Happy Monday, and welcome to the Quarterly Review. Or welcome back, anyhow. I said last month that I might try to sneak another one of these weeks in before the end of November, and I’m honestly not prepared to say this’ll be it for the year. There’s a lot out there to keep up with, and this is the most efficient means I have for ‘keeping up,’ as best as I can do that anyhow. I don’t know, man. I’m just trying to get through the day.

This QR is 50 releases — I was slating them right up to yesterday, so some of it’s pretty fresh — and will go from today through Friday. It will be most, if not all, of what is posted this week. I hope you find something you enjoy. Let’s go.

Quarterly Review #1-10:

Beastwars, The Ship // The Sea

At nearly 15 years’ remove from their self-titled debut (review here), New Zealand’s Beastwars have been through ringers in life and music alike, but their sound on their sixth full-length, they’ve never sounded quite so refined. Understand, it’s Beastwars, so I still mean immersive and crushing riff-heavy rock, which the band have honed to a point of bordering on noise rock in pieces like “The Storm” or the later “You Know They’re Burning the Land.” “Rust” and “The Howling” maintain a sense of the epic with Matt Hyde‘s shouts alternately into and out from the abyss, but the band have grown in the six years since their last album of originals, 2019’s IV (review here), and for the blowout in “The Devil” and the weight of chug in “Guardian of Fire,” their impact feels all the more craterous for it.

Beastwars store

Beastwars on Bandcamp

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Lacertilia, Transcend

I won’t take away from the shorter bangers here, whether it’s the wah-on immediacy of “Listen Close” or “Weird Scenes” with its stick-click immediacy, but each half(-ish) of Lacertilia‘s third LP (first for Majestic Mountain), Transcend, ends with a more extended cut, with “Nothing Sacred” (10:34) and “The Sun is the Key” (7:13) rounding out their respective sides, and the band are right to take the time when they take it. Of course, it’s symptomatic of the broader variety brought to the Cardiff five-piece’s craft, and they make Transcend a showcase of their reach, be it into acoustic strum and emergent bluesier scorch on “Over and Out,” the twisting lead guitar progressivism of “Deviate From the Plan,” which meets the grandeur halfway, or the percussion-laced instrumentalist build of the semi-title-track “Transcending.” They end up offering something different with each of the 10 songs, and balance raucousness and expressive purpose as they go in malleable and distinctive style.

Lacertilia on Bandcamp

Majestic Mountain Records store

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Dune Aurora, Ice Age Desert

With their debut album, Turin three-piece Dune Aurora draw together disparate ideas from across the modern riffy pastiche such that garage-style sway and more traditonalist stoner chug combine with at-times-ethereal melody, desert push, psychedelia and, in the case of “Trapdoor,” a poppier take entirely. There’s cohesion in the songwriting to match the aesthetic ambition, though, and Dune Aurora don’t come off as haphazard so much as multifaceted. The reworked prior single “Fire” demonstrates a fuzzy drive waiting in the wings as part of their approach, but the nod in “Burning Waters” is more dug in, and “Sunless Queen” reveals a patience underlying their builds that might come out more on subsequent outings, but the shove of “Crocodile” and that Nirvana riff in “Dune Chameleon” are vital to Ice Age Desert too, and it’s still just a sampling of the elements Dune Aurora use to ensnare the listener. As much as they have going on, that they don’t come across as confused seems to give them all the more potential.

Dune Aurora on Bandcamp

Argonauta Records website

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Khayrava, Ghost Pain

Ghost Pain is the debut two-songer from Almeria, Spain, post-metallic four-piece Khayrava, who present “Red Hot Sun” (7:04) and “Ghost Pain” (10:32) with a marked sense of texture as part of their intention. Both tracks crush, but both also offer a moment of departure from that, and the latter plays off the impact of the former with a keyboardier air and its later divergence into floating melody and crash before, just past the eight-minute mark, they torch the whole thing with a worthy and minutes-long crescendo. “Red Hot Sun” is huge, but its midsection gives over to a break of Tool-y groove met with heavy post-rock flourish from the guitar. That also, of course, comes back around to the pummel, but it’s in the getting there that Khayrava begin to reveal the character of the band, and with the depth of mix they bring to Ghost Pain and the clear intent toward nuance of style, I’ll be on the lookout for where they go from here.

