Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: experimental metal

Showing posts with label experimental metal. Show all posts

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja (2024)

Muuntautuja means Transformed and I'm told that's what Oranssi Pazuzu, experimental Finnish musicians, are every time they release a new album. I have to take that as read because I've only heard one thus far, their fifth, 2020's Mestarin kynsi. Well, I've also heard and reviewed the 2019 collaboration with Dark Buddha Rising, which they called Waste of Space Orchestra, which is why I checked out Oranssi Pazuzu to start with. I gave the former a 9/10 and the latter an 8/10. I found it all fascinating stuff.

This sixth album is different again, moving a little further away from black metal and a little more into electronica, but it's still an unholy hybrid of multiple genres. Voitelu (Anointing) epitomises that mindset with such a bizarre merger of different music that, by the time a stomping riff shows up three and a half minutes in, it feels like we're listening to four different songs at the same time. It starts out with a punk vibe but one that's too regimented to be chaotic, more regulated into industrial. The vocals are pure black metal orc shriek. And then there's some delicate Philip Glass piano over the top. It's a heady mix but it's almost the definition of not for everyone.

Most of the rest is a lot easier to approach. The title track, for instance, mixes subtle dark drone with chirpy electronic glitch bleeps and what could easily be a hiphop beat. The vocals are heavily processed, a la Kraftwerk. "We are the weird Finnish Robots" Oranssi Pazuzu seem to be saying. It all grows behind them into a post-punk approach, becoming more chaotic halfway through, while resisting the temptation to veer into noise rock. There are no screams here. It all feels held back, moments sounding rather like the Prodigy.

Ikikäärme (Eternal Serpent) is accessible too, but it requires some patience, unfolding slowly and steadily over ten minutes. It starts out with tinkling piano and loose jazz, but with an overarching pulse looming in the air above it. The initial vocals are rich and ritual, as if they're trying to conjure something up. Later, perhaps they succeed because they become so tortured that they sometimes come close to being unrecognisable as vocals. Is that a voice or a weird distortion effect on a synthesiser? I find this one delightfully weird and would call it out as my favourite piece of music, followed closely by the closer, an instrumental called Vierivä usva (Rolling Mist) that rolls inexorably along like a conveyor belt into Hell.

Some of it could be considered accessible to alt rock fans who have a grounding in certain bands. For instance, the album opens up with Bioalkemisti (Bioalchemist), a tantalising rhythm exploding into a heavy grungy riff. Suddenly we're in Swans territory and, interestingly, we kind of stay there even when the intensity reaches black metal levels. The guitars and vocals clearly go there, but the rhythm maintains an industrial bludgeon. Valotus (Illumination) dives quickly into industrial territory, escalates into an intensity that's more crust punk than black metal and then ends in noise rock, emphatically the most raucous the album gets. It would be sheer chaos if it wasn't so rhythmic.

As you might imagine, each track here takes Oranssi Pazuzu into different territory, without ever losing a consistency of approach. This band are still creating soundscapes with an unusually broad palette. It's easy to draw a line back through musical history to new wave and post-punk, but that line isn't remotely straight. It diverts here, there and everywhere, adding textures from all sorts of different genres, from ambient and modern classical all the way through to black metal. What results is often fascinating.

While I'd personally favour Ikikäärme and Vierivä usva, Hautatuuli (Grave Wind) is the track that fascinates me the most. It's another more restrained piece, with more of that new wave vibe, but the vocals are extreme. They're not shrieked here so much as they're whispered in ominous fashion from under a rock somewhere. It's like the soundtrack to a short play written by goblins, with the lead character a supposedly enticing predator who can't avoid coming across dangerously repellent. Come here, little boy. It's not remotely safe under this rock.

I like this album, but I don't like it remotely as much as Mestarin Kynsi. Just from two albums, it's as if Oranssi Pazuzu are a journey rather than a destination and each album is a stop on the way. I have a feeling I'm going to find every stop fascinating but I'm not always going to want to get out and explore. Here, I'm staying on board, waiting to see where we end up next.

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Noirum - Nature (2025)

Country: Czechia
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's an interesting album that's hard to categorise. I'm going with avant-garde black metal, as that's what the Metal Archives list and it's certainly grounded in black metal. Forests, Darkness and Sorcery opens up the album with a wall of sound guitar and a shriek in the vocals. The question is whether what else they do counts as avant-garde or just inventive. It seems entirely accessible to me, for extreme metal, and that's no bad thing. Does avant-garde have to mean challenging?

Some of it departs more obviously from black metal than the rest, but even there it's not always a wild shift. Sure, Jotunheimen goes to some interesting places that we wouldn't typically associate with black metal. It starts out with soothing Slavic folk chants, with a slow bass and slow keyboard melodies, not to forget a wonderful percussion sound. The vocals and percussion are manipulated later in the song so that it almost feels like a Kraftwerk compsition for a while. That's not a usual sound for black metal, even though it works well.

But Arctic Swamps often sounds like Celtic Frost, slow doom metal with prominent note bends on the guitars. It's still really heavy stuff, even if it feels like a sound that predates black metal in its current form. There's a proto-extreme thump on Eternal Snow that hints at thrash and industrial but it morphs into more recognisable black metal often enough. Deep Lake under the Moon kicks off like S.O.D. and it and Sólardauði both have mosh parts that I'd expect from someone like them. Wanderers has an epic swell over the black metal flurry. There are plenty of side trips into other subgenres here but they're all pretty compatible with black metal.

