Posted in Reviews on January 5th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
For the second orbit in a row, Rosario, Argentina, instrumentalists Black Sky Giant greet the New Year with the New Record. And so we climb aboard The Red Chariot. The turnover from 2022 into 2023, a year ago, brought the seemingly-anonymous, DIY-recording-and-releasing outfit’s fifth full-length, Primigenian (review here), which followed on from Jan. 2022’s End of Days Pilgrimage, so they’re well familiar with putting out new music in the industry’s traditional winter doldrums. To wit, they issued their fourth album, Falling Mothership in June 2021, but before that, there was Planet Terror in January of that same year, and I don’t know when in 2020 their debut, Orbiter, first came out, but the reissue was late Dec. 2021 (dates sourced from Bandcamp), which is close enough. Whatever their reason might be — or sometimes a band just falls into these patterns and there isn’t a reason — right now-ish seems to be their spot, and as habit breeds expectation it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that in Jan. 2025, they might have another 40-ish minutes of material behind which march into that unknown and distant-sounding future.
In the meantime, The Red Chariot invites the audience not only to appreciate how prolific Black Sky Giant have been over the last four-plus years — six LPs is nothing to sneeze at in that span, even if you’re not waiting on a lyricist and making it all yourself, etc. — but to process how their style has evolved in that relatively short period of time. Heavy psychedelia, post-rock, krautrock and prog have been factors since the outset, as a revisit to Orbiter will demonstrate, but The Red Chariot takes off with its title-track and harnesses a linear-coursing progressive fluidity that, with its effects wobbles, steady, maybe-programmed drums and root guitar figure coherent beneath the swirl, is a preface for the post-punk melancholic bounce of “A Timeless Oracle” and a hint at some of the spaces songs like “Submerged Towers” or the Euro-style meditative heavy riffing on “Electrical Civilization” will occupy.
Across eight songs and 38 minutes, Black Sky Giant hold firmly to that rhythmic flow that takes hold in “The Red Chariot,” and as the subsequent “Path” broadens the reach in its atmospheric, contemplative stretch, it’s lead guitar taking the place of vocals, but doing so with uncommon soulfulness and melodic expression. It’s not quite trying to sing lines, as some lead guitars do in no-singer units, but in the slow, echo-laced and foggy unfolding of “Path,” the guitar brings character to complement and contrast the heft of the bass that thickens up around three minutes in, and The Red Chariot isn’t through the first half of its first side before the band have managed to establish their presence and (part of their) intention, and it isn’t through its first three minutes before the willing listener is immersed.
As noted, “A Timeless Oracle” builds off the title-track and picks up from the sleepy, bluesy guitar layers that cap “Path” with an immediately decisive beat and shimmering guitar, quickly nestling into a verse that’s more The Cure than Kyuss (not complaining) and that builds to a quick head in its sub-three-minute run, but feels more like an idea being tried out than a fully-realized, fleshed-out piece like the side A finale “Illuminated by Reflection,” which follows, or the arranged-shortest-to-longest-but-it’s-all-dug-in progressive heavy psych that typifies The Red Chariot‘s back half.
Ambience is, has become, crucial, and while the underground sphere in which Black Sky Giant are operating might be under the grand and e’er-expanding umbrella of ‘Heavy,’ the wisps of Colour Haze-y guitar put to dramatic use across the slight Earth tinge of “Illuminated by Reflection” after “A Timeless Oracle” emphasizes the band’s ability to work in multiple niches at the same time. Thus the personality of The Red Chariot is built from its component songs, and it feels is all the more complete with “Submerged Towers” answering back to the delay-guitar and post-whathaveyou vibes of the opener and “A Timeless Oracle.” I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that “Submerged Towers” and “The Red Chariot” itself aren’t part of the same progression. If they’re not, or if one isn’t working off the other, they’re pretty close.
