Posted in audiObelisk on May 7th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
Massachusetts conceptualist sludge rock weirdos November Fire release their new single “Abigail” tomorrow, May 8, as both a standalone and the first glimpse of the album Doom Blues to come later this Fall and of the narrative universe in which the record takes place. If that sounds like a lot of work for one song to do, it is.
Bookended by guitar that’s bright enough to feel like it’s leading you into (and out of, later on) a blissful overgrown field ’60s sunfolk grass, the substance of what lies between the intro and outro is far more crunch-prone in its fuzz, insistent and odd. Kilter begone. That guitar part comes back in the second half, in a break after the verses and choruses have laid out the crux of the piece in terms of tone and grove, raw fuzz coupled with a varied vocal arrangement that’s about character as much as melody.
It’s a single from a record, and as I haven’t heard the totality of Doom Blues yet and we’re still months off from what I assume will be a Sept. or Oct. release, I can’t tell you how they expand on what “Abigail” is doing, or how the lore aspect pans out from there, but by painting modern ills with metaphor, November Fire find a way to bring another dimension of craft to their material, telling a story in a way they haven’t done before in music.
That element, the narrative, seems like it’s something the band are going to explore over a longer term — i.e., more than just this record, at least if the impulse holds. That they’re tying it to older material after the fact is interesting too, however that might pan out. But if the point is that art is a fluid thing, that it needs to move, to evolve, to change over time to stay vibrant, that’s a lesson well taken. There’s atmosphere here even with a barebones production, as November Fire seem to find a niche of their own in garage doom.
They give some background on the track in the single info below, which came down the PR wire.
As always, I hope you enjoy:
November Fire, “Abigail” track premiere
Recorded and produced by the band in basements and cars around New England, “Abigail” is also the inspiration for the start of their “Fireverse”, and this is her origin story.
“When I come up with a riff, sometimes I give it a code name, just things that pop in my head”, says guitarist Dave. “I was watching a documentary about the Salem Witch Trials and the name Abigail jumped in my head. Sometimes the code names stick, sometimes they don’t. In this case, it inspired Terry to create a whole universe!”
“I started thinking about the lyrics and decided, she’s a sorceress!”, adds vocalist and bassist Terry. “And then the lore ideas just started piling up. Now it’s become the foundation for how our past songs connect, and where future stories are headed.”
Expanding on Abigail’s lyrics, Terry adds “Most of our songs have always had themes of personal and societal struggles, now those stories can be set within a deep lore-rich universe, and can be tied together in a galactic struggle for survival, stories from a single person’s trials, to clashes on a galactic scale.”
On the music, drummer Jim Kelley notes “The song has a lot of energy behind it and the layers of vocals give it a real cinematic feel!”
November Fire’s “Abigail” will be available on digital platforms on May 8, including Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more. The full “Doom Blues” album, featuring six epic new tracks, will be available this Fall.
November Fire – Abigail (single) Out May 8th, 2026 (Digital) Self-released New England, United States
Cover art by Dave Hubai Lyrics by Terry Aubie
November Fire is: Terry Aubie – Bass, Vocals Dave Hubai – Guitars Jim Kelley – Drums
Posted in Whathaveyou on April 23rd, 2026 by JJ Koczan
So, I didn’t know it at the time, but in between slating this news story for the November Fire single “Abigail” being released May 8 ahead of the Massachusetts sludge weirdos’ new album, Doom Blues, in Fall, I got hit up to premiere the single. And, well, you know I’m down, so that’s a thing that’s happening. May 7 stream for the May 8 release. It’s on the calendar and everything.
But it wasn’t my intention when I set out that I’d be plugging a premiere here, it just kind of happened that way, and no, that’s not me complaining. I guess if you’re gonna take anything away from that — because no, I don’t actually think you’re going to set a reminder for the premiere or something — take that I think the song is cool and wanted to have the chance to share and talk about it. I don’t know that I will have heard the upcoming Doom Blues by then, but even as one of six tracks included, “Abigail” offers plenty to dig into.