So avant-garde may be a stretch, but it's definitely black metal with an open mind and that's been my favourite type of black metal since it found a name. It never ceases to amaze me how it's gone from a fundamentally restrictive single bleak sound to arguably the most versatile genre in all of metal, venturing into all sorts of musical territory that I'd never have imagined would welcome it back in the late eighties.

Jotunheimen aside, this tends to do it subtly, like a neat psychedelic section late in Sólardauði it's easy to miss if you're not paying attention. The harmonising vocals in Wanderers aren't missable, but there are nuances there that are. It's cleverly done. There's a complete drop midway through A Lone Tree that serves as wonderful emphasis, and, of course, the accompanying ramp back up to full gear. All these are worthy touches that highlight the strength of the songwriting.

The most overt example of something different, Jotunheimen aside, has to be Eternal Snow, which continually reinvents itself. It starts out proto-extreme and never quite ditches its industrial vibe but somehow finds its way into a jagged jazz section and back out again in a spacey swirl that feels almost new age. It's a constantly inventive song that keeps us well and truly on the hop. Somehow it doesn't end up on my favourites list, because that's the sort of thing that usually grabs me, but I prefer Jotunheimen for diversity and Wanderers for sheer groove.

Oddly, there seems to be less to say about this than I expected from a band labelled "avant-garde". It's a strong album, certainly. I've listened through this a bunch of times over a couple of days and nothing's got old yet. The musician responsible for most of it goes by VlastYs, whose usual credit is for "everything". However, I see a second guitarist, Martin Vymětal, who joined a couple of years in and is apparently still involved. I couldn't tell you which guitars belong to which musician, but it seems like a pretty safe bet to assume that everything else is VlastYs, including the songwriting.

I like this a lot, albeit a little less than I did on a first listen when it felt more groundbreaking. It is imaginative, for sure, but I have to wonder if this is more accessible than the previous two albums, which weren't generally labelled in English. Nedráždi Moniku harmonikou and Pusťte netvora do otvora are pretty much entirely in Czech, I believe, with perhaps an odd shift into other languages for tracks like Auris artifex or Vindaloo. Oh, and Bikini Hardcore, which doesn't sound close to the sound this band has. Certainly there were female vocals on the first album but not here.

Tuesday, 25 July 2023

Mortal Blood - Fate's Overture (2023)

Following on from yesterday, here's another EP containing five tracks, though it really isn't, given that it's over half an hour in length. Dan Krell, the musician behind everything here, as composer, performer and producer, may well think of it as an EP but I'm thinking of it as a full length album. Maybe he sees it as not substantially longer than its predecessor, last year's Unholy Feast, which was three minutes shorter. I think my criteria nowadays is whether it's longer than Reign in Blood or not, so that counts as an EP and this an album. Is there a better guide?

Krell infuses this with an interesting sound from moment one. It's advertised as gothic doom and I can't argue with that, but there's a band that sprang out of this immediately for me that doesn't feature on the influence list on Mortal Blood's EPK and that's Celtic Frost. It's most obvious in the vocals, which are delivered in a tortured style that reminds me of their Monotheist album, a dying god sort of voice that has to be distorted because it's more vast than our comprehension, speaking to us from beyond whatever veil separates men and gods, even dying ones.

The music behind it isn't as slow or as bleak, though it does fit both of those adjectives, even if the drums constantly suggest that everything else should speed up. It's more patient than aching and the bleakness is tempered by richer guitars. It's the guitars that add a gothic feel, but even when they try to soar, the vocals chain them back down again, even if they're just rumbling rather than delivering verses. I never caught lyrics here but I got the mood immediately and the voice keeps it mired in that mood.

Speaking to Krell's cited influences, I can hear a bunch of them here. There's some Candlemass in the majestic drive of Fury and Sorrow. There's some Paradise Lost in the more gothic guitar parts from Fate's Overture onwards, especially A Monster Approaches. There's some My Dying Bride in the sonic assault during the second half of Fury and Sorrow and the melancholic flow of A Monster Approaches. If there's any Gorgoroth here, it's in the vocals. I'm not hearing much Mercyful Fate, Dark Tranquillity or Amon Amarth. This is less theatrical and more soundscape, crew rather than cast.

It's as a soundscape generator that it's most successful, an approach that brings us right back to a Celtic Frost comparison, with the vocals leading the way. Krell's voice stays tortured throughout, fascinatingly so. It's primarily that vocal that makes this so ruthlessly uncommercial, in a way that we might associate otherwise with black metal, but almost every other instrument follows suit, an exception obvious only for the drums, which mostly pander to convention with double bass. All the influences Krell cites maintained a level of commerciality in their sound, even if it was just through melody. Mortal Blood has no interest doing that, just as the Frosties never did anything that they didn't want to do, even if it turned out to be a misstep.

Now, I'm a big Celtic Frost fan, going all the way back to their Hellhammer days, so I'm on board for this approach. However, I like the first three songs a lot more than the fourth, A Hell Dream, though it is growing on me. It's a little less focused than the others, which anchor the searching gothic guitarwork with the tortured vocals. It finds itself late, but it takes a while and it lost me a little as it got there, with guitars that know exactly what they're doing but drums that feel unsure. The final track, Empower the Warrior, finds itself immediately but it has a different feel, even using the same component parts. It plays to me like a black/doom metal take on a punk song, simple at its heart but weighed down by textures.

