Tag Archives: post-metal

My Top 20 Albums of 2018

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Happy New Year!  It’s time for my annual check-in to confirm that we’re still alive and well, and that I still have terrible taste in music.

Sample size: 71 albums
Quality: This was a pretty damn good year for music. I feel like my list is significantly stronger than 2017 and competitive with some of the best years I can remember. My top 7 could have all finished first in lesser years.

20. Horrendous – Idol

progressive death metal

Sample track: Soothsayer

It’s a trip. If you can swallow the vocals, which hit me as a bit too classically tortured to match the lush soundscape the band’s presenting, you’re going to be treated to one of those albums that packs so much subtle flavor that I think I could spin it 100 times and still find something new. It doesn’t hit the aesthetic zone of infinite repeatability for me that I think I would need to fully embrace its nuances, but it’s admirable.

19. Carpenter Brut – Leather Teeth

retrowave

Sample track: Inferno Galore

Half of this album actually sounds like it was lifted out of a classic 80s video game and modernized. I guess that’s the point, and he’s not exactly the only person doing it, but this album stood out to me for some especially powerful cuts, most notably Inferno Galore. I don’t think this is an album that will stick with me terribly long. I’m not a fan of the vocals, granted they’re limited to Cheerleader Effect and Beware the Beast. The whole thing is way too abrasive for me to enjoy at length passively. But yeah, I enjoyed it more than the average album this year. Fun spin and my misgivings are trivial, not game-breaking.

18. Panopticon – The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness

bluegrass/folk/black metal

Sample track: Echoes in the Snow

I had the pleasure this summer of seeing Austin Lunn headline the grand finale of a three day music festival, and that pretty well confirmed his status as my favorite personality in music. He’s also one of the only two artists to steal my number 1 slot twice. That… won’t be happening this year. The Scars of Man has a few drawbacks for me beyond its unwieldy name. Despite clocking in just shy of 120 minutes, it’s less stylistically innovative than his last three albums. The folk and metal come in distinct packages with little overlap. The lyrics are repetitive and don’t reach far beyond a basic motif of winter wilderness and mortality. The melodies aren’t particularly gripping on the whole. The vocal delivery is kind of muted. Like a lot of my favorite musicians, Lunn has an aura of heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity about him that transforms many of his flaws into points of endearment. (It’s not a coincidence that I gave Mark Kozelek first place last year.) I think, in this case, that’s more of a salvaging factor than the catapult that propels it above the competition. It comes across to me as a really spontaneous work, like he sat down and just played whatever came to him without much concern about refining it. That’s cool. I enjoyed it. Just not on par with say, Roads to the North or Autumn Eternal.

17. Bosse-de-Nage – Further Still

post-black metal

Sample track: Down Here

A few of these guys were members of an internet forum I frequent before they gained decent success on the post-bm scene touring with the likes of Deafheaven, so I’ll concede a bit of bias. I loved their last album, All Fours, but it took me a while to reasonably conclude that I loved it regardless of having a (to be fair, very small) personal connection to the band. Further Still hasn’t had as much of an opportunity to grow on me as All Fours did. It was released later in the year, I haven’t been in as much of a mood for that genre, and it’s stylistically very similar to their last release. Without devoting too much completely undistracted time to it, I do want to say this album brings very little new to the table, but their matured sound was great where it stood coming in. I would hardly say that more of the same is a bad thing. Basically, I like this album a lot on its surface but haven’t had much of an opportunity to fall in love with it. I think I potentially could. 17th with plenty of room to move up.

16. Sumac – Love in Shadow

post-metal/experimental

Sample track: Ecstasy of Unbecoming

I feel like Sumac is on the brink of becoming my favorite Aaron Turner project. The potential is certainly there. It’s never going to roll out something on the magnitude of Isis’s Oceanic, but Sumac is definitely drifting down a path I can get excited about. I feel like large chunks of this album were the product spontaneous experimentation in the studio, and improv noodling with a metal aesthetic is emerging as a core part of his sound. It reminded me at times of one of the best non-2018 releases I discovered this year–James Plotkin & Paal Nilssen-Love’s Death Rattle. On a kind of small world aside, as I’m writing this I pulled James Plotkin’s Wikipedia page, and apparently he’s done mixing work with Isis before. At any rate, I definitely enjoyed the eclectic ride of chucking this album on in the background a few times, but more than anything I’m curious about where he goes from here.

