Thantifaxath - Hive Mind Narcosis (2023)

Country: Canada
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Jun 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Here's a fascinating album from Toronto that's led off by a fascinating track, Solar Witch. The band describe what they do as avant-garde black metal, but this one starts out firmly in doom territory. Those are Candlemass chords, even if the guitars are doing weird scales around them. What black metal we hear at this point is in the vocals of, well, someone. This is a band of mystery and they're not interested in letting us know any of their names or responsibilities, though photos highlight a trio. That vocal is a raucous cry, somewhere in between a black shriek and a death growl but much closer to the former. The tempo does speed up and also gets increasingly jagged, but it shifts back and forth like a stuttering vehicle, an incredibly tricky slow fast slow fast slow that oddly works.

Solar Witch won't leave me alone, but other tracks joined it and I'm still not sure which I might call highlights. Die hard black metal fans, and I know how fanatical you get, are going to be happiest in Surgical Utopian Love, because it starts out as pure black metal as this album ever gets. For three minutes, it's fast and sheer and built out of jagged edges tortured into compliance. However, it's a long track, running eleven minutes and it has movements to explore. Three minutes in, it goes back to doomy and theatrical. Eventually it transforms into a sort of atmospheric krautrock.

What I found over repeat listens is that the album gradually shifts too, from the jagged rhythms of Solar Witch through the black metal wall of sound of Surgical Utopian Love slowly downward to Sub Lilith Tunnels, which starts out like krautrock and moves into avant garde classical. What triggered me to what was happening was an interruption. I came back to Hungry Ghosts, which I was enjoying as a smooth piece and suddenly found it jagged and deliberately awkward. That's because I'd gone back to it afresh and focused on what the guitars are doing behind the keyboards. Listening within the flow of the album, its jaggedness has much smoother tones than what went before.

It's almost like these songs are rocks that are laid out in a particular order. When we press play on the album, a waterfall starts to flow over them, smoothing them out. While we're listening to the first track, it's only just started that process. By the time we get to Hungry Ghosts, it's worn away many of the edges. By Sub Lilith Tunnels, everything's smooth. The only exception to that is Mind of the Sun, which closes out the album, because it speeds back up and returns to black metal. It's a good one too with a very neat cutoff to plunge us into sudden silence.

The best songs to me come early and late. I like Solar Witch more than Surgical Utopian Love, but I would guess that the die hards would reverse that. There's Mekong Delta in these songs, twisted a little more into an even more extreme direction. Hungry Ghosts is a delightful challenge and I dig Sub Lilith Tunnels a lot, as it shifts almost into a György Ligeti style dense choral vein, initially with Tangerine Dream overlaid but eventually pure. Mind of the Sun is a great and far more traditional closer.

In between, I have more trouble. The Lost Wisdom of Wolves is imparted through subdued whisper and distortion. It builds into that core black metal sound but spends a lot of time outside it. As on Surgical Utopian Love, the riffs are often constructed of mathematical patterns, as is Thantifaxath take as much influence from Philip Glass as from Emperor. As they get more fluid, the positive side is that these rhythms become hypnotic and draw us almost into a trance state. The downside is the way they can also lose us. Burning Kingdom of Now doesn't really do anything different from those songs around it but it never quite registers on me, more a point on the way somewhere.

What all this boils down to is that the "avant-garde" label that Thantifaxath stuck onto their genre is appropriate and challenging but not outrageously so. This remains accessible music, even as it's doing all sorts of things that we don't expect. It also becomes more accessible as the album moves along, from the weird tempo shifts of Solar Witch and the blastbeats of Surgical Utopian Love to a piece of atmospheric weirdness in Sub Lilith Tunnels that's almost entirely without drums. They do show up but only for a minute or so out of six and that late on.

I like a lot of this a lot but it's experimental enough that not all of it lands and the old chestnut of your mileage will vary firmly applies. If you're a black metal fan who's open to experimentation, as an increasing number of fascinating bands are doing, you should dig this. If not, then probably not.

Sigh - Shiki (2022)

Country: Japan
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Aug 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

There's so much going on in this album that I'm still not sure that I've truly come to terms with it. I know that I like it, but I didn't get a real grasp on it until at least a couple of times through. That's partly because Sigh have been around for a long time and have diversified their sound over a long career that I'm not overly familiar with. They were founded in Tokyo in 1989 as a black metal band in the Norwegian style. However, they soon added symphonic elements then shifted towards more of a more progressive, avant-garde style.

To highlight how long they've been shifting, they've named their albums acrostically for the band name since the beginning, so each cycle of four begin S, I, G and then H. This album marks the start of their fourth cycle, though the first G was technically an EP so this is a twelfth full length studio album. That G was Ghastly Funeral Theatre in 1997, the beginning of their experimentation, and I see that the most recent H, Heir to Despair in 2018, added traditional Japanese folk elements.

