Everybody come through day one intact? I know it got pretty weird there for a minute, but I felt like sense was ultimately made. Maybe not in all cases, but definitely most. Today also gets fairly wild, and some of this stuff has been covered before in some fashion and some of it not so much, but hell, you’ve been through this before, as have I, so you know what to expect when you’re expecting. Blood might be spilled. Bruises left. Or bliss. Or both sometimes. Hell’s bells. Let’s go already.

Quarterly Review #11-20:

Kal-El, Dark Majesty

With their fifth full-length, Dark Majesty, Norwegian heavy rockers and sci-fi-themed cleavage aficionados Kal-El make a willful play toward the epic. Their first 2LP and their first album for Majestic Mountain Records, the eight-song offering tops 65 minutes and splits into four two-song sides, each one seeming to grow bigger until the last of them, with the closing duo “Kala Mishaa” and “Vimana,” draws the proceedings to a massive close. Along the way, Kal-El not only offer their most melodically rich and spacious fare to-date — opening with their longest track in the 11:39 “Temple” (immediate points) — but blast Kyuss into the cosmos on the four-minute “Spiral,” and give Dozer a run for their money on “Comêta.” Gargantuan fuzz shines through on “Hyperion” in a near-maddening cacophony, but it might be the title-track that’s the greatest highlight in the end, marking the band’s accomplishment in heft, blending riffs and atmosphere to a broad and engaging degree. It is a triumph and it sounds like one.

Kal-El on Facebook

Majestic Mountain Records webstore

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The Ugly Kings, Strange, Strange Times

One would not accuse Melbourne’s The Ugly Kings of inaccuracy in titling their second album Strange, Strange Times, and though they launch with the post-Queens of the Stone Age title-track and the now-tinged cynicism of “Technodrone” and “Do You Feel Like You’re Paranoid?,” it’s in even moodier stretches like “Last Man Left Alive” they cast their lot toward individualism. Songs vary in intention but remain consistent in the quality of their construction and look-at-the-world-around-you theme, with “Lawman” leaning toward darker country blues, “Mr. Hyde” asking what would happen if Clutch and Ruff Majik ever crossed paths and the finale “Another Fucking Day” offering a deceptively immersive unfurling. I can’t help but wonder if The Ugly Kings feel surrounded in their home city by much, much druggier neo-psych acts in the heavy underground scene, but the clarity of purpose they bring to their songwriting would make them a standout one way or the other.

The Ugly Kings on Facebook

Napalm Records website

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Guhts, Blood Feather

Atmospheric and seething in kind, Guhts brings together members of New Yorkers Witchkiss and North Carolina’s Black Mountain Hunger for a pandemic-era debut release that in style explores the restlessness and the overwhelming nature of the age. With Amber Burns (interview here) on vocals, the drums programmed behind Scott Prater and Dan Shaneyfelt guitars/synths and the bass of Jesse Van Note, and a purpose wrought in immersion, the band distinguishes itself in its apropos grimness and in the potential for future exploration of the ideas laid out here, bordering in “The Mirror” on goth only after “Handless Maiden” offers raging, post-metallic lumber. One wonders how Blood Feather will sound five years from now, but more to the point, one wonders what Guhts might conjure in the meantime when/if they press forward. Either way, expect to see this on the list of 2021’s best short releases.

Guhts on Facebook

Guhts on Bandcamp

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Anunnaki, Martyr of Alexandria

Hey there, psych fans and experts on tragedies of the classic world, British Columbia two-piece Anunnaki have the psychedelic instrumental blowout themed around the murder of Hypatia you’ve been waiting for! Never heard of Hypatia? It doesn’t matter. Samples will provide some context and if they said the whole thing was about going shoe shopping, it wouldn’t be any less righteously far out. With “Golden Gate of the Sun” at the outset, the duo of Dave Read (guitar/bass) and Arlen Thompson (drums/synth) prime a bit of space-boogie, but the subsequent “Cyril, the Fanatic” shoves the freakery to the fore with wailing guitar and drones and seemingly whatever else they thought might work and does. The 15-minute finale, “The Cries of Hypatia,” dives deeper into drone, holding back the drums for about seven minutes while obscure speech and the titular cries unfold. Read and Thompson build it to a full, suitably deathly wash, and take the time to end minimal. Literary, arthouse, but not at all stale for that.

