Now for one by IWKC, another Moscow band who also like to have their blintzes buttered on both sides…by which I mean they aim to cover multiple stylistic modes and reach for a degree of excellence in an assortment of rock-related categories, decamping from the sunlit extremes of psychedelic free-form jams by way of heavy, stoner pummelling. Along the way, this caravan of nomads manage to turn in instrumental workouts that will appeal to fans who’ve been following American underground rock and math rock for the last 20 years, such as Pelican or Old Man Gloom… ‘Samadhi’ for instance isn’t too far away from a lost Earth track, though it’s also cross-planted with quasi-eastern melodies and half-note intervals on the keyboards. The basic quartet is supplemented on this Hladikarna album by a number of guest vocalists and singers, and even a tabla player for another note of exotic spice in the mix. The foursome are a crack team of “muscular” players who don’t blink for a second and sloppy notes are not tolerated in their perfectionist, airless music – very reminiscent of Isis in places. Guitar, keys and bass are mighty proficient, but Nikita Samarin (the drummer) might be the leader of sorts – his high-precision work on the tubs is evidently keeping the other players in line with the force of an iron grid. (Not to be confused with the talented Nick Samarin, who recorded the disc.) If you’re seeking modern heavy guitar music, but tempered with melodic keyboard work, good studio sound, and impressive dynamics, these Russian clonksters will satisfy your cravings on many levels. Fave track for me is the title track, but I’m a sucker for that organ sound (even if it’s probably faked by a digital keyboard). Despite the sunny moments, the IWKC continue to favour a music of aggression with many dark and menacing undercurrents. Witness the cover art, a nice tapestry in psychedelic colourful which might turn out to depict an atomic bomb blast. Far out.

From Yegoryevsk (on the right bank of the Guslitsa River in Moscow Oblast), we have the duo Old Sea And Mother Serpent, who between them turn in a fine epic of sludge on their Plutonian album. Created with conventional rock setup plus added keys, plus remorseless groany vocals, this is squarely in the genres of doom metal / death metal / sludge metal, and it’s about as turgid as three- month-old porridge and as interminable as an MCU movie. In addition to enduring the sensations of walking bodily through deep pools of wet cement, the listener will endeavour to listen to the lyrics and thus decode the “story” promised by the track titles on these four long tracks, most of them clubbing their way through the door at over 20 mins a time…I can’t help discerning a coherent narrative here when faced with songs like ‘The Scrag Temple’ and references to the “serpent masters…highest creatures”, but it’s a Gothic sword-and-sorcery epic gone horribly wrong, mixed with darker supernatural and Lovecraftian tropes, and even the cover paintings promise us an endless journey across a menacing mountain range that would even unnerve the most devoted Tolkien reader. Another major characteristic of these Sea-Serpent boys is their horrifyingly slow pace…they steel themselves for yet another deathly trudge over treacherous terrain each time the axes are plugged in, and if anything the album gets even slower and sludgier as it plods on. By the time we get to ‘Subterranean Solstice’, you’re so far down that you’ll need to be rescued by a deep-sea diver wearing lead boots in a bathysphere. True “crawlmetal” if ever there was.

More doom and sludge from Thy Grave, another Moscow band using two guitars, bass and drums to pound it out “old style” on their album Filth. Thy Grave certainly aren’t attempting any clever cross-genre moves, nope sir – “heavy as a tombstone with huge cast-iron nails hammered into it” is what they offer, and after six of these ghastly tracks your ears, head, and body will admit defeat as surely as if you’d been crushed beneath a granite boulder. Along with the torturous music, Thy Grave incline towards an extremely pessimistic view of humanity, offering us zero hope or solace with titles like ‘Devil from the Void’, ‘The Depth Devourer’, or ‘Approach to Suffering’. “Each opus is a reflection on all that surrounds us,” is their stated philosophy. “Degradation of the flesh has become a brand, and Hell has become the meaning of life,” they continue, confirming that this oppressive misery and doom, mingled with physical decay, is all they can see as they survey the world. The remarkable cover art, drawn by GodLikeIkons, not only endorses this perception of reality, it positively builds on it – conjuring up nightmarish, extremely twisted apparitions of death, mutation, degradation, and corruption. No tier of humankind, be they emperor, peasant, religious, adult or child, is safe from this catastrophic doom, according to the mighty pen of GodLikeIkons.