By this point, it's easy to see their black metal roots because lead vocalist Mirai Kawashima sings in a harsh demonic style, often spitting out lyrics with venom, and because there are fast sections where the drums ramp up to a serious tempo and the guitars follow suit, even if the result isn't an entirely traditional black metal wall of sound. These black metal sections show up in the majority of the eight songs proper on offer, but what's important to note is that they're far from alone.

They don't begin the album either. Kuroi Kage kicks off with a slow tortured guitar as if Sigh had a newfound passion for sludge metal. That song livens up during the midsection and there's a black metal part five minutes in, but it doesn't last too long. There's a much more gentle section after it featuring some soft alto saxophone from female vocalist Dr. Mikannibal, who otherwise provides equally demonic vocals that don't betray her gender. What's more, the guitar solos tend to be the sort of guitar solos we expect from traditional heavy metal albums, not that black metal has been ever known for guitar solos anyway.

So there are four clearly separate styles, three of which pervade the album: fast black metal, old school guitar solos and softer saxophone sections. Many songs include all three of these, plus the fourth, which is electronic experimentation that feels even older school than the guitar. There's a section in Satsui - Geshi no Ato that sounds like someone's changing the dial on a radio to float on through a slew of stations without ever stopping long at any of them. I did that on a demo back in the early nineties that I recorded in my bedroom, when my "band" was a couple of rulers, a desk and a Russian thrash album played at 78rpm instead of 33.

Oh, and just in case you thought that was it, there are all sorts of other tones and textures here to keep us on the hop. Shikabane starts out feeling like a punk song, before it goes experimental. Its percussion is absolutely fascinating, especially as its paired with electronic weirdness like ambient space rock. The second half of Satsui - Geshi no Ato couples a hip hop backing track with what feels like synth-driven harpsichord. There's a Metallica-esque groove on Fuyu Ga Kuru, but with a much more demonic voice than James Hetfield would ever deploy. More unusual drum rhythms prompt Kawashima to bring out his flute for a pastoral section.

I have little idea what to call out as favourites because I need to listen through more times. I felt a little confused early on, but Shoujahitsumetsu grounded me for a while. It's much more ferocious than Kuroi Kage, at least when it wants to be and oddly calming when it doesn't. Its primary shift away from black metal is the traditional guitar solo from Nozomu Wakai, which is excellent. Then I got lost again, but engaged with the more progressive sections in songs as the album ran on. Once I'd got to Fuyu Ga Karu, I was hooked.

However, the constant shifting between styles made it hard to get any individual song stuck in my brain. I stopped thinking about any of the songs individually and started thinking about this as an epic single piece, forty-six minutes long. It didn't seem to break down into a set of nine discernable movements, because each of those movements had movements and those movements reoccurred like themes, so where I ended up was that a strange concept where there are four versions of Sigh playing in different styles but they keep shifting in and out of the spotlight, resulting in us having impressions of each as well as impressions of the combination that coalesce within our brains at a later point in time.

For now, I guess I'd call out Fuyu Ga Kuru as my favourite track. There's the Metallica groove; that demonic lead vocal—even if it isn't spat out in a near rap the way it is on Satsui - Gesho no Ato; the pastoral flute part set against swirling keyboards; a black metal section that keeps dropping down to more traditional heavy metal riffs; more unusual rhythms to fascinate me; and eventually some of Dr. Mikannibal's alto sax to wrap things up. That might sound like an unholy mess but it works in that bizarre mixture.

After that, maybe I'd go for Shoujahitsumetsu but more likely the far more progressive Mayonaka no Kaii, which feels like a setpiece at the end of the album. It's the meat in a sandwich between a brief intro, Kuroi Kagami, and a less brief outro, Touji no Asa, but the three play well together. It's another fascinating mixture, not only including many of the elements that I've mentioned, along with a few more. There's a lot of Black Sabbath here, in the form of mellow but heavy psychedelic riffing, sometimes accompanied by flute. The vocals are demonic, of course, and the guitar solo as clean as those vocals aren't.

This is definitely for rock/metal fans with very open minds, but I think it's a gem. I'm very tempted to up my rating from a 7/10 to an 8/10 and probably well after a couple more listens. It simply isn't immediate stuff. We have to get to know this material to fully appreciate everything that's going on within it.

Obnubilo - Nascentes Morimur (2021)

Country: Chile/Australia
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 Nov 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

It's been noticeable for a while that the metal subgenre that's being stretched most beyond what boundaries we used to believe it has is black metal. Sure, there are bands still playing the sort of raw black metal with deliberately crappy production values that we heard on the Bathory debut in 1984, but there are also bands merging the style with others as seemingly far flung as bluegrass, ambient and jazz. I don't envy the musicologists who have to track this evolution, but I can enjoy a lot of it, especially given that black metal also seems to house more dedicated musicians than any other metal subgenre. Half the black metal out there are made by one man bands and those men tend to be involved with half a dozen projects at once, with another dozen behind them.

