Posted in Whathaveyou on February 10th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
There’s a lot to unpack here, so sit tight. First, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll note that these are artists with whom I’ve collaborated before. Lauri Kivelä, Vesa Vatanen and I made a record a little while back for a project called Alitila that’s coming out in March. So that’s worth mentioning. Second, Entheomorphosis, in which Kivelä is joined by Vesa Ajomo of Dark Buddha Rising, etc., is a new project but part of a longer thread of work these guys have undertaken starting over 15 years ago when Mr. Peter Hayden set out and following through to more recent output as Enphin, blowing out electronic psych and experimentalist textures of drone.
Some of that is happening on the upcoming Pyhä Kuilu as well, as you can hear in the synth-horror of the penultimate interlude “Huntu” ahead of the finale “Iätön,” a bookend with opener and longest cut (immediate points) “Alkiema,” which follows a similar path of somewhat agonized longform sludge experimentalism, Ajomo‘s lyrics (in Finnish) giving voice to the overarching meditation and spiritual journey in the music. As has been the case with their work all along, it doesn’t sound like anything so much as itself.
May is a while off, so there’s no audio yet, but Svart sent this down the PR wire:
Entheomorphosis’ debut album PYHÄ KUILU will stare through you!
Featuring members of Dark Buddha Rising and Mr Peter Hayden/PH/Enphin
The Finnish underground music scene is set to welcome a formidable new entity as Entheomorphosis announce the release of their debut album PYHÄ KUILU (“Holy Abyss”) on May 23rd, 2025 via Svart Records. A collaborative new outfit featuring seasoned members from the enigmatic Dark Buddha Rising and the genre-defying Mr Peter Hayden/PH/Enphin, Entheomorphosis has crafted an immersive sonic purge that plunges into the depths of transformation, spirituality, and cosmic dissolution.
Guitarist Vesa Ajomo (Dark Buddha Rising), one of the principal architects behind the project, explains:
“Entheomorphosis was born in the need to refine artistic and spiritual work. During the years of turmoil and isolation, the main riffs were forged and over time they meandered into an album that has the most emotional weight that I have ever been involved with. This is the process of physical, spiritual, and mental transformation.”
With crushing riffs, hypnotic rhythms, and dark, ceremonial vocals, PYHÄ KUILU carves out an abyssal space where listeners can confront their own psychic dissolution and re-creation. Each track invites the audience to partake in the process of unveiling, where the descent into swirling chaos of Entheomorphosis leads to spiritual refinement and ascension. It’s not all about leaving the listener in the dark however, as there is a more transcendent mission within the Entheomorphosis quest.
As Vesa Ajomo puts it:
“Within this album we have captured the energy, intuition, and guidance in the most organic form possible and allowed the compositions to take their final form at a slow pace. Through this initiation, we have found the holy abyss and bravely dived into the darkness in order to find the light.”
Entheomorphosis channels the influences of doom, drone, and avant-garde metal, yet the album stands as a work of unique potency. For fans of Neurosis, Godflesh, and especially the celebrated Finnish dark and heavy Psychedelic underground, Entheomorphosis is at the very underneath of the hypnotic dark underbelly of psychedelia. Recorded with a minimalist ethos, the band prioritized capturing the raw intensity and spiritual essence of their compositions, ensuring that PYHÄ KUILU resonates with both primal and metaphysical power.
PYHÄ KUILU is available on Svart exclusive transparent violet/black smoke vinyl, band exclusive transparent green/black smoke, limited gold vinyl, black vinyl, CD, and digital platforms on May 23rd, 2025. The album release show will take place at the Sonic Rites festival in Helsinki on 23rd – 24th of May, 2025.
PYHÄ KUILU is a journey across four movements, with each composition unravelling layers of profound symbolic meaning:
● “Alkiema” explores the absorption and distillation of light into a singularity—a dark, cosmic initiation leading to a metamorphosis of flesh and spirit.
●”Sikinä” follows with the re-birth of refined truth in flesh—a process of nourishment, ascension, and the painful shedding of old forms.
●”Huntu” acts as an atmospheric interlude, representing the tearing away of the illusory, exposing the core essence of the soul’s path.
●”Iätön” culminates the album’s journey in the transformation of the refined soul into an active operator of the Universal current, altering reality itself.
Entheomorphosis Vesa Ajomo: Vocals, Guitar, Moog Lauri Kivelä: Bass JP Koivisto: Guitar Lassi Männikkö: Drums
Posted in Reviews on December 4th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
The last full-length offering from Indianapolis traditionalist doomers The Gates of Slumber was The Wretch in 2011, and it’s been a long road getting from there to their self-titled sixth album, also their first outing through Svart Records. Begun in 1998 in the message-board era of internet-based doomly proliferation, and led in the present by founding guitarist/vocalist Karl Simon, the band’s six-song/35-minute return opus features bassist/backing vocalist Steve Janiak (also guitar/vocals in Apostle of Solitude, Devil to Pay) and drummer Chuck Brown (also also guitar/vocals in Apostle of Solitude), a lineup that first came together in 2019. The occasion at that point was a return performance at Germany’s Hell Over Hammaburg festival in — wait for it — March 2020.
That fest actually happened (it was early in the month), but of course there wouldn’t be much opportunity for building momentum from there as a global pandemic shut down the world. Already at that point, the band’s path had been tumultuous, from the 2014 passing of then-former bassist Jason McCash after The Gates of Slumber‘s final release, 2013’s Scion A/V-backed Stormcrow EP (review here) and disbanding. As Simon moved forward to release a self-titled debut (review here) with a new trio, Wretch, in 2016, who also toured that year and the next in the US and Europe, issuing the EP Bastards Born (review here) in 2017 and making live appearances right up to an East Coast run in Spring 2019, the path back to The Gates of Slumber is somewhat tumultuous, but the point is that the music never really stopped — there was also the Gates live album, Live in Tempe, Arizona (discussed here), in 2020 — and the fact that the Simon/Janiak/Brown lineup have been playing together for five years in addition to knowing each other for probably decades by virtue of their respective tenures in the Indy underground might account for some of the cohesion heard across the material on The Gates of Slumber. Or it might just be that they know what the fuck they’re doing with slow riffs and morose vibes. Take your pick.
Either way, The Gates of Slumber is a clear and concise statement of intent and declaration of self on the part of the band who made it, perhaps nowhere more so than on the four-minute side B leadoff “At Dawn.” While certainly not the first time the band has conjured a gallop in their quarter-century-plus history, the chug the trio ride there is particularly fluid. By that point in the proceedings, the revamped dynamic has already been unveiled, as Janiak not only takes a backing role on vocals for the grueling-but-catchy opening cut “Embrace the Lie” but handles some leads as well, going on to anchor the extinction-themed, later-Iommi-hued chorus of the subsequent “We Are Perdition” with an effective drawling delivery of the lyric “…global holocaust” before side A capper “Full Moon Fever” begins the tempo kick that “At Dawn” will push further, Brown‘s drums slow-swinging in classic fashion behind some harsher vocal delve from Simon in the song’s middle, before the scorching solo and march into the gradual fadeout take hold to comprise the back half.