Here’s what the PR wire had to say about it:
New England psychedelic sludgers November Fire to release single “Abigail” May 8th; new album “Doom Blues” coming Fall 2026
New England dark sludge band November Fire is back with “Abigail”, their first single off their upcoming album “Doom Blues”, coming in the Fall of 2026.
Recorded and produced by the band in basements and cars around New England, “Abigail” is also the inspiration for the start of their “Fireverse”, and this is her origin story.
“When I come up with a riff, sometimes I give it a code name, just things that pop in my head”, says guitarist Dave. “I was watching a documentary about the Salem Witch Trials and the name Abigail jumped in my head. Sometimes the code names stick, sometimes they don’t. In this case, it inspired Terry to create a whole universe!”
“I started thinking about the lyrics and decided, she’s a sorceress!”, adds vocalist and bassist Terry. “And then the lore ideas just started piling up. Now it’s become the foundation for how our past songs connect, and where future stories are headed.”
Expanding on Abigail’s lyrics, Terry adds “Most of our songs have always had themes of personal and societal struggles, now those stories can be set within a deep lore-rich universe, and can be tied together in a galactic struggle for survival, stories from a single person’s trials, to clashes on a galactic scale.”
On the music, drummer Jim Kelley notes “The song has a lot of energy behind it and the layers of vocals give it a real cinematic feel!”
November Fire’s “Abigail” will be available on digital platforms on May 8, including Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more. The full “Doom Blues” album, featuring six epic new tracks, will be available this Fall.
November Fire – Abigail (single) Out May 8th, 2026 (Digital) Self-released New England, United States
Cover art by Dave Hubai Lyrics by Terry Aubie
November Fire is: Terry Aubie – Bass, Vocals Dave Hubai – Guitars Jim Kelley – Drums
Posted in Reviews on October 10th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
This isn’t the end of the Quarterly Review — it wraps up on Monday — but it is the end of the week, and I’m ready for it. The music’s been good though and that’s something of a salvation for times where it seems like the strange and terrifying are in competition with each other to make life more awful. That doesn’t end on the weekend, of course, but at least I’ll have two days to put together the last post of this QR, and when you’ve been writing 10 reviews a day all week, half that counts as respite. Something like it, anyhow.
So before we wrap up the week with whatever on earth I’ll actually pick to close it out (any requests?), here’s one more batch, with my thanks for your valuable time and attention. Hope you find something cool.
Quarterly Review #51-60:
P+A+G+E+S, No More Can Be Done
No More Can Be Done is the debut album from South Africa’s P+A+G+E+S, but the Cape Town trio spent five years in the 2010s together as Morning Pages, so that their first record would hold so much intention behind it shouldn’t necessarily be a shocker. The reason behind the name change? An apparent change in their project, which is to say the band got way, way darker, way, way heavier and nasty in that sharp-toothed-thing-you-can’t-see-but-you-know-is-there-also-there-are-no-lights kind of way. The 15-minute opener/longest track (immediate points) “The Passage” leads the way down into the bleak, extreme sludge that follows, but as the careful linear build of “Shine On” later demonstrates, P+A+G+E+S are more methodical than the noise and outwardly chaotic feel would seem to indicate. Atmosphere plays a central role in what they do, and that’s consistent from their run as Morning Pages, but No More Can Be Done is about what’s lurking and lurching in the bleakness.
Following the intro “Chasm,” Bask launch their fourth album, The Turning, with minor-key mystique and subsequent crush via “In the Heat of the Dying Sun” and “The Traveler,” piling triumph upon triumph in a way that is indicative of the progressive songwriting at work. “The Cloth” is slower, but neither less weighted nor less gorgeous for that, and as “Dig My Heels” works in some of the Southern/Americana pastoralism the Asheville, North Carolina, outfit have always been known for, the melody proves a standout, setting up another life-affirming payoff in the seven-minute “Unwound,” the mellower turn for the build of “Long Lost Light” and the somewhat wistfully twanging undertones of the title-track, which closes with grace and poise rare enough in heavy anything. Clearly a band who have worked to and been successful in transcending their root influences, and an identity that’s been hard-forged over their decade-plus. The Turning sees them actively bring their approach to another level.