I like this but I appreciate the unconventional and uncompromising. Krell has a particular musical vision and he's focused on that so emphatically and singlemindedly that it's almost surprising that he acknowledged the real world by releasing this material. It's going to find people and many will hate it. However, the few who appreciate its sound will also appreciate its integrity. Even when it's at its most commercial, perhaps on A Monster Approaches, it refuses to play ball with anyone but Krell himself. It is what it is and that's all that should matter. I dig that.

Friday, 23 September 2022

Dir en Grey - Phalaris (2022)

Dir en Grey are one of those infuriating or joyous bands, depending on your perspective who are impossible to categorise, which should make it no surprise if I tell you that they come from Japan, Osaka in particular. Just wrap your ears around Schadenfreude, the opener on this, their eleventh studio album and first since 2018's The Insulated World. It starts out quirky and alternative; turns gothic, even operatic with a male lead vocal that suddenly sounds female; crunches from rock into metal; and then goes full on extreme with death growls over a downtuned backdrop that's happy to match. After that, it only gets more complex, with technical progressive metal.

So yeah, they're a symphonic gothic metal band. They're a progressive death metal band. They're an experimental alternative rock band. And they're not uncommonly all of those things at once. It shouldn't shock if I highlight that the band's favourite albums include records by Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, David Sylvian, Pantera and, well, the Beatles. All of those bands can be found here and a whole lot more, across a multitude of genres, but they're all subsumed into a unique Dir en Grey sound. The most obvious is probably Pantera.

Schadenfreude, the pleasure generated by seeing someone else's troubles, is an ambitious track to open up here, which I'm sure is the point. It's a breathe shy of ten minutes long and it rides the intensity levels like a rollercoaster. There are points where it's almost music box quiet, but points where it's metalcore intense. The band leader is Kaoru, who plays lead guitar, but the wildcard of the band, who matches every instrumental shift, is vocalist Kyo, who reminds of a Japanese Mike Patton. He doesn't just sing in multiple styles, he vocalises in even more. To my mind, it's the best thing on this album, whether as a song or as any particular part of one.

In a way, if you like the sheer variety in this one song, you may like this album too because it does a similar job across fifty-plus minutes. However, it's not really that simple, because Schadenfreude's long enough to do those things but also short enough for our brain to acknowledge it as an entity of its own. The album is the former but not the latter, so we inevitably break it down into a bunch of eleven individual songs and most of those are not long enough to do what Schadenfreude does, so have to succeed or not with smaller sonic palettes.

The other song that is long enough to sit alongside Schadenfreude is its bookend at the other end of the album, カムイ, which translates to Kamuy, a divine being in Ainu mythology that exists in a state of spiritual energy. It's a strange track, not as fast or urgent as Schadenfreude but with a lot of fascinating texture. There's a tango in there and a whole lot of subtle operatics from Kyo that I found delightful. It's not quite as varied as the opener but it's just as grand and it highlights that the current Dir en Grey really need room for their songs to breathe.

By the way, that's not unusual subject matter for this band, who have generated controversy with their videos. The album title this time out references a torture device, the Brazen Bull, an ancient Greek statue built from bronze in which victims were burned alive, their screams manipulated into sounding like the bellowing of a bull. It was commissioned by Phalaris, a Sicilian tyrant, hence the album's title.

The video this time out is for The Perfume of Sins, which is a mostly up tempo death metal number that gets more complex with its orchestration overlays. It's not my favourite piece here by a long shot, but the video does feature the Brazen Bull and a whole slew of other torture devices amidst other dark imagery. It feels deviant for the sake of being deviant though, carefully tailored to its iconography, and that lessens the impact. It's not raw enough or visceral enough. It's deviant chic and that feels odd for Dir en Grey, given how wild Kyo can get.

I'm fonder of songs like Utsutsu, Bouga o Kurau, because it's far happier to be its own thing. There are all sorts of elements to this one that I recognise, but I haven't heard them in this combination before and the jagged beat ensures that it remains a fascinating collection of fragments that has a groove all of its own. Ochita Koto no Aru Sora also walks the line wonderfully between frantically out of control metalcore and tight death metal riffing.

And, excluding the epic bookends which are easily my favourite tracks here, this is what I like best about Dir en Grey, a feeling that everything's going totally off the rails but somehow never quite does, because it's all planned and very carefully and skilfully executed. It's a pretty decent album for their twenty-fifth anniversary. I didn't like everything, but I appreciated what I didn't.

Wednesday, 17 August 2022

Meshuggah - Immutable (2022)

I've never felt particularly drawn to Meshuggah, the so called accidental founders of djent, mostly because I'm not a fan of djent or a lot of that modern style of metal that treats guitars like drums or percussion. Add in the lead vocals of Jens Kidman, which are delivered in a metalcore shout and they're just not my thing. That doesn't mean that they don't do what they do incredibly well. They do and that's why I'm listening to this, their ninth studio album, to see what I think of it nowadays.

To give this further context, I can't remember what the last Meshuggah album I listened to was. It may not have been their debut, Contradictions Collapse in 1991, because I think it was their follow-up, Destroy, Erase, Improve in 1995, probably around its release, which was the point when I was a young man drifting away from the metal scene towards the pub and life and a much wider range of music. So, given that I'm aware that their sound developed over time, my take on them up till now may be more based on my own musical prejudices as any actual merit.