Obnubilo is an international collaboration between musicians from Chile and Australia and this is its first release, featuring a suitably bleak title for the genre: Nascentes Morimur is the Latin for "When we are born, we are dying". All the instruments are played by Niklas K, who also wrote the music, while the vocals, both clean and harsh, are contributed by AP and Ben T. Sheehan, with the latter also responsible for the lyrics, whatever they are.

Niklas K is one Chilean part of this equation and it doesn't surprise that this is one of eight active projects for him, though he's credited under many names on the others: Ulf Kveldulfsson, NK, Kve, Niklas and Niklas Kveldulfsson for a start, with product on the shelves as Forestfather, Er Murazor, Æra, Deveneror and Swarm of Hatred. Also Chilean is AP, or Sulphur, S, Gorrge or Alfredo Pérez on releases by five other bands: Siaskel, Concatenatus, Lacrymae Rerum, Sol Sistere and The Ancient Doom. He's mostly a vocalist, though he drums for Concatenatus. Ben Sheehan is also a drummer, for Slaughter Thou in Australia, and a guitarist for Abstract the Light. He goes by multiple names too, but not so many: just Ben Sheehan and Baraath, and he only has five active projects. Whew!

So, what does this sound like? It comes described as avant-garde black metal and that seems fair, but it could be called progressive metal even more often. This opens up with strange rhythms and a bizarre urgency, as if the band was leading a psychotic waltz. Most of the vocals are clean but a harsh voice takes over at points for extra emphasis. It's jazzy, unusual and delightfully offbeat, a song that confuses on first listen but grows substantially with repeat runthroughs. And that's just track one.

With Reflections leaps more into black metal territory, with rapid blastbeats, shrieky vocals and a distant harsh call that resonates throughout. However, it has an oddly perky feel to it, with a neat melodic line and a delightfully hyperactive bass that combine to make us smile rather than escape to the forest to curse the bleakness of existence. Obnubilation continues in this vein and it's clear from later songs that aim for a similar approach that this is the core sound of the band. It spreads outwards from here, as they challenge the boundaries they set themselves, just like adventurous black metal bands are apparently supposed to do nowadays.

Unusually, my favourite songs come late in the album. Just as the first track challenged me on its first listen, the whole album followed suit and I wondered if I'd get into it at all. Repeat listens did help and this grew on me, but it never truly connects until deep into the second half.

Lost Horizons is the song that does it for me every time through. It's the longest one on offer, at a blink under seven minutes, and it does acquire an epic feel as it goes. Initially, it's nothing special, just a jagged feel that doesn't seem to have anywhere to go but that groove grows and grows and I found myself in an odd place where I was hearing all sorts of different bands at once. There's Joy Division here and Voivod and King Crimson and often at the same time, as the song hints at The Court of the Crimson King and Nothingface and Transmission, songs I've never previously thought of in a single breath. I can't fully explain it but it got well under my skin and I love it.

It's followed by These Solemn Words, which is even better in ways that are easier to explain. It may be the most prog metal song here, starting mild but interesting and growing as it goes. It also has a groove to it that continues to build, but it's not as overt as on Lost Horizons. This one grows with dynamics as much as simple progression. Icy Barren Steps wraps things up with panache, for three out of three memorable songs at the end of the album, this one featuring some intricate changes that I adored.

It's rare for me to find the strongest material late but this is hardly a traditional album. Even with these songs, it's the feel as much as anything that makes them work for me, something that's not easy to pin down and is always inherently subjective. The reasons why I dig these particular songs so much may well be the exact reasons why you don't. I know that a lot of people don't like Voivod because of their feel and, if you're one of those, you probably won't like this either. I can't call out songwriting, because it's obscured. It's hard to recommend it on a traditional line. It's not riffs or hooks or melodies or structure.

Everything comes down to feel so, if this review has piqued your interest, I'd recommend checking it out on YouTube, especially these later songs, and find out if it does the job for you. It may well. It may well not. It's certainly not going to be for everyone. It's not entirely for me, but I can tell it won't leave me alone and I like that.

Le Chant Noir - La Société Satanique des Poètes Morts (2021)

Country: Brazil
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Oct 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

Let's kick off a new month with something unusual. Even though everything here seems to be French, from the very name of the band to the lyrics to all of the songs, Le Chant Noir are actually a Brazilian outfit hailing from Rio de Janeiro. They're fairly listed as avant-garde black metal, making the intro a notably appropriate affair, with its backward masking over a flavourful carnival organ and accordion. The outro and the final track proper, Eloa, le bel ange, play overtly in this vein too, and it's never quite absent at any point. However, the first song, Le vampire, kicks off with power chords so reminiscent of the Who that I found myself imagining the opening credits to another CSI spin-off show.

This is a really interesting song. Sure, those are are black metal vocals that entice and beckon like an orc carnival barker and we respond. There are some wall of sound moments but mostly the drums are the other black metal component, if we skip past the Satanic lyrical content for a moment, but they're typical black metal drums. When they're fast, they're very fast, but the production has the odd effect of making them sound like the drummer is galloping far beyond his capabilities but very consistently. It's an odd feeling! And they're rarely echoed by any other instrument so, when the drums slow down, we're back with heavy metal power chords, speed drifting slowly away in the rear view mirror. That's what happens at the end of Le vampire, which is effectively just drums and voice, one that seems very female to me.

