Tagged: Black Metal

May 14, 2013

Discontinuities: a new way of seeing the world in hidden musical tones

Jute Gyte, Discontinuities, Jeshimoth Entertainment, CD JE063 (2013)

Jute Gyte is a very prolific act that has so far released 20 albums and a couple of EPs since 2007. For this album, JG man Adam Kalmbach had his guitar retro-fitted by Ron Sword of Sword Guitars (and Florida death metal band Last Sacrament) to accommodate a scale of 24 tones that enables our man to explore and play microtonal intervals. At last Kalmbach can break with his previous style of guitaring extreme industrial black metal soundscapes and dive into something even more extreme, hence a reason for the album’s title “Discontinuities”; other reasons will become apparent in this review.

Listeners will pick up the new sound straight away: on first hearing the album does sound highly discordant and cacophonous. It’s an organic sound though, one that comes across putting its feet right and not making awkward turns just for the sake of it. Other instruments on the album (bass, synth, programmed percussion) quickly fall in line with the new sound and my ears at least become accustomed just as fast. The music turns out to be as fluid and natural as Kalmbach’s own song-writing abilities allow.

The album describes a dense and hellish sonic universe in which familiar points of reference either no longer exist or are demonstrated to be bizarre and meaningless. The realisation that our paradigms of viewing the world and the universe are and have always been irrational falls heavily on us. Whether loud, defiant and brazenly noisy or subdued, Kalmbach presents us with the truth of our existence, hitherto inaccessible because of the limitations of previous musical tools we had, and that truth is not at all pretty. Lyrics of tracks like “Night is the Collaborator of Torturers” and “Romanticism is Ultimately Fatal” force us to acknowledge the ugly consequences of our delusions and self-cocooning with cultural myths, propaganda and groupthink. After the instrumental title track, later songs focus on decline and death in a world collapsing under the ruin we have inflicted on it.

Apart from the title track which is a minimalist guitar groan-drone affair, the songs tend to sound much alike: the basic structure for each track consists of several repeating riff loops. On all tracks the barking vocal is thin, harsh and ragged. The programmed drumming takes a distant second or third place to the other instruments and sticks to keeping time and setting the pace: this prevents the music from becoming bombastic

The whole work is bleak and relentless. Probably parts of it could have been edited for length as the guitar sound is so dense and demented that the music actually does not need to rely on repetition and length to accentuate tension. The sound can be a bit flat as well when there is excessive looping of riffs. Only on the last track “Acedia” does the music start to mix volume and mood dynamics: blaring metal guitar noise insanity is punctuated with short quiet and contemplative moments.

This might be one album that doesn’t get much play but when you do spin it, it’s highly immersive and confronting, and it’ll fair clean your head of the petty issues, fears, lies and obsessions that trouble everyone else and keep us all enslaved to The Man.

Contact: Jeshimoth Entertainment

May 12, 2013

Kentucky: an impassioned and fiery black metal / bluegrass clarion call for justice and the preservation of history

Panopticon, Kentucky, Pagan Flames, CD (2012)

My loyal, faithful fans – they probably number no more than a few misguided and socially maladjusted souls in desperate need of a more fulfilling life – who’ve been following my blatherings on TSP for many years will know that sometimes I get quite political and go off on rants totally unrelated to the music under review. Here at last is a recording over which I can now wax lyrical over politics and social justice; into the bargain also is the fact that it’s a black metal album! Yessiree, that most “apolitical” and socially apathetic of music genres has yielded an inspired and impassioned recording that comes down squarely on the side of one of the most marginalised, impoverished, embattled and least celebrated groups in modern America: the people, in particular the coal-miners, of the Appalachian mountain region in the eastern US. USBM one-man band Panopticon’s “Kentucky” revolves around the history of the struggles of the coal-miners of eastern Kentucky against their employers, the state and federal governments, and established religion for the right to form trade unions, improve their wages and working and living conditions, and give their families and communities a decent life.

