Brutal Super-Sonic Cataclysm: Wormed - Krighsu (2016)

Krighsu is the album I expected, and I expected a hugely brutal super-sonic cataclysmic cacophony or barely distinguishable vocals, inhuman drumming, irregular rhythms and weird deep-space ambiance. This album ticks all these boxes. Compared with their last album Exodromos, Krighsu feels more atmospheric and imaginative; the typically unforgiving instrumental sections are bookended by eerie ambiance and industrial sounding electronics. Occasionally these more eccentric moments breakthrough mid-song. 

Most importantly, the crushing technicality is just as engrossing and powerful as expected - riffs chug along with the force of planets smashing together, the bass throngs and creaks with almost maniacal aggression and the drums are machine-like and incessant; most interesting is the moments between complete annihilation where unorthodox tenderness creeps in through int he form textured guitar lines and moments of respite. There are odd moments of harmony and softness, barely audible beneath the sonic maelstrom, that really gives the album an interesting dynamic. I personally love the vocals, they are tuneless, certainly inhuman - the sound of metal colliding with metal, a low grating whirl lacking any harmony;  they're perfect for the album. 

Wormed combine the ultra sterility of tech-death with the putrid barbarity of 90's brutal death and contemporary atmospheric death; Wormed manage to merge these seemingly opposing approaches with ease and the bands incredible musicianship allows for this. Krighsu is a heavy and intelligent album that satisfies my need for completely hopeless, crushing and challenging music. 

Jadedness and rejuvenation: is there such a thing as too much metal?

It's all been a bit quiet this week because this writing lark has all become a bit of a chore. I knew this day would come. It was inevitable, but I'm sure a spurt of writing passion will come again. I've partly been struck down with a music overload, an auditory avalanche that started at the very beginning and has finally cascaded over me and numbed me into apathy and jadedness. 

I actually took a few days off from extreme-metal in general - that's completely blasphemous, perhaps even beyond comprehension, and I should be scorned and attacked. I think it's for the better actually; I've given myself a bit of a break and refreshed my mind and now I'm listening to stuff again and I feel a bit rejuvenated. Too much of one thing can deaden the impact and power it has over you and I think sometimes withdrawing oneself is needed. I've also had a short stint of minor man-flu which hasn't really helped motivate me, in fact I've been sort of sliming around the house like a anti-social malnourished vampire slug, cowering from bright light and human contact. In an even stranger run of events I've found myself listening to genres I've only touched upon very briefly before: trip-hop, downtempo, soul and hip-hop (Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is a masterpiece of conscious rap, hip-hop, funk, jazz-fusion) - it's been a very diverse and interesting week of musical discovery and I have been exposed to some extremely interesting stuff from a cross-section of genres that are rather alien to metal - perhaps I've been possessed. 

But I found my way back to the gruesome house of metal and found the urge to delve into some of the grossest and most forlorn music to counteract the weird and wonderful journey I had taken in the days previous. The Ruins of Beverast and Leviathan are two solo-projects that are truly empowered by hatred, misanthropy and grit. Their music is a spiral into hopelessness, there really isn't much to cling onto with their music melody-wise. I listened to their most recent albums - Blood Vaults and Scar Sighted - two extremely engrossing and disturbing musical words, vast in scope and detailed in range of sounds. Both are dark ambient forces infused with slow and desperate elements of doom and soaring moments of sharp black-metal; it's the atmosphere, however, that creeps through the album like creeping fog, that really makes these albums, and these bands, great. 

Atmosphere comes first here and it is controlled and utilized to intensify the proficient instrumental work, it's the glue that binds and without it you're stuck with a sterile and fragmented series of individual songs and moments that just sort of stagnates and jumps from one to the next, leaving a feeling of dissatisfaction. Albums need to flow and songs need to work together, speak to one another. 

Demilich's Nespithe does this so very well - fragments of riff patterns from previous songs repeat throughout the album, sometimes exploding briefly then disappearing and at other times merging with other songs fluidly. The entire album is a variation of the riffs heard on the first song, and this never gets stale, partly because of the eccentricity of the riffs to start off with, and partly because of the entirely fucked-up alien-demonic universe that the band had created as a foundation to the music. I don't like it when a song just ends, or fades out, leading to silence, a five or ten second silence that leads to the next song.