I'm hearing two voices here, though I'm only seeing a gentleman named Lord Kaiaphas credited. One feels male and very influenced by Dani Filth in its theatrical approach, so that's likely His Lordship. It becomes very deep on Nuit de l'enfer, though it mostly sits in the standard black metal shriek range. However, the other voice seems female to me and it shows up a lot, often taking the lead. Is this some sort of admirable versatility or is there a guest here that I don't know about, perhaps even a second lead singer, one just as influenced by Edith Piaf as Dani Filth?

Sadly I'm not seeing a lot of information about the band. It was founded in 2016 by Lord Kaiaphas and a couple of others Malphas and Mantus. The suggestion is that Kaiaphas provides the vocals, Mantus handles lead guitar and bass, while Malphas does everything else: rhythm guitar, keyboards, drums and a varied set of percussion instruments including vibraphone and marimba.

All of them have other bands too. As DJ Zhyin, Kaiphas mostly performs psygressive trance as Minimal Criminal, though he's also in a black metal outfit called Thokkian Vortex that evolved from just him to a full band. Mantus belongs to what looks like every other black metal band in Brazil, playing an array of instruments under an array of names; the most prolific bands are Mysteriis and Patria. Malphas is also in Mysteriis, as their drummer, and he's in a few others too, drifting into death and power metal. So they're all experienced and ready to create something new and different within their collective genre of choice.

There are heavier songs here that come closer to traditional fast black metal, like Nuit de l'enfer and Le baron sanglant, but they're more interesting when they're mixing it up, as they do often. There's a gothic edge here that comes into play in slower sections and in the interlude called Marche infernale. Often there's an echoey piano or distant guitar that combines with the theatrical approach to create a lush environment that far outstrips the actual depth of instrumentation. This isn't layered densely but it achieves some of what Cradle of Filth do anyway, just in a more stripped down form.

I really like Les métamorphoses du vampire, because it starts out gothic, goes full blown black metal and never quite loses that gothic edge, the piano maintaining its stubbornly slow presence, even with the song shifting into hyperspeed. We lose it on occasion but it's always there. That female voice has a spoken return here, almost as an interlude within the song itself, and the drums are fascinating on this one, again sounding very different to what we expect, but in a really good way. La danse macabre does many of the same things, without spending as much time at full speed.

I listened to this more than I should have done today, but I keep finding more in it each time I listen to either a particular song or the complete album. I liked it from the outset, but I like it more now than I did that first time through. Now, to a rabbit hole that these musicians suggest I should dive into, with Mysteriis surely the first band on that list after the debut Le Chant Noir album, Ars Arcanvm Vodvm. I like when black metal bands do something different and this band definitely do that, though perhaps not as much as I'd have liked, given how delightful the accordion is when they haul it out. How about a dedicated orcish carnival metal album built around the sound in Eloa, le bel ange?

Pupil Slicer - Mirrors (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Post-Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Mar 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

I've seen the memorable name of Pupil Slicer—clearly someone stumbled upon Un Chien Andalou, or at least the one famous clip from it—crop up in a few places so I thought I should check out what looks like their debut full length album, following some EPs. They're definitely an interesting band, though they're hardly going to be everyone's tastes. I usually see them defined as post-metal, but I see telling genres listed on their Bandcamp page like grindcore, mathcore and powerviolence. The one that I'm thinking rings truest is "chaotic hardcore".

That's because this is both wild and tight, often delivered at a breakneck speed but with a solid level of technical ability. There's a lot of stop and start with this band but everyone stops and starts at the same time and they shift tempo just as seamlessly. A blisteringly short song like Stabbing Spiders, all over and done with in a mere forty-seven seconds, comes very close to grindcore, but it's performed with guitars tuned in a very modern American metalcore style and there's too much else going on to be pure grindcore.

By the time L'appel du Vide, a much longer three minute song with a further thirty seconds of what is perhaps a manipulated electronic take on the intro to Metallica's Damage, Inc., was over, I'd figured out the obvious comparison and it's a surprising one. Back in 1992, the BRIT Awards, which featured a performing line-up of pop artists like Seal, Simply Red and Lisa Stansfield, opened with the legendary combination of avant garde techno pranksters, the KLF, and crust punk band Extreme Noise Terror. It was an unusual artistic statement, especially given the audience, but it seems to me that Pupil Slicer might just have stumbled onto that on YouTube and been inspired to start a band.

That's because L'appel du Vide, like the rest of the album to varying degrees, is rhythmic in ways that go far beyond the impressive drums of Josh Andrews. The vocals are spat out in rhythmic bursts like a machine gun, the guitar sometimes resembles a cycling siren, and there's artistic manipulation of the song, whether performed live or added in post. There's a fascinating backing vocal partway that's just as melodic as the song itself isn't. It sounds good to me, but it also sounds as much like an artistic statement as a song.