Further heavy metal and doom from Remote on their album whose title translates as Smoke. Compared to others heard in this bundle, this band from Kaluga are a shade more accessible and eschew the conventions of slowness and distortion in favour of an energised, enriched form of Black Sabbath. The “enriched” dimension comes from the added synths and phased-type pedal effects, which sustain every riff and carry it forward into a ghastly, layered, drone form. They do however share the taste for extreme-metal shouted and shrieked vocals, which tends to skew what is otherwise a fairly listenable album, albeit one still served by a chain-mailed fist by angry hostiles. The band formed around 2012 and have a respectable back catalogue; this might be their first record where all the lyrics are in Russian. I do respect a tough-minded attitude where a band refuses to compromise their vision in the vain hopes of pleasing an American audience or making global sales. Remote aren’t much of a song band in any case, but when the lyrics appear – sometimes sung, or chanted like hysterical headlines by guest voices – they make an unforgettable impact. My fave here is the 6-minute ‘P’epel’, almost pure meandering noise and no attempt at playing a tune; it slithers like a gigantic, malevolent python. But it’s atypical of the rest of the album. Hideous album cover art depicting a Hell populated with dragons, flames, and giant skulls, while horned demons commit depraved sexual acts. Note the almost-symmetrical designs of this artwork, aspiring towards the condition of Black Metal.

Her Highness are a duo known only the initials K.T. and K.A., and on their album Visions Of A Lower Life they offer six tracks of extreme heaviosity blasted out in the “doom” area with much emphasis on low end and menacing, shifting bass sounds…I kind of prefer the rare atmospheric moments, such as ‘Possibilities of a Deviant Rebirth’ or ‘Acceptance and Annihilation’, but that’s untypical of most of the album which is straight-ahead riffing and drumming. Would their act improve if they had a vocalist? Maybe, but there’s also a lot to be said for their pure instrumental bass and drum mayhem. The duo are not Russian – they come from Budapest and they’ve been proudly bludgeoning citizens since 2014 with their “depravating musical vision”, as they call it. They’re especially pleased that they do it all with bass guitar and drums alone. These “six hymns of despondent sludge” were penned between 2016 and 2019, but they recorded the album in a studio during the pandemic. The chap on the cover looks exactly like the “Pinhead” character in Hellraiser, except he’s stuck with hypodermic needles. The limited sonic range here produces nauseating effects after prolonged listening, which might be their desired outcome.

Detieti amused us for ten seconds with their slightly wacky Frogressive Punk album in 2018, but this Moscow band seem to be taking a new direction on Serious IV. Fairly large number of personnel involved in its making, playing synths, guitars, percussion, electronics, and samples…they’re mixing up any number of musical styles and genres here, exhibiting proggy-styled jazz-fusion riffs with complex time signatures sometimes spliced with modern-sounding sequencer patterns and sampledelic episodes. The lead guitarist – I think it’s Alexander Kosarenko – doesn’t quit when he gets the shredder in his mitts and pushes down on his effects board, and his tireless space-filling runs are impressive, but can also be quite exhausting to listen to. They claim “classic prog” as their basic model, but they’re certainly not harking back to Camel or King Crimson or any 1970s bands (except maybe Rush) – it feels like their inspiration comes from the 1980s second wave like Marillion, or even later. The opening cuts ‘Disorienteria’ and ‘Milky Squid’ will please listeners who like a rich, over-crowded dish with plenty of high-speed energy bursts and colourful crazy sounds; ‘Reflective Architect’ is slightly more approachable, and gives the keyboard players a chance to demonstrate their tasteful, melodic moves. “Detieti are still inspired by sci-fi movies from the 80s, [and] they come up with funny cartoon characters,” we are told; “all this helps to compose new music.” They’re referring to their overall method – part of their ambition is to create, or suggest, imaginary film soundtracks, hence the colourful cartoon images on the insert, drawn by Mikhail Ivanov. Like the songs, these images pass on the impression that Detieti are not entirely serious, yet they still contain traces of oddness and mildly surreal events.