 To me some albums are just 8 or 10 or 12 songs just glued together. Some people like stand-alone songs, which is fine, but metal as a genre thrives because of the scope and the power of the album as a whole. It should be, in my opinion, 40-minutes of interconnected sounds, patterns, themes, riff-work, that subtly repeats and interweaves and flows organically and naturally. Unnatural attempts at connecting albums to make them seem more coherent are just as bad at times too; some bands try to bridge that silence between one song and the next by splicing in an out of place orchestral-strings interlude, or a somber piano piece, or a spoken-word piece talking of the cover-up of chemtrails, etc, etc. It shouldn't be forced. It should be carefully worked into the songs and into the period between songs. This is what The Ruins of Beverast and Leviathan do well.

 If you have got this far, thank you for reading this jumbled and chaotic mess of thoughts and feelings and I hope to have more frequent posts up in the near future. 

Fuzzgump the Second

Vanessa Van Basten sounds Dutch, I haven't checked and I don't really care. She may or may not be related to the famous footballer, but I also don't care about checking that, either. She may or may not be one thing or another. I also thought that she was a classical singer - she is not. In fact listening to her/it/them makes me question the very fundamentals of my existence. On the 18th of February Mr. Fuzzgump added Vanessa Van Basten as a playlist on Spotify, he returned today to find the playlist, but he was baffled by how and why Vanessa taints his playlists. He decided to listen, expecting a light and airy fairy twinkly twangly light and feathery indie tingle wingle sound but was greeted with an unexpected dark and heavy fuzzy wuzzy doomy gloomy sound infused with a dissonant industrial sound that shocked and impressed Fuzzgump so much that he wanted me to share this with you: It's a song by Vanessa Van Basten. The riffs are fuzzy. The artwork is fuzzy in a different way - obscure, indistinct, vague, absurd and surreal in a very pleasing way. 

Note: Fuzzgump doesn't care for biography or history or truth. The only truth is in the fuzz, the fuzz is coats world with its suffocating essence. 

The First Fuzzgump

The first of Mr. Fuzzgump's fuzzy funderments. All that dwells here will be fuzzy, distorted, hazy, crazy, lazy, lo-fi, downright shady, blurred, obscured, disturbed, contorted, confused, muddled, befuddled, obscene, extreme. Fuzz is love, fuzz is life - fuzz obscures the sharp realities of high definition existence. I am Mr. Fuzzgump's spokesman: Fuzz has fuzzed his ability to speak...and type. The band above are Fuzz, a side-project of Ty Segall who I thought had died but realised I was mixing him up with Jay Reatard. He's quite fuzzy too. Fuzz is pretty generic every day fuzz, sort of lazy and nasally but fun. It opens like Sabbath before getting all folky-polkly like Zeppelin but then it becomes a bit more stoner-fied and nasally and dirty and fuzzy. 

Claustrophobic and Devouring: Altarage - Nihl (2016)

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ALTARAGE/?fref=nf
Bandcamp: http://altarage.bandcamp.com/

NIHL, the debut album by Spain's Altarage, is an overwhelming and all-consuming force of dense matter that completely drains all colour and life. The vocals are a hazy and grating, a vibrating shape-shifting monster that crawls from the deep and devours life - I imagine it's the noise that the shadowy and creeping arachnid-demon creature in the fantastic album artwork would make.

The entire thing, from the band logo to the artwork to the song-titles to the most important aspect - the music itself - is dripping in a claustrophobic and oppressive atmosphere; the production here is full and bass-heavy and the rumbling of the drums and the grating vocals are an incessant attack on the senses - the album succeeds in stunning the listener into submission. I'd attribute this partly to the diverse drum-work: they close 'Baptism Nihl' with a ritualistic pounding; similarly in creeping atmosphere of 'Batherex' they rumble with a demonic steadiness; towards the middle and end of 'Vortex Pyramid', as the song breaks down into further instability and chaos, the supersonic drum-work is frantic, almost inhuman, and at 3.45 breaks in to a jazz-like death-metal drum solo. 