There's performance art here from the outset. Kate Davies delivers the expected screams and other ultra-harsh gutturals but they're far beyond the more straightforward backing vocals of bassist Luke Fabian and there are points where they feel painful. Martys, for example, which opens up the album with a vengeance, features vocals with the expected harshness until, well, they go much further. The intensity level increases until, by the end of the song, it sounds as if she's in actual, serious pain, like she's just swallowed a vial of acid and her throat's dissolving as she performs.

After a few tracks, I started to wonder what this looks like visually. Husk is fast and furious, but it also gets downright sludgy at points and the longer it runs, the sludgier it gets. The last couple of minutes of Mirrors are More Fun Than Television is even sludgier. And what does it look like? There ought to be a visual component to this. What's going on at the beginning of Worthless, when it's just bass under a drone? Then again, what's going on when it gets moving? It sounds utterly destructive. At least Pupil Slicer put a music video together for the minute and change Interlocutor and it's as dark as it sounds, telling quite the self-destructive story in such a short time, but still leaving room for a very impactful ending.

The closest musical comparison I can conjure up is the debut Dillinger Escape Plan album, Calculating Infinity, but that's a slow motion version of this album. It shares the mathcore insanity of a song like 43% Burnt and even a guitar sound, but this is much heavier, the vocals are much more raucous and the stylistic chameleon play is much more extreme. If that sounds like your sort of thing, then this is going to be so your thing that you'll have found a new favourite band. Otherwise, this will probably scare you.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d's Pee AT STATE'S END! (2021)

Country: Canada
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Official Website | Wikipedia

Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor were a key name in the indie scene when I was hanging out at EMusic around the turn of the millennium, even before they split up in 2003. However, they were always unlike everyone else, even in a genre where the point is often for everyone to be as individual as possible. Certainly, this seemed obvious with this band even before we listened to them, given their name and the title of their debut album, F♯ A♯ ∞, which is a lot easier to quote now than it was in 1997.

This seventh album is just as non-comformist, from the title with its unconventional stylings to a four track line-up that merges pieces together into suites with astoundingly clumsy titles. The opener, for instance, is A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job's Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (Rockets for Mary). Is that really four tracks? Sure, why not. It's broken up that way on some streaming services, but perhaps because they can get away with charging more for each part separately than all together.

The band wouldn't be OK with that, given that they released this album alongside another list of the sort of political demands they tried on their previous album, Luciferian Towers. This time out, they're asking for the prisons to be emptied, power to be transferred from the police to the neighbourhoods they terrorise, the forever wars to be ended and the rich to be taxed until they're impoverished.

Now, the likelihood of all that happening because of fifty-two minutes of Canadian experimental rock is about as close to zero as can be comfortably imagined, but it's a nice thought and it underlines how music is not merely music to this band. Ahead of the album's release, they livestreamed it in entirety alongside a 16mm projection show, an aspect of their experience that's usually reserved for concerts. They aren't on anything as conventional as social media, so the links section above is pretty minimal, and I don't think they've updated their website since they reformed in 2012.

Much of what they do is minimal and often extended and downbeat. They don't have a particularly fun view of the world and that translates into their music. This album is often like that, but it's sometimes surprisingly upbeat. The second part of the first track, the Job's Lament, bit is quirkily playful. I'm not sure I've heard anything from them that's as perky as Government Came, from about four and a half minutes into its initial eleven. It's loose and jazzy and later parts of the full piece approach a jig feel. Perhaps that's the cliffs' gaze at empty waters' rise part of this conglomeration of a track, whose full title is this: "Government Came" (9980.0kHz 3617.1kHz 4521.0 kHz) / Cliffs Gaze / cliffs' gaze at empty waters' rise / Ashes to Sea or Nearer to Thee.

Experimental music often grabs me in part but rarely in full and this fits that description well. There's a long intro to the opening track that I really don't need to hear again, but there are some wonderful pieces of innovation in and amongst the, shall we say, not so accessible parts. Most of it is wildly more accessible to a mainstream public than its stylised title and avant-garde beginning might suggest.

I particularly liked both of the shorter pieces, Fire at Static Valley and Our Side Has to Win (For D.H.), each of which runs about six minutes. These remind me a lot of what Tangerine Dream were doing in the mid to late seventies, but far more organic, especially the latter because of the violins of Sophie Trudeau and what sounds like a cello to me but is probably the upright bass of Thierry Amar. As an old school Tangerine Dream fan, Fire at Static Valley is my favourite here by far.

It's a good world that has a band like Godspeed You! Black Emperor in it, even if there's a lot that we collectively still need to fix that this album sadly won't. Sometimes reality sucks and music is what we use to fill the holes.