Izrazets here with self-titled album…six energetic cuts by this gtr-bass-drums power trio from Moscow, Dmitry Kuzovlev, Dmitry Lapshin and Oksana Grigoryeva, who lash it out going hell for leather. Album came out in 2021, but these studio recordings date from 2017. If it’s prog moves you’re after, then Izrazets propose something rather different to the florid, over-produced mode of Detieti – their sound is much leaner and more aggressive, and they’ve got their declared elements of free jazz and dub music too. In places, like the unhinged see-saw motions on ‘Friends With Benefits’, I can almost hear a Robert Fripp fixation struggling to make itself heard among the restless bass and amplifier hum. I mean there’s a concern with detail and complexity in the guitar work, aiming to balance large clusters of notes with a frenetic New Wave spirit. Other New Wavish or post-punkish devices can be heard too, such as the harsh “angularity” evident on ‘Necklace’, where the tricky rhythm section zig-zags are spliced with nasty noise bursts from the guitar. Also try ‘Slippery Game’ if you’re craving a quick dose of Sonic Youth-styled hammered string-attack mayhem. There’s also the general tendency for the trio to keep shifting their course mid-stream, so each tune may showcase at least three or more genres or styles within the same frame. Yet they manage to keep their balance while doing this, and don’t contextualise these changes with anything so pretentious as symphonic-styled “movements” or clever titles, which can be a pitfall with a band who wants to signal their “cleverness” to the listener. This one’s growing on me…the players, who have connections to the bands Brom, The Rig, and Rudolf, work hard to milk every second of juice, dynamism, and musical variation out of their simple set-up.

Pretty horrible “grindcore” record from MxAxMxA, another Moscow band…their Long-Awaited Firstborn contains 13 short tracks, most of them around the ultra-short length I’d associate with Napalm Death or Discharge, and delivered with concomitant high-speed guitar aggro, insane drumming, and screeched vocals (alternating with howled and pained vocals). Some track titles, ‘Graveyard’ and ‘Werewolf’ suggest we’re also dealing with a supernatural horror subtext, one that’s also suggested by the grim cover artwork featuring a baby’s pram inside a cage suspended in a dungeon – like Rosemary’s Baby or The Omen updated for the ultra-violent 21st-century horror-movie junkie. Once you can get past their initial defences – acid sprayed in the face, barbed wire, flamethrowers, deep pits with spikes at the bottom and such – you’ll find MxAxMxA are capable of throwing in a few surprises and calmer moments during this short, but intense, album. Seems to have been released in Portugal as a cassette, and as a CDR in France…

Ferocious heavy pounding blasts from Nothing Has Changed on his Hissing Guilt (ZOHAR 237-2 / OLD TEMPLE OLD 174) CD. This is Michal Kielbasa, an old lag who also founded the industrial heavy metal trio Whalesong in 2009 and had a few records on the Old Temple label under that name. Tremendous amount of low end and horrifying drumbeats here, laying on the smothering atmospheres with a generous hand until the victim is unable to breathe. Cover art depicts the world as nothing more than a pile of inchoate rubble, a ruined building…while track titles allude to unhealthy depressive perceptions of existence, such as ‘No Escape’ and ‘All Meaning is Gone’, or (my personal fave) ‘We Will Never Be Free’, indicating Kielbasa adopts an all-or-nothing perspective on the state of the modern world, and despairs of ever finding liberation. In true “industrial” style, Nothing Has Changed likes to abbreviate his monicker to N.H.C. the better to stamp his identity on the world like a riveter shooting metal studs into your forehead, and on this particular assault he does indeed achieve some memorable moments of overloaded power noise, while the remorseless beats – acting like a demented form of dark Techno – fool the brain for one second into thinking this might be dance music, until you wake up and perceive the raging inferno of all-consuming fire before your eyes. After the ultra-grim opening tracks, the album does offer some moments of “atmospheric” relief in the form of cuts like ‘Trapped In A Corner’, which exhibits a very inventive use of layering and swirling effects, but even here the sense of nightmare is inescapable. Powerful, vicious, electrifying.

If that episode of iron and granite is a bit too much for your morning muesli, you might find more solace in the mysterious Ulesa’s self titled album (ZOHAR 236-2), which is more like a soothing cup of warm milk compared to those crunchy berries above. Voices, loops, ambient mist-a-thonics and gently pulsating rhythms are what constitute this slightly eerie universe in which Ulesa hovers like a disembodied pelican. There’s a real subtlety in the way these voices – apparently “playing the main role” in the production – are treated and positioned in the mix, leaving us balanced on the crucial knife-edge between the familiar and the unknown. As these spectres wail their unearthly chants, we hear traces of keyboards resembling forlorn trumpets in the murk and mist, while the rhythms have been reduced to mere suggestions of form, the memories of a gigantic foundry pounding in the distance some 40km away. Label press are enthused about the “dark and ritual tribalism” and praise the “cinematic touches” on this release. To add to the general air of anonymity, all the tracks are untitled and merely identified with Roman numerals, plus there’s the cover art of ambiguous, out-of-focus photos, said visuals entirely in the spirit of Ulesa’s music. Refreshingly short (circa. 30 mins of music) album and at times quite moving with its lonely and wistful atmospheres.