Already by that point the message that The Gates of Slumber are “back” has come through clearly, but in terms of aesthetic, their revelry of course takes a darker, more depressive hue. After “At Dawn” — which is neither the first fast or short song the band has ever had but stands out here nonetheless — The Gates of Slumber redirects to its closing duo, the seven-minutes-apiece pairing of “The Fog” and “The Plague,” the former of which rumbles out a lonely bassline before crashing in at full volume. It’s not quite like slamming into a wall, and even here the shifting character of the band can be heard in some of Janiak‘s punchthrough flourish in the low end, but the feeling of having arrived is palpable just the same as the initial chants begin, reminding the audience that this is a band who might consider the likes of Reverend Bizarre as peers, and whose roll has served as a catalyst for others in the style in the past. On a record brimming with doom, “The Fog” and “The Plague” both are especially doomed. A righteous culmination in “The Fog” after Simon‘s solo brings a crashout finish, and standalone guitar begins “The Plague” with due foreboding.
If “The Plague” is the payoff for the album as a whole — and it makes arguments for being thought of that way — then it’s all the more appropriate how much it reaffirms who The Gates of Slumber are while looking ahead to how that might continue to take shape over the course of this incarnation of the band. Slightly shorter than the song before, it is more willful in its slog, and thereby suitable to the subject of its title, and doubly notable for the coming together of Simon and Janiak for harmonies in the early hook before the song takes off on a Saint Vitus-esque shove leading to an eventual crawling return and shift back into that chorus, all the more effective the second time around for having so strongly declared itself the first. Even in that moment, the band remains identifiably The Gates of Slumber, but the element of ‘something new happening here’ isn’t to be discounted, and this isn’t the first time an established doom act has been richer sonically as a result of bringing Janiak on board. Some players make everyone around them sound better.
Whether or not “The Plague” is telling as to the future direction of The Gates of Slumber can’t really be known until when and if they do something after it, and a more immediate consideration is the fact that despite having significant ’00s and ’10s laurels to rest upon, they don’t, and that a crucial facet of this self-titled — the band stating in no uncertain terms this is who they are, right down to the minimalist black-on-black logo album cover because what’s the point of art or for that matter anything? — is what it adds to the scope of the band’s take on doom. It makes the record more than just a comeback for the band, reassuring that along with the grim point of view that’s informed their work all along and their commitment to a firm idea of what doom metal is and does, they’re finding spaces in which to progress and continuing to leave their stamp on the genre. The Gates of Slumber had long since earned a place among the finest American doom of the last 25 years. That they sound so hungry as well as so miserable results in an odd hopefulness for things to come. I’ll skip the hyperbole in the spirit of a band so clearly bent on purging bullshit from their sound, but at the very least, doom should be so lucky as to have The Gates of Slumber as the band’s hard-won new beginning.
Posted in Reviews on October 14th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Second week of the Fall 2024 Quarterly Review begins now. You stoked? Nah, probably not, but at least at the end of this week there will be another 50 records for you to check out, added to the 50 from last week to make 100 total releases covered. So, I mean, it’s not nothing. But I understand if it isn’t the make-or-break of your afternoon.
Last week was killer, and today gets us off to another good start. Crazy, it’s almost like I’m enjoying this. Who the hell ever heard of such a thing?
Quarterly Review #51-60:
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White Hills, Beyond This Fiction
New York’s own psychedelic heads on fire White Hills return with Beyond This Fiction, a collection of sounds so otherworldly and lysergic they can’t help but be real. Seven tracks range from the fluid “Throw it Up in the Air” to the bassy experimental new wave of “Clear as Day,” veering into gentle noise rock as it does before “Killing Crimson” issues its own marching orders, coming across like if you beamed Fu Manchu through the accretion disk of a black hole and the audio experienced gravitational lensing. “Fiend” brings the two sides together and dares to get a little dreamy while doing it, the interlude “Closer” is a wash of drone, and “The Awakening” is a good deal of drone itself, but topped with spoken word, and the closing title-track takes place light-years from here in a kind of time humans haven’t yet learned to measure. It’s okay. White Hills records will still be around decades from now, when humans finally catch up to them. I’m not holding my breath, though.
Five records deep into a tenure now more than a decade long, I feel like Demon Head are a band that are the answer to a lot of questions being asked. Oh, where’s the classic-style band doing something new? Who’s a band who can sound like The Cure playing black metal and be neither of those things? Where’s a band doing forward-thinking proto-doom, not at all hindered by the apparent temporal impossibility of looking ahead and back at the same time? Here they are. They’re called Demon Head. Their fifth album is called Through holes Shine the Stars, and its it’s-night-time-and-so-we-chug-different sax-afflicted ride in “Draw Down the Stars” is consuming as the band take the ’70s doomery of their beginnings to genuinely new and progressive places. The depth of vocal layering throughout — “The Chalice,” the atmo-doom sprawl of “Every Flatworm,” the rousing, swinging hook and ensuing gallop of “Frost,” and so on — adds drama and persona to the songs, and the songs aren’t wanting otherwise, with a dug-in intricacy of construction and malleable underlying groove. Seriously. Maybe Demon Head are the band you’re looking for.
You can call Earth Ship sludge metal, and you’re not really wrong, but you’re not the most right either. The Berlin-based trio founded by guitarist/vocalist Jan Oberg and bassist Sabine Oberg, plus André Klein on drums, offer enough crush to hit that mark for sure, but the tight, almost Ministry-esque vocals on the title-track, the way “Radiant” dips subtly toward psychedelia as a side-A-capping preface to the languid clean-sung nod of “Daze and Delights,” giving symmetry to what can feel chaotic as “Ethereal Limbo” builds into its crescendo, fuzzed but threatening aggression soon to manifest in “Acrid Haze,” give even the nastiest moments throughout a sense of creative reach. That is to say, Soar — which Jan Oberg also recorded, mixed and mastered at Hidden Planet Studio and which sees release through the band’s The Lasting Dose Records — resides in more than one style, with opener “Shallow” dropping some hints of what’s to come and a special lumber seeming to be dedicated to the penultimate “Bereft,” which proves to be a peak in its own right. The Obergs seem to split their time these days between Earth Ship and the somewhat more ferocious Grin. In neither outfit do they misspend it.
Bassist/vocalist Tommy Stewart (ex-Hallows Eve, owner of Black Doomba Records) once more sits in the driver’s seat of the project that shares his name, and with four new tracks Tommy Stewart’s Dyerwulf on Fyrewulf One — which I swear sounds like the name of a military helicopter or somesuch — offer what will reportedly be half of their third long-player with an intention toward delivering Fyrewulf Two next year. Fair enough. “Kept Pain Busy” is the longest and grooviest fare on offer, bolstered by the quirk of shorter opener “Me ‘n’ My Meds” and the somewhat more madcap “Zoomagazoo,” which touches on heavy rockabilly in its swing, with a duly feedback-inclusive cover of Bloodrock‘s “Melvin Laid an Egg” for good measure. The feeling of saunter is palpable there for the organ, but prevalent throughout the original songs as well, as Stewart and drummer Dennis Reid (Patrick Salerno guests on the cover) know what they’re about, whether it’s garage-punk-psych trip of “Me ‘n’ My Meds” the swing that ensues.