15. Tomb Mold – Manor of Infinite Forms

death metal

Sample track: Final Struggle of Selves

Every once in a blue moon I stumble on that elusive death metal album that brings absolutely nothing new to the table and completely beats the shit out of me anyway, and Tomb Mold hit the nail on the head. I don’t even listen to death metal very often for all I meme about it, but I’ve been putting this one back on all year. It just gets everything right for my aesthetic tastes, I guess. The vocals nail a sound that feels brutal without being cheesy or grating on me. All of the tones blend together really well to form a tight package without competing against each other. It’s got a kind of groovy mid-tempo pace I can’t help but bob my head to. Guilty pleasure or not, it’s been a frequent fun ride.

14. Death Grips – Year of the Snitch

experimental hip hop

Sample track: Death Grips is Online

I managed to not discover Death Grips until late 2016, and they’ve still forced their way into the mix of my most listened-to artists ever. I think there’s a lot of really weird experimentation going on here even by their standards. It’s a pretty meaty album to try to sit down and embrace, and I can’t say I’ve ever gotten through it attentively from start to finish. Maybe not their most passively pleasing work, but there’s a lot of weird experimentation going on here that’s kept me curious throughout the year.

13. Midnight Danger – Malignant Force

retrowave

Sample track: System Outage

Everyone I’ve sent this to has basically just told me “yeah, that sounds like the 80s alright.” Maybe if I was more familiar with the genre, it wouldn’t sound that special to me. I can’t say for certain; I’m not an avid pursuer of new trends in electronic music the way I am with metal. But I have definitely heard a lot of music in a similar vein to this, and none of it impresses me quite as much. I guess if you’re listening to it as “lol 80s” they might all sound alike? I think the album is packed with compelling loops and manages to plod forward with a really heavy beat while never becoming abrasive enough to shift me from that mindset of a cyberpunk dystopia. So yeah, there’s definitely a lack of extensive genre exposure on my end, but this has been my default go-to when I want to engage this sort of aesthetic for most of 2018.

12. Summoning – With Doom We Come

atmospheric metal

Sample track: Silvertine

Summoning have been one of my favorite bands for going on 15 years, and I’ve only been treated to three new albums in that span. So yeah, I was pretty hyped for this, and it would have been hard to screw up. I frequently queue up their entire discography and just let it roll for ten hours straight. I have never heard another band that sounds anything like them, and their sound pings every fantasy nerd pleasure point in my body. Much like it took Old Mornings Dawn a couple years to settle in as a rock in their anthology and not just epic by default, With Doom We Come doesn’t yet stand out distinct to me as something other than more Summoning. It’s hard to say if and when it will get there; at nearly 50 plays through, I know every track by heart but couldn’t tell you from a 30 second session which album they hail from. Maybe that’s a sign that none of them are particularly stand-out cuts. Is it as independently enticing as Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame or Dol Guldur to me? Nah, but the band that can do no wrong for me did no wrong in 2018.

11. A Forest of Stars – Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes

psychedelic black metal

Sample track: Precipice Pirouette

At this point, 2015’s Beware the Sword You Cannot See has pretty firmly cemented its slot among my all-time favorite albums. I didn’t expect Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes to compete with that, and it doesn’t, and that’s fine. If Dan Eyre’s lyrics have tipped over from dancing on the fringes of nonsense to completely incoherent rants, there’s still no lack of awkwardly well-spoken venom. If the compositions are a little more direct, they’re just as immense and driving. I’m not sure what I would think of this album if I experienced it with a blank slate regarding the band, but I would probably like it even more. They have one of the most unique and compelling sounds of the 2010s. I don’t think this is their best work, or even particularly close to it, but in terms of enjoyment, I’m just thrilled to have some new material to spin by them that doesn’t significantly deviate from the sound I’ve grown to love. I guess if I have one complaint, the album tends to meander a bit too long on some post-rocky vibes that never build up into the climaxes they’ve mustered in the past. Kind of torn on [i”>I really really like it[/i”> but want it to be more, and that’s what landed it just shy of my top 10.