Seems like every industrial band and his brother are making movie soundtracks these days – a cultural development which may also be related to the continuing abundance of modern horror movies, especially those which up the ante on psychologically troubling themes, concentrating on unknown or supernatural forces instead of wallowing in the gore and bones. This observation might well apply to Klechdy, a short 2018 film by Pawel Lukomski. I never saw it, but it deals with witchcraft and organ-harvesting and may be making some deeper point about immigration issues, as the hero Juju is an African man trying to make his way back to Poland and encountering many troubles in a remote village. The music for Klechdy (ZOHAR 235-2) is performed by Rigor Mortiss, an industrial rock band from Plock who formed in 1990. We heard them on their Wbrewny album from 2019, and on today’s item they pretty much continue the same formula of combining “the most suffocating elements from stoner/death metal with dense dark ambient drone”, as noted then. This adds up to a lot of angry and stringy guitars from Malgorzata Florczak and Maciej Stolinski, and with the added bass and drums it means certain tracks here are indistinguishable from any generic death metal thrash. However, when Florczak gets behind the keyboards he injects a lot of emotional horror simply through unleashing dissonant chords and jangling effects. I like the tracks where there’s a measure of tension and suspense, which may match up to scenes in the movie, but a lot of this record is all about the release – all-out terror assaults and cathartic riffing, suggestive of a panicked escape through a dark forest. Quite a mixed set; the record even closes with a rap by CB Mvula (the star of the film), performed over grisly guitar chords and unsubtle beats. A short and not very satisfying record; the music doesn’t flow well as an album, amounting to a series of cues, and it exposes one of the shortcomings of Rigor Mortiss, their overall lack of subtlety.

All the above from 4th October 2021.

I don’t feel too bad that I never heard of Chain before, as he seems to have gone out of his way to leave very few traces for the questing music detective to follow, and it would be a commonplace to describe him as a “cult” artist – a label which he would most likely resist. Fortunately we have sleeve notes here written by Alessandro Coco, evidently written from deep knowledge of this mysterious fellow and his music. He began life in a heavy metal band formed in 1977, with the unfortunate name of Death SS, with the singer Stefano Sylvester; they’ve been described with “cult horror death metal” and other such tags, and I see a compilation of their music on the Italian Minotauro label is now a highly-priced collector’s item. The music on this double LP, fully licensed from Minotauro, has been drawn from a number of his solo releases dated 1986 to 1998, with the majority of tracks lifted from the 1994 album Dies Irae; I single that one out, as it’s the source of some of his more memorable music. As it happens, Dies Irae was reissued by Minotauro in 2021, complete with Paul Chain’s “magickal” emblems on the front cover (not reproduced anywhere here) and one is tempted to track down a copy.

Paul Chain Is Dead Volume 1 is mostly a solo record – apart from the long centrepiece ‘Tetri teschi…’ where he’s joined by a rhythm section Claud Galley and Thomas Hand Chaste, and on ‘Way To Pain’ where acoustic guitarist Paul Dark was recruited for extra Baroque stylings, plus there’s the haunted near-hysterical moaning of Sandra Silver on one track. It’s nigh-impossible to summarise what Chain is doing, with his array of instruments – mostly synths and drum machines, but possibly guitars and electronics also – and while it’s possible to say he works in many “styles” or “genres”, what strikes the listener is the utter uniqueness of his music, the deep strangeness of it, and the force of conviction with which it’s delivered. Reaching for comparisons, Alessandro Coco invokes everything from psychedelic rock to minimal synth, but he also uses the helpful term “occult rock”, which is how many Chain fans referred to it. One might wish to refer to two other Italian musicians who have also flirted with occult and dark themes, Simon Balestrazzi and Pietro Riparbelli, who records as K11 and Tele S. Therion. But they’re both about “atmospherics”; Chain feels more like an occult practitioner. Nick Hamilton is even less equivocal in his praise, and calls Chain an “outsider”, a theme which would certainly be in keeping with the other marginal releases in this label’s fine catalogue. At first spins, I felt a certain amount of constrained emotion emanating from the corpus of Paul Chain, as if he were an introverted bedroom genius with a grudge against the world, spitting out barbs of anger, fear, pain, and doubt. Particularly so on the long track ‘Tetri teschi…’, where his soloing becomes increasingly demented and baroque, wallowing in delicious excess while the bass and drums chug away with their remorseless sullen punk-rock blastage, endlessly hammering out the same spastic riff. This 21-minute monstrosity occupies most of side B; recorded in 1981, it’s been edited down from a 31-minute epic. If you were looking for all the curlicued extravagance of Italian prog melded into a Frankenstein with industrial music and lumpen amateurish punk, check in here immediately. This one originally came out on Violet Art of Improvisation (1989), a release highly collectible in its original CD and vinyl formats.