If the pattern would hold, with Black Sky Giant alternating back and forth between prog-psych and heavy-post-punk methodologies, the denser-seeming fuzz of “Electrical Civilization” would hold and flesh out as it does — it is marked by a midsection that dares to be pretty in a way rock can’t always manage before transitioning back to the central riff in a way that recalls earlier Tool — and “Augury” would answer in contradiction. That is not how they roll it out, however, as the penultimate “Augury” arrives with immediate prog-heavy clarity. The turn they’ve made instead is into the atmospheric heavy rock of “Path” and “Illuminated by Reflection,” and the personality of the guitar as it twists into verse lines at about a minute in is no less resonant than in the earlier tracks. Lead-style riffing carries through the midsection and into a broader finish, almost wistful or Southern in its layering, but as much as to auger is to foretell — and one might argue that each Black Sky Giant outing has been an auger for the progression of the next; I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the post-punk here is more manifest next time, but I’ll stop short of predicting — it comes across like a good time being remembered, perhaps as it happened.
Rounding out is the six-minute “In the Sight of the Mountain God,” which feels duly reverential, and if you’d look for sacred mountains, Argentina’s got plenty in its western Andes, among them Aconcagua, which is tallest in the Americas. Whatever burg hosts this particular deity, one assumes that like all gods, it prefers gradual tempos, tonal richness, and a sonic conversation with the ethereal offered through terrestrial means, and sure enough that’s the offering being made by Black Sky Giant, though a shift at three minutes in results in a minor redirection as a setup for the shred-into-the-fade ending. And the noisy finish is somewhat surprising given how controlled and thoughtful the band (who I assume is more than one person, but of course I could be wrong) have been up to that moment, but I suspect that the giving over to that more raucous impulse is the point, and so “In the Sight of the Mountain God” is a fit conceptually as well as in tone and mood.
A lot can and will happen before Jan. 2025 comes around, and it may be that one won’t hear from Black Sky Giant until then if they do another record, if that’s their plan at all. As it stands, the instrumental approach, the narrative slivers posted with the records, and the thematic stylization of the artwork draw The Red Chariot into the context of what Black Sky Giant do as representing their most forward-thinking outing to-date, but it’s clear that the pursuit-of-sound chase that’s brought them here will continue unabated as long as the band itself does.
Posted in Reviews on April 10th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Welcome to the Spring 2023 Quarterly Review. Between today and next Tuesday, a total of 70 records will be covered with a follow-up week slated for May bringing that to 120. Rest assured, it’ll be plenty. If you’re reading this, I feel safe assuming you know the deal: 10 albums per day from front to back, ranging in style, geography, type of release — album, EP, singles even, etc. — and the level of hype and profile surrounding. The Quarterly Review is always a massive undertaking, but I’ve never done one and regretted it later, and looking at what’s coming up across the next seven days, there are more than few records featured that are already on my ongoing best of 2023 list. So please, keep an eye and ear out, and hopefully you’ll also find something new that speaks to you.
We begin.
Quarterly Review #1-10:
ISAAK, Hey
Last heard from as regards LPs with 2015’s Serominize (review here) and marking 10 years since their 2013 debut under the name, The Longer the Beard the Harder the Sound (review here), Genoa-based heavy rockers ISAAK return with the simply-titled Hey and encapsulate the heads-up fuzz energy that’s always been at the core of their approach. Vocalist Giacomo H. Boeddu has hints of Danzig in “OBG” and the swing-shoving “Sleepwalker” later on, but whether it’s the centerpiece Wipers cover “Over the Edge,” the rolling “Dormhouse” that follows, or the melodic highlight “Rotten” that precedes, the entire band feel cohesive and mature in their purposeful songwriting. They’re labelmates and sonic kin to Texas’ Duel, but less bombastic, with a knife infomercial opening their awaited third record before the title-track and “OBG” begin to build the momentum that carries the band through their varied material, spacious on “Except,” consuming in the apex of “Fake it Till You Make It,” but engaging throughout in groove and structure.