The music is a splendid mix of aggressive and pile-driving black metal, stirring bluegrass music performed on banjo and violin, melodic post-rock and spoken voice and found sound recordings. Together with its subject matter, “Kentucky” comes close to being something a more fired-up Godspeed You Black Emperor could have produced if that band had incorporated some black metal aspects. Particular highlights of the album include Panopticon leader A. Lunn’s adaptation of “Come All Ye Coal Miners” which finishes with brief coal-mine work ambience and a brief speech on the history of the exploitation of mine workers and the land alike; “Black Soot and Red Blood” which details the battles the miners fought against a formidable multi-headed enemy; and the instrumental outro track “Kentucky”, a beautiful homage on banjo, resonator and mandolin to the mountains and forests of Kentucky state and the ghosts of people who died defending their lands and communities.

Songs on the album are arranged in a historical time-line form the early history of native Americans to the present and the music proceeds from the personal – two locations in rural Kentucky dear to A Lunn’s heart – to the historical and general.

Admittedly this is not a perfect work – some of the black metal can be repetitive and bombastic and the vocal on “Black Waters” is so distant and blurry that the lyrics can hardly be heard – but the sentiment behind the music is a deeply felt one and powers it all the way through the album. “Kentucky” is a clarion call to all decent-minded people to remember the history of the coal miners in Appalachia and their fight for a decent life, and to support present efforts of community and environmental groups to preserve the lands and natural resources of southeastern Kentucky.

Some of the profits from sales of this album are being donated to fight the use of mountain-top removal as a mining method in Kentucky. Mountain-top removal is a particularly hideous and devastating form of large-scale mining: it involves using dynamite or other explosives to blast away forest, top soil and hundreds of vertical metres of rock to expose coal seams. The debris is dumped into nearby valleys and river-beds, causing silt-up and disrupting the natural flow of streams and rivers. The consequences of this form of mining, while it dispenses with the expense and hazards involved in sending miners underground, can be imagined: air pollution including toxic aerial chemicals, increased soil erosion in affected areas, increased risks of flash-flooding and mudslides threatening homes and communities, pollution of groundwater to name a few.

In addition, the areas affected by mountain-top removal in both Kentucky and neighbouring parts of West Virginia state have historic, cultural and archaeological significance as several of them were the scenes of bitter fighting in the Battle of Blair Mountain, fought by 10,000 coal-miners and supporters against mining companies, local law enforcement and eventually the US Army, in West Virginia in 1921. Several thousand coal-miners who took part in this battle, the largest armed civil uprising in US history after the American Civil War, came over from Kentucky; the miners also received support from local communities, in particular from returned WW1 veterans and medical people who treated wounded miners. The uprising was crushed severely and miners were forced back into the mines on pay and working conditions made worse than before. However the battle also raised public awareness of and sympathy for the appalling working conditions that coal-miners had to face, and eventually in the 1930s the miners benefited from political, social and economic changes brought about by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.

However as the fight to preserve Blair Mountain from mining demonstrates, the battle for worker rights and to preserve the memory of this battle continues.

Contact: Pagan Flames

May 7, 2013

Cypher: black metal fusion soundtrack tracking our path to Hell

Spektr, Cypher, Agonia Records, ARCD102 (2013)

It’s been several years since I heard anything by this duo and one reason is that Haemoth & Co haven’t been very prolific: “Cypher” is their first release since “Mescalyne” in 2007. The major advance in Spektr’s music since then is the musicians’ incorporation of elements from several other music genres such as industrial, melodic post-metal, jazz and the usual musique concrete and spoken voice samples with the result that this album resembles a soundtrack to an otherwise silent horror sci-fi film. There is also much manipulation of atmosphere and emotion here.