Anunnaki on Facebook

Cardinal Fuzz webstore

NoiseAgonyMayhem website

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Bill Fisher, Hallucinations of a Higher Truth

A departure even from his departure, Church of the Cosmic Skull bandleader Bill Fisher‘s second solo offering, Hallucinations of a Higher Truth, follows the darker progressive rock of 2020’s Mass Hypnosis and the Dark Triad (review here) with 40-plus minutes of piano-led singer-songwriter fare, taking a stated influence from the lyrics-as-everyday-musings of Randy Newman on songs like “Better Than You” and “Off to Work,” while revamping his main outfit’s “Answers in Your Soul” and “Evil in Your Eye” to suit the arrangement theme. As Fisher has engaged plenty with classic forms in his work, Hallucinations of a Higher Truth feels by no means beyond his creative reach, and he’s an accomplished enough songwriter and performer to pull it off, thereby demonstrating that if you can craft a song you can make it do whatever the hell you want, and that “you” in this case is him. This isn’t going to be everybody’s thing, but Fisher carries it ably.

Bill Fisher webstore

Church of the Cosmic Skull website

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Seum, Live From the Seum-Cave

Montreal low-end filthmongers Seum return to follow-up earlier 2021’s Winterized EP (review here) with Live From the Seum-Cave, basking in an even rawer incarnation of their guitars-need-not-apply drum/bass/vocals attack. “Sea Sick Six” is even nastier here than it was on the last EP, and the eponymous opener “Seum” is an anthem of disaffection that finds its lyrical answer in “Life Grinder” and “Blueberry Cash” alike — the why-do-I-even-have-this-shit-job point of view as unmistakable as the throat-singing that pops up in the aforementioned “Sea Sick Six.” The trio are beastly on “Winter of Seum,” and they make a special highlight of “Super Tanker” from 2020’s Summer of Seum EP, working tempo shifts into the punishing march that are less than predictable and yet totally over the top in their extremity. This is a good band who genuinely sound like they don’t give a fuck. That’s a hard thing to make believable. I hope they never put out a record and do EPs forever.

Seum on Facebook

Seum on Bandcamp

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Spirit Adrift, Forge Your Future

Spirit Adrift have broken out from the doomly mire to proffer clear-headed, soaring traditional heavy metal. The unit, led as ever by guitarist/bassist/vocalist Nate Garrett with Marcus Bryant on drums, offer three new tracks on Forge Your Future in the title-track, “Wake Up” and “Invisible Enemy,” channeling Randy Rhoads even through more denser tonality and the nodding groove of the last. Echo behind Garrett‘s vocals reminds here and there of Brian “Butch” Balich of Penance/Argus, but Spirit Adrift‘s path across four full-lengths and companion short releases like this one over the last six years has been its own, and the emergence of Garrett as a singer has been a crucial part of making these songs the concise epics they are. Crisp in craft and confident in delivery, Spirit Adrift only sound like masters of their domain here, and so they are. Heavy metal that loves heavy metal.

Spirit Adrift on Facebook

Century Media Records website

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Mutha Trucka, Mutha Trucka

The Chicago-based three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Eric Ervin, bassist/vocalist Dana “Erv” Ervin and drummer/backing vocalist Ted Sciaky plunge deep with their self-titled debut into the ’90s era of heavy rock, with vibes running between C.O.C., Monster Magnet, Clutch and Kyuss, among others, but there’s a might-throw-elbows spirit that comes through even in willfully spacious pieces like “I’m Free” (some Lemmy influence there too) and “Wizards & Gods” that adds aggro spirit to the bulk of the nine-song/39-minute affair, a piece like “D.B. Blues” — which stands for “Dirty Bitch Blues” — as unpretentious in its overarching style as it is politically incorrect. “Fogginess” hits near eight minutes and moves toward the trippier end of grunge, with one of the outing’s many layered solos playing out amid the solid groove beneath, the band refusing to compromise their abiding lack of pretense even in the face of that which would otherwise be psychedelic. Not much time for that nonsense — there’s crunch to be had.