With doom in their collective heart and riffs to spare, UK doom metal traditionalists Iron Void roll out a weighted 44 minutes across the nine songs of their fourth full-length, IV, seeming to rail against pandemic-era restrictions in “Grave Dance” and tech culture in “Slave One” while “Pandora’s Box” rocks out Sabbathian amid the sundry anxieties of our age. Iron Void have been around for 25 years as of 2023 — like a British Orodruin or trad-doom more generally, they’ve been undervalued for most of that time — and their songwriting earns the judgmental crankiness of its perspective, but each half of the LP gets a rousing closer in “Blind Dead” and “Last Rites,” and Iron Void doom out like there’s no tomorrow even on the airier “She” because, as we’ve seen in the varying apocalypses since the band put out 2018’s Excalibur (review here), there might not be. So much the better to dive into the hook of “Living on the Earth” or the grittier “Lords of the Wasteland,” the metal-of-yore sensibility tapping into early NWOBHM without going full-Maiden. Kind of a mixed bag, it might take a few listens to sink in, but IV shows the enduring strengths of Iron Void and is clearly meant more for those repeat visits than some kind of cloying immediacy. An album to be lived with and doomed with.
An offering of thickened, massive lava-flow sludge, plodding doom and atmospheric severity, Dread Witch‘s self-released (not for long, one suspects) first long-player, Tower of the Severed Serpent, announces a significant arrival on the part of the onslaught-prone Danish outfit, who recorded as a trio, play live as a five-piece and likely need at least that many people to convey the density of a song like the opener/longest track (immediate points) “The Tower,” the eight minutes of which are emblematic of the force of execution with which the band delivers the rest of what follows, runtimes situated longest to shortest across the near-caustic chug of “Serpent God,” the Celtic Frost-y declarations and mega-riff ethos of “Leech,” the play between key-led minimalism and all-out stomp on “Wormtongue” and the earlier-feeling noise intensity of “Into the Crypt” before the more purely ambient but still heavy instrumental “Severed” wraps, conveying weight of emotion to complement the tonal tectonics prior. Bordering on the extreme and clearly enjoying the crush that doing so affords them, Dread Witch make more of a crater than an impression and would be outright barbaric were their sound not so methodical in immersing the audience. Pro sound, loaded with potential, heavy as shit; these are the makings of a welcome debut.
Next-generation heavy fuzz purveyed with particular glee, Tidal Wave seem to explore the very reaches they conjure through verses and choruses on their eight-song Ripple Music label debut (second LP overall behind 2019’s Blueberry Muffin), The Lord Knows, and they make the going fun throughout the 41-minute outing, finding the shuffle in the shove of “Robbero Bobbero” while honing classic desert idolatry on “Lizard King” and “End of the Line” at the outset. What a relief it is to know that heavy rock and roll won’t die with the aging-out of so many of its Gen-X and Millennial purveyors, and as Tidal Wave step forward with the low-end semi-metal roll of “Pentagram” and the grander spaces of “By Order of the King” before “Purple Bird” returns to the sands and “Thorsakir” meets that on an open field of battle, it seems the last word has not been said on Tidal Wave in terms of aesthetic. They’ve got time to continue to push deeper into their craft — and maybe that will or won’t result in their settling on one path or another — but the range of moods on The Lord Knows suits them well, and without pretense or overblown ceremony the Sundsvall four-piece bring together elements of classic heavy rock and metal while claiming a persona that can move back and forth between them. Kind of the ideal for a younger band.