Five the Hierophant - Through Aureate Void (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 26 Feb 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

While it's not as broadly despised as nu metal, I see a lot of hate hurled at the black metal genre, as if even the guys listening to slamming brutal death metal see it as just noise. And, sure, black metal in its rawest form can often be an underproduced bleak and uncompromising wall of sound, but I believe that it has to be the most versatile extreme subgenre nowadays, as those intense aspects can merge so well with a variety of other genres, not all of which are metal. That black metal can tie so integrally to ambient and jazz and psychedelic rock fascinates me.

Case in point: Five the Hierophant, who play what is often described as post-black metal but could be dark jazz or even progressive rock. They hail from London, though not all their names are rendered in the Latin alphabet—महाकाली translates from the Nepali into Mahakali—and they conjure up what is an enticingly accessible avant-garde sound. It's utterly original even if it reminds of a slew of utterly original bands who play with black metal in unusual ways, like Katharos XIII, White Ward and Oranssi Pazuzu. The other point of comparison I found is to seventies prog bands like Van der Graaf Generator and King Crimson.

It's entirely instrumental in the sense that there's no vocalist, though there are narrative moments to be found, and it incorporates a lot of jazz and ethnic music, saxophone arguably the lead instrument and hand drums occasionally as obvious as any other instrument, such as on Pale Flare Over Marshes. The instrumentation gets strange from the sliding bells that kick off Leaf in the Current; while I knew what djembes are from listening to west African music, I hadn't the faintest idea what a rag-dung was, but it's apparently a long Tibetan trumpet, not something you'd usually hear in a derivative of black metal.

There are five pieces of music on offer here, all over eight minutes and averaging over ten, with Pale Flare Over Marshes only a second shy of fifteen, and I adored the first four.

Leaf in the Current is the majestic opener, Mitch's bass stirring up a dark atmosphere underlined by a deep groove and some urgent beats, then decorated in fascinating fashion by whoever's handling the saxophone. This is prowling dark jazz and it utterly stole my attention for twelve minutes. Fire from Frozen Cloud and Berceuse (for Magnetic Sleep) play in the same ballpark but mix things up a little. They're still dark jazz that nail their groove and overlaid with sax, not just soloing but with timeless drawn out long notes.

All these pieces are magnetic because their grooves are so immersive but they also feature subtleties deep in their backgrounds that are well worth exploring. Even while the sax is at its most prominent and especially when it isn't, I often found myself focused on the bass. I did that a lot on Berceuse, an old name for a particular type of lullaby and it does take the hypnotic nature of these pieces and turn it in that lulling direction, though I was engrossed throughout.

Pale Flare Over Marshes feels a lot looser to me, perhaps because it's longer. It does some of the same things but it feels jazzier and more experimental, breathing a lot more, even with the most overt riff to be found anywhere on the album. I didn't like it as much as the previous three pieces of music, but I still liked it a great deal. It was The Hierophant (II) that left me dry and that's a shame because I had this down as a solid 9/10, challenging Omination for Album of the Month, until that point.

This is a really strange piece to end the album. It reminded me a lot of King Crimson, but it's like the most out there improvisational section of Moonchild got moved to the end of the record instead of serving as an unusual introduction to the killer last track. Like Moonchild, this one does odd things with drums too, starting out with a very progressive slow drum solo, while the atmosphere builds so the saxophone can eventually join in. I didn't hate it but it felt like quite the letdown after the prior four pieces.

And so I guess this has to drop from that 9/10, but not far. This still gets a solid 8/10 from me and it's one more fascinating album in a month when I've aleady reviewed Nepal Death and Omination. Now I'm eager to check out the prior Five the Hierophant album, Over Phlegethon, which was their debut in 2017, and a couple of EPs that are longer than most albums, Magnetic Sleep Tapes Vols. I and II, especially if they sound like Berceuse.

Adrian Tăbăcaru - Lucifer: A Rock Opera (2020)

Country: Romania
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2020
Sites (Adrian Tăbăcaru): Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube
(Lucifer: A Rock Opera): Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Here's something a little different. Adrian Tăbăcaru is a Romanian drummer who's composed and performed in a variety of genres, from jazz to electronic and including stints as an orchestral percussionist. However, this album is Tăbăcaru with his prog rock hat on, because it's a rock opera performed by a set of musicians and actors from Romania and the UK. He composed this piece of music but the story isn't his.

It originated as a poem by Mihai Eminescu, who has been called as important to Romanian literature as Shakespeare was to English. This project prompted me to read up on him and he's a fascinating author. I'd love to track down an English translation of Luceafărul, the long poem first published in 1883 that is the source for this rock opera, and especially a novel or novella by the name of Poor Dionis, which for 1872 looks seriously wild. So the poem is by Eminescu and the libretto is by Ioana Ieronim. Also somewhere in play is Anșoara Moraru, credited as "literary consultant". How often does prog rock need a literary consultant? Yeah, I was intrigued.