A 15-minute two-songer from Lima, Peru’s Matus, as the psychedelic weirdo sometimes-cultists of long standing offer “El Aullido” (8:45) and “Planetario” (6:55) as their first outing since 2021’s Espejismos II (review here). Both processions — and they are that — feel built out from jams, but the recordings have guitarist Manolo Garfias and keyboardist Richard Nossar (both also alternate bass duties) at their core, along with Roberto Soto‘s drumming, Veronik‘s theremin in the deep-freakout section of “Planetario,” Úrsula Inga‘s vocals on “El Aullido,” and so on with other guests (including Camilo Uriarte, who co-produced and mixed, along solo artist Chino Burga on guitar, and Cristóbal Pérez on sax for “Planetario”) adding to the movement. “El Aullido” pairs shoegaze with a roll informed by South American folk, perfect for Inga‘s vocals, while “Planetario” carries more of its melody in the keyboards and surrounding ambience. It’s a welcome check-in from Matus as they celebrate the 20th anniversary of the band.
Where New England bizarropsych rockers November’s Fire‘s 2024 album, Through a Mournful Song, took an approach to its material like some of earliest Monster Magnet‘s underproduced kitchen-sink quirk, the two-song EP 2025 presents two different faces, and that turns out to be because the songs included are over 30 years old. “2025” and “Somnia” — the latter which brings in original guitarist Greg Brosseau for a guest spot that includes clean lead vocals — were allegedly written in the early 1990s, and if you told me the root of the title-track was a teenaged thrash riff, they make that easy enough to believe in the modernized, thickened chug of the song as it stands now. That is to say, they’ve brought it into the sludgy experimentalist context of the work now, but it remains dark. As it inevitably would. “Somnia” is shorter, has some backing chants, and feels meditative even as the guitar holds to its restlessness. Weird band staying weird, screwing around with their old stuff and getting something out of it. Sometimes an experiment works.
Bergen, Norway, four-piece Goatmilker don’t really leave you with much choice other than to call them progressive, though that hardly says boo about the reach of their self-titled debut, which is as much psychedelic punk as it is black metal in its rhythms, but remains a work of heavy rock and roll nonetheless, grooving, catchy on “Devils on My Tail,” aggro-weird on “Time… Tearing Apart,” all-in on tonal overwhelm for “Mountains” and cheekily grandiose in the finale “Storm” only after they’ve seen fit to take on Journey‘s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” which given the goes-where-it-wants succession leading up to it hardly feels out of place at all. While at no risk of overstaying its welcome at eight songs and 34 minutes, Goatmilker does make for a challenging listen at times, but the rewards for actually paying attention to what they’re doing are worth whatever effort is required. That is to say, engage actively for best results.
If Grin sound a little different on Incantation, a two-track 7″ with a digital bonus cut in the flatteningly heavy “Echoes in the Static,” that might be because the duo of drummer/vocalist Jan Oberg and bassist Sabine Oberg didn’t record themselves as usual, but instead tracked live at Wave Akademie in their native Berlin with Anton Urban (Jan Oberg co-produced, mixed and mastered, so still had a hand for sure). So, rather than the studio leftovers one might expect mere months after the band’s last full-length, Acid Gods (review here), the songs may have their origins as such but arise from different circumstances. There’s some more of a wash to “Incantation” and “The Color of Ghosts,” and “Echoes in the Static” is consumed by its titular noise toward its finish, but “The Color of Ghosts” dares some melodic vocals amid all that bombast, and as usual, Grin forge their own take on metal, sludge and intense atmospheric heavy.
