Matt Elliott - The End of Days (2023)

Country: France
Style: Dark Folk/Jazz
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 7 Apr 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia

Here's something fascinating. Matt Elliott is British but he lives in France where he's a noted folk musician in the neo-folk movement. His music is dark and melancholy and the one immediate and abiding comparison is to Leonard Cohen, but it doesn't take long to realise that this is something different. His voice, as we hear quickly on the opener, The End of Days, is whispery and beautifully broken just like latter day Cohen, but his hypnotic Spanish guitar rhythms is more reminiscent of Cohen's first two albums. That's an interesting pairing and it works very well indeed.

The biggest difference between Elliott and Cohen is that Cohen's songs were fundamentally about delivering lyrics, with the music, as glorious as it often was, serving to support that task. Elliott is a musician perhaps before he's a singer and poet, and he's keen on taking these folk songs into jazz territory, not just playing guitar but also saxophone, in a way that mimics a clarinet. One of the six songs on offer is an eight minute instrumental and the others feature long instrumental passages that work wonderfully on their own and somehow bring a strange focus onto the words.

Elliott is not the poet that Cohen was, though there are some wonderful phrases to suggest that he could be—"Sweep away the broken glass; some things were never made to last" begins Song of Consolation—and he has the brevity that the best poets find, discarding a thousand words to keep the one that matters. He's been a solo artist since 2003, previously known for indie electronica and remixes, usually credited as the Third Eye Foundation. I believe he's still active under that name, a primary band that's become over time a side project to his solo work in neofolk and dark jazz.

These two elements mix gloriously and the title track is a fantastic example. It starts out folk, just like a Cohen song, but the words don't stand out, maybe being an angry response to COVID, the guitar standing out far more and growing into jazz, as a sort of mad funeral dirge which is utterly gorgeous, not unlike the funeral procession for the elephant in Santa Sangre. It unfolds over ten minutes and they're ten unfathomably short minutes, even though it feels when they're over that we've just listened to an entire album, not just a single song.

January's Song takes us back to the folk. When the vocals arrive, they appear to be in choral form but it may well just be Elliott accompanying himself through echo and overlay. This is even more of a melancholy piece than the opener, but it's that rich sort of melancholy that Cohen mastered and which always lifts me rather than depresses me. It always tells me that times are dark but there's still beauty to be found and both are inherent in this music. There are precious few lyrics here, an isolated verse, but they seem to respond to COVID in succinct fashion. It's all about mood, the jazz swirling around the guitar like a tiny storm.

The most beautiful piece is the instrumental, Healing a Wound Will Often Begin with a Bruise. It's almost a vocal piece with the guitar providing the voice, because it's that sort of lead instrument, but it feels like an instrumental immediately. I was almost wary of Elliott's voice showing up but it never does, until the next song, Flowers for Bea, the twelve and a half minute epic of the album. It also has few lyrics, so after a a slow verse, it shifts into instrumental mode, driven this time by the cello of Gaspar Claus. Eventually there's a second verse that fades out in an echo, as if we're in an empty hall that still contains the ghosts of its years. It's all grief, but the emotions behind that do change over the dozen minutes.

There's a lot of emotion here, even when Elliott isn't singing, though his voice adds fresh levels to that emotion. Unresolved, for instance, is just a short piece to wrap up, but it's a sort of refusal to acknowledge that a loved one is gone. Never mind Flowers for Bea, which are exactly what you're thinking because she's gone, this one asks when she's coming back, even though she never will. I'm sure there's a word in another language to describe that feeling.

I like this a lot and need to dig back to see how Elliott got to this point. Not everything solo seems to be in this vein, but it may have moved more and more towards this dark folk/jazz hybrid. It may be that it's primarily for the Ici, d'ailleurs label in France. At this point in time, it's special. I feel a need to know when he got there.

Katharos XIII - Chthonian Transmissions (2022)

Country: Romania
Style: Black/Doom Metal, Dark Jazz
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 23 May 2022
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives

Not everything I'll review this week is from a band I discovered through Apocalypse Later a couple of years ago, but here's another one. Katharos XIII are a black/doom metal band from Timișoara, Romania, but they're also categorised as dark jazz, a genre I'd never even heard of but I promptly fell in love with anyway. At least on that 2019 album, Palindrome, they were a combination of slow doomy riffs and soloing saxophone, bleak black metal shrieks and ethereal but commanding clean female vocals. No, you wouldn't expect these elements to sit together but, holy crap, they work.

