Posted in audiObelisk on May 27th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
Dually-umlauted Virginian heavy trio Üga Büga release their second album, Valley of the Wolf (review here), on June 5 through Louisville’s Third House Communications. Premiering on the Bandcamp player below is “The Sand Witch,” which bears out the record’s blend of metal and heavy rock, sharpened turns of riff toned like a fuller version of a Dio record with rocker-burl vocals over top. It’s a dudely affect, and they’re not the first to employ it, but neither is the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Calloway Jones, bassist Niko Cvetanovich, and drummer Jimmy Czywczynski (which I would pronounce “chiv-chinski,” and wonder if I’m right) wanting for self-awareness in their presentation, if the hairless cats in the photo above didn’t already make the point. “The Sand Witch” is the whopping fourth single from Valley of the Wolf, so if you haven’t gotten an idea of where they’re coming from as yet, the opportunity is certainly there, figuratively as well as literally on the same player.
And whether or not you caught wind of Üga Büga‘s 2024 debut, Year of the Hog (review here), Valley of the Wolf tells its story in clear and unmistakable terms, fusing genre elements across the chugging “Earthsuckers” and the more aggressive crunch of “Divination,” groove underlying all as they go, even the purposefully atmospheric “Ghost in the Diamond Cage” and the foreboding drum-thud and keyboard cycles of the penultimate intro/interlude “Descent” ahead of the extended and part-thrashy finale “Revolting Power.” It may be there’s a narrative at work lyrically, but when I say ‘story’ above, I mean the one about who the band are in terms of sound. Jones has a clear background in metal vocalizing — his harsher shouts and screams feel like not the first time he’s scoured his vocal cords for the cause — and the trio are able to thread between rock and metal all the more for their variety of purpose, each piece offering something to add to the entirety. Not a new idea for how to work an album, by any means, but put to effective use on the careening “Motorhog” and elsewhere. Is someone in this band a fan of At the Gates?
Having multiple songwriters, as they proport to in the PR wire below, having initially played Jones‘ compositions, accounts for some of that intent-diversity, but largely straightforward structures — and by that I mean straight to your likely-unsuspecting face — melody and rhythmic sweep keep the proceedings accessible, at least for the converted. That is to say, Valley of the Wolf isn’t without its challenging aspects, but it does successfully bridge its different sides together, sounding like a cohesive whole rather than ‘now-we-thrash-now-we-riff,’ not that that can’t also have an appeal. Like its righteous comic-style cover art, the album is busy and colorful in the details, but if you step back and take it in as an entirety, it forms a coherent, single thing. It just roughs you up a little bit in the process of doing so.
The preorder link and more info follows the song on the player below, courtesy of the PR wire.
Hailing from Virginia, Üga Büga fuses influences like Mastodon, Soundgarden, High on Fire, and The Mars Volta into a genre-bending force of rock and heavy metal. Their forceful sound is matched by fantastical lyrics of post-apocalyptic hog men, sinister wizards, and dual-wielding warriors tearing through landscapes on motorcycles—evoking scenes similar to the worlds of TMNT, Dragon Ball, and other classic comics and cartoons. Riding high after their 2024 debut album, Year of the Hog, ÜGA BÜGA is set to unleash their next chapter, Valley of the Wolf.
Formed in mid-2021, ÜGA BÜGA experimented with various lineups and styles before solidifying their current lineup in November 2022, featuring singer/guitarist Calloway Jones, bassist Niko Cvetanovich, and drummer Jimmy Czywczynski. This lineup infused their own diverse styles into a collection of songs written by Calloway Jones, reshaping them into a cohesive and undeniably heavier sound—one that would define their debut album, Year of the Hog. Now, the band writes collaboratively, with each member’s contributions playing a crucial role in shaping their evolving sound.
Posted in Reviews on March 23rd, 2026 by JJ Koczan
Hope you had a banner weekend. Last week was pretty slammed. As ever, I’m like three days’ worth of news behind, and this is still just the penultimate day of the Spring 2026 Quarterly Review, so there may yet be more creative ways for me to find to shoot myself in the ass and make myself feel overwhelmed because… well anyway, stick around, folks!