That said, I'm not particularly enthused here and for exactly the reasons I expected. Meshuggah's sound is very much their own and it feels like they're staking out close boundaries to defend it in a vaguely post-apocalyptic setting. This isn't industrial, but it's stripped down to the essence of the band so emphatically that it's almost industrial adjacent for how mechanical it all sounds. All the instruments are really playing rhythm, just like this is a band of drummers who happen to have an array of different tones on their kits. Many of those tones sound like machines, especially on songs like Phantoms. Is that a bass or an industrial rivetting machine? Is that a keyboard backdrop or an array of industrial saws in the distance?

And these sounds combine to find a groove and a rhythm and then continue in a mostly monotone fashion for a long time. Most of the songs are in the four to six minute range, only Black Cathedral shorter at exactly two minutes and only They Move Below is longer at well over nine. However, the album is long, running notably over an hour, and there just isn't enough here to warrant that. Coil would have done more in twenty minutes.

I have to give some praise, because none of these rhythms are typical and that's why this gets the progressive metal label, and, if the point is to persuade us into some sort of trance state where an hour goes by without us really noticing, then they come close to succeeding. I found this less music to actively listen to and more music to by hypnotised by and feel instead. That probably warrants a further tag of experimental metal, which would serve much better than prog metal, because this is a long way from someone like Dream Theater, which is what prog metal conjures up in my mind.

Is industrial metalcore a thing? Maybe it should be. This Meshuggah isn't a huge distance from an early Einsterzende Neubaten covered on actual instruments by a metal band, instead of whatever metal pipes they could find to hit with other metal pipes. In fact, compared to something rhythmic and chaotic like Abfackeln!, this starts to seem almost conventional, and that song is almost forty years old. What I'd like to have seen, on a ninth album no less, is more invention, more melody and especially more variety. Unless you can fall into these humungous grooves, there's not much here to find.

And, crucially, it just keeps going. My thoughts after a few songs didn't change after a few more, a delightfully subdued guitar intro to They Move Below the first point where I heard something that went beyond percussion. That's track seven, over half an hour into the album, but it's also the first to actually grab me. It gets less interesting when it goes into the now expected rhythmic mode but it's more interesting, even then, than anything that went before or indeed most of what is still to come. That mostly has to do with the texture behind the rhythms though and the song still goes on too long. There are moments of imagination on The Faultless. Armies of the Preposterous is much more aggressive. Past Tense is a dark and interesting outro and easily my favourite piece here. That's not a lot to go on, I know, but it's something.

Were this a regular forty minute album, I'd probably go with a 6/10. Each song finds its groove and I doubt that the band's core fans aren't going to be too concerned that those grooves aren't much different from each other. However, at sixty-six minutes, this really dragged on me. Now, if you're into experimental metal or drone metal and you're OK with monotony, feel free to add a point. I'd prefer to see Sunn O))) live again and they hit fewer notes in their entire set when I saw them than any one song here.

Wednesday, 26 May 2021

Aegos - The Great Burst of Light (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Post-Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram

Here's another album whose genre is really hard to pin down. It came to me described as "progressive doom metal" and there are certainly some aspects of that to be found, but it's only one part of a vast picture. I've ended up going with post-metal, even though I reviewed a post-metal album yesterday, as this is about as different to Pupil Slicer as can comfortably be imagined and still count as metal. You'd actually be pretty safe using the cover art as the genre, because the music is as bleakly beautiful.

I know very little about Aegos, beyond that whoever's actually in the band hails from Texas. Who and where, I couldn't tell you. The band's page on Bandcamp does list some guests, but three of them are vocalists in some form or other and the two musicians are credited with saxophone and cello and are therefore not responsible for the bulk of what we hear in the five long tracks on offer. There's guitar and bass and drums, as you'd expect. They may be the work of one musician or fifteen. I have no idea.

What I can tell you is what I hear on this album, which I believe is the debut release for Aegos. While it gets very loud and very quiet, reasonably fast and reasonably slow, the first adjective I'd throw out is "patient". Just like the cover art, there's a lot of space in this music and there are echoing silences to flavour the songs as much as the actual notes. Sometimes there are drones, often short ones created out of power chords and there's a haunting emptiness behind some drawn out passages.

Yet, that's far from Aegos's only approach. Ironically, The Stillbeing is the least still of these songs, an intricate weaving of bass, drums and electronica building into a harsh vocal over slow ominous riffing and frantic beats. There are multiple voices here using multiple vocal styles. This song kicked off with a clean voice, but it grows to a harsh one that doesn't sound like it came from the same throat. Even here, it mixes up because there's a point where it becomes a harsh duet.

Vocal guests include Jei Doublerice, Chelsea Murphy and Annastatsea. Doublerice is Italian and listed in Metal Archives as the singer for a symphonic black/death metal band called Journey into Darkness but on Aegos's Bandcamp page as a member of Despite Exile and Abiogenesis, both of whom show up on their own Bandcamp pages as metal bands but experimental ones. Murphy is American and sings for Dawn of Ouroboros, who are listed as "progressive post-black/death metal". Annastatsea, who is credited for spoken word, is also American and another experimenter, opening her soul to the cosmos and embracing the darkness, as her bio reads. In other words, they're all open to something new.

I liked this album from the outset, even though I'd have preferred more variance between clean and harsh vocals. The consistency of the shouty approach on songs like Chaos and Nebulous means that it overstays its welcome a little, though it also ends well. There are five songs here, which generally get longer, from the opener which runs six minutes all the way up to the thirteen minute closer. As you can imagine, they get progressively more epic and I'd call out the fourth track, Qualia, as my highlight.