Persistently weird in the mold of Arthur Brown with unpredictability as a defining feature, Guided Meditation Doomjazz may mostly be a cathartic salve for founding bassist, vocalist, experimentalist, etc.-ist Blaise the Seeker, but that hardly makes the expression any less valid. Expect arrives as a five-song EP, ready to meander in the take-the-moniker-literally “Collapse in Dignity” and the fuzz-drenched slow-plod finisher “Sit in Surrender” — watery psychedelic guitar weaving overhead like a cloud you can reshape with your mind — that devolves into drone and noise, but not unstructured and not without intention behind even its most out-there moments. The bluesy sway of “The Mind is Divided” follows the howling scene-setting of the titular opener, while “Stream of Crystal Water” narrates its verse over crunchier riffing before the sung chorus-of-sorts, the overarching dug-in sensibility conveying some essence of what seems despite a prolific spate of releases to be an experience intended for a live setting, with all the one-on-one mind-expansion and arthouse performance that inevitably coincides with it. Still, with a rough-feeling production, Expect carries a breadth that makes communing with it that much easier. Go on, dare to get lost for a little while. See where you end up.
II is the vocalized follow-up to Cancervo‘s 2021 debut, 1 (review here), and finds the formerly-instrumental Lombardy, Italy, three-piece delving further into the doomed aspects of the initial offering with a greater clarity on “Arera,” “Herdsman of Grem” and “The Cult of Armentarga,” letting some of the psychedelia of the first record go while maintaining enough of an atmosphere to be hypnotic as the vocals follow the marching rhythm as the latter track moves into its midsection or the rhythmic chains in the subsequent “Devil’s Coffin” (an instrumental) lock step with the snare in a floating, loosely-Eastern-scaled break before the bigger-sounding end. Between “Devil’s Coffin” and the feedback-prone also-instrumental “Zambla” ahead of 8:43 closer “Zambel’s Goat” — on which the vocals return in a first-half of subdued guitar-led doomjamming prior to the burst moment at 4:49 — II goes deeper as it plays through and is made whole by its meditative feel, some semblance of head-trip cult doom running alongside, but if it’s a cult it’s one with its own mythology. Not where one expected them to go after 1, but that’s what makes it exciting, and that they lay claim to arrangement flourish, chanting vocals and slogging tempos as they do bodes well for future exploration.
So heavy it crashed my laptop. Twice. The second full-length from Mumbai post-metallers Dirge is a self-titled four-songer that culls psychedelia from tonal tectonics, not contrasting the two but finding depth in the ways they can interact. Mixed by Sanford Parker, the longer-form pieces comprise a single entirety without seeming to have been written as one long track, the harsh vocals of Tabish Khidir adding urgency to the guitar work of Ashish Dharkar and Varun Patil (the latter also backing vocals) as bassist Harshad Bhagwat and drummer Aryaman Chatterji underscore and punctuate the chugging procession of opener “Condemned” that’s offset if not countermanded by its quieter stretch. If you’re looking for your “Stones From the Sky”-moment as regards riffing, it’s in the 12-minute second cut, “Malignant,” the bleak triumph of which spills over in scream-topped angularity into “Grief” (despite a stop) while the latter feels all the more massive for its comedown moments. In another context, closer “Hollow” might be funeral doom, but it’s gorgeous either way, and it fits with the other three tracks in terms of its interior claustrophobia and thoughtful aggression. They’re largely playing toward genre tenets, but Dirge‘s gravity in doing so is undeniable, and the space they create is likewise dark and inviting, if not for my own tech.
Witch Ripper‘s sophomore LP and Magnetic Eye label-debut, The Flight After the Fall, touches on anthemic prog rock and metal with heavy-toned flourish and plenty of righteous burl in cuts like “Madness and Ritual Solitude” and the early verses of “The Obsidian Forge,” though the can-sing vocals of guitarists Chad Fox and Curtis Parker and bassist Brian Kim — drummer Joe Eck doesn’t get a mic but has plenty to do anyhow — are able to push that centerpiece and the rest of what surrounds over into the epic at a measure’s notice. Or not, which only makes Witch Ripper more dynamic en route to the 16:45 sprawling finish of “Everlasting in Retrograde Parts 1 and 2,” picking up from the lyrics of the leadoff “Enter the Loop” to put emphasis on the considered nature of the release as a whole, which is a showcase of ambition in songwriting as much as performance of said songs, conceptual reach and moments of sheer pummel. It’s been well hyped, and by the time “Icarus Equation” soars into its last chorus without its wings melting, it’s easy to hear why in the fullness of its progressive heft and melodic theatricality. It’s not a minor undertaking at 47 minutes, but it wouldn’t be a minor undertaking if it was half that, given the vastness of Witch Ripper‘s sound. Be ready to travel with it.