In all seriousness, considering The Patient Mrs. was away last week — who schedules these things? — and my daughter spent two and a half of five possible days at school, I came through it pretty well. I’m just tired and I missed my wife while she was gone. Ain’t no sunshine, and so on.
We wrap up tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
Quarterly Review #51-60:
Godzilla Was Too Drunk to Destroy Tokyo, Sideral Voivod
Fuzz rockers Godzilla Was Too Drunk to Destroy Tokyo — or Godzilla WTDTDT, if you want to go by how they abbreviate their Instagram — give automatic impressions of quirk, and their most realized work to-date, their second full-length, Sideral Voivod, thankfully has more going for it than the in-genre radness of the band’s moniker. Based on the coast of Northern Italy, the trio of bassist/vocalist Sara de Luca, guitarist Alessandro “Camu” Camurati and drummer Nicola Viola find a place between art-punk and weighted fuzz, each piece contained in itself and its intention, but feeding into a tense flow with periodic blowouts like “Telekinetic Thunder Yeti” or “Space Leech,” somewhere between Black Flag and Black Sabbath, while “Worship the Middle” makes the latter allegiance plainer. It might sound like it’s coming at you flailing, but the really dangerous thing is I think Godzilla Was Too Drunk to Destroy Tokyo might know what they’re doing. Imagine that.
Ritual Arcana‘s Heavy Psych Sounds-issued debut offers cultish bikerisms and doomed roll, never quite veering into caricature as classic-styled modern cult-heavy does, but kept aligned to a central tonal weight as heard in the atmospheric “Berkana” or in the nodding “Occluded.” The band is comprised of SharLee LuckyFree on bass/vocals, Scott “Wino” Weinrich (The Obsessed, et al) on guitar, and Oakley Munson (The Black Lips) on drums, and some of the roll throughout is recognizably Weinrich‘s style, but in a song like the declarative “Free Like a Pirate” or “Road Burnt,” there are elements that speak to the songwriting collaboration taking shape in their darkly-presented but still accessible style, and with that in mind, those finding their way to Ritual Arcana through their guitarist’s sundry projects will find Ritual Arcana harnessing something distinct from all of them. I’ll be curious to hear how the balance between push and dwell Ritual Arcana lay out here comes to fruition over the longer term, and by that I mean it’s an exploration worth following.
New Brass Hearse? Well hello. The Boston-based outfit fronted and I think steered by the classic-psych-meets-weirdo-doom-melancholia whims of frontman Ron Rochondo present their first single in six years with the four-minute “Salem Rain,” which sets its drunken-singalong of a hook “Let’s go to Salem in the rain” at the foundation of its intent. Musically, the song is wistful in the guitar and starts as backing ambience as the lyrics immediately begin a conversation leading to the suggestion in the chorus — at one point there’s even mention of the Willows, wihch is a park in town — which is forward in the mix and presented in layers as an escape from monotony. In the final minute, they depart the verse/chorus format and over complementary guitar, finish out with a Beach Boys-y vocal arrangement, toying with that notion of sentimental sounds but coming across as sincere in the delivery. As in maybe the song really does want to get out of here for a while and go hang out in the park and smoke cigarettes and whatnot. Fair.
If you might read ‘three songs/79 minutes’ and that’s a lot, well, the three songs are actually part of the same overarching movement — it’s all one song — so yes, the good doctors Paradiso and Space (also Øresund Space Collective) aren’t kidding when they allude to operating at a planetary scale. “Swampworld” is the name of all three tracks (broken down as Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and the longform drone marked by croaking sounds and vague mists of synthesizer indeed evokes things alien, humid and teeming with unseen animal life. Surely the power of suggestion plays a role there, but I don’t think that’s invalidating. If you looked at a museum painting of a swamp world and it was called ‘Swampworld’ and it brought to mind a swampy kind of world, would you say it was using the power of suggestion? That’s art. Liquid Planetscapes‘ immersion requires a willing participant, but if you’re able to get yourself in a state of mind open to its happening-on-a-different-scale-of-time procession, the sense of journey is duly otherworldly, and warm besides.