I'd enjoyed the three earlier tracks but never entirely. I loved some parts of each of them, while some others left me dry. Qualia feels right throughout and, at almost eleven minutes, there's plenty of it to go wrong. Fortunately it doesn't and it grows magnificently. It also features yet another unexpected use of the saxophone in extreme metal, something I'm starting to treasure. It eases in softly, with an ethereal voice behind an unusual beat and a hovering dissonance that feels science fictional, like an alien race observing us through what appears to be a swarm of of bees.

Then it erupts, a frantic beat accompanying a beauty and the beast duet between clean female and harsh male voices. When the sax shows up, it's a wild and free jazz instrument squealing around a riff so relentless that it just has to be deliberately regimented to counter the saxophone. It works really well. Gravity Bending Light is less epochal, even at a couple of minutes longer again, but it gets there five minutes in when the vehemence of the early section boils away and everything gets peaceful. The cello adds to this, as does the oddly choral chanting later on. It's dark but it's delightful.

I hope I can find something out about whoever's behind Aegos. Something this interesting deserves to have credit appropriately assigned. The guests are certainly worthy but they're not the primary here and I wish I could praise him, her or them properly.

Monday, 1 February 2021

Thou & ERR - The Helm of Sorrow (2021)

I appreciated last year's collaborative album between Baton Rouge sludge metal merchants Thou and folksy post-rocker Emma Ruth Rundle, May Our Chambers Be Full, more than a 6/10 rating suggested. I loved how the two disparate styles worked together, each rendered more interesting by the other. It was the lead male vocals of Bryan Funck that stopped me going higher, partly because they just grate on me but partly because they didn't seem to help the album at all. The haunting voice of Rundle over the darkness and weight of Thou was enough to work and the best songs did exactly that.

This EP contains four songs recorded during the sessions for that album that didn't make the final cut for whatever reason. They do much the same thing and don't sound to me like throwaway versions. I'm impressed once more by how they merge the two styles within the first four minutes of Orphan Limbs, which is neatly atmospheric until it goes batshit and screams to an abrupt finalé. At least when Funck takes over, he doesn't do so fully and his voice does play better for me when Rundle is there as a solid counter.

My favourite song here is easily the closer, Hollywood, a Cranberries cover with Rundle doing her best Dolores O'Riordan impression, full of lilting Celtic inflections, and Thou delivering a neatly ominous backdrop of beats. It's an appropriate subject for a song told this way, as the beauty of Tinseltown has always been a notable contrast to the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles and the dirty industry fuelling it. This covers both sides at once, the drums of Tyler Coburn, which shine throughout this EP, tolling a remembrance for everyone Hollywood has destroyed.

The pair of songs in between, Crone Dance and Recurrence, left me dry on a first time through but the former grew on a second. Recurrence is the closest to regular Thou, so their fans should appreciate it, even as they wonder why it's on this EP. Crone Dance is more interesting, a sort of midpoint between a more Thou song like Recurrence and a more Rundle song like Hollywood. Funck gets the lead at points but also fades to texture at others, letting Rundle take over without too much of a fight. The midsection is the heaviest the EP gets too, churning away effectively, and it ends really effectively, dropping tempo all the way to the end.

So I'll give this one a 6/10 too. It's a worthy partner to May Our Chambers Be Full, doing some of the same things in the same way and both shining and disappointing for the same reasons. If you bought the Diehard version of that album, this should have showed up as a bonus already covered. If not, but you dug that album, as so many clearly did, it making quite the dent on the end of year lists, it's safe to say that you're going to dig this too.

Friday, 8 January 2021

Oranssi Pazuzu - Mestarin Kynsi (2020)

Here's a 2020 catch up album that I really should have caught in 2020, as Oranssi Pazuzu were half of a pair of groups who combined ranks to create the ritual piece of music at the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands under the name of Waste of Space Orchestra. I reviewed that last January and loved it, as unusual a combination of space rock and doom metal as it was. This is different, more like a combo of space rock and black metal, but I love it just as much.

There are six songs on offer here, the shortest lasting for over seven minutes and the longest ten, and the commonality is in how well they find grooves and grow them. What's odd is that they build these grooves out of bizarre building blocks, strange sounds and odd time signatures, components that are more likely to alienate us than entice us, but they capture us immediately.

These rhythms are not the rhythms that we know but they're clearly rhythms and they're emphatically repeated so that we can't ignore them. What surreality is woven around those rhythms is like nothing we've heard before either, but it does follow internal logic. It's mathematical, reminding both of King Crimson and Philip Glass, and it makes everything here very calculated, however experimental it feels.

Ilmestys is the first of those six songs and it sets the stage well because it's a real trip. For most of its running time, it's a trance state decorated by dramatic vocals and electronic experimentation. It feels like we've been trapped in a parallel dimension and we're being berated by a disgruntled demon, one who doesn't care how we feel in this warm, organic environment and rants at us anyway. Of course, the Pazuzu of the band's name is a demon, in Babylonian mythology the king of the wind demons, and the one that possesses Regan in The Exorcist. Oranssu means orange.

Tyhjyyden sakramentti is quieter noodling, but in an interesting time signature. It's a few minutes in when it suddenly escalates—and escalate it truly does. Suddenly we're stuck in some space maelstrom with that infectious odd beat etching itself onto the inside of our skull. The vocals are just as twisted but more sung than spoken. Ever shaking things up, the band bring in a flute, of all instruments, for a contrast against another space maelstrom and angry lesson from the demon on Uusi teknokratia.