The narrative — blessings and peace upon it — presents A Grand Stream as the result of Smote guitarist Daniel Foggin and drummer Rob Law absconding to a cabin in the woods by a stream to write and record. There’s certainly escapism in it, and one might argue Smote‘s folk-tinged drone and atmospheric heavy meditations have always had an aspect of leaving the ol’ consciousness at the flung-open doors of perception, etc., but the 10-minute undulating-but-mostly-stationary noise in “Chantry” is still a lot to take. That it follows the 16-miinute “Coming Out of a Hedge Backwards,” laced with sitar and synth and other backing currents filling out the ambience, should be indicative of the sprawl of the over-70-minute LP to begin with. Smote aren’t strangers at this point to the expanse or to longform expression, but there still seems to be a sense of plunging into the unknown throughout A Grand Stream as they make their way deeper into the 18-minute “The Opinion of the Lamb Pt. 2,” and the rolling realization of “Sitting Stone Pt. 1” at the beginning resounds over all of it.
Hard to argue with Mammoth Caravan‘s bruising metallism, not the least because by the time you’d open your mouth to do so the Little Rock, Arkansas, trio have already run you under their aural steamroller and you’re too flat to get the words out. The six-song/36-minute Frostbitten Galaxy is the second record from the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Robert Warner, bassist/vocalist Brandon Ringo and drummer Khetner Howton, and in the willful meander of “Cosmic Clairvoyance,” in many of their intros, in the tradeoffs of the penultimate “Prehistoric Spacefarer” and in the clean-sung finale “Sky Burial,” they not only back the outright crush of “Tusks of Orion” and “Siege in the Stars,” as well as opener/longest track (immediate points) “Absolute Zero,” with atmospheric intention, but with a bit of dared melody that feels like a foretell of things to come from the band. On Frostbitten Galaxy and its correspondingly chilly 2023 predecessor Ice Cold Oblivion (review here), Mammoth Caravan have proven they can pummel. Here they begin the process of expanding their sound around that.
If you caught Harvestman‘s psychedelic dub and guitar experimentalism on Triptych Part One (review here) earlier this year, perhaps it won’t come as a shock to find former Neurosis guitarist/vocalist Steve Von Till, aka Harvestman, working in a similar vein on Triptych Part Two. There’s more to it than just heady chill, but to be sure that’s part of what’s on offer too in the immersive drone of “The Falconer” or the 10-minute “The Hag of Beara vs. the Poet (Forest Dub),” which reinterprets and plays with the makeup of opener “The Hag of Beara vs. the Poet.” “Damascus” has a more outward-facing take and active percussive base, while “Vapour Phase” answers “The Falconer” with some later foreboding synthesis — closer “The Unjust Incarceration” adds guitar that I’ve been saying for years sounds like bagpipes and still does to this mix — while the penultimate “Galvanized and Torn Open,” despite the visceral title, brings smoother textures and a steady, calm rhythm. The story’s not finished yet, but Von Till has already covered a significant swath of ground.
Following up on 2022’s successful debut full-length, Born of Obsidian, the 11-song/37-minute Of Amber and Sand highlights the UK outfit’s flexibility of approach as regards metal, sludge, post-heavy impulses, intricate arrangements and fullness of sound as conveyed through the production. So yes, it’s quite a thing. They quietly and perhaps wisely moved on from the bit of amateur anthropology that defined the MesoAmerican thematic of the first record, and as Of Amber and Sand complements the thrown elbows in the midsection of “Death No More” and the proggy rhythmmaking of “Fenjaan” with shorter interludes of various stripes, eventually and satisfyingly getting to a point in “Bell Tower,” “Neheh” and “Timekeeper” where the ambience and the heft become one thing for a few minutes — and that’s kind of a separate journey from the rest of the record, which turns back to its purposes with “Crux Ansata,” but it works — but the surrounding interludes give each song a chance to make its own impact, and Kurokuma take advantage every time.
SlugWeed, The Mind’s Ability to Think Abstract Thoughts
Do you think a band called SlugWeed would be heavy and slow? If so, you’d be right. Would it help if I told you the last single was called “Bongcloud?” The instrumental New England solo-project — which, like anything else these days, might be AI — has an ecosystem’s worth of releases up on Bandcamp dating back to an apparent birth as a pandemic project with the long-player The Power of the Leaf, and the 11-minute single “The Mind’s Ability to Think Abstract Thoughts” follows the pattern in holding to the central ethic of lumbering instrumental riffage, all dank and probably knowing about trichomes and such. The song itself is a massive chug-and-groover, and gradually opens to a more atmospheric texture as it goes, but the central idea is in the going itself, which is slow, plodding, and returns from its drift around a fervent chug that reminds of a (slower) take on some of what Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol had on offer earlier in the year. It probably won’t be long before SlugWeed return with anther single or EP, so “The Mind’s Ability to Think Abstract Thoughts” may just be a step on the way. Fine for the size of the footprint in question.
Dug-in solo krautistry from Tempe, Arizona’s Jeff Hopp, Man and Robot Society‘s Asteroid Lost comes steeped in science-fiction lore and mellow space-prog vibes. It’s immersive, and not a story without struggle or conflict as represented in the music — which is instrumental and doesn’t really want, need or have a ton of room for vocals, though there are spots where shoehorning could be done if Hopp was desperate — but if you take the trip just as it is, either put your own story to it or just go with the music, the music is enough to go on itself, and there’s more than one applicable thread of plot to be woven in “Nomads of the Sand” or the later “Man of Chrome,” which resonates a classic feel in the guitar ahead of the more vibrant space funk of “The Nekropol,” which stages a righteous keyboard takeover as it comes out of its midsection and into the theremin-sounding second half. You never quite know what’s coming next, but since it all flows as a single work, that becomes part of the experience Man and Robot Society offer, and is a strength as the closing title-track loses the asteroid but finds a bit of fuzzy twist to finish.
Posted in Whathaveyou on September 19th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
A quick fill from drummer Chuck Brown is all the ceremony The Gates of Slumber need to launch their studio return, as the title-track of their impending sixth album and first in 13 years, Embrace the Lie, soon unfolds with founding guitarist/vocalist Karl Simon dug wholly into the righteous Iommic doom on which the band cut their teeth in the aughts. “Embrace the Lie,” which also opens the record, is the first single to feature the new lineup of The Gates of Slumber, with Brown and bassist/vocalist Steve Janiak, both of whom handle guitar/vocals in Apostle of Solitude, and in its final verse as Janiak takes the lead vocal spot, it hints at new ideas taking shape in the band’s sound that one hopes will play out across the album to come.