Let me phrase it in traditionally clichéd polarising fashion. You're either going to hate this from its very outset or Katharos XIII will become an unforgettable changing experience, because you have never heard anything like this before and you can't let the moment go. As with Palindrome, this is a long album, its hour plus running time broken across only six tracks, and, as with Palindrome, I'm unable to let each of those tracks just shift into the next. I had to repeat listen to each one before I could move onto the next one, just to come to terms with what it had done.

Neurastenia is the first, an ambitious but uncompromising piece to kick things off, given that it's a fourteen minute epic. It's made up of the components I mentioned above, sans the shrieks, but it's also told in wavelike modulations, which are hypnotic electronica in the midsection. The emotional depth is stunning, Manuela Marchis-Blînda a will-o-the-wisp leading us we know not where. It's an haunting piece of music, an inspiration and a warning, a treat and an ending.

The Golden Season is almost shocking because it begins with recognisable riffs, though the layers of keyboards soon draped across the music render it denser and more obscured. Until, that is, the entire piece drops into a delicate pool of atmosphere and everything's peace and suspension with saxophone almost as whalesong, soothing and reaffirming. Which, of course, lasts until it doesn't, a black metal wall of sound looming out of nowhere and changing everything, the guitars sheets of sound, the keyboards all enshrouding, the bass a prowling beast, the clean vocals a lament, the result an emotional weight, a journey from drifting freedom to cosmic albatross of guilt that's an impactful ten minutes indeed.

Trying to gather my senses to be able to offer a coherent review, I should point out that this one is a lot more pulsing than its predecessor. It does most of the same things but it throbs as if it's alive and might just continue onwards after the musicians leave the studio. This is similar dark jazz but more organic, shifting away from the smoky cafés and shadowed streets of films noir inside a live body. It's sticky and palpable. It breathes. And it may not be entirely human, the title track some sort of supernatural mutation or alien infestation. This is music for elder gods, listening from the dark gaps beyond the stars, behind the celestial gates that bind them.

The hardest task I have is to suggest what this sounds like in comparisons. Well, it's Wolves in the Throne Room and Jarboe and Bill Evans and Coil and Celtic Frost and John Zorn and Vangelis and maybe György Ligeti. You know, that hackneyed old combo. Every track here is a work of dark art. I can't rank them. They're all astounding and they each do something different but each is done to a degree that's difficult to fathom. I think I spent the second half of the title track utterly stupefied, my mouth open and the world forgotten. I felt like the Highlander receiving the Quickening. And, once it ended, From the Light of Flesh spun up delicate and utterly beautiful and it destroyed me.

This is an unparalled emotional journey. It may well be my album of the year. Maybe I'll regain the power of speech in a week or so. Maybe I won't need that ever again.

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.

White Ward - Love Exchange Failure (2019)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | VK | YouTube

I'm always interested in seeing how far genres can stretch and no genre has stretched as far lately as black metal, which has gradually embraced sounds that not one person listening to the first Bathory album back in 1984 would have believed possible. Part of that is because of the advent of post-black metal, which is what Ukrainian band White Ward play.

For three minutes, this is soft piano and teasing saxophone, not the sort of thing you might expect from a traditionally confrontational genre like black metal. Perhaps the cover art influenced me subconsciously, but I felt like I was walking through someone else city where I was at once out of place but somehow still safe and comfortable. Then it veers wonderfully into a vicious section because that's what black metal does best.

As this title track runs on, it continues to alternate between soothing and vicious and the result is something that's very difficult to ignore. As it ends, twelve minutes in, amidst warm and organic pulsing, we know that we've heard something of note and want to go back to the start so as to experience it afresh immediately. I resisted the urge for a change and continued on.

Very few bands have the sheer command of dynamics that White Ward have and I wonder if that's because they came to this style from the opposite direction to usual. Often black metal bands start out raucous and raw and grow into a more diverse, more nuanced, more elegant sound over time. I may be wrong and what I can see on their Facebook page suggests that I am but it sounds to me like White Ward started out as elegant and nuanced and added the black metal vehemence onto that.

Either that or they fit a couple of session musicians into their line-up far more completely than usual. It would beggar belief if Dima Dudko on sax and Stanislav Bobritskiy on keyboards just wandered into the studio one day and laid down the tracks that they were given. They're inherent to this music, a crucial and key part of it, yet I'm not seeing them listed as actual members of the band. Whole sections of these songs simply wouldn't be there without them.

Even for someone like me, who's got used to saxophones in places I wouldn't have expected them, there's a lot here. This is a long album, featuring four songs over ten minutes, interspersed by three shorter ones that still aren't necessarily short. The shortest track here is only just shy of six minutes, meaning a running time of over an hour. It's easy to get caught up with the flow of this album and lose track of time entirely. When it eventually wraps up, it's almost a shock because we're living in the world of White Ward.