What horrific futurist film might Spektr be offering on “Cypher”? It agrees more or less with previous work of theirs in which an intrepid adventurer, investigating the deepest recesses of the human mind, crosses into a realm beyond life where not even the dead normally go but some of heightened mental and emotional sensitivities, and some training in gnostic knowledge and ritual, might dare to enter. The volume of the music goes up and down as if the whole thing were animated by an inwardly-generated self-aware consciousness. The critical Rubicon appears to take place somewhere in track 3 (“The Singularity”).

Pivotal tracks are “Teratology”, “The Singularity”, “Antimatter”, the surprisingly blues-sounding (at least in its first few minutes) “Cypher” and “Le Vitriol du Philosophe”, this last being the most brutally industrial, ambient and futuristic, and the least black metal. Indeed, black metal figures much, much less than might be expected: the guitars are still sharp but have a more melodic bent. The long tracks rampage across the musical spectrum and dive into quite unexpected turns and twists; the short tracks are usually quiet ambient interludes between long tracks.

Only about 45 minutes, the album feels like a mammoth effort on the duo’s part to create a hellish odyssey into demonic kingdoms, out of which our explorer ends up crawling out of a wormhole into a future society run by self-aware machines powered by simulacra of human brains. There is not a flesh-n-blood critter in sight. One shudders to think that the one thing more terrifying than what Satan and his acolytes can magick up is the mind, individual and collective, that can imagine Satan and the demonic hierarchy in the first place. As I sit and type this review, am I already looking into the shape of Hell?

Contact: Agonia Records

May 7, 2013

Kuxan Suum (self-titled): spacey psychedelia and black / death metal fusion inspired by Mayan mythology

Kuxan Suum, self-titled, Fallen Empire Records, LP FE-2012-02 (2012)

Belonging to the Black Twilight Circle of southern Californian black metal bands, several of which have Hispanic American origins, Kuxan Suum take a keen interest in exploring Mayan mythology and culture. This self-titled release is a compilation of a demo “Kinich Ahau” and another track that may or may not have been released previously on the (now-defunct) Crepusculo Negro label.

“Kinich Ahau” begins with a beautiful trilling guitar melody that becomes bleached in its tone and the echoes that build up and reverberate through your skull. Soon enough the guitar melody gains a bleached-out acid psychedelic reverb edge that makes you see weird day-glo lime-green / hot purple / sky-blue cartoon colours in your mind. The echoes climb higher in scale until your ears almost bleed from the shrill, near-screechy edge.

The rhythm section joins in the fun and quickly a phantom vocal starts to screech and howl in the background while guitars and drums go hell for leather to their inevitable fate when they must surely disappear high in the cosmos and become part of its eternal fabric. About the halfway mark the track reaches a plateau and the pace slows down so the music coasts along while the weird bubbling and gurgling noises whirl wildly about in your brain and the vocalist groans and sighs as if suspended in an ethereal fluid bearing him to another plane of torture. Guitar shimmer and reverberation continue with the tone milked for all it’s worth.

The track continues on and on, escalating in derangement and intensity … I think you can tell where it will end, it ain’t gonna be peaceful … the heart-rending screams go on and on … sure enough, everything is rent apart and the very atoms and sub-atomic particles are cut asunder and dissipated throughout space until all is null and the universe carries on as if nothing ever happened.

The second track “Principle of Harmonic Resonance” is a deeper, meatier piece, more death metal in its orientation, and with clearer and more definite vocals that are fairly up-front in the music. The guitars have sparkling jewel-like tones that enrich the song together with the faint ethereal background synthesiser. Although the song doesn’t soar as screechingly high as “Kinich Ahau” and is a darker piece, it has its own far-reaching charm especially just after the halfway mark when, for a couple of minutes, it threatens to take your brain apart cell by cell by its mesmeric tones. Changes of key take the track into some dangerously interesting and interestingly dangerous by-ways that seriously mess with the brain. This is a place where you might want to stay forever: lead guitar is bewitching in its melodies, the rhythms are crisp and no-nonsense chunky, the synthesiser is keening away in sympathy with the vocalist whose raspy voice swings from pity and sorrow to derangement and despair at the madness creeping over him.