But other moods, and other dimensions to this strange man’s personality, soon become clear. Besides doing the excessive guitar-noise thing and struggling with angstry demons, he’s also capable of the most distant and ice-cold minimalism…Side A contains cold and unsettling synth songs, expressing multiple forms of nihilism and alienation with their weird sounds, unhinged arrangements, and unexpected shifts. Instantly transcending any “cold wave” or “industrial” labels you might want to throw at his music. Oddest of all is his “cover version” of Dies Irae, the Penderecki composition; Chain has taken the original oratorio (written in remembrance of Auschwitz), stripped it of any vocal content, and reduced it to 6:25 mins of intense, hollowed-out hissing and moanage; the complexity of the original has bled out, leaving just the barest traces sketched in skeletal outlines. Further bleakness can be found on Side C, where the mood turns towards the melancholic and the music forms lugubrious shapes, moving about in near-darkness. These include such harrowing titles as ‘Way To Pain’, ‘Noise in the Brain’, and ‘Presence of the Soul’s Forest’, but for me the standout on this side is ‘Life Down’, another 1994 piece enriched with its incredibly wild synth work, full of unpredictable shifts; by turns sinister and growling, or freaking out like an evil twin of Sun Ra, bordering on dementia. The programme calms down slightly by Side D, occupied by ‘Domino’ from his Opera Decima (The World of the End) LP. Here, the parts don’t fit together quite so successfully for me, and one might accuse the track of meandering in places across its 23 minutes, but even so it induces a queasy sensation, putting the ear off-balance, indicating all is not well in the kingdom. Here, Chain’s synths sound like he’s a less benign version of Klaus Schulze, massed artificial tones and unusual melodies abounding.

Our man Catena continued to use the Paul Chain name after he left Death SS in 1983, but he underwent some form of crisis in 2003; at any rate, he destroyed a lot of the surviving evidence of his work (tapes, photos) as part of this “artistic death”. I am kind of reminded of Kenneth Anger, the American occult underground film-maker, who took out an advert in Village Voice in 1967 to announce his own death; he is still alive, of course, but he was making some point about closing down a previous chapter of his artistic career. Naturally, being Anger, he wanted to do it dramatically and with a certain amount of ritual magick attached to the action, hence the full-page advert with its black border and stark message. Perhaps Catena, himself evidently no stranger to the occult and esoteric, was attempting something similar. We’re no nearer solving the mystery of this enigmatic outlier, but I’m very glad to have heard this powerful and singular music; we look forward to hearing Volume 2. Still in print at time of writing. From 15th June 2021.

Besides being brutal, Mz.412 delighted in a particularly extreme form of blaspheming and anti-religious screeds, resulting in bleak records that were almost 100% anti-humanity. But thankfully, there’s less of that mean streak in evidence on today’s record, and although there’s plenty of painful bludgeoning and deathly themes, the duo also manage a good menacing atmospheric mood on some tracks, for instance the title cut and also ‘Bar as Broderlos Rygg’. This atmospheric dimension I attribute to the contributions of Ekelund, appearing here under a runic name my keyboard cannot reproduce, and familiar to us from past works as Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words and Trepaneringsritualen. I have a soft spot for both of those acts of his, even though the latter is extremely blackened and grim, and the former is utterly bleak and suicidal. As Dead Letters, Ekelund has made artistic capital out of his own mental illness, freely owning that he has suffered from borderline personality disorder, resulting in depression and a terrible disconnect from the rest of the human race. For that, he elicits my sympathy; conversely, Nordvargr just seems to be hateful and misanthropic for the sake of it, and as yet I’ve found no evidence to the contrary.

As to Lidaverken Del I, it emerges as surprisingly listenable compared to the toxic blasts of Mz.412, and contains certain hooks that make it shade more accessible – vocals (called “incantations” here by the press note), strong rhythms, pounding beats, compelling mesmerising drone-based riffs…but make no mistake, it’s still firmly in the “Death Industrial” mode, spitting out many poisonous barbs, unpleasant textures, and insufferable noise, challenging you to endure this sheer aural Hell. The press persuades us that this record “adds new elements to the otherwise rigid tropes of the genre”, an assertion which might be true, but I’d have to let other experts determine that. Available in CD and as a limited LP pressed in black or olive green vinyl. From 24th June 2021.