Boston despondent sludge metallers Mollusk made their debut a decade ago with Children of the Chron (review here), and they’ve reportedly had Cursebreaker in the works since not long after, but if the seven songs (six and a demo) have been seasoned for the years between, don’t worry, you’d never know it from the sheer pummel they elicit. “Trapped in a Cave” opens with telltale density and plod, and though the subsequent “Azathoth” and “Two Things” might up the tempo or delve into willful repetition, the downer cast remains right into and through “Human Suffering” and the closing linear build of “Apostle,” which is immediately backed by its own demo, which is even rawer and dirtier feeling than the proper album track just before. However long it’s been in the making, rest assured it sounds like they just dug it up. Fresh, in that way.
Maybe the proggiest thing about Berlin instrumental three-piece Zahn is the sense of adventure they bring to their songcraft, the feeling of intention behind what they do, even when it’s an idea that probably came about spontaneously. Their heavy, electronics-infused sound is always textured and atmospheric, and Purpur‘s eight songs fit that mold more than they fit any other, as Felix Gebhard, Chris Breuer and Nic Stockmann range through the futurism of “Diaabend,” or go big-riff in the later build-into-crush of “Katamaran” or “Atoll,” start dancey and post-punk with “Stroboskop” or finish hypnotic with a build around the central strum of “Butter.” If there’s middle-ground to be had, it might be in “Alhambra,” but middle-ground isn’t necessarily what I’m looking for when they’ve got the rad electro-density mashup of “Gensher” instead. Zahn don’t always want to be very, very heavy, but they keep their ability to get there in use as one of the many tools of their craft.
Prophets of Thwaites, Vulnerant Omnes Ultima Necat
Preceded only by demos and rehearsal recordings, Vulnerant Omnes Ultima Necat is the first EP from the Netherlands’ Prophets of Thwaites — comprised of guitarist/vocalist Esma Larabi, bassist Ferry Vermeeren and drummer Nico Beemster — who with it offer two dug-in slabs of atmospheric doom/post-metal in “Deadlock” (7:32) and “Vulnerant Omnes Ultima Necat” (6:38); probably too long to press to a 7″, and well enough to give an impression of the spaciousness of their sound, whether that’s in the vocals and corresponding plod of the former or the squibbly solo as the title-cut works into its final minute. The vocals come through too clearly to really feel shoegazey in my mind (like, I would expect more effects on Larabi‘s voice in a ‘gazier context), but I don’t think that hurts them so much as it sets the band up for a more individualized exploration as they continue to grow. They make it easy to look forward to where they might be headed.
Tokyo bass-and-drum duo Shizumunamari offer the two-song Nov. 2025 sophomore full-length Nagasugita Genjitsu as a herald of what the band calls the ‘New Wave of Japanese Doom Metal’ (sadly not called the ‘New Wave of Japanese Weirdo Doom’), and shit, here’s hoping. With Namari Toyama on vocals, bass and keys and Ebianime on drums, “Nagayama” (14:34) celebrates raw tones and drawling vocals, reminding of some of Queen Elephantine‘s open-air Cisnerosism, but less directly meditative in style and sneaking in a dub break later on before they bring back the nod to close and let “Nagai Kyoku” (22:17) begin its longform procession with a grungier intro and a persistent roll punctuated with crash cymbal and building on the original vocal reachout. They use minimalism more in “Nagai Kyoku,” and the late-arriving organ sounds don’t detract from that, but “Nagai Kyoku” sounds like it could easily kepe going when it ends. Shizumunamari took six years before following up their first record. Hopefully their third comes on a shorter turnaround and we can really get this ‘wave’ going. I’m ready for it.