Luceafărul isn't the traditional western story of Lucifer, the fallen angel. It does deal with a similar celestial being called Lucifer or Hyperion, who is doing his job as the morning star when he's called by a lustful princess called Cătălina whom he naturally falls in love with. She wants him to glide down and be with her, in all the meanings of that term, and he's all for it, even agreeing to give up his immortality for her. However, he can't do that without permission from the Demiurge, who he promptly visits at the edge of the universe. Sadly, by the time the Demiurge dissuades him, the sly mortal Cătălin has stolen his Cătălina away.

Yeah, that makes Lucifer surprisingly sympathetic, which is odd, but it also makes for an emotional ride which is perfect for a rock opera like this. It plays a lot closer to classical than say, the Who's Tommy, but a lot closer to rock than anything by Verdi. Tăbăcaru's drums are rarely entirely absent, though they're as versatile as they need to be here. Check out the power of Exordium, the overture that kicks us off, or the wild keyboard runs found in Intermezzo, rock instrumentals that bookend some operatic sections.

We're introduced to the key characters in Lucifer and hear them set up the story in Longing for the Star. Lucifer is a strutty character who hints at being playful and Cătălina is as playful as it gets, the harlot. After this introduction, though, the styles shift. Beyond Infinity has a narrator move us forward and The Long Way Home demonstrates how dark this can get. It's a quiet piece but a dark one, with ritual elements to the lead vocals and the chanting ones behind her. There's lots for Tăbăcaru's drums to do here and there's an oddly slow organ too, creating a neatly unsettling tone.

Thus far, the project has been a little schizophrenic, with a pair of rock instrumentals and a pair of story songs performed by actors in an operatic style. While there are vocals on The Long Way Home, I couldn't catch their words, so this is a mood piece that sets us up for a short but raucous rock song that borders on metal. It's Asking the Void and there are extreme lead vocals here as the keyboards get dissonant and experimental, vocals akin to black metal shrieks but lower and mostly intelligible.

As if in reaction, Antithesis returns to the darkness of The Long Way Home but with more evil vocals, albeit whispery ones full of intent like they're delivered by a devil pretending to be an angel and not doing a great job of it. The music backing her is experimental, xylophones and dissonant strings. If that's the least engaging song because of its odd nature, then the most engaging is the next one up, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, in its way just as experimental, with dancing piano and urgent drums. The urgency only builds as this rock song suddenly becomes a metal song halfway through, fast metal at that with a whole new urgency.

There's a lot less Hyperion and Cătălina as I'd have expected from what the poem promises, but album does take us on an appropriately emotional journey with genres involved that I didn't expect. It's a highly varied piece, which is at once its best aspect and its biggest problem. I do appreciate a world in which Longing for the Star and A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning can appropriately exist on the same album, but I do wonder how much of an audience is going to appreciate that. It would seem that people who like one aren't too likely to like the other. I hope that's not the case.

What else I liked here is that a prog rock opera, with enticing snippets of brass and experimental xylophones, not to mention a cast of eight vocalists and the pivotal role being played by a drummer, can teach me about Romanian poetry. That's a world I very much want to live in. Thank you!

Lingua Ignota - Caligula (2019)

Country: United States
Style: Avant-Garde
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 19 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

This isn't metal in any definable way, but it features on at least five best of 2019 metal lists and in the top ten of four of them. It's performance art as much as it's music but it's not the unapproachable noise that you may be imagining from that term. It's raw and it's visceral and it's heartachingly real, a sort of therapy for musician Kristin Hayter, a survivor of domestic abuse who describes her songs as "survivor anthems".

At times, this is sheer noise. On her Bandcamp page, the lyrics for Day of Tears and Mourning read simply "[INCOMPREHENSIBLE SCREAMING]". Sure, it has quiet organ music to start but it gets very dark very quickly and her vocals resemble black metal shrieks, albeit over a plodding and ominous beat rather than hyperspeed blastbeats. Do You Doubt Me Traitor has a full on assault on our senses, Hayter primal screaming into the void, transforming the words of her abuser into fierce art.

At other times, it's exquisitely beautiful. Hayter was a church cantor who's classically trained in piano and voice and a number of songs here feature a polyphony that I recognise as Bulgarian from Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a glorious album of world music that led the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir to places they never expected to go, from Xena to Kate Bush via The Tonight Show. This style is especially obvious as the album begins on a song called Faithful Servant Friend of Christ.

Sometimes, the beautiful and the noise merge, like on the utterly brutal and unforgettable If the Poison Won't Take You My Dogs Will. Hayter chants, the beauty fragile and cracking over a soft drone, but when she reaches a Kyrie Eleison refrain towards the end of the song, that being the Greek for "Lord have mercy", a curtain of noise descends over her in a way that any extreme metal band would dearly love to emulate. There's a similar curtain in I am the Beast and before Do You Doubt Me Traitor gets visceral, it's a heartfelt invocation.