The history of The Gates of Slumber is complex at this point, with Simon having put the band to rest in 2013 and the 2014 death of bassist Jason McCash, three years on from their till-now-final studio album, The Wretch (review here). Their 2019 reunion, which Simon discussed here, came after his founding of the band Wretch, which released a self-titled debut (review here) in 2016 and the next year followed up with the Bastards Born EP (discussed here). Embrace the Lie arrives as an endpoint for this winding path, and though The Gates of Slumber are moving forward with new players and a new album, their doom remains as downtrodden as ever, as “Embrace the Lie” hammers home its central thesis: we’re fucked.
The esteemed Svart Records will offer Embrace the Lie on Nov. 29, as the PR wire tells it:
The Gates of Slumber return with a new single out today, upcoming sixth album out in November via Svart Records
“I never intended to pick up with The Gates of Slumber ever again in 2014. While I did start the band and wrote most of the first album it was never intended to be a one man show.” -Karl Simon, 2024
Indiana’s True Doom Metal legends The Gates of Slumber return with a new album out on Svart Records in November. The self-titled album is the band’s first full length offering since The Wretch from 2011. First taste from the upcoming sixth album is out today. Listen to the new single Embrace the Lie, an ode to the lying news media and political talking heads, now.
The Gates of Slumber was formed by Karl Simon in 1998. Various people were in and out of the group between 1998 and 2001, when the Blood Encrusted Deth Axe demo was recorded with Jamie Walters of Boulder on drums and Dr. Phibes/Athenar (later to form the cult black metal band Midnight) on bass. In 2003 Jason McCash took over the bass duties and was a long-time member of the band until his untimely demise in 2014, after which Simon decided it was time to call it quits. That was until 2019 when the renowned metal festival Hell Over Hammaburg wanted to bring the band back on stage to perform at the festival’s 2020 edition. Simon reformed the band with its original member Chuck Brown on drums and Steve Janiak on bass and got back to work. “We’d been asked several times to play Hell Over Hammaburg. But there was no “we” to play. The germ of the idea started. We started re-learning songs from the first LP. It wasn’t too long into the rehearsals that we started coming up with new songs.”, states Simon.
After a reunion tour was finished, Covid kicked in to slow down the process. Half of the album was already written but the remaining half took its time, and the songs were left to stew in their juices. With bastard heavy songs honoring the Doom Metal greats Saint Vitus and Penance, straight forward bangers, lyrics inspired by the Black Death and John Carpenter’s The Fog, The Gates of Slumber is a truly crushing album and a must listen to any Doom Metal fanatic.
The Gates of Slumber is available on Svart exclusive black/white marble vinyl, limited transparent blue vinyl, black vinyl, CD, and digital platforms on November 29th, 2024.
Posted in Reviews on August 15th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Darkness and headphone-ready immersion pervade the second full-length from Göden, the offshoot project steered by former Winter guitarist Stephen Flam. And maybe that’s not a huge surprise after the band’s Svart-issued 2020 debut, Beyond Darkness (review here), set itself to the task of vivid, sometimes horrifying worldmaking, but Vale of the Fallen, in addition to continuing Flam‘s collaboration with vocalist Vas Kallas (Hanzel und Gretyl) and keyboardist Tony Pinnisi (also Winter), drummer Jason Frantz and violinist Margaret Murphy step back in to contribute to what feels like a more solidified lineup this time around. Where the debut was spliced through with dialogue-driven mythos across eight “Manifestations” and was 76 minutes long, Vale of the Fallen dwells differently in its 42-minute/10-track stretch, with “Manifestation IX” picking up the narrative where it left off and the dramaturge there combining with a deep focus on instrumental atmospherics throughout, whether that’s the violin-and-birdsong “The Divine” at the outset, the cinematic creeper drone that emerges from “Rings of Saturn” or the standalone-string resonance of Murphy‘s echo on the penultimate “The Requiem.”
The last of those follows “Manifestation IX” and brings to mind Celtic Frost in its title, and the more conceptual end of Tom G. Warrior‘s work is still relevant as an influence, but the palette has expanded on Vale of the Fallen, and the album is quick to demonstrate that in the industrial-style impact(s) of “In the Vale of the Fallen,” which finds Kallas‘ rasp topping a churn reminiscent of Author & Punisher as a preface to the closer “Majestic Symphony,” which bounces with low end beat and a more melodic/semi-spoken vocal in its ambient verse. Pinnisi‘s keyboard features as a crucial element in the mix of “In the Vale of the Fallen,” “Urania” and “Black Vortex” as well early on, conveying the bleakness of atmosphere at the same time it fleshes out the melody. A particularly crushing nod in “Death Magus” feels born out of more YOB-riffed cosmic-doom impulses; it’s not quite psychedelic, but there’s some ethereal reach happening in Flam‘s guitar, which is the root element of the material across the record’s span and of Göden more broadly, though as a group, they push against that notion in the bassy, keyboardy roll at the outset of “Black Vortex” and the double-kick lumber of low end beneath Kallas‘ throaty gnashing in “Zero” later on. With Flam also handling bass duties, “Zero” repeats its message of nothingness and lands on “zilch” twice — once headed into the bridge and again at the finish — for what feels like fair enough emphasis.
All the while, the air surrounding Vale of the Fallen is thick, severe. Even with a half-hour-plus chopped from the runtime and one dialogue-based inclusion as opposed to eight, the sophomore Göden outing retains the sense of actively challenging convention that in part defined the debut. It clearly does not believe in genre boundaries between doom, dark industrial and theatrical metal, and more than that, it is uncompromising in the interpretations of its own ideas of what the songs should be doing and how they interact. Whether it’s in one of the already-noted interludes or in the harsh cast of “Black Vortex” as the longest piece here at 7:10, Vale of the Fallen brings vivid, deep-grey-swirling mood as a matter of priority, and the combination of elements between Flam, Pinnisi and Kallas will feel definitive here for anyone who heard Beyond Darkness. That is to say, the newer LP is built on the accomplishments of its predecessor. It retains the spirit of experimentalism, be it in “Manifestation IX,” the noise of “Rings of Saturn” or the daringly uptempo push of “Majestic Symphony,” but comes across as more grounded in its foundation because, from the standpoint of its creators, it likely is. Göden took what they felt worked last time and used it as the basis for a to-this-point progression that is both palpably individual and that sounds like it still has more places to go.
To wit, the industrial metal dissonance, the continued narrative or thematic thread, and the abiding grimness to the proceedings here. There may or may not be more to the Göden story — I honestly don’t know — but the band sound more coherent, more intentional, in what they’re doing this time out, and rather than take away from the experimental feel, it adds to it and lets the material reside in a different space. The sounds remain extreme in their way. It’s not the bludgeoning of death metal or the searing char of genre-adherent black metal, but the songs are delivered with force and the unconventional ethic is in itself an extreme position, dug into the creation — the manifestation, if you prefer — of this lurching malevolence that Göden so readily foster. It’s true that in terms of the basic listening experience, Vale of the Fallen is more accessible than Beyond Darkness, but the scale at which they’re operating is subject to the same reality-warping sensibility as the songwriting itself, and as they find new avenues of expression for the stories they’re telling, their sound is likewise richer and less predictable than it would be if Vale of the Fallen operated more directly in answer to the methodology and structure of Beyond Darkness.