Desert Collider, Generation Ship: Endless Drift Through Infinity
Generation Ship: Endless Drift Through Infinity is the ambitious, sci-fi-conceptual (at least semi-conceptual) debut full-length from Italian desert-style heavy rockers Desert Collider, delivered through Small Stone and Kozmik Artifactz. I don’t know if they’re setting up a continuity, if all their releases forever will be telling metaphorical tales under the banner of ‘Generation Ship,’ or when the thematic emerged from the material. But it rocks. For a highlight, one might suggest either “Sonic Carver,” where they hit hard and space out in the back half, or the 13-minute “Far Centaurus: Drifting without Guidance through Interstellar Space,” which takes stoner ambience and uses it as the basis for a dynamic, melodic and Mellotron-inclusive build. They’re able to play back and forth between immediacy and atmospherics (though “Nomads of the Red Sun” starts and stays acoustic), and while they’re on familiar ground stylistically, the push for an individual point of view is there, musically as well as in the presentation. Guess we’ll see where their journeys take them.
Get up. Such is the clear message of Üga Büga at the outset of Valley of the World as the Virginian trio of Calloway Jones (guitar, keys, vocals), Niko Cvetanovich (bass, backing vocals, more keys), and Jimmy Czywczynski (drums, backing vocals, consonants) approach sludge from a distinctively metallic place. Double-kick drumming, sharp-cornered structures, and vocals that veer before declarative melody and screams all feed into an overarching sense of aggression, even if the grooves themselves aren’t bludgeoning. Is it party metal? I wouldn’t tell you no, but don’t take that as “it’s stupid,” because the complexity even in the breakdown of “Nail That Binds” speaks to the consideration given to these parts and songs. That said, “The Sand Witch” (the sandwich?) thumps in a way that feels like it wants you to clap along at the show, and the chug and lurch of “Earthsuckers” early on stays on the beat, so put that with the thrashing in “Divination” and the big rolling finish in eight-minute closer “Revolting Power” and you get some picture of where they’re at on the idea of your good time.
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 19th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
It was like two weeks ago that The Knights of Doom 2026 — the inaugural edition of a two-dayer put on by JB Matson and the crew from Maryland Doom Fest, which ended its decade-plus run in 2025 — announced the first names for its lineup. The full bill has been revealed since, and if you’re getting mini-MDDF vibes off the list of names, many of whom are veterans of past years, I don’t think that’s unfair, but there are some newcomers as well. And if you do some quick division on 35 bands over two days, you know that’s 17.5 per day — actually it’s 16 on June 20 and 19 on June 21; yes I had to count — so those days are probably going to start early, go late, and be jam-packed in a spirit that should be familiar to anyone who hit MDDF during its time.
You can see how this might go, right? Folks show up for the family reunion — and MDDF was very, very much that; a more loyal crew would be hard to find on the Eastern Seaboard if you even deigned to look — and bands get added. This year is two days. It’s got room to grow, and I don’t know if it will — on some level, these folks have been-there-done-that in terms of building a festival culture and vibe, let alone managing four days’ worth of logistics with 50-plus bands shuffling about — but this will be the starting point one way or the other. It can only happen first once, and with love and respect for many in that family from a little ways north, I hope it goes off without a hitch.
The announcements were made on social media:
💀KNIGHTS OF DOOM ‘26 final band dump / rosters / complete lineup!!!
Wolftooth, Vanishing Kids, Foghound, Crop, Moonsinger, Uga Buga, Clamfight, Sun Voyager, Locust Pointe, End of Age, Thunderbird Divine, Black Manta, Bog Wizard, Faith in Jane, Black Night, Tommy Stewart’s Dyerwulf
June 21:
Lie Heavy, Borracho, Stone Nomads, Curse the Son, Bloodshot, Stormtoker, Hovel, Mourn the Light, Thunder Horse, Kulvera, Born of Plagues, Dreadstar, Professor Emeritus, Strange Highways, Gravedigger’s Biscuits, Grave Next Door, Double Planet, Bleak Shore, Burn the Martyr
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 3rd, 2025 by JJ Koczan
I’m not sure if this is everybody playing next year’s Legalize Lex, or just Legalize, at Al’s Bar in Lexington, Kentucky. This year had 17, and this is 14 bands, so if they’ve pared it down a bit, fair enough, but it’s also next April, so if they’re allowing for a couple others to get on board or for plans to chance, also fair enough. Note that Hashtronaut, Crop, Swamp Hawk, Shi and Veilcaste played this year’s Legalize, and a couple repeats year to year, friends and associated acts, is part of building a festival culture as well.