Billed as a Satanic death doom metal duo specialising in themes of Biblical-era apocalyptic war and genocide, Helsinki-based Unsalvation sally forth on their second album “Decimation by Revelation” with bloodthirsty grinding blackened death metal cacophony. Burning acid guitar corrosion, insane drums hammering away at full blast-beat speeds and the most gruesome and horrific monster vocals, both death metal and black metal, with little concern for the niceties of song composition – y’know, concepts like clear melodies that we can all remember and follow, definite beats and rhythms, lyrics we can at least try to follow no matter how indecipherable the singing is – are the order here. The duo’s musical approach centres around deploying death metal structures and conventions in an unstructured, free-flowing style that includes elements from atmospheric BM, industrial and noise to create a frightful and chilling sound universe where Blackness, Chaos and Death reign supreme.

Starting with Track 2, “Incarnation of the Lightbringer” and continuing with “Locust Epiphany”, the death metal songs proper start off as bursts of sudden chaos given some structure by the furious drumming: the guitars churn out continuous meandering drone grind and the voices, usually ghostly in nature, ebb back and forth in the mix as they scream and groan. With “Pestilence and Death of the Firstborn”, some semblance of actual song structure and riffs is present but anything approaching order quickly gets swallowed up in the black chaos. Right across the album also is an incredibly chilly and malevolent atmosphere.

The songs that really distinguish this album are those where Unsalvation leave behind (or almost leave behind) their death metal trappings and dive into sheer noise or the darkest, doomiest ambient music or non-music as it were. Opener “From Hebron to Bethlehem” will have listeners scratching their heads as to whether they’re hearing just a lot of static or anything resembling music at all. At least the track will winnow those unprepared to enter True Sonic Black Hell from those foolish or manic enough to want to follow Unsalvation and dive right in! At another extreme is “Decimation upon Yehudim”, a creepy ambient snapshot of another, very unearthly and darkly sinister dimension coming later in the album. The remaining songs after this track mix industrial chainsaw-guitar noise and monster-cloud-full-of-demons ambience or looping samples of machine noise with death metal blast-beats and crunchy guitar grind, some of which forms actual death metal riffs.

While it lasts, the album is a lot of fun to hear, with the sheer lunacy and energy that went into it. Layers of sonic textures associated with death metal are stretched out and savoured to the full with unexpected effects: the harsh crushing abrasion of death metal guitars turns into industrial-strength corrosion that would rip through a flotilla of 1,000 space-ships in less than the blink of an eye while guttural DM vocals become a Lovecraftian entity too terrible for human imagination to behold. The tracks could have been a bit longer for a more immersive experience and the production could have been improved so that the drumming (which shapes the music) could have been thicker and heavier rather than tinny. Unsalvation might not break much new ground in deconstructing death metal and turning it into noisy industrial death experimentation but they bear close watching from fans of experimental extreme metal if only to see where their eccentric vision takes them.

I must confess this was a case where the album front cover caught my attention and I’m not sure why because as you can see it’s not particularly pretty or cartoonish or lacking in any sort of artistic taste. Barishi is a three-piece sludge metal band with black, death and progressive influences based in Vermont in the United States’ New England region, although originally the band started out as a quartet and only became a trio when the original vocalist left after the band had already recorded two albums. This current release, “Old Smoke”, is Barishi’s third recording so in a sense it’s a first album for the guys in their current line-up with lead / rhythm guitarist Graham Brooks taking over vocalist duties.

Opening track “The Silent Circle” is very strong and confident in its delivery and any uncertainty over Brooks taking on more than his fair share of the work is dispelled immediately: his gruff blackened death metal vocals, edged in New England winter cold, are assured and hold their own very well against the band’s dense musical arrangements and tight precise playing. A very clear and professional production enhances the music which with a few deft changes of key expands enormously into highly atmospheric, almost dream-like worlds outside our own. While the song is long, the band’s playing is very focused and restrained, concentrating on a rhythm and set of riffs that are consistent throughout yet allowing for changes throughout the track that ensure the whole song is never boring. Next up, “Blood Aurora” involves an even bolder vocal approach from Brooks, trying on both death and black metal vocal styles and not doing badly at all: from now on, the challenge must be which style he prefers and whether it suits the song and its nature-based lyrical content (which includes references to cannibalism and the ill-fated Donner Party migration in California over winter in 1846-7 on one track “The Longhunter”). As on the first song, the music relies on precision playing and a disciplined attitude, this time with lead guitar solo, chunky riffs and some powerful tom-tom thunder in parts.