In and amongst all this, there are some gloriously wild moments. There's a mad elephant at the end of Ilmestys and, a few minutes into Uusi teknokratia, we drop into a clockwork nightmare, with multiple instruments, including female voice, beating time. These are underlines to the thought that it's often acutely dramatic, as if there's a simultaneous performance art element to interpret it that I'm missing because I only have the audio. Sure, it's out there stuff, an enticing psychedelic space metal painting, but it ought to move and I want to see what it looks like.

The primary reason to set this aside from King Crimson and Philip Glass and other musicians who are on this world to experiment is that it gets a lot heavier than any of them. Oranssi Pazuzu go beyond, taking their space rock shenanigans all the way up to full on black metal at points. Sometimes, like on Taivaan portti, they kick off with a black metal wall of sound and pretty much stay there, but, on most songs, they play with dynamics and contrast, merely doing so with a broader intensity palette than an army of regular experimenters put together.

So, while this is absolutely a black metal album, it's also a space rock album and an electronica album and a whole bunch of other things, all woven together into a heady and innovative mix. I haven't yet explored Oranssu Pazuzu's back catalogue but this emphasises why I need to do that Real Soon Now. I hear that they reinvent themselves on every release, so their work is always fresh.

I was disappointed yesterday with the latest Hum album, a year end list topper. I'm not disappointed with this, which made five end of year lists I'm tracking thus far, including three top tens and one top five, a second in Jeff Terich's list at Treble Zine. I like it a lot more than the release ahead of it in that list, the collaboration between Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle, but I see a lot of interesting albums on that list, including a bunch on I, Voidhanger Records, whose catalogue I expect to dive into deeply.

Wednesday, 2 December 2020

Thou & ERR - May Our Chambers Be Full (2020)

Even though they've only released five albums under their own name since their founding in 2005, the Baton Rouge sludge metal outfit known as Thou are actually rather prolific. They just release a lot of other stuff: split releases, EPs and, increasingly, collaborations. Thus far, all their collaborations have been with fellow American sludge metal band, the Body, but this one is quite the departure.

ERR isn't another sludge metal band, but an alternative singer/songwriter by the name of Emma Ruth Rundle, apparently best known for her folky post-rock output, not only solo but also with Marriages, the Nocturnes and Red Sparowes. She's also released darkwave and ambient guitar projects, so clearly she's versatile. That's promising when faced with a collaborative project with Thou.

Apparently, they're fans of each other and, when working together was suggested, they leapt at it. The result is certainly interesting, Rundle's clean and haunting voice providing a welcome contrast to the sheer weight of what Thou play. They are a very heavy band indeed, mixing the downtuned heaviness of sludge with the bleakness of black metal, the latter present mostly in the particularly harsh vocals of Bryan Funck. At least I think it's him, as he's credited on vocals alone while KC Stafford plays guitar too. Frankly, whoever it is, I like Thou's music a lot more than I like those vocals, which seem intrusive here.

A song like Ancestral Recall is sublime with Rundle lilting at the sky while Thou drag her back down to the earth, if not into it. It loses that dynamic entirely when Funck joins in. The same holds true on the majority of other tracks, though to a lesser degree on Magickal Cost, as the wilder rhythms keep that interesting even with a harsh voice, just not as interesting as with only Rundle. This album runs 36m and, even by the halfway point, I was convinced that this would be a much better album were Rundle the only voice heard.

Much of that is because I found Funck so annoying, but some of it is because Thou continually mix up the textures they set Rundle's voice against. That dynamic works on the heavy, dense sound of Out of Existence, but also on the sparser Magickal Cost and Into Being. Thou downtune so far that even the guitars sound like basses, except maybe during the solos on Into Being, and what sounds like an array of basses make a slow song like that one achingly heavy. Rundle is a perfect counter to whatever Thou do, orders of magnitude lighter than them but never without weight of her own. Funck fits one style only and that's limiting.

The albums wraps with a nine minute song called The Valley, which is a tearful dirge when it's entirely instrumental, its tentative guitar merging with what sounds like a violin and a distant choral effect. This is so sparse a song that Tyler Coburn's drumkit often feels like a single handheld drum, beating the toll of a life lost. This is Thou meeting Rundle on her own post-rock ground but still making it all dark. To my mind, this is easily the album's highlight, the most evocative piece of music here by far. I wasn't even disappointed when Funck briefly joins in seven minutes in like he's a wraith creeping out of a grave.

And with The Valley, and the album with it, done, I just had to start over to see how everything felt in the wake of that epic closer. I found that it played a little better, that vibe well and truly established. The album actually got lighter on a second listen, as if there was a ray of sunlight threatening to add colour to Thou's now traditional black and white woodcut cover art, even if it doesn't manage to come good on its threat. Every song improves on a second listen and Funck doesn't seem quite so intrusive, though he never becomes welcome.

I really wish I could hear this without that harsh voice, though. I was actually tempted to drop this to a 6/10 but I think that would be unfair. There's too much good stuff here for that to sit right with me. However, my 7/10 might well have been higher had I been able to wave a magic wand and make Rundle the sole voice. Certainly, the lesson of this collaboration is that she works fantastically well with Thou and I hope they work together again, in only slightly different circumstances.