Both songs deserve a wider audience for their fusion of spaced-out ambient psychedelia and black / death metal taken to the genres’ extremes. Listeners are led, willingly or unwillingly, on a major voyage through multiple levels of existence to an absolute revelation, beyond which there may only be annihilation. There must be a link with Aztec or Mayan mythology here: perhaps the songs take as their inspiration the journey that souls of people who have died of natural causes make after death through several layers of hell to reach Mictlan, the Land of the Dead, where they dwell in nothingness forever.

Contact: Fallen Empire Records

April 23, 2013

Cold of Ages: a grand and epic black metal / doom fusion recording

Ash Borer, Cold of Ages, Profound Lore Records, CD (2012)

Ash Borer’s second album could very well be their breakthrough release: it’s at once highly atmospheric, cold, dark, incredibly focused and energetic. After a brief lilting introduction, the music springs full-bore into all-out aggression and depressive darkness. If Ash Borer were strongly associated with the Cascadian black metal scene in the past, they’re moving away from it with a strong and distinct style that plumbs deeply into darkness and nihilism. There is still a nature ambience near the album’s beginning but increasingly it’s being replaced by melody and riff, speed and a song-writing and playing approach that emphasises a huge range in sound dynamics.

Opening track “Descended Lamentations” is a heady combination of melancholy doom grandeur, black metal chaotic fury and ominous Gothic ambience. Trilling lead guitar lines are mixed up with sharp buzzy riffing and the vocals are equally varied, ranging from reverb-cloaked monster growls to phantom cries and howling. The heights and depths of this fusion of black metal / doom / psychedelia are mined for their riches in melody, tone, mood and atmosphere to produce an epic music mammoth – and still there are more treasures that Ash Borer offer up.

“Phantoms” initially runs on a slower track but picks up energy and speed very quickly. Before you know it, it’s careening madly about the joint as if trying to find an escape and discovering none. The tones are less bright and the mood is urgent. On and on the piece goes, raging against everything hurled against it by an uncaring universe. Defeat is at hand however and the mood becomes more sullen and despondent.

“Convict All Flesh” might well be the best track here – it’s truly an example of how to write and play an operatic work of black metal doom existential melancholy. Spider guitar riffs spin into an arching glittering network over sludge drum thunder and slavering vocals. The grand edifice falls away before an interceding choir of sweet-voiced angels but the Lord of Chaos charges in to claim what’s owing to him and the track thrashes about in hopeless frenzy. Guitars blaze away, drums bang and crash and those phantom voices groan and growl in the distant background.

The band could be forgiven for a forgettable and lame closing track but “Removed Forms” does not do badly at all. Beginning as a muted minimalist piece performed on a solo guitar in the manner of a Japanese koto being plucked to the accompaniment of sorrowful female ghost voices, the track erupts into a hysterical race against the encroachment of annihilation.

Parts of the album could have been edited for length: “Convict All Flesh” does overstay its welcome in its latter half and the coda to “Phantoms” could have hurried up a little so that “Convict …” comes sooner rather than later. A section of “Removed Forms” is clunky and lumbering. All four songs are similar in their structure, beginning slowly and coasting for a while before blasting into frantic and furious BM chaos. Hardly any time to take a breath at all! Arguably also the album manipulates listeners’ feelings and emotions in the way all four songs roller-coaster through quiet and loud sections.

Overall though this is a grand and epic recording, and the Ash Borer members give the album everything they have in energy, musicianship and inspiration. The music brims with urgency and a sure knowledge that life is brief and filled with pain, and death does not necessarily bring relief.