One assumes Spotlights will headline, and Hashtronaut and Crop would seem to have moved up the bill as well. Crystal Spiders will surely be awesome, and Fairie Ring and Doomsday Profit and Insomniac and well basically I’m just listing names at this point because I think the bands are cool and somehow you’re just supposed to get that reading. Come on, man. You were at that Insomniac gig in Brooklyn, right? Talking to myself and Gavin Zollo because I don’t think Ron actually reads. Ha. I don’t think anybody reads.
I digress. Driving untold hours to stand around a place to see bands? Sounds right up my alley. Not even joking:
Legalize Lex 2026
Hello everyone, we had a couple of errors on the initial release post and we want to make sure we represent all our bands the best we can, so we’re reposting this bad boi! We definitely appreciated all of your likes and comments the first time around, your support means the world to us. If you feel so inclined, please share this post so we can keep spreading the word! Year 3 is gonna be a banger! Excited to see you all!
Lineup: Spotlights Hashtronaut Crop Crystal Spiders Swamp Hawk Faerie Ring Uga Buga Insomniac Doomsday Profit Veilcaste Dead Vibes Ensemble Shi Acromancer Blonde Cauldron
Posted in Reviews on October 9th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
I have to stop and think about what day it is, so we must be at least ankle-deep in the Quarterly Review. After a couple days, it all starts to bleed together. Wednesday and Thursday just become Tenrecordsperday and every day is Tenrecordsperday. I got to relax for about an hour yesterday though, and that doesn’t always happen during a Quarterly Review week. I barely knew where to put myself. I took a shower, which was the right call.
As to whether I’ll have capacity for basic grooming and/or other food/water-type needs-meeting while busting out these reviews, it’s time to find out.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
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Vibravoid, We Cannot Awake
Of course, the 20-minute title-track head rock epic “We Cannot Awake” is going to be a focal point, but even as it veers into the far-out reaches of candy-colored space rock, Vibravoid‘s extended B-side still doesn’t encompass everything offered by the album that shares its name. Early cuts “Get to You” and “On Empty Streets” and “The End of the Game” seem to regard the world with cynicism that’s well enough earned on the world’s part, but if Vibravoid are a band out of time and should’ve been going in the 1960s, they’ve made a pretty decent run of it despite their somewhat anachronistic existence. “We Cannot Awake” is for sure an epic, and the five shorter tracks on side A are a reminder of the distinguished songwriting of Vibravoid more than 30 years on from their start, and as it’s a little less explicitly garage-rooted than their turn-of-the-century work, it further demonstrates just how much the band have brought to the form over time, with ‘form’ being relative there for a style that’s so molten. Some day this band will get their due. They were there ahead of the stoners, the vintage rockers, the neopsych freaks, and they’ll probably still be there after, acid-coating dystopia as, oh wait, they already are.
Taking influence from the earlier-Mastodon style of twist-and-gallop riffing, adding in vocal harmonies and their own progressive twists, West Virginia’s Horseburner declare themselves with their third album, Voice of Storms, establishing a sound based on immediacy and impact alike, but that gives the listener respite in the series of interludes begun by the building intro “Summer’s Bride” — there’s also the initially-acoustic-based “The Fawn,” which delivers the album’s title-line before basking in Alice in Chains-circa Jar of Flies vibes, and the dream-into-crunch of the penultimate “Silver Arrow,” which is how you kill Ganon — that have the effect of spacing out some of the more dizzying fare like “Hidden Bridges” and “Heaven’s Eye” or letting “Diana” and closer “Widow” each have some breathing room to as to not overwhelm the audience in the record’s later plunge. Because once they get going, as “The Gift” picks up from “Summer’s Bride” and sets them at speed, the trio dare you to keep pace if you can.
