Wormrot - Hiss (2022)

Country: Singapore
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Jul 2022
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Singaporean grindcore sounds exactly like the sort of thing I review here at Apocalypse Later but a lot of the mainstream press ignores. However, Wormrot have been press darlings for years and this fourth album has been consistently acclaimed as their masterpiece, as well as a swansong for vocalist Arif, a founder member, who left the band after fifteen years behind the mike. They get a lot of coverage and Hiss made at least five best of lists for 2022, as many as Amorphis, Rammstein and Meshuggah.

And I can see why because this is surely the most versatile grindcore album I've ever heard, much of that due to the sheer range of Arif, making his position in the band a particularly tough one to fill. Sure, there's a ten second blitzkrieg song here that does exactly what you expect and nothing more. This one's called Unrecognizable and it's just there, as the nineteen second Shattered Faith is just there later on the album. These aren't anything new and there are precise equivalents on every other grindcore album. The good news is that that's less than half a minute of time wasted, while they get on with the interesting stuff. And there's a lot of that.

In fact, there's so much variety on offer that it'll be hard to cover all of it. Yes, most of these songs are short. Twenty-one of them take up only thirty-three minutes, though the closer, Glass Shards, is an almost unimaginable four and a half minutes all on its own. That's an intro in prog rock but it seems like a sprawling epic in grindcore and the violin of Myra Choo is a standout element, mixing so well with the guitars of Raysid. Yes, most of these songs are fast, with Hatred Transcending the one that screams along so fast it's like Wormrot are riding a lightning bolt, but Pale Moonlight is slow and tribal and All Will Wither is slower still, Arif's snarling calmly over a slow beat, with zero input from guitars, just shimmering cymbals approximating feedback.

But let's talk about Arif, because he's the first reason for this to be so versatile. He pulls out high shrieks and low growls on the opener, The Darkest Burden. Then he adds a surprisingly rich clean voice to Broken Maze, almost like I'd expect to hear from Bucovina. For Behind Closed Doors, he's off into another genre, with old school chanted hardcore vocals before everything went shouty. In When Talking Fails, It's Time for Violence, he shifts again with an anarcho-punk singalong chorus. And that's jut the first four songs, which rack up about six and a half minutes between them.

Guitarist Raysid, now the only founder member left in the band, covers a lot of ground too. He can play incredibly fast, as you'd expect for grindcore, but often he lets Vijesh, who is an insanely tight drummer, run loose and doesn't even attempt to match him, playing much slower riffs in front and sometimes even just power chords. Regardless of how fast Vijesh is blurring, Raysid plays riffs on Behind Closed Doors that wouldn't feel out of place on the Metallica debut, which was really just Diamond Head a little faster.

My favourite songs come late on the album, when he's playing a highly melodic guitar behind Arif. Desolate Landscapes and Vicious Circle both almost sound like two different songs behind played in the same studio at the same time and they sound wonderful. This harmonic work is also there a little earlier on Voiceless Choir, which even adds some divvying up of lyrics that old school hip hop artists used to do. At the other extreme, there's experimental dissonance on Your Dystopian Hell and Hatred Transcending. Nobody here wants to just do the one thing that's always done and I'm unable to conjure up a better approach to take to any genre.

And, talking of things that just aren't done, there's that violin. Whoever came up with the bright idea to add a violin to a grindcore album deserves a prize. Myra Choo isn't omnipresent, like she'd be in a folk metal band, but, whenever she turns up, the music finds a whole new level that's unlike anything I've heard before. Grieve, in particular, is searing. It's a sub-two minute instrumental and it almost finds its way into industrial, because Choo isn't interested in playing sweet on this one. It starts out sounding like the band are in a factory, cutting sheet metal with a chainsaw. Then Choo speeds up and it's fascinating.

She plays much sweeter on Glass Shards, delivering an excellent solo, letting Raysid follow suit on guitar and then combining with him to even greater effect. I assume she's just here as a guest and that may or may not be a one time thing, but I hope she works with Wormrot more and whoever in the Singaporean extreme metal scene might be open to diversifying their sound. I caught a violin moment here and there, on Sea of Disease and Noxious Cloud and especially Weeping Willow, but sometimes so fleeting that I wondered if I was just adding her in my imagination.

All of which adds up to this not being your typical grindcore album, but still delivering the goods in every way that grindcore fans would expect. It's a groundbreaking album. If there's a catch here, it has to be that the few traditional songs suddenly seem like filler because so much else has moved on to new and vibrant territory. And that's the only reason I'm going with an 8/10 instead of a 9/10.

Calvaire - Nodus Tollens (2019)

Country: Singapore
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 21 Jul 2019
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I've reviewed a couple of post-rock albums here at Apocalypse Later in 2019. Sparkle and especially Ogmasun explore the post-rock mindset of not writing songs in a traditional form but creating soundscapes by playing traditional rock instruments. I've also reviewed some post-hardcore, which sadly doesn't share that mindset. Fortunately, post-black metal does and here's a quality example from Singapore's Calvaire, presumably named for the Belgian horror film with Vincent Cassel but maybe for the novel by Octave Mirbeau.

Now, black metal has often leaned towards the verbose, so songs of eight or nine minutes in length is nothing new. It's often mixed with ambient music, so the quieter side of this album isn't surprising either. Even when it's at its loudest and most raucous, black metal enjoys a wall of sound approach, a further step into soundscape territory. And, of course, black metal shrieks have always been an instrument in themselves.

In other words, it's not much of a step to go from black metal to post-black metal. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to find that a good deal of what I'm used to calling black metal genre was really post-black metal, merely before the term was ever coined. This album knows that it's post-black metal but it isn't too far adrift from its parent genre with five full tracks that total just shy of forty minutes, a further two minute collection of sounds called Liberosis nudging it over that mark.

To my thinking, the best tracks are the opener and the closer, but what's in between doesn't slack any. Aokigahara is the opener, named for the so-called Suicide Forest on the lava slopes of Mount Fuji. This seems appropriate, as Calvaire are often listed as playing depressive black metal too, and suicide is about as depressive as depressive gets. The album title might prompt that because it refers to the realisation that you don't understand the story of your own life, as if you're a character in the wrong book. Flowers of Fixed Ideas is the closer and I have no idea to what that refers.

I should add here, however, that I didn't find either of these tracks to be depressing (and I've listened to plenty of depressive black metal that is). I found them to have a melancholy to them but the bell-like guitar work has both a ritual aspect and an uplifting nature. Aokigahara is more deliberate, so I wonder if it's about someone (usually a young lady) visiting the forest to take her own life but Flowers of Fixed Ideas is about her returning home having not done so.

By comparison, Lacrimae Rerum is harsher, more brutal and more incessant, a sort of assault that presumably brings on the tears mentioned in its title. It does quieten down at points but it's always more black than post-black. Liberosis, the experimental two minutes that follows it, is more post-black than black, so the album does swing back and forth. The Celestial Dog has a lot of each side, as does Open Grave Dialogue, which combines blastbeats and shrieks with a slow melodic guitar line floating over everything, as if it's a spirit leaving a body.

This is interesting stuff. It's not for those who want their black metal to sound like the product of a cluster of demons celebrating their evil works. It's for those who appreciate the idea of post-rock but also believe in the idea that evocative soundscapes can be harsh and brutal.