Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships, Rosalee EP
Having released their debut full-length, TTBS, earlier in 2021 as their first outing, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Lincoln, Nebraska’s Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships still seem to be getting their feet under them in terms of sound and who they are as a band, but as the 34-minute-long Rosalee EP demonstrates, in terms of tone and general approach, they know what they’re looking for. After the thud and “whoa-oh” of “Core Fragment,” “Destroyer Heart” pushes a little more into aggression in its back end riffs and drumming, and the chugging, lurching motion of “URTH Anachoic” brings a fullness of distortion that the two prior songs seemed just to be hinting toward. It’s worth noting that the 16-minute title-track, which closes, is instrumental, and it may be that the band are more comfortable operating in that manner for the time being, but if there’s a confidence issue, no doubt it can be worked out on stage (circumstances permitting) or in further studio work. That is, it’s not actually a problem, even at this formative stage of the project. Quick turnaround for this second collection, but definitely welcome.
Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships on Facebook
Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships on Bandcamp
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Closet Disco Queen, Stadium Rock for Punk Bums
Their persistently irreverent spirit notwithstanding, Closet Disco Queen — at some point in the process, ever — take their work pretty seriously. That is to say, they’re not nearly as much of a goof as they’d have you believe, and on the quickie 16-minute Stadium Rock for Punk Bums, the Swiss two-piece-plus, their open creative sensibility results in surprisingly filled-out tracks that aren’t quite stadium, aren’t quite punk, definitely rock, and would probably alienate the bum crowd not willing to put the effort into actively engaging them. So the title (which, I know, is a reference to another release; calm down) may or may not fit, but from “Michel-Jacques Sonne” onward, bring switched-on heavy that’s not so much experimentalist in the fuck-around-and-find-out definition as ready to follow its own ideas to fruition, whether that’s the rush of “Pascal à la Plage” or the barely-there drone of “Lalalalala Reverb,” which immediately follows and gives way to the building-despite-itself finisher “Le Soucieux Toucan.” If these guys aren’t careful they’re gonna have to start taking themselves seriously. …Nah.
Closet Disco Queen on Facebook
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