Contact: Ash Borer, Profound Lore Records

April 22, 2013

Regnum Saturni: flowing, raging, hypnotic black metal noise intensity

Fell Voices, Regnum Saturni, Gilead Media, 2xLP RELIC45 (2013)

Fell Voices is a black metal band based in Santa Cruz (California) but often associated with the Cascadian black metal scene (northwest US / southwest British Columbia, Canada). ”Regnum Saturni” is the first album of theirs that is not named after the band or left untitled; the band has a demo and two previous albums that went without titles, which would have caused some discomfort to distributors and fans alike. Especially as songs on previous albums also had no titles! Well, on “Regnum Saturni” those little problems have now been fixed: the songs that feature now bear titles which together suggest a theme of transformation from a lower level of existence to a higher one. Listeners may well be divided over this release: whereas previous releases had definite melodies and riffs, this album may come across as unstructured and intangible, and the music appears deliberately difficult and remote. Life is not easy when you’re under the spell of Fell Voices!

All three tracks are long and on the double LP version each takes up one side of the record. This means that Side D contains nothing at all. (One would think at least it might have an interesting recording of forest bird and insect noises.) Opener “Flesh from Bone” tiptoes in quietly for a bit before suddenly plunging listeners into a roaring whirlwind of sharp guitar noise which pulses with a grinding chainsaw rhythm. Vocals can barely be heard unless they are wailing or screeching in agony. Yet the music isn’t an endless self-indulgent exercise in black metal noise drone and chaos; there is change from noise and anguish to passages of stillness and solitude, dark though they are. However such interludes are soon swept aside by more scourging music from which lead guitar riffs might arise and glimmer briefly before they are engulfed in the fierce storms.

We segue into Track 2 “Emergence” with the faintest of breaks but the mood and energy level remaining low and restrained. Soon we are tossed into a long extended black metal noise drone world, one featuring a wavering feedback drone and constant repetitive drumming. The effect can be very hypnotic even though the mood is far from serene: in fact it’s aggressive and hostile. Voices scream in pain and torment continuously, guitars wobble as if sharpening their strings on whet-stones and the percussion continues its banging rhythm without rest. This time there’s no let-up, no rest from the torture. Towards the end, the percussion becomes more thunderous and emphatic, voices still scream and the heaving guitars hang over the track.

“Dawn” is a powerful thundering track of attacking percussion and denser-than-ever clouds of black metal guitar. Whining drone, rousing drums, more howling and keening voices and that ever-present boiling guitar noise atmosphere fill your brain from ear to ear. This is a highly suffocating experience. Although the music overall doesn’t stray from the very straight and very narrow, there’s enough variation in its details to keep some, if not most, listeners tagging along. The best moments come in the last few minutes of the track: the drumming consists of thunderous rolls, the screaming becomes unearthly and the shuddering guitars assume a quieter air as gradually the track loses its pent-up fury.

The album can be an exhausting experience to hear all the way through and perhaps there was no need for it to be so long at 61 minutes. The introductions and codas don’t need to be as stretched as they are, as they are joined with only the slightest of breaks. What is most impressive about the album is its raging intensity and the musicians’ utmost dedication to their craft. They obviously don’t care about pandering to all their fans’ preferences; the music is relentlessly single-minded and its scope is very narrow. The band that springs to mind as a point of comparison is Nadja whose music in the past has been similarly noisy, intense and powerful if unvarying.

I can see this album enjoying fairly limited success among Fell Voices’ fans. I can’t see though that the band is prepared to return to a more melodic and less underground style.

Contact: Gilead Media, Vendetta Records

April 18, 2013

Time is but a Doorway to the Incinerator: music that addresses the pain and meaninglessness of existence

Torture Chain, Time is but a Doorway to the Incinerator, Eternal Summer, cassette (2012)

This US act has only released a few demos with long titles if not long playing times. The music is a raw punk-influenced straightforward black metal with no keyboards and no attempt at creating a particular mood or atmosphere. The introduction could be a creepy found sound recording of cheesy melodic synthesiser tone wash and a woodwind combination of clarinet and oboe tunes. It doesn’t last long: it’s swept straight into oblivion by a roar of hateful black metal guitar scrabble and frenzied drumming with overworked cymbals. Floppy drums pound out frantic beats and the crackly rasp of the vocal is frightful in its severe texture and malevolence.