In stated narrative conversation with the Arabic influence on Spanish and greater Western European (read: white) culture, specifically in this case as regards the work of Persian philosopher Ibn Sina, Parisian self-releasing three-piece Pelegrin follow-up 2019’s Al-Mahruqa (review here) with the expansive six songs of Ways of Avicenna, with guitarist/vocalist François Roze de Gracia, bassist/backing vocalist Jason Recoing and drummer/percussionist Antoine Ebel working decisively to create a feeling of space not so much in terms of the actual band in the room, but of an ancient night sky on songs like “Madrassa” and the rolling heavy prog solo drama of the later “Mystical Appear,” shades of doom and psychedelia pervasive around the central riff-led constructions, the folkish middles of “Thunderstorm” and “Reach for the Sun” and the acoustic two-minute “Disgrace” a preface to the patient manner in which the trio feel their way into the final build of closer “Forsaken Land.” I’m neither a historical scholar nor a philosopher, and thankfully the album doesn’t require you to be, but Pelegrin could so easily tip over into the kind of cartoonish cultural appropriation that one finds among certain other sects of European psychedelia, and they simply don’t. Whether the music speaks to you or not, appreciate that.
Lush but not overblown, Argentinian instrumentalists Black Sky Giant fluidly and gorgeously bring together psychedelia and post-rock on their third album, Primigenian, distinguishing their six-song/31-minute brevity with an overarching progressive style that brings an evocative feel whether it’s to the guitar solos in “At the Gates” or the subsequent kick propulsion of “Stardust” — which does seem to have singing, though one can barely make out what if anything is actually being said — as from the denser tonality of the opening title-track, they go on to unfurl the spiritual-uplift of “The Great Hall,” fading into a cosmic boogie on the relatively brief “Sonic Thoughts” as they, like so many, would seem to have encountered SLIFT‘s Ummon sometime in the last two years. Doesn’t matter; it’s just a piece of the puzzle here and the shortest track, sitting as it does on the precipice of capper “The Foundational Found Tapes,” which plays out like amalgamated parts of what might’ve been other works, intermittently drummed and universally ambient, as though to point out the inherently incomplete nature of human-written histories. They fade out that last piece after seeming to put said tapes into a player of some sort (vague samples surrounding) and ending with an especially dream-toned movement. I wouldn’t dare speculate what it all means, but I think we might be the ancient progenitors in question. Fair enough. If this is what’s found by whatever species is next dominant on this planet — I hope they do better at it than humans have — we could do far worse for representation.
Posted in Whathaveyou on December 3rd, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Less than a year after releasing the album themselves digitally, Argentina’s No Stone have been picked up by StoneFly Records for a vinyl pressing of their debut, Road Into the Darkness (review here). Cultish and on the rawer end of garage doom, the release nonetheless carried across a melodic focus in its post-Uncle Acid vocal arrangements, and the blend of bare fuzz and ethereal sneer will no doubt come across well suited to the 12″ platter on which it’ll be presented. South American heavy, Argentine heavy, remain undervalued by the gringo underground in general, but anytime you get a Euro label signing a band — in this case, as the imprint’s second release; showing nothing if not priority — it’s worth noting. All the more so here because the record kicks ass and the band aren’t nazis so far as I know.