10. Bongripper – Terminal

doom metal/post-rock

Sample track: Terminal

If you like to hear 45 minutes of the same thing repeated in deep distorted tones, this album might be for you. For better or worse, it’s for me. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before. There’s not enough here for me to really point and go “now that was something”. They just landed on some killer riffs and grinded them into oblivion. I got to hear them play the full album live this year, and I was totally in the zone for it just rocking back and forth. I think the album experience is about the same, and half the time I click play on it I catch myself staring off into space 20 minutes later. A hell of a lot of bands play this style. Most of them don’t actually suck me in to the point of distraction. I’m not sure what’s particularly different about this one to pull it off, but here we are.

9. Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts

hip hop

Sample track: Freeee

I never much cared for Kanye outside of a small handful of tracks dominated by guest artists. His lyrics and the arrogant attitude that resonates in his vocal style just rub me the wrong way. I actually had a sort of epiphany when I was compiling my year end list and this album kept popping up as a contender. It hadn’t yet registered that, for once, I just kept listening to him. I guess Kanye the rapper is a little less prevalent here–I won’t miss 4th Dimension if I never hear it again. Maybe it’s Kid Cudi’s influence, maybe it’s a general shift in focus, I don’t know, but this is the first time where I really found myself not merely conceding that Kanye is a talented producer but actually personally loving his songs. Feel the Love, Freeee, and Reborn are all fantastic, and the vast majority of the album keeps me engaged on a level I am not used to associating with Kanye West at all.

8. Haru Nemuri – Haru to Shura

hip hop/j-pop

Sample track: rock ‘n’ roll wa shinanai

I guess the basic idea behind this album is pretty straight forward, albeit unconventional. It’s j-pop except she’s rapping. The song writing verges off in a lot of novel directions that I have no baseline to really qualify in terms of originality, but they keep the album interesting from start to finish. The thing I like most though is her vocal expressiveness. The passion and tension and angst is impressively tangible for foreign language spoken word. I didn’t think I would have much to say about this, and I don’t. It’s great. Listen to it.

7. Thou – The House Primordial

doom/drone

Sample track: Diaphanous Shift

This has been one of my favorite background pieces of the year. It’s hard to describe what makes one drone-centric album more appealing than the next. I think this presents a very full wall of sound that at times approaches a state I could only describe as noise, but thick bass tones still drive the album, and it’s peppered with bluesy riffs that suck you into direct engagement just long enough to consciously remind you that you’re enjoying this without becoming a distraction. The fullness of it is definitely a distinction from the more classic doom/drone hybrids I dabbled in but could never really embrace in the early 2000s. Khanate but huge is definitely a comparison that comes to mind. At any rate, this is a style that appeals to me more and more as I get older, and The House Primordial absolutely nails it for me. It’s kind of crazy that this misses my top 5, for all I’ve enjoyed it. 2018 was a competitive year.

6. Zeal & Ardor – Stranger Fruit

African-American folk metal

Sample track: You Ain’t Coming Back

Zeal & Ardor is a project that began with the novelty game of trying to mash up atypical genres of music. Black metal and African American spirituals worked out pretty tight, and here you go. This is a pretty exciting album for me, personally, because it’s not something I’ve ever heard done before and it approaches an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time. Don’t let the “metal” tag deter you; I think this is an album that should be pretty accessible to people unaccustomed to heavier music. The gospel, soul, and African American folk traditions get the spotlight. The metal’s primary function is to present it in a more intense and pressing light. I think there might be some Tom Waits influence going on here too. At least, Row Row very distinctly reminded me of Clap Hands. It’s a really interesting project, and the song writing is solid on the whole. I feel like the lyrics could have dug deeper, and the studio gloss did start to wear on me after what must have been at least three dozen plays, but Stranger Fruit was a pretty integral part of my 2018 music experience.

