Italian lurch-conjurers Zolfo return with their second album, Descending Into Inexorable Absence, on Zann’s Records, Violence in the Veins and Riff Merchant Records. Comprised of six tracks running 58 doom-resounding minutes, it is the light-consuming follow-up to their 2020 debut, Delusion of Negation (review here), which set them forth on the course of malevolent extremity that the new album continues. The initially subdued take on post-“Black Sabbath” nod with the sax-laced intro “Last Layers” that provides entry into the dark, scream-topped churn that is foundational to the titular descent — and the sax gets a little jazz-active, but otherwise, the movement down is already grueling — and “Lament of the Light” seems to raise the level of impact as each of its crashes and thuds slams down, a correspondingly huge death growl providing decisively inhuman presence.
In the midsection of “Lament of the Light,” the five-piece — first names only: Dave on vocals, Fabrizio (also sax) and Nicolò on guitar, Saverio on bass and Piero on drums — preface some of the speed they’ll inject periodically throughout, whether it’s the early rush of “Apoptosis” (premiering below), the title of which references a withering and death of a body’s cells, or the wall o’ punishment that the subsequent 18-minute closer “Silence of the Absolute Absence” becomes around 10 minutes in. You know, before the guitar hints at psych and drops out to leave the listener momentarily to their fate with bass and drums before shifting into a more post-metallic procession. Extremity is the thread that draws Descending Into Inexorable Absence together, though, and that resonates even in the spaces of “No Home for an Eternal Wayfarer” purposefully left open early on in the style of Bell Witch, an engrossing melancholy pushing toward caustic with the screams overlaid on its about-to-explode dirge. There is a beat’s pause right about at 7:35 into “No Home for an Eternal Wayfarer,” barely there, but there, and the build that ensues thereafter pushes into an absolute overwhelm of harsh, densely-toned chaos, wielded with a controlled hand but pointedly vicious. Have you ever been shoved off a cliff into a pit of metal spikes? Me neither, but if I was, I have to think the silence to which that track cuts at its end is how it would feel to be thusly impaled.
Active in its drums at the start, “Admire the Mire” almost teases respite in context. At nine minutes long, its tempo finds a mid-paced groove in which to dwell, but even here the gnashing harshness of the vocals and the punishing brutality led by the guitars preside, and as it gets faster, it gets noisier, and the outright will to crush persists, certainly no less so with the big-doom slowdown around seven minutes in. Later in the reaches of “Silence of the Absolute Absence,” Dave‘s voice doesn’t so much give out, but echoes with the kind of high-register shout that results when your throat is done tearing itself apart for the next however long, and I don’t know over how long a period Descending Into Inexorable Absence was tracked, but I remember recording screaming takes, and if “Admire the Mire” and that finale were done the same day, or even just the latter piece on its own, I’d have no trouble believing genuine physical recovery was required afterward. That they chose to preserve that moment rather than dub it over is admirably organic, and gives “Silence of the Absolute Absence” a suitably desperate crescendo to its initial voidward cries and fuller death-doom plod.
Before they get there, “Apoptosis” bursts forth from the faded feedback of “Admire the Mire,” a count-in of one before the onslaught begins. While still nowhere near accessible in terms of broader stylistic geography, the effects-topped shouts that cut through in the first half are as close as Zolfo come to ‘clean’ vocals, but the screams and growls resume amid a pummel that tips the balance toward more death than doom, holding to the monolithic presence and tonality of its surroundings as its pushes itself down your throat, no doubt with some kind of cellular decay in mind. If by the time “Silence of the Absolute Absence” kicks in — and the only question is if it’s your life or all life that’s gone; could go either way — you don’t feel as though the chasm into which you’ve plunged was inside you all along, chances are you’ve already stopped listening and gone about your day as a probably-well-adjusted human being. Depressive aural misanthropy has never been for everyone, and Descending Into Inexorable Absence could hardly be called shy in its motives.
Nonetheless, if you’re up for it, “Apoptosis” premieres in the embed below, courtesy of the band. Some other preliminaries follow — recording credits, tracklisting, lineup; the necessities — and the music is the rest of what you need to know at this point, apart perhaps from an exact release date, which is to-be-announced. Don’t worry though, you’ll hear it coming in the distance when it’s time.
With best wishes:
Zolfo, “Apoptosis” track premiere
This spring we are going to release our new full-length album “Descending into Inexorable Absence”.
A polyphasic compound of 58 minutes, divided into a massive blend of doom/sludge intensity and layers of blackened and post-metal contamination, recorded at MOLOTOV recording by Andrea Lenoci, mixed and mastered at Skyhammer Studio by Chris Fielding and framed by Khaos Diktator Design.
The second chapter of our discography, will be released on double gatefold coloured vinyl by Zann’s Records and Violence In The Veins, and on a limited edition tape by Riff Merchant Records.
TRACKLIST: 1. Last Layers (2:55) 2. Lament of the Light (9:25) 3. No Home for an Eternal Wayfarer (11:19) 4. Admire the Mire (9:43) 5. Apoptosis (6:14) 6. Silence of the Absolute Absence (18:04)
Zolfo: Dave – Vocals and Lyrics Fabrizio – Guitars and Sax Nicolò – Guitars Saverio – Bass Piero – Drums
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.
nine minutes long, its tempo finds a mid-paced groove in which to dwell, but even here the gnashing harshness of the vocals and the punishing brutality led by the guitars preside, and as it gets faster, it gets noisier, and the outright will to crush persists, certainly no less so with the big-doom slowdown around seven minutes in. Later in the reaches of “Silence of the Absolute Absence,” Dave‘s voice doesn’t so much give out, but echoes with the kind of high-register shout that results when your throat is done tearing itself apart for the next however long, and I don’t know over how long a period Descending Into Inexorable Absence was tracked, but I remember recording screaming takes, and if “Admire the Mire” and that finale were done the same day, or even just the latter piece on its own, I’d have no trouble believing genuine physical recovery was required afterward. That they chose to preserve that moment rather than dub it over is admirably organic, and gives “Silence of the Absolute Absence” a suitably desperate crescendo to its initial voidward cries and fuller death-doom plod.