The release is Jan. 7, like the headline says. StoneFly sent the following down the PR wire:
OCCULT STONER ROCK/ PSYCHEDELIC DOOM TRIO NO STONE SIGNS TO STONEFLY RECORDS FOR A WORLDWIDE VINYL RELEASE OF THEIR ROAD INTO THE DARKNESS ALBUM ON JANUARY 7 2022
StoneFly Records is thrilled to announce the signing of Rosario, Argentina based trio NO STONE and look forward to release their debut album Road Into The Darkness on 180g vinyl. This album will be the second album released by StoneFly Records. These quarantine made recordings were salvaged from a secret bunker hidden in the heart of Argentina and have been transferred to wax for the collector’s pleasure. Embracing a lo-fi aesthetic, this album will restore your faith in doom or send you to your grave.
In April 2020, NO STONE released a single: “Bewitched” which I very loved. It was only later in February 2021 that I finally heard about NO STONE again. Few friends sent me the link to their album and I was then jumping the feet ahead in this beautiful darkness. I loved the rawness of their sound; maybe something reminiscent of other Argentinian bands like Mephistofeles for example. The overall vibe was crying to me: Uncle Acid. I was seduced by these strong songs filled with these occult stoner proto-metallic riffs; I knew I wanted these guys on my label.
Road Into The Darkness has been recorded during the quarantine with minimalistic means. You can’t expect a studio album here, you gotta embrace the lo-fi aspect of the album in order to appreciate it fully. The vinyl version will offer a different version than the digital one. We worked with Martin Antonsson Productions who re-mixed the whole songs and mastered them for vinyl playback. The goal was to bring more definitions to the songs while keeping their vital essence alive.
Road Into The Darkness channels a dark magic that will please the old horror movie fans. You could easily swap the soundtrack of one of these black and white Hammer’s movies for it and just see fire!
NO STONE’s Road Into The Darkness was digitally released February 13, 2021. The band is a mixture of melodic harmonized vocals with heavy-style riffs with power drums & bass lines, inviting you to enter into their dark psychedelic world inspired by the atmosphere of old horror cult movies.
Tracklisting: 1. Intro 2. Bewitched 3. The Frayed endings 4. Devil Behind 5. Goodbye’s Blues / Put Me In A Hole 6. Shadow No More 7. Road Into The Darkness
NO STONE is: Pablo Lanziani: Vocals, guitars and synths Diego Moran: Bass Maximiliano Fradellin: Drums, Percussion
You know what? We’re through the first week of the Quarterly Review as of this post. Not too bad. I feel like it’s been smooth going so far to such a degree that I’m even thinking about adding an 11th day comprised purely of releases that came my way this week and will invariably come in next week too. Crazy, right? Bonus day QR. We’ll see if I get there, but I’m thinking about it. That alone should tell you something.
But let me not get ahead of myself. Day five commence.
Quarterly Review #41-50:
Howling Giant, Alteration
Let the story be that when the pandemic hit, Nashville’s Howling Giant took to the airwaves to provide comfort, character and a bit of ‘home’ — if one thinks of live performance as home — to their audience. With a steady schedule of various live streams on Twitch, some playing music, some playing D&D, the band engaged their listenership in a new and exciting way, finding a rare bright point in one of the darkest years of recent history. Alteration, a crisp four-song/20-minute EP, is born out of those streamed jams, with songs named by the band’s viewers/listeners — kudos to whoever came up with “Luring Alluring Rings” — and, being entirely instrumental from a band growing more and more focused on vocal arrangements, sound more like they’re on their way to being finished than are completely done. However, that’s also the point of the release, essentially to showcase unfinished works in progress that have emerged in a manner that nobody expected. It is another example from last year-plus that proves the persistence of creativity, and is all the more beautiful for that.