A collection of bangers on the second LP through Glory or Death Records from San Diego rockers Mezzoa, TON 618 plays out over the course of a taut 13 songs and 39 minutes, careening desert style in “Hard to Hear,” punking up the groove in “Chump” before basking in Sabbath worship for “Wasted Universe” (think “Symptom” thereof), building crunching tension in “Uncle Cho” only to release it in the second half of the song with a grunge melody, carrying that melody into “Smiles for Everyone,” and then slamming all that momentum into the fuzzed radness of the lead tone and Alice in Chainsy vocal of “How You Been.” That’s not the end, I’m just less efficient than the band and so I’m running out of space. “Blessing” attains inner Nirvana while “Desert Snakes” sounds like it’s ready for a John Garcia guest spot, “Chachi Liberachi” echoes the sharper corners of “Wasted Universe,” “Goin’ Down” has that riff that every New York hardcore song ever (yes, all of them. don’t @ me.) has but goes somewhere completely different with it, and closer “How Are We” highlights the craft that’s let them do it all in the first place. Hey kid, you like rock music? Well get a load of this.
Beginning with its longest track in the nine-minute “Biting In,” Orsak:Oslo‘s Silt and Static finds the Norwegian/Swedish outfit somewhat outgrown from their dronier foundations, harnessing a psychedelia that moves with krautrocking purposes, while retaining the band’s previously-established ambient instrumentalist approach. “Days Adrift” is an even thicker roll, with ebbs and flows that give precedent to the shove that results in “Salt Stains,” which follows, while “Petals” dips momentarily into minimalism. But the story here is the fullness of sound, with pieces like the subdued-but-building “Resonance in Ash” or “Petals” in conversation with Pelican/Russian Circles-style heavy, while “The Onward Stride” and “Time Leak” bring prog more to the forefront and “Bread and Sink” lets the rumble bring it all together. In these ways, Silt and Static rewrites the story of Orsak:Oslo as a band, and their reach has never seemed so broad.
Modder, Destroying Ourselves for a Place in the Sun
The hypnotic drone finish of “Type 27” that ends side A of Modder‘s second album, Destroying Ourselves for a Place in the Sun, is just one way the band incorporate ambience as a key element in their trades between loud and quiet, tense and open, and crushing and spacious. These different sides come together in various combinations across the six cuts on the Belgian instrumentalist five-piece’s 41-minute run, which sets out in oppressive and blasting fashion with “Stone Eternal,” as heavy as whatever doom you want to put it next to and still able to hit with the precision of Gojira. The shorter “Mather” is more angular, glitchy and mirrored by “Chaoism” on the album’s second half, and though they lead off with their longest track (immediate points) in “Stone Eternal,” the heavy djenty chug that comes to fruition on “In the Sun” is unmistakable as anything but the closer, building, receding, tossing in what sure sounds like a human voice chanting and surging in intensity to round out with a keyboard-overlaid bludgeoning. By then you’re pretty much pulp anyway.
Past Warnings of Present Futures tells you a lot about its point of view in the title, but electronic experimentalists Futuredrugs push the meaning deeper still, opening with a barely recognizable take on “What a Wonderful World” with “Skies of Blue” and revamping Tom Waits‘ “Dirt in the Ground” on “…And the Gallows Groaned.” The cinematic, dark synth/programmed backdrop of these and the sampled “No Home” blur the line between originality and reinterpretation/manipulation, and I won’t claim to know whether pieces like “Ice Age Coming” or “When the Last Tree Falls” are similarly sourced, but maybe. In any case, in a time when remembering things like “nothing matters anyway” is a comfort, there is space for the open-minded listener to dwell among these seven tracks, which when taken as a whole succeed in embodying the apocalyptic hellscape of recent years. I don’t know if they’re offering sanctuary so much as a snapshot, but as that, it sure feels like an accurate depiction.