Khayrava on Bandcamp

Khayrava on Instagram

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River Cult, High Anxiety

“Who invented 9-5,” River Cult ask on “Fast Crash.” “They should be shot dead,” is the answer the lyrics give. Fair. The third long-player from the heretofore undervalued New York-based disgruntled fuzzbringers manages to make a mental health crisis swing like desert rock on “Smoke Break,” the sixth of the seven inclusions on the 38-minute offering, seeming to answer the crash-in, warm tone and lyrical fuckall of the opening title-track in the process. They’re not wrong, and if you’re gonna say the world sucks, at least “Feels Good to Scream” has a density of distortion to hold up to the message, vocals biting through like early-metal’s cultist inheritor, cavernous and obscure ahead of centerpiece “Mind the Teeth” start-stop chugging as the lore of ‘The Wolf’ is cast. The trio of guitarist/vocalist Sean Forlenza, bassist Anthony Mendolia and drummer Eli Pizzuto (ex-Naam) find a niche for themselves in downtrodden fuzz, ending with “New Song,” which even having been tracked at Brooklyn’s Studio G sounds fresh off the stage.

River Cult on Bandcamp

River Cult on Instagram

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Beast Eagle, Sorceress

In the soaring vocals of Kate Prokop and the riffs behind them chugging away at the verses of “The Dead Follow” and the moodier surge into the layered hook of “Witch Hunt,” Omaha, Nebraska’s Beast Eagle answer their 2024 self-titled debut EP with five more songs of metal-rooted heavy groove, clear and fluid in “Sharp Tongue” but not without aggression underlying. The bass in “The Dead Follow” is mixed the way I feel bass should always be — forward — and that gives even the mellower stretch as they move into the ending a different sense of presence than it might otherwise have, but in the galloping verse and sprawling chorus of “The Demonstration” and the rush of “Send Me Down,” the latter of which, admittedly, is more of a rocker, speaking to a burgeoning dynamic in their sound, they retain a feeling of charge, and that defines Sorceress‘ 19-minute run as much as the taut chug in “Sharp Tongue.”

Beast Eagle on Bandcamp

Beast Eagle on Instagram

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The Munsens, Degradation in the Hyperreal

Having relocated from Denver to Asbury Park, New Jersey, The Munsens are no less vicious or crushing on their second album, Degradation in the Hyperreal. “Eternal Grasp” starts the procession as much death metal as it is sludge, which is an ethic that “Supreme Death” will bring to gorgeously extreme fruition a short time later, while pieces like the melancholic, minimalist instrumental “Vesper” and the blistering megasludger “Sacred Ivory” and the outro “I Avow” offset the onslaught of “The Knife,” “Scaling Ceausescu’s Balcony” and the lumber-into-double-kick of “Drauga,” vocals offering precious little comfort for the downward journey of the record’s 46 minutes. That “The Knife” finishes, specifically, ahead of “I Avow,” stands as testament to just how far The Munsens have pushed into extremity over the course of their decade-plus, but they are not entirely unforgiving either, despite having grown only more gnashing over the course of their decade-plus tenure.

The Munsens on Bandcamp

The Munsens on Instagram

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Rattlesnake Venom Trip, Eclipse the Sun

They’re not thrash, but thrash is part of what Dayton, Ohio’s Rattlesnake Venom Trip get up to on their new four-song EP, Eclipse the Sun, with a sharp edge to the riffing on lead cut “Hollowed Eyes” that tells the tale. The second half of that track subsides some in terms of forward thrust, setting up the still-chugging-but-slower “Ablaze Set I,” with a more resonant hook, and “Brushstrokes/Eclipse the Sun,” which in its first half is as far as Rattlesnake Venom Trip go in divergence from the burl and push, but in its second answers for the metal and the nod both that it seems to have inherited from the opener. Punchy bass’ed reinforcement takes place over the five minutes of “Cold Winds Blow,” and the four-piece maintain a clear-eyed sense of identity through whatever turns the material makes, somewhere between heavy rock, Southern metal, thrash and stoner idolatry. You could sit and parse it, but the band make it pretty easy to trust where they’re headed as they go.