And honestly, that it doesn’t makes it an even more fitting follow-up than if Göden had simply done the same thing over and again, since so much of what the band bring to (dim, fog-dampened) light throughout Vale of the Fallen is the refusal to compromise in terms of the overarching vision — easy to read it as Flam‘s, but I won’t downplay anyone else’s contributions here — of what Göden are. Hearing what it brings to the later nod of “Black Vortex,” the interludes, and so on, I wouldn’t be surprised if the violin continued to be a growing presence in their sound when and if another full-length should be realized, but beyond that, should the personnel involved remain consistent, Göden are pointed in setting boundaries far in the distance, and the feeling of foreboding, the looming threat, the payoff, and the component mythology are all the more vivid for that. They carry an artistry dangerously close to unique.
This is it. This one’s for all the marbles. Well, actually there are no marbles involved, but if you remember way back like two weeks ago when this started out, I told you the tale of a hubristic 40-something dickweed blogger who thought he could review 100 albums in 10 days, and assuming I make it through the below without having an aneurysm — because, hey, you never know — today I get to live that particular fairy tale.
Lamp of the Universe Meets Dr. Space, Enters Your Somas
Who’s ready to get blasted out the airlock? New Zealand solo-outfit Lamp of the Universe, aka multi-instrumentalist Craig Williamson (also Dead Shrine, ex-Datura, etc.), and Portugal-residing synth master Dr. Space, aka Scott Heller of Øresund Space Collective, Black Moon Circle, and so on, come together to remind us all we’re nothing more than semi-sentient cosmic dust. Enters Your Somas is comprised of two extended pieces, “Enters Your Somas” (18:39) and “Infiltrates Your Mind” (19:07), and both resonate space/soul frequencies while each finds its own path. The title-track is more languid on average, where “Infiltrates Your Mind” reroutes auxiliary power to the percussive thrusters in its first half before drifting into drone communion and hearing a voice — vague, but definitely human speech — before surging back to its course via Williamson‘s drums, which play a large role in giving the material its shape. But with synthy sweeps from Heller, Mellotron and guitar coming and going, and a steady groove across both inclusions, Lamp of the Universe Meets Dr. Space offer galactic adventure limited only by where your imagination puts you while you listen.
Richmond, Virginia’s Inter Arma had no small task before them in following 2019’s Sulphur English (review here), but from the tech-death boops and bops and twists of New Heaven‘s leadoff title-track through the gothic textures of “Gardens in the Dark,” self-aware without satire, slow-flowing and dramatic, this fifth full-length finds them continuing to expand their creative reach, and at this point, whatever genre you might want to cast them in, they stand out. To wit, the blackdeath onslaught of “Violet Seizures” that’s also space rock, backed in that by the subsequent “Desolation’s Harp” with its classically grandiose solo, or the post-doom lumber of “Concrete Cliffs” that calls out its expanse after the seven-minute drum-playthrough-fodder extremity of “The Children the Bombs Overlooked,” or the mournful march of “Endless Grey” and the acoustic-led Nick Cavey epilogue “Forest Service Road Blues.” Few bands embrace a full spectrum of metallic sounds without coming across as either disjointed or like they’re just mashing styles together for the hell of it. Inter Arma bleed purpose in every turn, and as they inch closer to their 20th year as a band, they are masters unto themselves of this form they’ve created.
The opening “Chimera” puts Chasing Shadows quickly into a ritualized mindset, all the more as Warsaw meditative doomers Sunnata lace it and a decent portion of their 11-track/62-minute fifth album with an arrangement of vocals from guitarists Szymon Ewertowski and Adrian Gadomski and bassist/synthesist Michal Dobrzanski as drummer/percussionist Robert Ruszczyk punctuates on snare as they head toward a culmination. Individual pieces have their own purposes, whether it’s the momentary float of “Torn” or the post-Alice in Chains harmonies offset by Twin Peaks-y creep in “Saviours Raft,” or the way “Hunger” gradually moves from light to dark with rolling immersion, or the dancier feel with which “Like Cogs in a Wheel” gives an instrumental finish. It’s not a minor undertaking and it’s not meant to be one, but mood and atmosphere do a lot of work in uniting the songs, and the low-in-the-mouth vocal melodies become a part of that as the record unfolds. Their range has never felt broader, but there’s a plot being followed as well, an idea behind each turn in “Wishbone” and the sprawl is justified by the dug-in worldmaking taking place across the whole-LP progression, darkly psychedelic and engrossing as it is.
Among the most vital classic elements of The Sonic Dawn‘s style is their ability to take spacious ideas and encapsulate them with a pop efficiency that doesn’t feel dumbed down. That is to say, they’re not capitulating to fickle attention spans with short songs so much as they’re able to get in, say what they want to say with a given track, and get out. Phantom is their fifth album, and while the title may allude to a certain ghostliness coinciding with the melancholy vibe overarching through the bulk of its component material, the Copenhagen-based trio are mature enough at this stage to know what they’re about. And while Phantom has its urgent stretches in the early going of “Iron Bird” or the rousing “Think it Over,” the handclap-laced “Pan AM,” and the solo-topped apex of “Micro Cosmos in a Drop,” most of what they’re about here harnesses a mellower atmosphere. It doesn’t need to hurry, baby. Isn’t there enough rush in life with all these “21st Century Blues?” With no lack of movement throughout, some of The Sonic Dawn‘s finest stretches here are in low-key interpretations of funk (“Dreams of Change,” “Think it Over,” “Transatlantique,” etc.) or prog-boogie (“Scorpio,” “Nothing Can Live Here” before the noisier crescendo) drawn together by organ, subdued, thoughtful vocal melodies and craft to suit the organic production. This isn’t the first The Sonic Dawn LP to benefit from the band knowing who they are as a group, but golly it sure is stronger for that.
It’s not until the hook of second cut “Ohm Ripper” hits that Rifflord let go of the tension built up through the opening semi-title-track “Serpent Power,” which in its thickened thrashy charge feels like a specific callout to High on Fire but as I understand it is just about doing hard drugs. Fair enough. The South Dakota-based five-piece of bassist/vocalist Wyatt Bronc Bartlett, guitarists Samuel Hayes and Dustin Vano, keyboardist Tory Jean Stoddard and drummer Douglas Jennings Barrett will echo that intensity later in “Church Keys” and “Tumbleweed,” but that’s still only one place the 38-minute eight-track LP goes, and whether it’s the vocals calling out through the largesse and breadth of “Blessed Life” or the ensuing crush that follows in “LM308,” the addled Alice in Chains swagger in the lumber of “Grim Creeper” or the righteously catchy bombast of “Hoof,” they reach further than they ever have in terms of sound and remain coherent despite the inherently chaotic nature of their purported theme, the sheer heft of the tonality wielded and the fact that 39 Serpent Power has apparently been waiting some number of years to see release. Worth the wait? Shit, I’m surprised the album didn’t put itself out, it sounds so ready to go.