Mutha Trucka on Facebook

Mutha Trucka on Bandcamp

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3rd Ear Experience, Danny Frankel’s 3rd Ear Experience

Who’s Danny Frankel? Long story short, he was Lou Reed‘s drummer, but in fact he’s got a session-player career that’s found him performing with a staggering array of artists and bands. He puts his stamp on his very own 3rd Ear Experience alongside the group’s founding guitarist Robbi Robb as well as a host of others including fellow founder AmritaKripa, synthesist Scott “Dr. Space” Heller and more besides. The resulting journey is six tracks and 63 minutes of psychedelic gloryscaping, desert-born but galaxy-bred, with longform works like “What Are Their Names” (18:18), “Weep No More, My Friend” (14:49) and closer “Timelessness Pt. 2” (12:03) expanding across exploratory and fluid movements offset by shorter stretches like the suitably percussive “Cosmos Glazed Elephant.” In opener “A Beautiful Questions,” the drums hardly feature, but the lead-in for “What Are Their Names” feels no less intentional than when the penultimate “Timelessness Pt. 1” gives way to silence ahead of the beginning of the finale. I’d say more, but I seem to have lost my train of hyperbole-laden praise. Wonderfully so.

3rd Ear Experience on Facebook

Space Rock Productions website

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Solarius, Universal Trial

Originally recorded in 2006, Solarius‘s heretofore unreleased four-song EP, Universal Trial, is notable for predating the self-titled Graveyard album, as guitarist/vocalist Jonatan Ramm would end up joining that band in 2008, seeming after Solarius dissolved. The 21-minute release arrives now with the considerable backing of Heavy Psych Sounds in no small part because of that nifty bit of context, and the classic-style boogie wrought in “Sky of Mine” is enough to make it a prescient-feeling footnote in the storied history of Swedish retroism, let alone the brooding-into-surging, organ-laced “Into the Sun,” which if it was issued by a new band this week would be an excuse unto itself for Bandcamp Friday. Wrapped in the shuffling title-track at the start and the harmonized, patiently-drawn “Mother Nature Mind” at the end, Universal Trial feels like a lesson in the essential role of producer Don Alsterberg (Graveyard, Blues Pills, Spiders, etc.) in defining the style as well as in what might’ve been if Solarius had put this out at the time.

Heavy Psych Sounds on Facebook

Heavy Psych Sounds website

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We proceed onward, into this ever-growing swath of typos, lineup corrections made after posting, and riffs — more riffs! — that is the Quarterly Review. Today is Day Four and I’m feeling good. Not to say there isn’t some manner of exhaustion, but the music has been killer — today is particularly awesome — and that makes life much, much, much better as I’ve already said. I hope you’ve found one or two or 10 records so far that you’ve really dug. I know I’ve added a few to my best of 2021 list, including stuff right here. So yeah, we roll on.

Quarterly Review #31-40:

Spelljammer, Abyssal Trip

To envision an expanse, and to crush it. Stockholm three-piece Spelljammer return five years after Ancient of Days (review here), with an all-the-more-massive second long-player through RidingEasy, turning their front-cover astronaut around to face the audience head on and offering 43 minutes/six tracks of encompassing largesse, topping 10 minutes in the title-track and “Silent Rift,” both on side B with the interlude “Peregrine” between them, after the three side A rollers, “Bellwether,” “Lake” and “Among the Holy” have tripped out outward and downward into an atmospheric plunge that is a joy to take feeling specifically geared as an invite to the converted. We are here, come worship with us. Also get crushed. Spelljammer records may not happen all the time, but you won’t be through “Bellwether” before you’re saying it was worth the wait.

Spelljammer on Facebook

RidingEasy Records website

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The Black Heart Death Cult, Sonic Mantras

A deceptively graceful second LP from Melbourne’s The Black Heart Death Cult, Sonic Mantras pulls together an eight-song/45-minute run that unfolds bookended by “Goodbye Gatwick Blues” (8:59) and “Sonic Dhoom” (9:47) and in between ebbs and flows across shorter pieces that maximize their flow in whether shoegazing, heavygazing, blissing out, or whatever we’re calling it this week on “The Sun Inside” and “One Way Through,” or finding their way to a particularly deadened meadow on “Trees,” or tripping the light hypnotic on “Dark Waves” just ahead of the closer. “Cold Fields” churns urgently in its 2:28 but remains spacious, and everywhere The Black Heart Death Cult go, they remain liquefied in their sound, like a seemingly amorphous thing that nonetheless manages to hold its shape despite outside conditions. Whatever form they take, then, they are themselves, and Sonic Mantras emphasizes how yet-underappreciated they are in emerging from the ever-busy Aussie underground.

