Quarterly Review: Vibravoid, Horseburner, Sons of Arrakis, Crypt Sermon, Eyes of the Oak, Mast Year, Wizard Tattoo, Üga Büga, The Moon is Flat, Mountain Caller
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.
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Horseburner, Voice of Storms
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.
Blues Funeral Recordings website
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Sons of Arrakis, Volume II
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.
Black Throne Productions website
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Crypt Sermon, The Stygian Rose
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.
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Eyes of the Oak, Neolithic Flint Dagger
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.
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Mast Year, Point of View
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.
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Wizard Tattoo, Living Just for Dying
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.
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Üga Büga, Year of the Hog
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.
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The Moon is Flat, A Distant Point of Light
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.
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Mountain Caller, Chronicle II: Hypergenesis
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.
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