I should add here that the world of White Ward isn't quite as soothing as it initially seems. The title track, which opens things up, is warm, welcoming stuff to begin with but it ends on a darker note. Later songs emphasise that even in the quieter sections. Dead Heart Confession opens in a room where a radio is broadcasting about the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer.

I'm not sure what goes down at the end of Uncanny Delusions and so also the album, but someone is clearly really unhappy about something, screaming her discontent. The band describe their music as "intensely deviant music of a noir share" and that's a neatly poetic way to put it. As welcoming as they often sound, there's a darkness below the surface if we pay attention.

I'm still in love with the Katharsis XIII album of dark jazz that I reviewed in October and this sits well alongside it. It's less jazzy but it's just as full of immersive depth and dynamic range. I'll throw this one onto the same device to listen to in the dark and see if it will stay with me as much.

Katharos XIII - Palindrome (2019)

Country: Romania
Style: Black/Doom Metal, Dark Jazz
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 14 Oct 2019
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives

I have no idea how to describe what Katharos XIII do, but I'm thankful that I'm struggling with that task now because it means that I've finally found them. I wasn't particularly looking for them but I'm always looking for the sort of music that I've never heard before and they're a great example. They really are an answer to questions you don't know you have.

I came upon them described as black/doom metal and it seems that they moved into that from depressive black metal, which really isn't light years away. However, if you imagine black/doom metal, you're not likely to imagine this. It's certainly not the bastard child of Mayhem and Candlemass and it's not remotely like other black/doom bands I've heard, like Barathrum.

I was sold on the album just listening to the bass of Hanos-Puskai Péter at the beginning of the opening song, Vidma, because it's dark and doomy but it has a warm and inviting tone. It's like telling us that things are going to be deadly but come on in anyway, because the water's warm. Then the ethereal voice of Manuela Marchis takes over, soft and melodic but always with power, like Tori Amos if her cover of Slayer's Raining Blood had been her biggest hit. Drummer Sabat refuses to play the expected rhythms, almost improvising over the other musicians. And then...

And then, three minutes in, it shifts from folky jazz into somewhere utterly unique. It's not just the eruption into black metal shrieks, presumably the work of the guitarist and keyboardist who goes only by F., over an achingly low and slow backdrop of exquisite doom, it's the fact that it's accompanied by a saxophone soloing over the whole thing. Yeah, you heard me. Except that the result is much better than you're currently imagining. It's courtesy of Alex Iovan who's the tenor saxophonist in Katharos XIII, adding an enticing and highly unusual element to their sound.

He's not the only one. A couple of minutes later, it all drops back into an ambient darkness, with jangling bells behind Marchis's haunting voice. I may be listening on Hallowe'en entirely by accident, but this sounds exactly like the house you don't want to trick or treat at, because there's no way you're going to leave. Her voice also splits into different tracks, that weave into something new, like a dark ambient take on Linda Perhacs where the abundant sky around us has fallen and everything's gone except whatever's grinning in the darkness in front of us.

Vidma is over far too quickly, even at eight minutes and change. It caught me so much by surprise that I hadn't quite grasped what was happening until it was done and I had to prepare myself for the next song. Instead, I went back to Vidma and listened to that a few times before moving onwards. That kept on happening too, as I had to fully devour To a Secret Voyage before I moved on to Caloian Voices and so on. By the time I got to Xavernah Glory, the last of the five tracks on offer which, between them, amount to almost an hour of running time, I'd been listening for most of a day.

And I'll be listening to this a lot more, including on headphones tonight in the wee hours with no distractions. There are a lot of parts that could slip easily into the background because they're so ambient, but that's deceptive because there's a lot going on even when it doesn't seem like it. The first couple of minutes of No Sun Swims Thundered fit that bill, but pay attention and they reveal their secrets. This song builds organically and incessantly to what I believe is a theremin solo. That's not a guitar effects pedal, right?

Katharos XIII are from Timișoara and this is their third studio album, with a demo and a split album with fellow Romanians Ordinul Negru to their name before it. Their Facebook page calls what they doom/black metal, but also dark jazz, a genre also known as doom jazz. How have I not heard of this before? It apparently grew out of a merger of film noir soundtracks and dark ambient music. I will be exploring. In the meantime, this is something the likes of which I've never heard before and I like that just because as much as because it's immersive and powerful stuff.

Just like the Ultima Radio album I reviewed earlier this week, this review may or may not help you understand whether it's for you or not. Just check out Caloian Voices on YouTube. If it leaves you dry, this isn't your music. If it wows you the way it wowed me, you'll have found another new favourite band.