Rattlesnake Venom Trip website

Rattlesnake Venom Trip on Bandcamp

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Pesta, The Craft of Pain

For their third long-player, The Craft of Pain (on Glory or Death), Brazil’s Pesta offer a take on doom born of traditional metal. They’re not aggro, or outwardly depressive, but “Masters of the Craft of Pain” and the swinging “Marked by Hate” find a route from Sabbath and the NWOBHM to doom just the same. A guest appearance from Scott “Wino” Weinrich (The Obsessed, etc.) on vocals for “Mirror Maze” is a departure, but not so radical as to be out of place, especially backed by the depth of groove in the subsequent rocker “In the Drive’s End.” On side B, the pair of “The Inquisitor Pt. I” and the initially-acoustic-based “The Inquisitor Pt. II” provide a more theatrical reach, but the acoustic-and-key-strings “Canto XXI” brings in Rodrigo Garcia (Diffuse Reality) for another curve before “Shadows of a Desire” returns to ground to finish out not so far from where “Marked by Hate” left off. At no point do Pesta feel like they’ve diverged from where they want to be.

Pesta on Bandcamp

Glory or Death Records website

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Atom Lux, Voidgaze Dopamine Salad

The lyrics posted with the cumbersomely-titled “J.I.B.B.E.R.I.S.H. (John Inflates Balloons Because Every Remote Island Starts Hallucinating)” are wrong, and the level of psychedelic tricksterism and playfulness across Atom Lux‘s debut, Voidgaze Dopamine Salad is such that I’m not sure if that’s on purpose or not. Rest assured, different references to “I Am the Walrus” are being made. The self-recording solo-project of Roman multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Lucio Filizola is a garden of weirdo delights, with the keyboardy bounce of “Death by Small Talk” giving away none of the subversively easy garage swing of “Spaghettification Apocalypse” and “Stoned Monkey Heritage” bashing away like it’s an alternate-reality 1964, which by the way I’m no longer convinced it isn’t. It’s from gleeful oddities like “Dance Plague Delirium” that progressive rock first emerged in the comedown era. The same trajectory may or may not be in store for Atom Lux long term, but right now any kind of ‘comedown’ still feels a good ways off.

Atom Lux on Bandcamp

Atom Lux on Instagram

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The Obelisk Questionnaire is a series of open questions intended to give the answerer an opportunity to explore these ideas and stories from their life as deeply as they choose. Answers can be short or long, and that reveals something in itself, but the most important factor is honesty.

Based on the Proust Questionnaire, the goal over time is to show a diverse range of perspectives as those who take part bring their own points of view to answering the same questions. To see all The Obelisk Questionnaire posts, click here.

Thank you for reading and thanks to all who participate.

The Obelisk Questionnaire: Marcos Resende of Pesta

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How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?

I see myself as a person who, in addition to being a musician, likes to be involved in the whole chain that involves my music, this has a bit of Underground culture that makes you have to create other skills to bring your music to your audience. This involves playing guitar, producing shows, making music videos, anyway… I realized that I just wanted to insert myself more and more in all issues related to my music.

Describe your first musical memory.

I don’t know exactly what was the first thing I heard that caught my attention, I grew up in a house with a lot of music, since my parents listened to“Samba, which is a very popular Brazilian music (now a little less) like “Cartola” and “Jorge Ben Jor” and my sister listening to a lot of ’80s pop music… and all that music always caught my attention somehow… Rock and Metal came after that… I discovered Queen’s A Night at the Opera at the beginning of my teenage years, and at that time I didn’t know much about it! But I was sure at that time that I needed an electric guitar, there was no other way! and at the same year I got one by trading an old acoustic guitar I had and a few more things, at that time I was consuming everything I could find, from punk to death metal.