Friday, 16 August 2019

Blindead - Niewiosna (2019)

Country: Poland
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 Apr 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

The more I listen to bands from Poland, the more I realise just how varied and deep the rock scene must be over there. Case in point: Blindead, whose sixth album came out in April without me noticing. It's unlike any of those other Polish bands I've been enjoying. Frankly, it's unlike much of anything I've heard. While a few comparisons do come to mind at points, I'm not used to hearing all of them on the same album.

Niewiosna, the eleven and a half minute title track, for instance, spends five minutes building textures before vocals show up to surprise us. The music continues to build anyway, melodic jangling guitars gradually fading into the wall of darkness that grows up around them. Drums are punctuation not accompaniment. The vocals are spoken rather than sung and spoken in a recitation as if this is performance art or sardonic ritual. Sans vocals, this could be a new wave song played at a third normal speed. With vocals, I'm really not sure what it is but it had my attention.

The Bandcamp tag that makes most sense is "experimental", but it's musical experimentation not noise, even when the album gets extreme. They also use tags as varied as alternative, electronic, post-metal and sludge. There's a lot of truth to each. What makes the band special is how they can combine it onto a single album and have it make some sort of demented sense.

It was Niepowodzenie where I started to grasp the point. It's the shortest track here by far, at just under five minutes, but the music is both perky and hypnotic. It's also extremely rhythmic, not unlike some of the work of Philip Glass. More importantly it's cinematic, even without the performance art vocals. It felt like something Wong Kar Wai might use if he ever made a giallo. There's suspense but there's dynamism and hints of story, like some young lady is being chased, but by what?

By this point, I'd looked them up. If Google Translate isn't misleading me, the band's gigs are often soundtracks to the films of Roman Przylipiak. I'm finding a bunch of short films on IMDb by him but I haven't seen any. I have to say that I'm interested in doing so now.

And what film would Potwór się rodzi accompany? It feels experimental from the outset, reminiscent of Andrew Eldritch jamming with Coil in slow motion. But then, it gets all doomladen in the midsection, more like Swans, but with some ritual drumming from Konrad Ciesielski and snippets of conversation. If that wasn't enough of a change, it soon adds in the electronica and goes off the deep end. Are we in a serial killer's basement watching him warm up his power tools? This is heavy stuff but not in any usual way. At least the end has a pulse.

I was completely hooked at this point, because the rollercoaster was moving faster and the seatbelts had evaporated and what is Ani lekkomyślnie, ani bezboleśnie? It's pure punk, with snarled vocals. There's Iggy Pop in there and Lou Reed and some sort of demonic creature. It's like someone was forced to transform into his inner beast during an Einstürzende Neubauten concert, while Celtic Frost watched.

Maybe that's what happens. When I put the song titles into Google Translate, I saw a progression. It didn't know what Niewiosna means, but the others are Failure, The Monster is Born, Not Reckless, Not Painless and Spring. Maybe it's a concept piece with science going wrong, creating a monster, trying to deal with what it is and eventually finding a dark solution.

I'm less fond of that last track, Wiosna, which is too subtle until, well, it isn't subtle enough. It gets even more out there, but this is magnetic and engrossing stuff across the board. Most people will hate it, of course.

Thursday, 25 July 2019

E-an-na - Nesfârşite (2019)

Country: Romania
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website

Oh wow, there's a lot going on Nesfârşite, a Romanian folk metal album from the bizarrely named E-an-na, from Sibiu which used to be the capital of the principality of Transylvania. If that sparks history, then I should add that the band's name stems from Eanna, a Sumerian temple in Uruk, which was the home of Inanna, the Mesopotamian fertility goddess, who became Ishtar to a later bunch of worshippers. That it also sounds like the sort of chant you might find in a folk ballad is probably not a coincidence.

For a couple of tracks, it's pretty consistent in a wildly diverse way. Viu runs a mere three minutes, but travels a heck of a lot of ground. It begins with crunchy djent riffs but death growls give way to flutes, which give way in turn to an accordion and suddenly we're in a Romanian village fair. Then, just to underline that this is metal, we leap into high gear in the form of the sort of drinking song you might expect from Korpiklaani. Then, halfway, we find a folk melody that's joined by a plucky bass and now we're in gypsy punk territory, not far from a Gogol Bordello sound. Viu means Alive in Romanian and it's a highly appropriate title for such a vibrant song.

If you like the schizophrenic mindset of Mr. Bungle but your tastes tend to downtuned metal and eastern European folk music, then E-an-na are your band because they keep this up on Aer. It isn't quite as outrageous but it does come close and it's twice as long to allow for other elements, like synths that show up halfway through and an interlude for piano and humming. The core here is pretty close to repetitive nu metal, which I wouldn't normally thrill to, but the sheer imagination that peppers that core with a variety of wild textures is a delight. You simply never know what you're going to hear next.

From there, it becomes a very schizophrenic album, with a couple of wildly different approaches. It's akin to tuning into two radio stations at once, one of them featuring wild, engaging music that you've never heard before and the other being the same old mainstream stuff that you try to avoid. It makes for an odd but fascinating listen.

The first of those two stations is really out there, not just exploring the folk sounds of Romania. Some tracks are instrumental, such as Fiecare gest al nostru, with its prominent violin, and a guest slot for Robert Cotoros from a gloriously named band called Hteththemeth. Others are vocal. Pielea is an oddly frenetic jazz song that made me wonder if I'd woken up with my head on the counter of a European café for lunatics. I adored it as a jaunty vocal piece with energetic stylings from Roxana Amarandi and I adored it as an intricate instrumental. This could be my favourite song of 2019.