Some pressure on Dune-themed Montreal heavy rockers Sons of Arrakis as they follow-up their well-received 20222 debut, Volume I (review here) with the 10-track/33-minute Volume II. The metal-rooted riff rockers have tightened the songwriting and expanded the progressive reach and variety of the material, a song like “High Handed Enemy” drawing from an Elder-style shimmer and setting it to a pop-minded structure. Smooth in production and rife with melody, Volume II isn’t without its edge as shown early on by “Beyond the Screen of Illusion,” and after the thoughtful melodicism of “Metamorphosis,” the burst of energy in “Blood for Blood” prefaces the blowout in “Burn Into Blaze” before the outro “Caladan” closes on an atmospheric note. No want of dynamic or purpose whatsoever. I’ve seen less hype on the interwebs about Volume II than I did its predecessor, and that’s just one of the very many things to enjoy about it.
Classic heavy metal is fortunate to have the likes of Crypt Sermon flying its flag. The Philadelphia-based outfit continue on The Stygian Rose to stake their claim somewhere between NWOBHM and doom in terms of style — there are parts of the album that feel specifically Hellhound Records, the likes of “Down in the Hollow” is more modern, at least in its ending — but five years on from their second LP, 2019’s The Ruins of Fading Light (review here), the band come across with all the more of a grasp of their sound, so that when “Heavy is the Crown of Bone” lays out its riff, everybody knows what they’re going for is Candlemass circa ’86, but that becomes the basis from which they build out, and from thrash to ’80s-style keyboard dramaturge in “Scrying Orb” ahead of the sweeping 11-minute closing title-track, which is so endearingly full-on in its later roll that it’s hard to keep from headbanging as I type. Alas.
The kind of undulating riffy largesse Eyes of the Oak proffer on their second full-length, Neolithic Flint Dagger, puts them in line with Swedish countrymen like Domkraft and Cities of Mars, but the former are more noise rock and the latter aren’t a band anymore, so actually it’s a pretty decent niche to be in. The Sörmland four-piece use the room in their mix to veer between more straight-ahead vocal command and layered chants like those in the nine-minute “Offering to the Gods,” the chorus of which is quietly reprised in the 35-second closing title-track. Not to be understated is the work the immediate chug of “Cold Alchemy” and the marching nodder “Way Home” do in setting the tone for a nuanced sound, so that the pockets of sound that will come to be filled by another layer of vocals, or a guitar lead, or an effect or whatever it is are laid out and then the band proceeds to dance around that central point and find more and more room for flourish as they go. Bonus points for the soul in “The Burning of Rome,” but they honestly don’t need bonus points.
A kind of artful post-hardcore that’s outright combustible in “Concrete,” Mast Year‘s sound still has room to grow as they offer their first long-player in the 25-minute Point of View on respected Marylander imprint Grimoire Records, but part of that impression comes from how open the songs feel generally. That’s not to say the nine-minute “Figure of Speech” doesn’t have its crushing side to account for or that “Teignmouth Electron” before it isn’t gnashing in its later moments, but it’s the band’s willingness to go where the material is leading that seems to get them to places like the foreboding drone of “Love Note” and deconstructing intensity of “Erocide,” just as they’re able to lean between math metal and sludge, which is like the opposite of math, Mast Year cover a lot of ground in their extremes. The minor in creeper noisemaking — “Love Note,” closer “Timelessness” — shouldn’t be neglected for adding to the mood. Mast Year have plenty of ways to pummel, though, and an apparent interest in pushing their own limits.
In the span of about 20 minutes, Wizard Tattoo‘s Living Just for Dying EP, which finds project-founder Bram the Bard once again working mostly solo, save for guest vocals by Djinnifer on “The Wizard Who Loved Me” and Fausto Aurelias, who complements the extreme metal surge and charred-rock verse of “Tomorrow Dies” with a suitably guttural take; think Satyricon more than Mayhem, maybe some Darkthrone. Considering the four-tracker opens with the acoustic “Living Just for Dying” and caps with similar balladeering in “Sanity’s Eclipse,” the EP pretty efficiently conveys Wizard Tattoo‘s go-anywhereism and genre-line transgression at least in terms of the ethic of playing to different sounds and seeing how they rest alongside each other. To that end, detailed transitions between “The Wizard Who Loved Me” and “Tomorrow Dies,” between “Tomorrow Dies” and “Sanity’s Ecilpse,” etc., make for a carefully guided listening process, which feels short and complete and like a form that suits Bram the Bard well.