Describe your best musical memory to date.

Among many memorable moments it’s hard to choose one as the apex, but I think when I bought my first “real” guitar, it was something so great to me that I couldn’t believe I had done it! Well, this has a context, as you may have already noticed I’m from Brazil, and things here are not easy, but I don’t want this to sound like a complaint because I have a good structure, it’s just a fact, going back to context… when I finally thought I could buy a real guitar the prices were pretty absurd in here, and the Chinese forgeries took over, and that made everything more complicated to get any guitar of those consolidated brands like Gibson, Fender, Gretsch, Epiphone…

So an opportunity came to do a job in Europe, and I decided to extend this trip a little and pass a few weeks in London, at the end of that trip I found a used Gibson Les Paul in a window at Macari’s Guitar Shop at Camden Town, all my money ran out at that moment but I was already at the end of the trip and couldn’t be happier to have no money. I came back with this guitar on my back and all Pesta’s records were recorded with this guitar, this memory remains incredible in my memory.

When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?

I think we are all being tested all the time, with conflicts between professional and artistic life… Family conflicts, political conflicts… But I think in my teenage years, I saw my family becoming a very religious family, and at the time I didn’t exactly understand why, but in that time that seemed to be my way too, I wanted to understand what was happening with them, after all they are my family, but a while went by and I saw that it was not for me, and this rupture/separation was a little disturbed, but very important to move forward, today I see that my belief is outside of any religious or institutional role, I do not believe in that and intend to continue that way.

Where do you feel artistic progression leads?

For most artists one thing is certain, it will not lead to success and media fame as we grew up seeing, this is a fact. But for all people who are firmly in the art somehow, they have a possible aspiration to get recognition, most of the time it will come from a niche or a community, some will break this barrier and reach people outside this niche, and to me what matters most in artistic growth is not the size that the artist will be at some point from now, but if his art is growing and being recognized, and this recognition is not the cover of Rolling Stone, it can come from any corner, from any site, blog, from friends or fans, even if they are a few, but this crescent role gives you a consistency to continue and target new things, audiences, etc.

How do you define success?

Well, while my art is growing I understand this as a success, while people are sending us messages saying that our music is marking his moment in life, so I understand it as success, we have to keep putting our goals, some of them is more reachable, others more challenging… But for every goal, where do we succeed, like get our album released in a vinyl version, doing a big show or a tour, I understand it as success.

What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?

I wish I didn’t need to see the stupid president we have in Brazil today… Well, the list of “disgusts” is huge, but this is the top of the moment.

Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.

Right now, I want to keep recording albums with Pesta, it’s been a good journey with these guys and we are finally releasing the version we made of Nightmare song by Sarcófago’s on streaming platforms, after some agreements with Cogumelo Records which is the rights holder, we will release a music video of this song as well and we are excited! But I still want to explore some psychedelic things with Brazilian rhythms because it’s something that is culturally important to me, and it’s part of my experience here somehow… And finish a personal project called Necropolis Ascends, which is a project of mine with a great friend from Greece, we’re in the final stages of recording our first EP and we’re pretty excited about the Trip Gothic Doom madness we’re creating.

What do you believe is the most essential function of art?

For me to take people away from the tyranny of everyday life, from this reality that is at the same time chaotic and trapped, plastered with rules and duties… The Freedom that art brings is liberating for those who are aware of it, and this liberation is a fuel incredible powerful for a less ordinary life.

Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?