At the core of Mothman and the Thunderbirds is multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Alex Parkinson, and on the band’s second album, Portal Hopper, he’s not completely on his own — Egor Lappo programmed the drums, mixed, and plays a guitar solo on “Fractals,” Joe Sobieski guests on vocals for a couple tracks, Sam Parkinson donates a pair of solos to the cause — but it’s still very much his telling of the charmingly meandering sci-fi/fantasy plot taking place across the 12 included progressive metal mini-epics, which he presents with an energy and clarity of purpose that for sure graduated from Devin Townsend‘s school of making a song with 40 layers sound immediate but pulls as well from psychedelia and pop-punk vocals for an all the more emphatic scope. This backdrop lets “Fractals” get funky or “Escape From Flatwoods” hold its metallic chicanery with its soaring melody while “Squonk Kingdom” is duly over-the-top in its second-half chase soon enough fleshed out by “So Long (Portal Hopper)” ahead of the lightly-plucked finale “Attic.” The specificity of influence throughout Portal Hopper can be striking as clean/harsh vocals blend, etc., but given the narrative and the relative brevity of the songs complementing the whims explored within them, there’s no lack of character in the album’s oft-careening 38-minute course.
Given its pro-shop nature in production and performance, the ability of The Lunar Effect to grasp a heavy blues sound as part of what they do while avoiding either the trap of hyper-dudely navelgazing or cultural appropriation — no minor feat — and the fluidity of one piece into the next across the 40-minute LP’s two sides, I’m a little surprised not to have been sick of the band’s second album, Sounds of Green and Blue before I put it on. Maybe since it’s on Svart everyone just assumed it’s Finnish experimentalist drone? Maybe everybody’s burnt out on a seemingly endless stream of bands from London’s underground? I don’t know, but by the time The Lunar Effect make their way to the piano-laden centerpiece “Middle of the End” — expanding on the unhurried mood of “In Grey,” preceding the heavy blues return of “Pulling Daisies” at the start of side B that mirrors album opener “Ocean Queen” and explodes into a roll that feels like it was made to be the best thing you play at your DJ night — that confusion is a defining aspect of the listening experience. “Fear Before the Fall” picks on Beethoven, for crying out loud. High class and low groove. Believe me, I know there’s a lot of good stuff out already in 2024, but what the hell more could you want? Where is everybody?
Even if I were generally inclined to do so — read: I’m not — it would be hard to begrudge Portland heavy rock institution Danava wanting to do a live record after their 2023’s Nothing But Nothing (review here) found them in such raucous form. But the aptly-titled Live is more than just a post-studio-LP check-in to remind you they kick ass on stage, as side A’s space, classic, boogie, heavy rocking “Introduction/Spinning Temple” and “Maudie Shook” were recorded in 2008, while the four cuts on side B — “Shoot Straight with a Crooked Gun,” “Nothing but Nothing,” “Longdance,” “Let the Good Times Kill” and “Last Goodbye” — came from the European tour undertaken in Fall 2023 to support Nothing But Nothing. Is the underlying message that Danava are still rad 15 years later? Maybe. That certainly comes through by the time the solo in “Shoot Straight with a Crooked Gun” hits, but that also feels like reading too much into it. Maybe it’s just about representing different sides of who Danava are, and if so, fine. Then or now, psych or proto-thrashing, they lay waste.
A free three-songer from Varese, Italy’s Moonlit, Be Not Afraid welcomes the listener to “Death to the World” with (presumably sampled) chanting before unfurling a loose, somewhat morose-feeling nighttime-desert psych sway before “Fort Rachiffe” howls tonally across its own four minutes in more heavy post-rock style, still languid in tempo but encompassing in its wash and the amp-hum-and-percussion blend on the shorter “Le Conseguenze Della Libertà” (1:57) gives yet another look, albeit briefly. In about 11 minutes, Moonlit — whose last studio offering was 2021’s So Bless Us Now (review here) — never quite occupy the same space twice, and despite the compact presentation, the range from mid-period-QOTSA-gone-shoegaze (plus chanting! don’t forget the chanting!) to the hypnotic Isis-doing-space-push that follows with the closer as a but-wait-there’s-more/not-just-an-afterthought epilogue is palpable. I don’t know when or how Be Not Afraid was recorded, whether it’s portentous of anything other than itself or what, but there’s a lot happening under its surface, and while you can’t beat the price, don’t be surprised if you end up throwing a couple bucks Moonlit‘s way anyhow.
Much of Northern Lights is instrumental, but whether or not Leo Scheben is barking out the endtimes storyline of “Darkhammer” — stylized all-caps in the tracklisting — or “Night Terrors,” or just digging into a 24-second progression of lo-fi riffing of “Paranoid Isolation” and the Casio-type beats that back his guitar there and across the project’s 16-track latest offering, the reminder Doom Lab give is that the need to create takes many forms. From the winding scales of “Locrian’s Run” to “Twisted Logic” with its plotted solo lines, pieces are often just that — pieces of what might otherwise be a fleshed-out song — and Doom Lab‘s experimentalism feels paramount in terms of aural priorities. Impulse in excelsis. It might be for the best that the back-to-back pair “Nice ‘n’ Curvy” and “Let ’em Bounce” are both instrumental, but as madcap as Scheben is, he’s able to bring Northern Lights to a close with resonant homage in its title-track, and cuts like “Too Much Sauce on New Year’s Eve” and “Dark Matter” are emblematic of his open-minded approach overall, working in different styles sometimes united most by their rawness and uncompromising persona. This is number 100 of 100 records covered in this Quarterly Review, and nothing included up to now sounds like Doom Lab. A total win for radical individualism.
Posted in Whathaveyou on February 14th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Just a quick heads up to anyone not immediately in the borough’s sphere of influence as I am even way out here in the suburbs of my beloved Garden State, the proper pronunciation should be “Brooklyn New York,” three words, no comma. You don’t have to do a fake accent or make it cutesy, but that comma — which is correctly placed in the writing of Winter‘s impending live album, Live in Brooklyn, NY — is silent.
Between that and the fact that there’s a live release at all coming — Svart has it out April 19, like the header says — that’d probably be enough to get stoked on, but Winter‘s Stephan Flam also worked with Svart on the release of his dark experimental/conceptual outfit Göden, who yes, inherited a lot of Winter‘s pioneering extremity of doom, and it’s casually revealed below that a second Göden LP will be out this May. Considering we’re already starting to see release announcements for then, I’d expect word down the PR wire in the next couple weeks, since this will be first a month earlier.
In any case, a live Winter release from 2012 is probably the best thing one could hope for from them — I don’t know that a studio album would, could or should ever happen, but stranger things have — and a new Göden is sure to be far too weird for 99.9 percent of humans and all the more righteous for that. I look forward to hearing both the way one looks forward to plastic surgery — self-mutilation working toward a perceived good. They do that shit in stripmalls now. I feel like that alone makes a Winter live record necessary.
From the PR wire:
Svart Records are proud to release the first official live album from cult death doom band Winter!
In August and September of 2012, Winter participated in the “Power of the Riff East/West” series of concerts held in California and New York. After first playing the West Coast shows with bands like Pelican and Noothgrush among others, Winter returned to their hometown New York on September 2nd and played a show in Brooklyn’s Warsaw with their best line-up; Stephen Flam/Guitar, John Alman/Bass and vocals, Jim Jackson/Drums and original keyboardist Tony Pinnisi who played with the band first time since recording “Into Darkness” LP in 1989.