The Black Heart Death Cult on Facebook

Kozmik Artifactz store

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Shogun, Tetra

Tetra is the third long-player from Milwaukee’s Shogun, and in addition to the 10-minute “Delta,” which marries blues gargle with YOB slow-gallop before jamming out across its 10-minute span, it brings straight-shooter fuzz rockers like “Gravitas,” the someone-in-this-band-listened-to-Megadeth-in-the-’90s-and-that’s-okay beginnings of “Buddha’s Palm/Aviary” and likewise crunch of “Axiom” later, but also the quiet classic progressive rock of “Gone Forever,” and the more patient coming together of psychedelia and harder-hitting movement on closer “Maximum Ray.” Somewhat undercut by a not-raw-but-not-bursting-with-life production, pieces like “Buddha’s Palm/Aviary,” which gives over to a sweeter stretch of guitar in its second movement, and “Vertex/Universal Pain Center,” which in its back end brings around that YOB influence again and puts it to good use, are outwardly complex enough to put the lie to the evenhandedness of the recording. There’s more going on in Tetra than it first seems, and the more you listen, the more you find.

Shogun on Facebook

Shogun on Bandcamp

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Nadja, Luminous Rot

Keeping up with Nadja has proven nigh on impossible over the better part of the last two decades, as the Berlin-by-way-of-Toronto duo have issued over 25 albums in 19 years, plus splits and live offerings and digital singles and oh my goodness I do believe I have the vapors that’s a lot of Nadja. For those of us who flit in and out like the dilletantes we ultimately are, Luminous Rot‘s aligning Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff with Southern Lord makes it an easy landmark, but really most of what the six-cut/48-minute long-player does is offer a reminder of the vital experimentalism the lazy are missing in the first place. The consuming, swelling drone of “Cuts on Your Hands,” blown-out sub-industrialism of “Starres,” hook of the title-track and careful-what-you-wish-for anchor riff of “Fruiting Bodies” — these and the noisily churning closer “Dark Inclusions” are a fervent argument in Nadja‘s favor as being more than a sometimes-check-in kind of band, and for immediately digging into the 43-minute single-song album Seemannsgarn, which they released earlier this year. So much space and nothing to lose.

Nadja on Facebook

Southern Lord Recordings website

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Shroud of Vulture, Upon a Throne of Jackals

Welcome to punishment as a primary consideration. Indianapolis death-doom four-piece hold back the truly crawling fare until “Perverted Reflection,” which is track three of the total seven on their debut full-length, Upon a Throne of Jackals, but by then the extremity has already shown its unrepentant face across the buried-alive “Final Spasms of the Drowned” and the oldschool death metal of “The Altar.” Centerpiece “Invert Every Throne” calls to mind Conan in its nod, but Shroud of Vulture are more about rawness than sheer largesse in tone, and their prone-to-blasting style gives them an edge there and in “Halo of Tarnished Light,” which follows. The closing pair of “Concealing Rabid Laughter” and “Stone Coffin of Existence” both top seven minutes and offset grueling tension with grueling release, but it’s the stench of decay that so much defines Upon a Throne of Jackals, as though somebody rebuilt Sunlight Studio brick for brick in Hoosier Country. Compelling and filthy in kind.

Shroud of Vulture on Facebook

Wise Blood Records website

Transylvanian Tapes on Bandcamp

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Towards Atlantis Lights, When the Ashes Devoured the Sun

Ultra-grueling, dramatic death-doom tragedies permeate the second full-length, When the Ashes Devoured the Sun, from UK-based four-piece Towards Atlantis Lights, with vocalist/keyboardist Kostas Panagiotou and guitarist Ivan Zara at the heart of the compositions while bassist Riccardo Veronese and drummer Ivano Olivieri assure the impact that coincides with the cavernous procession matches in scope. The follow-up to 2018’s Dust of Aeons (review here), this six-track collection fosters classicism and modern apocalyptic vibes alike, and whether raging or morose, its dirge atmosphere remains firm and uncompromised. Heavy lumber for heavy hearts. The kind of doom that doesn’t look up. That doesn’t mean it’s not massive in scope — it is, even more than the first record — just that nearly everything it sees is downward. If there’s hope, it is a vague thing, lost to periphery. So be it.