Absolutely everything I think as aspiration that I want to do involves music somehow, but maybe the “less” musical of my projects is slowing down from Technology (which is my main occupation) and opening a Pub, this project has already been about to happen a few times but I’ve always bumped into time, but at some point I want to put this dream into practice, it won’t be exactly a place to play just what I like, because in this case I would go broke (lol), but a small place that allow pocket shows and be intimate enough to go with your friends, get drunk and listen to good music! I know we already have this type of option around here, but there’s still room for more!

https://pestadoom.bandcamp.com
https://youtube.com/pestadoom
https://facebook.com/pestadoom
https://instagram.com/pestadoom
http://www.pestadoom.com/
https://www.facebook.com/abraxasevents/
https://www.instagram.com/abraxasfm/
blackfarmrecords.bigcartel.com
instagram.com/blackfarmrecords
facebook.com/blackfarmrec

Pesta, Faith Bathed in Blood (2019)

Whatever else Isolation Dawn‘s debut single has — and it has plenty — it has a killer “Ough!” Listen and watch for it about 4:54 into the seven total minutes of the Brazilian collective’s eponymous first track. “Isolation Dawn,” which, yes, is a pandemic project, brings together members of Pesta, Dirty Grave, Riffcoven, Erasy, Weedevil, and others, and the idea is of course collaborative expression made possible through technology at a time when getting together in a rehearsal room and hammering out riffs wasn’t possible.

If you’re unfamiliar with Brazilian heavy, I don’t think you’d be wrong to consider Isolation Dawn a primer for some — definitely not all — of what’s going on in the country and the kind of groove being wrought. The vocals of Thiago Satyr bring a classic doom mindset (as well as the aforementioned “ough!”) as the guitars of André Bode and Leandro Carvalho hold down the central riff. There’s organ from Luan that gives a sense of grandiosity to the nod brought to bear by drummer Flavio Cavichioli and bassist Anderson Vaca as Melissa Rainbow shows up later on backing vocals. New stuff from any of these players would be noteworthy. The fact that they’ve all come together is all the more so.

What happens now with Isolation Dawn? I don’t know where all these people live — they’re not exactly going for minimalism with six people and maybe more involved — but is an album possible? If it’s been two years since they started working on this, is it something they can feasibly pursue, or maybe they already have? There could be a whole full-length in the can and it’s like a big secret that no one knows and then blamo, one day there it is. It’s a known unknown. And one for another time, perhaps, though I’ll note that in calling this the “debut” single, the PR wire below does seem to hint toward the possibility of more. Maybe they’ll be able to get in a room after all.

Been a minute since we had a socially-distant video. They will be a hallmark of this era in music.

Enjoy:

Isolation Dawn, “Isolation Dawn” video premiere

The Isolation Dawn project appears in mid-2020 amid the social isolation resulting from the pandemic, with both positive and negative developments in several aspects. Hyper coexistence, apprehension about the future and greater access to instruments, all converged in an attempt to put into practice a somewhat bold idea: a “collab Doom” formed by members of different bands of the genre.

Thus, guitarist Leandro Carvalho (ERASY) initially calls bassist Anderson Vaca (PESTA) and drummer Flávio Cavichioli (WEEDEVIL), consulting them about the idea. Without hesitation, approval happens. So, Leandro calls guitarist André Bode (RIFFCOVEN) and vocalist Thiago Satyr (WITCHING ALTAR), who also approve the idea and join the project. There is a suggestion by Flávio for the addition of one more voice in the band, and so Melissa Rainbow is added and closes the lineup. Additionally, Satyr calls Luan to contribute with Keyboards, and Pedro Vitus is invited to co-produce and mix and master the debut material, which resulted in a solid audiovisual for the track “Isolation Dawn,” edited by Berns, made by masterfully with clippings and videos of different formats.

Musically, the group’s debut track is a powerful and pulsating sound panel dedicated to Doom Metal, with explicit references, and more implicit ones, from several traditional names of the genre, in addition to presenting some of the musical DNA of each member and of their respective other projects.  “Isolation Dawn” is scheduled for release in February, on streaming and YouTube.

Isolation Dawn :
Thiago Satyr – Vocals
Melissa Rainbow – Vocals
Anderson Vaca – Bass
André Bode – Guitars
Leandro Carvalho – Guitars
Flavio Cavichioli – Drums

Bruxa Verde Produções

Available on all digital platforms March 10th via Abraxas.

Isolation Dawn on Instagram

Abraxas on Facebook

Abraxas on Instagram

Bruxa Verde Produções on Facebook

Bruxa Verde Produções on Instagram

Bruxa Verde Produções Linktree