The rare appearance of this performance in Brooklyn, featuring all their classic tunes like “Servants of the Warsmen”, “Power and Might”, “Destiny, Eternal Frost” etc. was recorded, and is now presented here for all their fans. This isn’t any cheap nostalgia driven reunion cash out, but a real and raw deal. RISE!
Winter “Live in Brooklyn NY” vinyl, CD and t-shirts out 19.4.2024.
Winter’s spiritual successor Göden will release a new album on Svart Records in May 2024. More info on that will follow soon, so keep your eyes and ears open!
Posted in Reviews on October 4th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Wednesday, huh? I took the dog for a walk this morning. We do that. I’ve been setting the alarm for five but getting up before — it’s still better than waking up at 4AM, which is a hard way to live unless you can go to bed at like 8 on the dot, which I can’t really anymore because kid’s bedtime, school, and so on — and taking Tilly for a walk around the block and up the big hill to start the day. Weather permitting, we do that walk three times a day and she does pretty well. This morning she didn’t want to leave the Greenie she’d been working on and so resisted at first, but got on board eventually.
In addition to physical movement being tied to emotional wellbeing — not something I’m always willing to admit applies to myself, but almost always true; I also get hangry or at least more easily overwhelmed when I’m hungry, which I always am because I have like seven eating disorders and am generally a wreck of a person — the dog doesn’t say much and it’s pretty early and dark out when we go, so I get a quiet moment out under the moon going around the block looking up at Venus, Jupiter, a few stars we can see through the suburban light pollution of the nearby thoroughfares. We go up part of the big hill, have done the full thing a couple times, but she’s only just three-plus months, so not yet really. But we’re working on it, and despite Silly Tilly’s fears otherwise, her treat was right where we left it on the rug when we got back. And she got to eat leaves, so, bonus.
There are minutes in your day. You can find them. You can do it. I’m not trying to be saccharine or to bullshit you. Life is short and most of it is really, really difficult, so take whatever solace you can get however you can get it. Let’s talk about records.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
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Maggot Heart, Hunger
This is Maggot Heart‘s third record and they’re still a surprise. It can be jarring sometimes to encounter something that edges so close to unique within the underground sphere, but the Berlin outfit founded/fronted by Linnéa Olsson (ex-The Oath, ex-Grave Pleasures, ex-Sonic Ritual) offer bleak and subversively feminine post-punk informed by black metal on Hunger, and as she, bassist Olivia Airey and drummer Uno Bruniusson (ex-In Solitude, etc.), unfurl eight tracks of arthouse aggro and aesthetic burn, one can draw lines just as easily with “Nil by Mouth” or the later “Looking Back at You” to mid-’70s coke-strung New York poetic no wave and the modern European dark progressive set to which Maggot Heart have diligently contributed over the last half decade. The horn sounds on “LBD” are a nice touch, and “Archer” puts that to work in some folk-doom context, but in the tension of “Concrete Soup” or the avant garde setting out across the three minutes of the leadoff semi-title-track “Scandinavian Hunger,” Maggot Heart demonstrate their ability to knock the listener off balance as a first step toward reorienting them to the atmosphere the band have honed in these songs, slightly goth on “This Shadow,” bombastic in the middle and end of “Parasite,” each piece set to its own purpose adding some aspect to the whole. You wouldn’t call it easy listening, but the challenge is part of the fun.
Adjacent to New Psych Philly with their homebase in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and with a self-titled collection that runs between the shoegazing shine of “Deadzone,” the full-fuzz brunt of “Slack” or “Inside Out,” the three-minute linear build of “Fell Off” made epic by its melody, and the hooky indie sway of advance single “Be as One,” the trio Catatonic Suns make a quick turnaround from their 2022 sophomore LP, Saudade, for the lysergic realization and apparent declaration of this eight tracks/31 minutes. With most cuts punkishly short and able to saunter into the noise-coated jangle of “Failsafe” or the wash of “Sublunary” — speaking of post-punk — Catatonic Suns eventually land at closer “No Stranger,” which tops eight minutes and comprises a not-insignificant percentage of the total runtime. And no, they aren’t the first heavy psych band to have shorter songs up front and a big finale, but the swirling layered triumph of “No Stranger” carries a breadth in its immersive early verses, mellow, sitar-laced midsection jam and noise-caked finish and comes across very much as what Catatonic Suns has been building toward all the while. The same might be true of the band, for all I know — it seems to be the longest piece they’ve written to-date — but either way, put them on the ‘Catatonic Voyage’ tour with Sun Voyager for two months crisscrossing the US and never look back. Big sound, and after three full-lengths, significant potential.
Densely weighted in tone, brash in its impact and heavy, heavy, heavy in atmosphere, Sacri Suoni‘s second album together and first under their new moniker (they used to be called Stoned Monkey; kudos on the change), Sacred is Not Divine positions itself as a cosmic doom thesis and an exploration of the reaches and impacts to be found through collaborative jamming. Four songs make it — “Doom Perspection of the Astral Frequency 0-1” (8:15), “Six Scalps for Six Sounds” (10:28), “Cult of Abysmus” (13:15) and “Plutomb, Engraved in Reality” (8:02) — and as heavy has they are (have I mentioned that yet?) there is dynamic at play as well in the YOB-ish noodles and strums at the start of “Six Scalps for Six Sounds” or in “Cult of Abysmus” around the 10-minute mark, or in the opener’s long fade, but make no mistake, the mission here is heft and space and the Milano outfit have both in ready supply. I think “Plutomb, Engraved in Reality” has maybe three riffs? Might be two, but either way, it’s enough. The character in this material is defined by its weight, but there are three dimensions to their style and all are represented. If you listen on headphones, try really hard not to pulverize your brain in the process.
Earthy enough in tone and their slower rolling moments to earn an earliest-Acid King comparison, Barrie, Ontario’s Nova Doll are nonetheless prone to shifting into bits of aggro punk, as in “Waydown” or “Dead Before I Knew It,” the latter of which closes their debut album, Denaturing, the very title of the thing loaded with context beyond its biochemical interpretations. That is, if Nova Doll are pissed, fair enough. “California Sunshine” arrives in the first half of the seven-song/29-minute long-player, with rhythm kept on the toms, open drones and a vastness that speaks at least to some tertiary affect of desert rock on their sound. Psychedelia comes through in different forms amid the crunch of a song like “Mabon,” or “California Sunshine,” and the bassy centerpiece near-title-track feels willfully earthbound — not complaining; they’re that much stronger for changing it up — but the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Casey Cuff, bassist Sean Alten and drummer Daniel Allen ride that groove in “Denaturation” like they already know the big spaceout in “Light Her Up” is coming. And they probably did, given the apparent care put into what is sometimes a harsh presentation and the variety they bring around the central buzz that seems to underscore the songs. Grown-up punk, still growing, but their sound is defined and malleable in its noisy approach on their first full-length, and that’s only encouraging.