Virginian trio Üga Büga — guitarist/vocalist Calloway Jones, bassist/backing vocalist Niko Cvetanovich and drummer/backing vocalist Jimmy Czywczynski — don’t have to go far to find despondent sludgy grooves, but they range nonetheless as their debut full-length, Year of the Hog unfolds, “Skingrafter” marrying a crooning vocal in contrast to some of the surrounding rasp and burl to a build of crunching heavy riff. The album is bombastic as a defining feature — songs like “Change My Name” and “Rape of the Poor” come to mind — but there’s a perspective being cast in the material as well, a point of view to the lyrics, that comes through as clearly as the thrashy plunder of “Supreme Truth” later on, and I’m not sure what’s being said, but I am pretty sure “Mockingbird” knows it’s doing Phantom of the Opera, and that’s not nothing. They round out Year of the Hog with its eight-minute title-track, and finish with a duly metallic push, leaning into the aggressive aspects that have been malleably balanced all along.
Ultimately, The Moon is Flat‘s methodology on their third album, A Distant Point of Light, isn’t so radically different from how their second LP, All the Pretty Colors, worked in 2021, with longer-form jamming interspliced with structured craft, songs that may or may not open up to broader reaches, but that are definitively songs rather than open-ended or whittled-down jams (nothing against that approach either, mind you). The difference between the two is that A Distant Point of Light‘s six tracks and 52 minutes feel like they’ve learned much from the prior outing, so “Sound the Alarm” starts off bringing the two sides together before “Awestruck” departs into dream-QOTSA and progadelic vibery, and “I Saw Something” and its five-minute counterpart, closer “Where All Ends Meet” sandwich the 11-minutes each “Meanwhile” and “A Distant Point of Light,” The Moon is Flat digging in dynamically through mostly languid tempos and fluid, progressive builds of volume. But when they go, they go. Watch out for that title-track.
Chronicle II: Hypergenesis continues the thread that London instrumentalists began with their debut 2020’s Chronicle I: The Truthseseker and continued on the prequel EP, 2021’s Chronicle: Prologue, exploring heavy progressive conceptualism in evocative post-heavy pieces like opener “Daybreak,” which resolves in a riotous breakdown, or “The Archivist,” which is more angular when it wants to be but feels like a next-generation’s celebration of riffy chicanery in a way that I can only think of as encouraging for how seriously it seems not to take itself. The post-rocking side of what they do is well reinforced throughout — so is the crush — whether it’s “Dead Language” or “Into the Hazel Woods,” but there’s nothing on Chronicle II: Hypergenesis more consuming than the crescendo of the closing “Hypergenesis,” and the band very clearly know it; it’s a part so good even the band with no singer has to put some voice to it. That last groove is defining, but much of Chronicle II: Hypergenesis actively works against that sort of genre rigidity, and much to the album’s greater benefit.
across the chugging “Earthsuckers” and the more aggressive crunch of “Divination,” groove underlying all as they go, even the purposefully atmospheric “Ghost in the Diamond Cage” and the foreboding drum-thud and keyboard cycles of the penultimate intro/interlude “Descent” ahead of the extended and part-thrashy finale “Revolting Power.” It may be there’s a narrative at work lyrically, but when I say ‘story’ above, I mean the one about who the band are in terms of sound. Jones has a clear background in metal vocalizing — his harsher shouts and screams feel like not the first time he’s scoured his vocal cords for the cause — and the trio are able to thread between rock and metal all the more for their variety of purpose, each piece offering something to add to the entirety. Not a new idea for how to work an album, by any means, but put to effective use on the careening “Motorhog” and elsewhere. Is someone in this band a fan of At the Gates?