Vaguely lysergic, twanging with a non-chestbeating or jingoistic ’70s American singer-songwriter feel, Rose City Band‘s Earth Trip brings sentiment without bitterness in its songs, engaging as the title hints with nature in songs like “Silver Roses,” “In the Rain,” “Lonely Planes,” “Ramblin’ with the Day,” “Rabbit” and “Dawn Patrol.” An outlet for Ripley Johnson, also of Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo, the “band” isn’t so much in Rose City Band, but there is some collaboration — pedal steel here and there, as on “Ramblin’ with the Day” — though it’s very much Johnson‘s own craft and performance at the core of this eight-song set. This is the third Rose City Band long-player in three years, but quickly as it may have come about, the tracks never feel rushed — hushed, if anything — and Johnson effectively casts himself in among the organic throughout the proceedings, making the listener feel nothing if not welcome to join the ramble.
Johannesburg, South Africa’s The Tazers are suited to a short-release format, as their Dream Machine EP shows, bringing together four tracks with psychedelic precociousness and garage rock attitude to spare, with just an edge of classic heavy to keep things grooving. Their latest work opens with its languid and lysergic title-track, which sets up the shove of “Go Away” and the shuffle in “Lonely Road” — both under three and a half minutes long, with nary a wasted second in them, despite sounding purposefully like tossoffs — and the latter skirts the line of coming undone, but doesn’t, of course, but in the meantime sets up the almost proto-New Wave in the early going on “Around Town,” only later to give way to the band’s most engaging melody and a deceptively patient, gentle finish, which considering some of the brashness in the earlier tracks is a surprise. A pleasant one, though, and not the first the three-piece have brought forth by the time they get to the end of Dream Machine‘s ultra-listenable 16-minute run.
Pressed in an ultra-limited edition of 34 tapes (the physical version also has a bonus track), Kavrila‘s Rituals III brings together about 16 minutes of heavy hardcore and post-hardcore, a thickened undertone giving something of a darker mood to the crunch of “Equality” as guitars are layered in subtly in a higher register, feeding into the urgency without competing with the drums or vocals. Opener “Sunday” works at more of a rush while “Longing” has more of a lurch at least to its outset before gradually elbowing its way into a more careening groove, but the bridge being built is between sludge and hardcore, and while the four-piece aren’t the first to build it, they do well here. If we’re picking highlights, closer “Elysium” has deft movement, intensity and atmosphere in kind, and still features a vocal rawness that pushes the emotional crux between the verses and choruses to make the transitions that much smoother. The ending fades out early behind those shouts, leaving the vocals stranded, calling out the song’s title into a stark emptiness.
Brutal rebirth. Robin Van Oyen is the lone figure behind Bruges, Belgium-based death-doom outfit Gateway, and Flesh Reborn is his first EP in three years. Marked out with guest guitar solos by M., the four-track/25-minute offering keeps its concentration on atmosphere as much as raw punishment, and while one would be correct to call it ‘extreme’ in its purpose and execution, its deathliest aspects aren’t just the growling vocals or periods of intense blast, but the wash of distortion that lays over the offering as a whole, from “Hel” through “Slumbering Crevasses,” the suitably twisting, later lurching “Rack Crawler” and the grandeur-in-filth 12-minute closing title-track, at which point the fullness of the consumption is revealed at last. Unbridled as it seems, this material is not without purpose and is not haphazard. It is the statement it intends to be, and its depths are shown to be significant as Van Oyen pulls you further down into them with each passing moment, finally leaving you there amid residual drone.
Admirably punk in its dexterity, Bala‘s debut album, Maleza, arrives as a nine-track pummelfest from the Spanish duo of guitarist/vocalist Anx and drummer/vocalist V., thickened with sludgy intent and aggression to spare. The starts and stops of opener “Agitar” provide a noise-rock-style opening that hints at the tonal push to come throughout “Hoy No” — the verse melody of which seems to reinvent The Bangles — while the subsequent “X” reaches into greater breadth, vocals layered effectively as a preface perhaps to the later grunge of “Riuais,” which arrives ahead of the swaggering riff and harsh sneer of “Bessie” the lumbering finale “Una Silva.” Whether brooding in “Quieres Entrar” or explosive in its shove in “Cien Obstaculos,” Maleza offers stage-style energy with clarity of vision and enough chaos to make the anger feel genuine. There’s apparently some hype behind Bala, and fair enough, but this is legitimately one of the best debut albums I’ve heard in 2021.