Although the demo is dense and fast, individual bits are often distinctive: high-pitched lead guitar solos sometimes fly through the storm like electrical charges and riffs and rhythms change throughout. Rhythms can sometimes be jaunty and rhythm guitar riffs may have a very strong folk-martial feel in a style similar to the old French Black Legions band Vlad Tepes. About halfway through, the song recedes into a quiet acoustic guitar passage and is thoughtful and meditative before it gives way to a steady and relaxed section dominated by a repeating melodic guitar riff loop. The song speeds up into a fast and busy runaway train of repeating guitar riffs, steady drumming and haranguing BM vocals thick with aggression, hostility and pain. Rhythms and riff changes will continue for some time, then change either abruptly or subtly in ways that listeners won’t catch until too late and the riffs transform yet again into something else. Towards the end there’s an interrogation between black metal guitar and acoustic guitar and after the strings finish their Q&A session, the track relaxes into a fairly laidback rhythm. The music builds to a very layered conclusion of heavy rhythms and beats, noisy and buzzy guitars all careening towards a singularity, and more pained and quite demented vocals.

This is absorbing music with so many changes in structure and pace, and with lead guitar soloing that can sound quite conventional yet understandable in its context: when the rest of the music is so chaotic, noisy and has a harsh, gravel-like texture, the lead guitar needs a different sound and playing approach to differentiate itself and to introduce a new theme or a counter-balance to the music. As a result, sometimes the lead guitar sounds a lot more pure-toned, joyful and bubbly, and melodic than it should be. The aggression and toughness are obvious in the music; there may be quiet, soulful moments of delicate acoustic guitar tunes but these are few and far between. The title may be long and awkward but it expresses in language intended to shock that life is not pleasant and is full of pain and existential hollowness.

Released in cassette format, the cassette cover features arresting line artwork of what looks like black ink drawn finely on white background and then reproduced on a copier.

Contact: Eternal Summer

April 17, 2013

Muknal (self-titled): herald of evil and disturbing forces from the far ends of the cosmos

Muknal, self-titled, Crepusculo Negro, cassette CN-22 (2012)

(Note: At this time of writing the EP’s third pressing of 300 copies had already sold out!)

At just over 17 minutes in length, this self-titled EP by the US band Muknal sure packs in heckuva load of black / death metal punch. This band is surely onto something deeply dark and evil here from the get-go: the music has a sick and disturbing feel and seems to come from the far reaches of the cosmos where time began. Muknal is one of a group of Californian black / death metal acts known as the Black Twilight Circle, many of whose members espouse Mexican nationalism and are keen students of Aztec and Mayan cultures and traditions. The bands issue their music on tape through several labels, the most notable of which is Crepusculo Negro.

As the EP goes so fast and it’s so short, the three songs that feature can be heard as one long work. “Cruciation” sounds like the soundtrack to an invasion of Earth if ever the aliens want something to celebrate and remember their victory for ever more: rhythm guitar and percussion push on in a steady advance while lead guitar spits out ghastly death rays of heat, each of which melts down entire fleets of planes and flotillas of ships in seconds flat. The aliens’ triumph comes in a matter of minutes. The next track “Rotten Genesis” is a varied piece for its size: starting out slow, steady and a bit stodgy, it quickly transforms into a mix of fast and slow music shot through with zinging blasts of extra-terrestrial lead guitar feedback.

The atmosphere is the stand-out feature of the EP: it’s unearthly and gives an impression of a huge universe, endlessly expansive, yet indifferent and most likely hostile to the evolution and presence of human beings. Dark forces emanate from the universe’s farthest corners to attack Earth and seek out and destroy us humans.