What amazes me is how well read Hayter is musically. She's only in her mid-thirties and she didn't find rock music until a cousin left behind a copy of Nirvana's Nevermind. Yet, even in high school, she was listening to Ornette Coleman, Cattle Decapitation and John Zorn. "It's not too difficult", she's said, "to get from Nine Inch Nails to [Einsterzende] Neubauten to Merzbow." That's true, though most people aren't going to make it all the way! I wish I could mention influences like Klaus Nomi, Diamanda Galás and Nick Cave on more reviews. She even performs throat singing on Sorrow! Sorrow! Sorrow!

It's impossible not to be affected by this album. I popped it on, expecting to listen to a couple of tracks and head to bed. Instead, I devoured it and let it devour me, finally dropping at six in the morning. Hayter's mantra in Spite Alone Holds Me Aloft is "betray me" and she wrings more emotion out of those two words than you can comfortably imagine. And that's before shifting to "kill them all". The album wraps up with I am the Beast, a sort of vicious madrigal, in which the mantra becomes "all I know is violence".

Frankly, Caligula shocked me, not just as statement but as musical vision. I may have encountered a lot of experimental noise albums, but it's a rare one that I'll go back to or even finish. This is something as brutally impactful as it is entertaining. It's certainly not going to be for anyone but it's a lot more accessible than it might seem. The dynamics are amazing and it will make you read up on Hayter's background. The combination will tear out your heart and leave it bleeding in your hand. It's the most vital piece of avant garde music I've ever heard in my life. And it loops, because the saddest thing about abuse is that it's a cycle and the music reflects that.

Mike Patton & Jean-Claude Vannier - Corpse Flower (2019)

Country: France/USA
Style: Avant-Garde
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 13 Sep 2019
Mike Patton Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Wikipedia
Jean-Claude Vannier Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

To suggest that a Mike Patton album is interesting is rather redundant but I got a real kick out of this one, created in collaboration with French legend Jean-Claude Vannier. The latter seems to be regarded nowadays mostly for his work arranging music for Serge Gainsbourg, Francoise Hardy and other French legends, but he made plenty of interesting solo music too, including a wild 1972 debut album, L'enfant assassin des mouches, or The Child Fly Assassin.

The album was apparently constructed with the two men on either side of the Atlantic. Vannier conjured up ideas which he sent to Patton, who played with them and sent them back. Patton recorded in the States with his band, while Vannier recorded in France with an orchestra. Some snippets were previously written and recorded, but incorporated into new music, while most are new.

If that conjures up images of Frank Zappa's patchwork studio creations, that would be fair because there's certainly some Zappa here, both musically, on experimental songs like Cold Sun Warm Beer with its varied voices (Patton's remind of Captain Beefheart) and wilder instrumentation, and lyrically, on scatalogical songs like On Top of the World or Pink and Bleue, which starts out, "When I drink too much, I shit my pants."

There are other obvious influences here too and they tend to make themselves that way quickly. The opening track, Ballade C.3.3, for instance, has Patton sound rather like Nick Cave but the words come from Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. I don't recognise any of the other lyrics but it would not surprise me if other songs took a similar approach. Hungry Ghost is full of dark poetry and A Schoolgirl's Day feels like a prose writing exercise.

Camion moves firmly into Tom Waits territory, with Vannier providing a set of odd instrumentation and Patton shifting into dark lounge singer mode. There's an old quote from Vannier that explains why this is natural. If I'd read it without context, I'd think that, "I've always been interested by the wrong side of the music, the wrong notes" would be a Tom Waits line, but it was Vannier.

There's a lot more Waits here than Cave, but there's quite a bit of both. I think the two combine best on Browning, a song about the gun, with the most involved delivery from Patton, who croons like Cave, whistles like Waits and even howls at points like Screaming Jay Hawkins. I love when artists that I admire start playing in territory mastered by other artists that I admire.

As ought to be inevitable with Vannier involved, there's also a particularly strong influence from French yé-yé music, about which I clearly know a lot less than I should. This was pop music but counterculture pop music back in the sixties, with much taken from English language rock 'n' roll. I've heard Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Hallyday and others but, like Patton has apparently done lately, I should dig deeper.

There's French music everywhere here, but it becomes overtly at points, like in Insolubles, with Patton crooning to a backing of xylophone and accordion, or On Top of the World, a funky piece complete with handclaps and whistles, which nonetheless punks up at points in tone and lyrical content. There's a carnival organ on Hungry Ghost that could come from the Tom Waits influence or from France. It's great to see worlds collide here and suddenly make far more sense than they did previously.

As always with experimental albums, not everything works here but I dug it a lot. And, as always with Mike Patton, songs go to very strange and versatile places. One minute, we're listening to the operatic vocals of Anne Germain on Hungry Ghost, the next we're in the middle of what sounds like a domestic argument in Corpse Flower, which, I should add, is definitely not the flower on the cover. Why, I have no idea.

If your ears are always open for new sounds and your tastes are a lot wider than the regular rock and metal spectrum, you could do a lot worse than to check out this album. Let it be your gateway drug into the wonderful world of Mike Patton or, for me, that of Jean-Claude Vannier.