French prog-fuzz five-piece Tremor Ama make a coherent and engaging debut with Beneath, a first full-length following up a 2017 self-titled EP release. Spacious guitar leads the way through the three-minute intro “Ab Initio” and into the subsequent “Green Fire,” giving a patient launch to the outing, the ensuing four songs of which grow shorter as they go behind that nine-minute “Green Fire” stretch. There’s room for ambience and intensity both in centerpiece “Eclipse,” with vocals echoing out over the building second half, and both “Mirrors” and “Grey” offer their moments of surge as well, the latter tapping into a roll that should have fans of Forming the Void nodding both to the groove and in general approval. Effectively tipping the balance in their sound over the course of the album as a whole, Tremor Ama showcase an all-the-more thoughtful approach in this debut, and at 30 minutes, they still get out well ahead of feeling overly indulgent or losing sight of their overarching mission.
Delivered on multiple formats including as a 12″ vinyl through Regain Records offshoot Helter Skelter Productions, the bleary cultistry of The Crooked Whispers‘ two-songer Dead Moon Night also finds the Los Angeles-based outfit recently picked up by Ripple Music. If it seems everybody wants a piece of The Crooked Whispers, that’s fair enough for the blend of murk, sludge and charred devil worship the foursome offer with “Hail Darkness” and the even more gruesome “Galaxy of Terror,” taking the garage-doom rawness of Uncle Acid and setting against a less Beatlesian backdrop, trading pop hooks for classic doom riffing on the second track, flourishing in its misery as it is. At just 11 minutes long — that’s less than a minute for each inch of the vinyl! — Dead Moon Night is a grim forecast of things to come for the band’s deathly revelry, already showcased too on last year’s debut, Satanic Whispers (review here).
Schooled, oldschool doom rock for denim-clad heads as foggy as the distortion they present, No Stone‘s debut album, Road into the Darkness, sounds like they already got there. The Rosario, Argentina, trio tap into some Uncle Acid-style garage doom vibes on “The Frayed Endings,” but the crash is harder, and the later 10-minute title-track delves deeper into psychedelia and grunge in kind, resulting in an overarching spirit that’s too weird to be anything but individual, however mmuch it might still firmly reside within the tenets of “cult.” If you were the type to chase down a patch, you might want to chase down a No Stone patch, as “Devil Behind” makes its barebones production feel like an aesthetic choice to offset the boogie to come in “Shadow No More,” and from post-intro opener “Bewitched” to the long fade of “The Sky is Burning,” No Stone balance atmosphere and songcraft in such a way as to herald future progress along this morose path. Maybe they are just getting on the road into the darkness, but they seem to be bringing that darkness with them on the way.
Dead Icons is the sixth full-length from Brazilian psychedelic outfit Firefriend, and throughout its 10 songs and 44 minutes, the band proffer marked shoegaze-style chill and a sense of space, fuzzy and molten in “Hexagonal Mess,” more desert-hued in “Spin,” jangly and out for a march on “Ongoing Crash.” “Home or Exile” takes on that question with due reach, and “Waves” caps with organ alongside the languid guitar, but moments like “Tomorrow” are singular and gorgeous, and though “Three Dimensional Sound Glitch” and “666 Fifth Avenue” border on playful, there’s an overarching melancholy to the flow, as engaging as it is. In its longest pieces — “Tomorrow” (6:05) and “One Thousand Miles High” (5:08) — the “extra” time is well spent in extending the trio’s reach, and while it’s safe to assume that six self-recorded LPs later, Firefriend know what they want to do with their sound, that thing feels amorphous, fleeting, transient somehow here, like a moving target. That speaks to ongoing growth, and is just one of Dead Icons‘ many strengths.