The tracks aren’t greatly different from one another although the first song is quite good for its full-on attack and atmospherics in its first minute. The third track “Eidolon” sometimes has quite complex and changeable rhythms and beats, and it piles on ever more suffocating intensity with furious fast-paced percussion workouts, blats of lead guitar and a howling demonic vocal overhead.

The songs feel incomplete, being so short, and a few extra minutes on each of them with extra lyrics might have bulked them up. As they are, the lyrics are very brief and general and vaguely describe spiritual and occult desecration and extreme violence: not much to see here, let’s move along. The vocals are filthy and sound reptilian. The EP actually could do with a slightly more murky, gargly and muddy sound.

Overall the music is energetic, often intense and most of the time very out of this world. The evil it calls our attention to is vast and unfathomable and while we can fuss about preparing to defend ourselves, this evil will surely defeat and obliterate us – it’s just a matter of time.

By the way folks, if you hear news of strange rumblings beneath the ground and oceans, and of people and buildings disappearing suddenly in giant sinkholes like the one that took that poor guy at home in Florida (some folks must have been praying to the Angel of Death to take George W Bush’s brother Jeb but the grim reaper must be hard of hearing with all the supplications he receives from across the world to take out one politician or another as he took one Jeff Bush instead), that must be due to the awakenings of the hordes of the Dark Lord Cthulhu beneath the Earth’s crust in preparation to do battle with the Elder Gods coming here from the far ends of the cosmos. We have been warned!

Contact: Crepusculo Negro

April 10, 2013

Bloodlands: a description of a black hell of depression and nihilism

Ash Borer, Bloodlands, Gilead Media, EP RELIC47 (2013)

Ash Borer hails from California and since I buy a lot of music from Aquarius Records in San Francisco, one would think by now I should have known about this act since 2008 when it formed. But wouldja believe, I only found about these guys a week or so ago and that by sheer accident while mucking around on the Internet! “Bloodlands” is the band’s most recent release and features just three tracks.

“Oblivion’s Spring” combines fierce and brutally fast and punishing black metal with a repetitive and melancholy post-rock guitar riff loop. Although the black metal rhythms and rasping vocals dominate, the pure-toned dreamy guitar loops are never far away and form part of the backdrop to the music. Hornet-like tremolo guitar fans tension and a sinister atmosphere develops. The track is layers of blizzard-like black metal rhythm and sound texture going at full tilt, giving the impression of a black metal hurricane with a demonic life of its own. The force is relentless, even during the track’s quieter moments. Eventually the whole piece gives way to a very impressionistic drone of a ghost wind blowing over a dark desert.

“Dirge / Purgation” is another blistering exercise in raw atmospheric black metal rage texture and existential despair. Prolonged drone guitar links a short and fierce blizzard attack to a longer, slower piece that goes from a sluggish, pounding rhythm to a faster, more urgent black metal rendition of the same motifs from the slow music, and back. Sometimes the vibrato guitar playing over the top of the bass and rhythms sound a little like Middle Eastern stringed instruments. The track grows more powerful and muscular in its percussion. Everything moves inexorably to a monstrous towering climax

There’s a lot of repetition but it’s enough to identify the tracks without overdoing the looping and pushing the music to insane extremes that lose sight of the music’s intent. One side of the EP is more grimly black metal than the other, the latter incorporating melody and some psychedelic influence into its own eager maw. The composition of the two tracks follows a conventional structure piling on tension, fury and emotion into a monster that must inevitably explode under its weight; but though the climaxes consist mainly of long dronin g guitar, they can be awe-inspiring and soar majestically.

The overall impression the EP gives is of a snapshot of a much longer and more demonic soundtrack describing a world of black hell where punishments are unrelenting, hard and cold, and are given by devils implacable and indifferent to human suffering by nature. This is one recording that could have been much longer without having to compensate for extra playing time by introducing other music elements that might detract from the sense of nihilism or deep depression.