With their self-released debut album, In Line for the End Times, hard-driving single-guitar four-piece Howl at the Sky enter the field with 12 songs and a CD-era-esque 55-minute run that filters through a summary of decades of heavy rock and roll influences. From their native state of Ohio alone, bands like Valley of the Sun and Lo-Pan, or Tummler and Red Giant a generation ago — these and others purveying straight-ahead heavy rock light on tricks and big on drive. More metal in their riffy underpinnings than some, certainly less than others, they foster hooks whether it’s a three-minute groover like “Stink Eye” and opener “Our Lady of the Knives” or the more spacious “Dry as a Bone” and the penultimate “Black Lung,” which has a bit more patience in its sway than the C.O.C.-circa-’91 “The Beast With No Eyes” and modernize ’70s vibes in the traditions of acts one might find on labels like Ripple or Small Stone. That is, rock dudes, rockin’. Vocalist Scott Wherle bears some likeness to We’re All Gonna Die‘s Jim Healey early on, but both are working from a classic heavy rock and metal foundation, and Wherle has a distinguishing, fervent push behind him in guitarist Mike Shope, bassist Scot “With One ‘T'” Fithen and drummer John Sims. For as long as these guys are together, I wouldn’t expect too many radical departures from what they do here. Once a band has its songwriting down like this, it’s really more just about letting grow on its own over time rather than forcing something, and the sense they give in listening is they know that too.
The first two four-song EPs by Buenos Aires psych/post-rock four-piece Fin del Mundo — guitarist/vocalist Lucia Masnatta, guitarist Julieta Heredia, bassist Julieta Limia, drummer/backing vocalist Yanina Silva — wander peacefully through a dreamy apocalypse compiled together chronologically as Todo Va Hacia el Mar, the band’s Spinda Records first long-player. From “La Noche” through “El Fin del Mundo,” what had been a 2020 self-titled, the tones are serene and the melodies drift without getting lost or meandering too far from the songs’ central structure, though that last of them reaches broader and heavier ground, resonance intact. The second EP, 2022’s La Ciudad Que Dejamos, the LP’s side B, has more force behind its rhythms and creates a wash in “El Próximo Verano” to preface its gang-vocal moment, while closer “El Incendio” takes the Sonic Youth-style indie of the earlier material and fosters more complex melodicism around it and builds tension into a decisive but not overblown resolution. It’s 34 minutes long and even between its two halves there’s obvious growth on the part of the band being showcased. Their next long-player will be like a second debut, and I’ll be curious how they take on a full-length format having that intention in the first place for the material.
A pandemic-born project (and in some ways, aren’t we all?), the two-piece instrumentalist unit Bloody Butterflies — that’s guitarist/bassist Jon Howard (Hordes) and drummer August Elliott (No Skull) — released their first album, Polymorphic, in 2020 and emerge with a follow-up in the seven tracks/27 minutes of the on-theme Mutations and Transformations, letting the riffs do their storytelling on cuts like “Toilet Spider” and “Frandor Rat,” the latter of which may or may not be in homage to a rat living near the Kroger on the east side of Lansing. The sound is punker raw and as well it should be. That aforementioned ratsong has some lumber to its procession, but in the bassy “Fritzi” that follows, the bright flashes of cymbal in opener “BB Theme” (also the longest inclusion; immediate points) and the noisy declaration of post-doom stomp before the feedback at the end of “Wormhole” consumes all and the record ends, they find plenty of ways to stage off monochromatism. Actually, what I suspect is they’re having fun. At least that’s what it sounds like, in a very particular way. Fair enough. It would be cool to have some clever lesson learned from the pandemic or something like that, but no, sometimes terrible shit just happens. Cool for these two getting a band out of it. Take the wins you can get.
Whilst prone to NWOBHM tapping twists of guitar in the leads of “Alien Hunter,” “Quicksilver Trail,” etc. and burling up strains of ’90s metal and a modern heavy sub-burl that adds nuance to its melodies, Solar Sons‘ fifth album, Another Dimension, arrives at its ambitions organically. The Dundee, Scotland, everybody-sings three-piece of bassist/lead vocalist Rory Lee, guitarist/vocalist Danny Lee and drummer/vocalist Pete Garrow embark with purpose on a narrative structure spread across the nine songs/62 minutes of the release that unveils more of its progressive doom character as it unfolds its storyline about a satellite sent to learn everything it can about the universe and return to save a dying Earth — science-fiction with a likeness to the Voyager probes; “The Voyage” here makes a triumph of its keyboard-backed second-half solo — presumably with alien knowledge. It’s not a minor undertaking in either theme or the actual listening time, but hell’s bells if Another Dimension doesn’t draw you in. Something in the character has me feeling like I can’t tell if it’s metal or rock or prog and yes I very much like that about it. Plenty of room for them to be all three, I guess, in these songs. They finish with the swing and shred and stomp of “Deep Inside the Mountain,” so I’ll just assume everything works out cool for homo sapiens in the long run, conveniently ignoring the fact that doing so is what got us into such a mess in the first place.
A 5:50 single to answer back to last year’s second long-player, Only the Dead Know Our Secrets (review here), the latest from Mosara — which is actually an older track given some reworking, vocals and ambience, reportedly — is “Amena,” which immediately inflicts the cruelty of its thud only as a seeming preface for the Conan-like grueling-ultradoom-battery-with-shouts-cutting-through about to take place. A slow, noise-coated roll unfolds ahead of the largely indecipherable verse, and when that’s done, a cymbal seems to get hit extra hard as though to let everyone know it’s time to really dig in. It is both rawer in its harshness and thicker in tone than the last album, so it puts forth the interesting question of what a third Mosara full-length might bring atmospherically to the mix with their deepening, distorted roil. As it stands, “Amena” is both a steamroller of riff and a meditation, holding back only for as long as it takes to slam into the next measure, with its sludge growing more and more hypnotic as it slogs through the song’s midsection toward the inevitable seeming end of feedback and drone. Noisy band getting noisier. I’m on board.
Jupiter‘s Uinumas is a complex half-hour-plus that comprises their fourth full-length, running seven songs — that’s six plus the penultimate title-track, which is a psych-jazzy interlude — as cuts like “Lumerians” and “Relentless” at the outset see the Finnish trio reestablish their their-own-wavelength take on heavy and progressive sounds classic and new. It’s not so much about crazy structures or 75-minute-long songs or indulgent noodling — though there’s a bit of that owing to the nature of the work, if nothing else — but just how much Jupiter make the aural space they inhabit their own, the way “After You” pushes into its early wash, or the later “On Mirror Plane” (so that’s it!) spaces out and then seems to align itself around the bassline for a forward shuffle sprint, or the way that closer “Slumberjack’s Wrath” chugs through until it’s time for the blowout, which is built up past three minutes in and caps with shimmer that borders on the overwhelming. An intricate but recognizable approach, Jupiter‘s more oddball aspects and general cerebrality might put off some listeners, but as dug in as Jupiter are on Uinumas, on significantly doubts they were shooting for mass appeal anyhow. Who the hell would want that anyway? Bunch of money and people sweating everything you do. Yuck.