Posted in Whathaveyou on September 1st, 2025 by JJ Koczan
When I lived in New England, the fires in November were from people burning leaves in metal drums in their back yards. It smelled nice and felt like something people where we were in Massachusetts had probably been doing since before their barrels were manufactured. Not the best for the atmosphere maybe, but on the scale of damages thereupon, pretty light. To wit, I drove past in a gas-powered automobile, so not like I’m not also on board with killing the planet, whether I like it or not. I guess there’s also a Samhain semi-reference there, if they want it to be.
It’s a neat story that November Fire‘s “2025” was first written in 1991. Of course, the intervening 34 years have brought new perspective to the piece and its recording, but you can hear the original thrashy chug at the song’s foundation around which the band’s swirling darksludge is built up. Its five-minute run resolves in a Slayery wash of howling noise, and the shorter “Somnia” follows, with an almost psychedelic-folk impression, echoing vocals over a space left purposefully part-empty. Two songs, two vibes, and I’m not sure if they’re actually putting it out as a cassingle, but if they are, I entirely support doing so. Imagine you’re at a gig and somebody hands you this tape. Right on.
The band’s 2024 debut album, Through a Mournful Song, streams below, as “2025” hasn’t yet been posted. The PR wire brought the following:
Psychedelic sludge rockers November Fire announce new single “2025”, out September 19th
After releasing the acclaimed “Through A Mournful Song” full-length in 2024, the heavy psychedelic sludge band November Fire is back with a brand new single, titled “2025”.
“2025, the year we all come to die!” Those words and riffs were written in November Fire’s infancy in the summer of 1991, and back then we couldn’t have imagined that the song would see the light of day over 33 years later.
“2025 was one of the very first songs we wrote in the summer of 1991. Back then, it seemed so far in the future”, says guitarist Dave. “It was influenced by a lot of thrash metal and post-apocalyptic art that was around at the time, especially Sepultura.” Although the song was quickly dropped, the song title became an inside joke within the band.
“I’d like to go to Japan someday.”
“Well, you better hurry, 2025 is only 12 years away!”
With the actual year 2025 fast approaching, the band started playing around with the riff again and realized what a cool song it was. But, it needed some work; the lyrics of the second verse were unintelligible from the old hissy tape they had. Plus, the song was short in its punkish, crossover roots.
“2025 was one of the very first songs we played, so the lyrics were pretty straightforward, basically ‘We’re all going to die!’,” says Terry Aubie, bass player and vocalist. “We had yet to get into writing about societal ills, so this time around, I evolved the lyrics to the greed of mankind driving climate change along with the ‘We’re all going to die!’ parts. We also extended the bridge and added a crazy psychedelic ending.
The second song on the release, “Somnia”, features O.G. November Fire guitarist Greg Brosseau on guitars and lead vocals and keeps with the theme of reviving old material. “Back in 1992, ‘Somnia’ was a jam that me and Greg used to tinker with at 3 in the morning. We had a bunch of these little cool, weaving guitar lines.” Much like ‘2025’, the song was revived with new lyrics and an expanded arrangement. “It’s a song of awakening, and reflection on where we’ve been, what we’ve learned, and where it will lead,” adds Brosseau on the lyrics.
Like their debut album, “2025” was recorded and mixed 100% D.I.Y. by the band in basements and cars. The cover art was self-produced and drawn by the band as well, featuring a retro cassette card, evoking those summer nights in 1991, when anything was possible…
November Fire – 2025 Single out September 19th, 2025 Self-released (Digital) New England, US
Tracklist: 1. 2025 (5:22) 2. Somnia (2:31)
All songs written by November Fire
November Fire is: Terry Aubie: Bass, Vocals, Lyrics on Track 1 Dave Hubai: Guitars Jim Kelley: Drums Greg Brosseau: Guitars, Vocals, Lyrics on Track 2
and as I haven’t heard the totality of Doom Blues yet and we’re still months off from what I assume will be a Sept. or Oct. release, I can’t tell you how they expand on what “Abigail” is doing, or how the lore aspect pans out from there, but by painting modern ills with metaphor, November Fire find a way to bring another dimension of craft to their material, telling a story in a way they haven’t done before in music.