“Bloodlands” is an excellent introduction to Ash Borer and its style of atmospheric raw BM that includes doom influences and drone verging on abstract and experimental.

Contact: Gilead Media

April 10, 2013

Mother: ambient raw black metal in a vast and ancient landscape of flat plains, dry heat and the threat of fire

Cicadan, Mother, US, Eternal Warfare, cassette (2013)

Cicadan is a recent black metal act based in Cobram, located on the Victorian side of the Murray River in southeast Australia. Helmed by Shamus Toomath, Cicadan plays doomy black metal with ambient, drone and experimental / abstract music influences. “Mother” is the debut album, featuring three tracks whose titles suggest a description of a 24-hour period somewhere in Australia during a time when European settlers were yet to arrive and change the landscape forever.

Cobram’s Wikipedia entry says its climate is a Mediterranean-type one with hot dry summers and cool wet winters averaging 300 days of sunshine a year. This balmy background would hardly favour the rise of black metal bands, let alone one as intense, powerful and sullen as Cicadan. Yet this first recording is a dark and smouldering one. The album is a creature of its surroundings: each track is topped and tailed with field recordings of the natural environment of Toomath’s home town. Chittering birds and insects like cicadas, from which the project obtains its name, and the deep stillness of the Australian bush form the underlying inspiration for the music. Something of the flat expanses of the Australian continent is captured in the album’s more meditative moments. Lyrics in all three songs hint at the endless cycles of life and regeneration of nature in a long history. Something about the lyrics reminds me of Al Cisneros’ writing for Om: it’s a bit hypnotic and a little remote, and there’s a hint of change that leads to a heightened awareness of nature’s connection to the cosmos.

“Day” has a hot and dry start of insects chirping loudly and birds sheltering in the tree canopy. The acoustic guitar introduction is lethargic under the weight of the heat. It soon weighs into the steely acid grind of the black metal guitar which falls like heavy rain across the sonic landscape. The pace is slow and majestic with powerful droning doom guitar and an ugly chanting BM vocal. “Dusk” is similar to “Day” in its basic structure: a soft melodic guitar introduction builds into a shimmering and malevolent piece with spiky lead guitar solo melody and muttering demon voice. Droning riffs add some variation and tension to the music. The track is creepy with a regular loop of reverb-touched clicks appearing early and gradually coming to define the song’s structure and atmosphere. It all becomes post-rock in a way reminiscent of the Cascadian black metal scene with a choir of ghostly voices and the sounds of nature following a melancholy lead guitar tune.

The real glory of the album is “Night (Dendronic Pessimism)”, the shortest of the three songs but the most varied and atmospheric. It’s very powerful in its long booming drone riffs against a background of burning black metal rhythm guitar. Quiet acoustic banjo or mandolin-like strings with night-time ambience and a spoons percussion rhythm feature for a brief time. The piece fades into crackling fire.

With a sound palette that includes BM-guitar rain showers, huge deep sonic bass booms and competent drumming that doesn’t appear to be programmed, Cicadan has a rich foundation for his music to really soar. At present the songs here aren’t greatly different from one another in their basic elements and structure, and their differentiation lies in the field recordings and the quieter, more introspective acoustic music sections attached to them. There is huge potential for Cicadan to become much bigger and more well-known outside Australia but he needs more music composition practice. Writing music in conventional song structure formats might be worthwhile to enable him to understand more about building up tension and emotion to maintain listener interest, and to appreciate better the freedom and limitations that unconventional music structures have. Sometimes in order to break the rules, you have to know and obey them first. A couple of tracks on “Mother” don’t have very obvious climaxes and the music starts to tail away too soon with the result that endings seem to take forever.

If Cicadan can improve his music composition skills and gain experience playing the music live, he will be an unstoppable force in Australian black metal, the equal of acts like Elysian Blaze and Striborg in their intense and idiosyncratic approaches to the genre.

Contact: Eternal Warfare