While the long tracks are taken up with a highly technical style of playing, showcasing the musicians’ ability to work together at a fast pace and to build up a dense style of music, the short tracks demonstrate the musicians’ ability to delve into and experiment with other styles of music: “Cursus Ablaze” is a beautiful ambient instrumental piece dominated by acoustic guitar full of the wonder of the vast natural environments to be found still in the US; and “The Longhunter” and “Entombed in Gold Forever” have strong grooves with strong death metal influences and structures.

If they still have any surprises, Barishi unleash them on the title track, mixing atmospheric progressive rock, folk and black metal together in a looser though no less meticulously performed style. The music seems more expansive and at the same time introspective, and in its meanderings there is a strong sense of a journey being undertaken resulting in self-discovery or a personal revelation.

While the album probably could have done with a wider range of sounds and atmospheres to make the songs more individual, and Brooks probably needs to settle on one particular vocal style and stick to it, and develop an emotional range with it – listeners quickly figure that his black metal style is all aggression and not much else, and other vocal styles deal with other moods – my impression is that “Old Smoke” represents a new direction for Barishi and is the culmination of a great deal of careful thought and hard work in refining the band’s style and direction. The energy on the album is controlled and channelled into a slow steady burner brimming with passion and soul. It deserves a wide audience and might very well be a sleeper classic of its kind.

It starts off very quietly in a dark mournful mood, as an orchestral introduction to what perhaps might be a movie adaptation of a novel by one of the Bronte sisters – brooding, melancholy, yet a little hopeful and giving a hint of the drama that lies within – and before you know it, the recording’s full majesty as an atmospheric and epic death / doom metal album erupts in its first proper track “A Dying Light”, the intro title track being but a mere ambient instrumental to this song. Yes, at last death / doom metal comes into its own as a serious genre in its own right, mustering and mastering deep emotion (sorrow and grief in particular) and stately dignity. For all that though, with the power this style can gather, there is the danger of the recording taking itself too seriously, with all the pomposity and arrogance this can imply; fortunately the six-piece Spanish band Sun of the Dying does not fall into that trap, preferring to mix the orchestral synthesiser-generated grandeur with sharp death metal and deep guttural vocals in equal amounts, and to write moderately long songs (the longest falling just short of nine minutes in length) on subject matter such as despair, suicide, the end of hope and love, and ultimately the end of life on Earth itself.

The music can be very ponderous and sometimes I wish those synths would just go away as their sound can actually be too warm for music this morose and doomy. Rockpop-friendly riffs and melodies are few and far between but in their stead is music, both metal and non-metal, that is highly atmospheric and very emotionally intense. The vocals are a mix of gravelly DM growl and clean-toned crooning that sometimes goes operatic; for the first time perhaps, I actually find the DM growling preferable to the not-too-remarkable clean singing. Each track is a small work of art in itself, starting small and escalating suddenly to a huge multi-layered work, with percussion, guitars, bass and background orchestral synths combining their respectively powers into an expressive synergistic whole.

The album can be heard as a whole – though for some listeners this may be a test in endurance – or as a set of self-contained tracks that can be heard on their own, even though they are related in a general way through their lyrics, all of which express a loss of hope, love and life at both a personal level and on a more abstract plane. While the music is not especially original in its sound, which could actually be a lot more raw and emotional if the musicians could substitute acoustic equivalents for the synth-generated orchestral backing, and there is scope perhaps for some improvisation and even some theatre, this recording does have feeling, passion, dignity and tragic splendour.

Sun of the Dying originally formed in 2013 as a side project of guitarist Daniel Fernández Casuso with inspiration taken from classic British doom metal bands that formed in the late 1980s / early 1990s: Anathema, My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost.

Like its tongue-twisting title and the intricate cartoony artwork, this album, the second by Seattle-based black / death / thrashers Xoth, is a tight, dense and intricate affair of songs packed with lots of time signature and key changes, flippy blast-beat percussion, chunky rhythms and lyrics combining sci-fi fantasy, aspects of the occult, Lovecraftian themes, conspiracies and a nihilist attitude to humanity. The songs are delivered in a very clean production with plenty of space within each track in spite of the densely layered music and most instruments and the dual vocals, calling and responding to each other, can be heard very clearly. The technical execution is sharp and impeccable. Yet somewhere along the way, somebody forgot to tell the Xoth guys, busy as they were with the technical aspects of composing the music and recording it, that they need to write ACTUAL songs with melodies and riffs that flow into one another and make each and every track a self-coherent monster being. The result is an album where the songs tend to bleed into one another and resemble variations of the one meandering, torturous meta-track. Because each song hews to much the same template of song composition – pack in as many speedy technical thrashy riffs and melodies into the one song, and don’t change the sound or ambience (non-existent anyway) of the music and its production with each new song – the tracks don’t have their own distinct identities and it’s up to the rasped lyrics to identify one song from the next.