NIHL is a gem riff-wise too: heavy chugs merge with creaking dissonance, laser-sharp stabbings of coldness merge with reverberating atmospheres and old-school mid-paced grooves merge with intense spurts of brutal-death skull-crushery - it's all very well done. At 36-minutes NIHL is the perfect length for an album of such intensity;  not too short - leaving dissatisfaction - but not at all dragging on, becoming stale. The album ends leaving me, at least, craving more brain-sapping and skull-crushing intensity which, at a most simple level, is the sign of a captivating album.

Alphabetical Discovery - Week F, Day Two: A Forest of Stars

Carrying the essence of Victorian occult beliefs, superstitions and squalor, A Forest of Stars traveled backward and then forward in time to unleash their distinctive approach to extreme metal; theirs is a theatrical mix of black-metal, psychedelic, 70's-esque prog-rock, and classical, though pinpointing their sound is ultimately proves futile and dissatisfying. Nothing really comes close to matching the inherent English morbidness of their sound - tortured vocalist Mister Curse croaks, croons and delivers his vocals in a vernacular straight from the streets of Victorian England, a stage-magician terrifying superstitious crowds. With seven members and the regular use of pianofortes, peculiar percussion, violins, and flutes, A Forest of Star's sound is grand - a swirling incantation of subtle and beautiful melodies and folk sections that lure a listener in counteracted by the gritty and sordid. At its foundation their black-metal approach is very well-done, take 'Blaze of Hammers' from their most recent fourth album Beware The Sword You Cannot See as an example of the evil and unforgiving intensities that snarl through their miserably beautufk sound  - they never forget their roots; twinned to their black-metal is a death-obsessed, vitriolic and melancholic approach to album concepts and lyrics. Their lyrics carry the music as much as the instrumentals themselves, they are extremely imaginative and, matched with the idiosyncratic vocal delivery, they create a truly unique atmosphere unlike anything I've really listened to before.

The accused are great in number,

though if you'd kind enough to line them up, 

I could find it in me to fire the shots.

Temples holed by misplaced homily.

Nails all lined up to support heads lording over spikes of infamy.

Your alter-ego can dig the pit.

Then, once it's lined with silent bones, 

we can stir the ghosts around.

Perhaps take their powder as salve.

Though it'll perish your thoughts, I'll tell you.

Curiosity pushed you in, face first on top of all the others.

So let's roll the old worm ball down another cerebral hill,

Bone over wire / racing the funeral pyre.

                                                                  ('Virtus Sola Invicta')

Alphabetical Discovery - Week F, Day One: Falls of Rauros

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Falls-of-Rauros-197095916993311/
Bandcamp: http://fallsofrauros.bandcamp.com/

Note: This was supposed to be posted yesterday: Monday the 14th. So just imagine it's a Monday and all will be fine.

Rising dawn forces creeping shadow into hiding; the sound of the ocean laps, swallows, pulls at desolate shorelines; an ethereal echo harmonises with a wide-arching wind  over vast landscapes: this is the sound of Portland, Maine's Falls of Rauros. Vulnerable and wispy, dreamy and raw, the band belong to a scene that passionately merges elements of folk and black-metal with deep layers of melody and sensitivity. The band have a melodic and exploratory guitar-lead sound: lines of piercing and soaring melody intertwine, smoke, and drift above echoed gazing vocals. The guitar work in the bands third full-length - 2014's Believe In No Coming Shore - is a snaking work of art, spiraling and moving throughout the 42-minutes with a magical quality. It's not typically black-metal, although that label has been attributed to the band - they're much more tender, pensive and less-aggressive; there are certainly moments where songs reach a crescendo, where drums, bass, guitars and vocals bubble and steam, but as a whole their sound flows through channels of poignant melancholy and reflection. The majority is instrumental too, vocals rise from the mix occasionally but for the most part it's the exploratory folk-etched sound that takes command. It's a very honest and beautiful sound.