The best songs here to me are from this side of the band's sound. Pânda is a great example, a little less jazzy than Pielea but just as folky and with an inexorable patient drive forward that feels cinematic. I'm not the first to conjure up an Emir Kusturica comparison here and that doesn't surprise me. In this mode, E-an-na are irresistible. The opening of Mashiara features a delightful vocal from Roxana Amarandi that had me grinning like a madman. It follows Pielea perfectly for a double bill that isn't going to get matched any time soon.

That other station that keeps creeping in, sometimes a lot, sometimes only a little, is a nu metal station that plays djent and metalcore. Epitaf, slated for release as a single, comes to life whenever the bagpipes show up but it otherwise combines many of my least favourite aspects of modern metal, like Korn playing djent on St. Patrick's Day. It's really not my thing.

On occasion, this notable contrast works. iO.tă could be seen as a sort of duet between the styles and it works reasonably well for the most part. More often, it jars, especially when the metalcore takes over. Early in Frica, a monotonous guitar repeats while Ioana Popescu explores a piano keyboard and it's engaging, but then the contrast vanishes and it's just palm muting and shouts. As Frica runs on, it gets interesting then boring, then interesting then boring. It's like sitting outside a couple of studios with doors open, the fascinating band on the left constantly getting drowned out by the band on the right. And I couldn't move my chair towards the accordion.

There's a lot here and the musicianship is very strong, as it has to be to put something like this together. Even Epitaf, which lost me completely, is done well and I see that it's some people's favourite song here. Different strokes, I guess. However, I tend to adore bands that mix up styles, taking diverse sounds and bringing them together to create something new. E-an-na really ought to be one of my favourite bands and, frankly, they still could be, if only they'd close that studio door on the right.

Tuesday, 22 January 2019

Ahl Sina - Troops of Pain (2019)

Country: Egypt
Style: Experimental Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

If you've been following my reviews thus far, you'll have noticed that I like my metal interesting. Don't sound like the other guys and I'm going to pay attention. Blur the boundaries between subgenres and you've got my interest. Bring in far flung ethnic sounds and I'm going to be eager to listen. Well, here's a folk/progessive metal band from Egypt who kick off their album with a ten minute song. This is so far up my alley I can feel it tickling my taste buds.

And it does indeed turn out to be an interesting album. After listening through a few times in entirety, what it really sounds like to me is a prog metal opera that at times gets very folky, as classical music often tends to do.

That ten minute opener, The Gift, begins with chanting then shifts to flute and percussion, diverts into electronic territory and then an intricate guitar intro. When the singing shows up, it's clean vocals over flute, then violin. The melodies quaver and the flutes trill. Only when an electric guitar solo suddenly arrives almost four minutes in does this really assert itself as metal but, a minute further in, we suddenly find ourselves in flight with death metal growls that are later replaced by shrieks halfway between black metal and Bobby Blitzer of Overkill. Even then the ethnic instruments keep on accompanying, even leading and, on occasion, running entirely solo. By eight minutes, we find a spoken word section, marking the fifth vocal style used in one song. And, if I'm not mistaken, all of them except the chanting at the beginning are courtesy of a single man, Moustafa Troll, who founded Ahl Sina in 2009.

So that's ten minutes of an album that runs over an hour, with one track, Enlightenment Discarded that's even longer than The Gift.

There's so much more to say but it would be redundant. Frankly, I could end my review there and you're either going to move right along or raise your eyebrows at the potential.

Well, I should add that I'm still exploring this on my fourth or fifth time through because there's that much going on, both musically and with regard to the storyline.

I'd like to pick up a lyric sheet for this to figure out what's unfolding because it's clearly aimed at being a coherent story and I haven't got a clue what that is, other than something contemporary that speaks to the human condition and its tendency towards conflict. The title track wraps up with a sample from a poem by Jane Elliott called Racism Destroyed in One Minute.

Musically, it's exquisite, all the way up to the tortured shriek halfway through Vowed. It's emphatically an Egyptian band at heart and you'd be forgiven for expecting them to all be Egyptians deeply in touch with the musical heritage of the country. Just listen to the intro to Knowledge and Pain and tell me that that isn't an Egyptian playing frame drums behind an Egyptian string section?

Well, what surprises me most is that Ahl Sina are actually international in scope and this album was recorded in three different nations without a single joint rehearsal of all the members. The strings are courtesy of Stefanie Pfaffenzeller from Germany and the tribal drummer, Shaadie Khoury, is in the US. I presume Amr el Zanaty on the traditional percussion and Ahmed el Eskndarany on flutes are in Egypt, as are Troll on vocals and Shung on keyboards and guitar, but bassist Marcel Hauptmann is also German.

They perform together gloriously, whether they actually perform together or not. This doesn't sound piecemeal at all, even if the international members did record their bits separately and someone glued them together later. I'd very much like to hear this band live, especially supporting Orphaned Land. While one band is Egyptian and the other Israeli, the two would seem to be utterly compatible musically and thematically. I could see the same Lebanese bellydancers performing with both bands.

Now, let me listen through again and see if I can choose some highlights. I'm almost scared to post any because I'm pretty sure that my favourites will be changing every time I listen. It's not remotely as catchy as the Egyptian influenced Sechem album I reviewed recently, Disputes with My Ba, though some of the flute and percussion sections will have you bellydancing in your office chair and scaring whoever's in the next cube, but it's much deeper and more worthy of exploration.

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