That the album tends to sound much the same throughout is a pity because the Xoth guys obviously enjoy what they do, and play with so much enthusiasm and a sense of humour that you feel such a curmudgeon for daring to kvetch about the album. There’s quite a lot in and about the lyrics to like: they’re not densely packed with long words impossible to pronounce in a rasping guttural death metal voice that would have you racing for the online dictionaries to find out what they mean, and the images they evoke are comic-strip immediate. It’s a real pity that the style of music doesn’t change for each change in the subject matter of the songs: the music tends to be rather one-dimensional straight-up death thrash cartoon metal with very little black metal influence. There’s very little that’s scary here and much that I’d call campy and kitschy.

The album is likely to be Xoth’s breakthrough into the alternative mainstream of tech death / thrash metal. For all its imperfections, it’s likely to be a cult classic for its humour, energy and the high standard of musicianship on display.

In ancient Mayan religion, Ah Puch was one of the names of the death gods who ruled over the world of the dead and who were associated with darkness and disaster. The Aztec equivalent was Mictlantecuhtli or Lord Mictlan. These gods are the inspiration for this debut album by sludge doom band Dirge who hail from Mumbai in India. In a light-bulb moment, Dirge decided to mix Mayan and Aztec mythological elements with a quick history lesson on the conquest of the Aztec empire by Spanish conquistadores under the leadership of Hernan Cortes, who also had help from indigenous Mexican groups under the rule of the Aztecs, in the 1520s. The result is an interesting narrative on how Ah Puch / Lord Mictlan gets his fill of war, blood and gore from both the Aztecs and the Spanish, playing both sides off each other as it were, and this theme inspires and pushes a set of very heavy grinding sludge doom songs with death metal elements and a strong sense of dread.

“Invoking the Demigod” sets the tone with hard-hitting concrete-slab riffs, solemn thumping percussion and ragged screeching guttural vocals. It’s a steady track with a strong focus, plodding yet relentless, a form of punishment in itself. In later parts of the track, melodic death metal elements creep in and the song finishes in a blur of lead guitar feedback and cold atmosphere. For some listeners, this will be the outstanding track on the album; for other listeners, the follow-up “Montezuma’s Revenge” with its mix of hyper-doom melodies and riffs along with the shrieking vocals and the stentorian bass grit turning the song into heightened sludge doom theatre, will be the stand-out. As on the previous song, “Montezuma’s Revenge”, in which the spirit of Ah Puch enters the dying Aztec king Montezuma, explodes into lead guitar roar at its climax and the song ends in six-string howl.

The album continues in much the same vein with ever more stupendous death-influenced sludge doom crushing all resistance before it while singer Harshad Bhagwat wails overhead. The music can be overpowering and sometimes monotonous, though in later parts of most songs the lead guitar solo turns out to be inventive and energetic, providing a refreshing break in what would otherwise be wall-to-wall sledgehammer doom. A brief interlude “The Dilemma”, dominated by acoustic guitar melody, gives listeners a much needed pause from too much juggernaut power. From then on, the album resumes its tale of how individual humans like La Malinche, Cortes’ interpreter, advisor and mistress, and Cortes himself, succumb to Ah Puch’s bloodlust.

Each song is a tremendous juggernaut in itself, highly intense and packed with plenty of melodies and riffs, and is probably best heard on its own. However the six tracks are chapters in an overarching narrative, meaning that they have to be heard as a whole, and I daresay a lot of listeners may be worn-out hearing just the first half of the album as the intensity of the music and the lyrics can be extreme. Later songs lose some of the early sludge doom style and become cleaner, more prog-rock and even a bit commercial and generic in their sound. It’s almost as if the band is running out of steam and getting quite exhausted themselves after the halfway mark on the album. The songs probably could have been edited for length with no harm done to the album’s theme or the music’s intensity.

For a debut album, this is a very impressive effort even with the flaws and inconsistencies in the music. Dirge have some work to do, to keep to a consistent style while incorporating a range of influences, but I’d say these guys are worth watching in the future.