Towards Atlantis Lights on Facebook

Kostas Panagiotou on Bandcamp

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ASTRAL CONstruct, Tales of Cosmic Journeys

It has been said on multiple occasions that “space is the place.” The curiously-capitalized Colorado outfit ASTRAL CONstruct would seem to live by this ethic on their debut album, Tales of Cosmic Journeys, unfurling as they do eight flowing progressions of instrumental slow-CGI-of-the-planets pieces that are more plotted in their course than jams, but feel built from jams just the same. Raw in its production and mix, and mastered by Kent Stump of Wo Fat, there’s enough atmosphere to let the lead guitar breathe, certainly, and to sustain life in general even on “Jettisoned Adrift in the Space Debris,” and the image evoked by “Hand Against the Solar Winds” feels particularly inspired given that song’s languid roll. The record starts and ends in cryogenic sleep, and if upon waking we’re transported to another place and another time, who knows what wonders we might see along the way. ASTRAL CONstruct‘s exploration would seem to be just beginning here, but their “Cosmos Perspective” is engaging just the same.

ASTRAL CONstruct on Instagram

ASTRAL CONstruct on Bandcamp

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TarLung, Architect

Vienna-based sludgedrivers TarLung were last heard from with 2017’s Beyond the Black Pyramid (discussed here), and Architect continues the progression laid out there in melding vocal extremity and heavy-but-not-too-heavy-to-move riffing. It might seem like a fine line to draw, and it is, and that only makes songs like “Widow’s Bane” and “Horses of Plague” all the more nuanced as their deathly growls and severe atmospheres mesh with what in another context might just be stoner rock groove. Carcass circa the criminally undervalued Swansong, Six Feet Under. TarLung manage to find a place in stoner sludge that isn’t just Bongzilla worship, or Bongripper worship, or Bong worship. I’m not sure it’s worship at all, frankly, and I like that about it as the closing title-track slow-moshes my brain into goo.

TarLung on Facebook

TarLung on Bandcamp

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Wizzerd & Merlin, Turned to Stone Chapter III

Somewhere in the great mystical expanse between Kalispell, Montana, and Kansas City, Missouri, two practicioners of the riffly dark arts meet on a field of battle. Wizzerd come packing the 19-minute acoustic-into-heavy-prog-into-sitar-laced-jam-out “We Are,” as if to encompass that declaration in all its scope, while Merlin answer back with the organ-led “Merlin’s Bizarre Adventure” (21:51), all chug and lumber until it’s time for weirdo progressive fusion reggae and an ensuing Purple-tinged psych expansion. Who wins? I don’t know. Ripple Music in releasing it in the first place, I guess. Continuing the label’s influential split series(es), Turned to Stone Chapter III pushes well over the top in the purposes of both acts involved, and in that, it’s maybe less of a battle than two purveyors joining forces to weave some kind of Meteo down on the heads of all who might take them on. If you’ve think you’ve got the gift, they seem only too ready to test that out.

Wizzerd on Facebook

Merlin on Facebook

Ripple Music website

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Seum, Winterized

“Life Grinder” begins with a sample: “I don’t know if you need all that bass,” and the answer, “Oh, you need all that bass.” That’s already after “Sea Sick Six” has revealed the Montreal-based trio’s sans-guitar extremist sludge roll, and the three-piece seem only too happy to keep up the theme. Vocals are harsh, biting, grating, purposeful in their fuckall, and the whole 28-minute affair of Winterized is cathartic aural violence, except perhaps the interlude “666,” which is a quiet moment between “Broken Bones” and “Black Snail Volcano,” which finally seems to just explode in its outright aggression, nod notwithstanding. A slowed down Ramones cover — reinventing “Pet Sematary” as “Red Sematary” — has a layer of spoken chanting vocals layered in and closes out, but the skin has been peeled so far back by then and Seum have doused so much salt onto the wounds that even Bongzilla might cringe. The low-end-only approach only makes it more punishing and more punk rock at the same time. Fucking mean.

Seum on Facebook

Seum on Bandcamp

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