5. Wayfarer – World’s Blood

post-black metal

Sample track: The Crows Ahead Cry War

Picking up where the cover art leaves off, this album sets an unmistakable western American atmosphere within the opening seconds. A brooding, atmospheric journey that calls to mind elements of Altar of Plagues and Spectral Lore, their song-writing is impeccable, but it’s the thematic niche that really sets this apart as more than a valiant rehashing of what’s been done before. So much of the black metal listening experience is a passive journey. I think the reason it’s my favorite genre is because you can thoroughly enjoy an album on repeat 100 times without zoning in attentively enough to pick up on half of its subtleties. It’s the art that keeps on giving. Wayfarer’s unique aural imagery of a bleak Great Plains landscape haunted by the ghosts of its butchered inhabitants sets the meditative focal point for immersion, and the rest exhumes itself ever more over time. This will be an album I’m still spinning regularly half way into 2019.

4. Primordial – Exile Amongst the Ruins

Irish folk metal

Sample track: Sunken Lungs

I’m not sure how I fell out of touch with Primordial, but I have no recollection of their last album. Exile Amongst the Ruins didn’t blow me away out the gate quite on par with the raw energy of the 2011 work that really made me fall in love with them, but Nemtheanga’s voice can carry just about anything, and this release might be just as compelling in a much more subtle way. I guess it’s kind of easy to dismiss because Primordial have been playing pretty much the exact same sound forever, but I feel like they landed on a really robust vibe for this album that sustains throughout. It’s morbid, but it’s all so pretty at the same time. It’s really kind of soothing to listen to, in a roundabout way. Relative to a lot of other bands I love that have put out decent-but-not-their-distinctly-best works in 2018, I think this has the most potential to stick around and continue to grow on me. Maybe a few years from now it will be my default Primordial go-to album. I think it’s possible. Nine months is a short time to form conclusive opinions about a band that’s been pumping out solid material for 25 years. I feel an endearing bond with this one that’s hard to put my finger on.

3. Tropical Fuck Storm – A Laughing Death in Meatspace

experimental rock

Sample track: You Let My Tyres Down

A couple of months ago someone sent me The Drones’ Shark Fin Blues, and that was the first time I’d ever encountered Australia’s reasonably well-known frontman Gareth Liddiard. I still haven’t actually gotten my hands on any Drones albums, but I scooped up his side project, Tropical Fuck Storm, the minute their first release hit the shelves. God I’m in love with this guy’s style. He feels completely unhinged and free rolling through his songs, in both his vocal performance and his chaotic brink-of-collapse guitar execution. A Laughing Death in Meatspace blasts that in your face out the gate with my favorite track on the album, You Let My Tyres Down, but this project offers a lot more on the edge beyond Liddiard’s guitar. The second track introduces an often revisited electronic side that’s just a eclectic. The lyrics tap a political frustration that appeals to me. All-around outstanding effort that pings a lot my personal tastes. This is the first time in a while I remember feeling this strongly about an album that is fundamentally rock in origin.

2. Imperial Triumphant – Vile Luxury

avant-garde black metal

Sample track: Swarming Opulence

When I linked this album to one of my few acquaintances who actually enjoys metal, the first response I got was “Gustav Holst”. I dig it. Perhaps a trifle influenced by French black metalers in the vein of Blut Aus Nord and Deathspell Omega, New York City’s Imperial Triumphant are largely forging their own uncharted path. The album’s portrait of “vile luxury” twists high art instrumentation into demented vomit, injecting bombastic convulsions of classical brass and jazz piano into a soundscape of highly disharmonic and technical black metal. It’s a really brilliant vision, I think, derailing the traditionally sophisticated arts into pure hedonism. The theme of the album is apparent on its aural face, and they’ve got a jazz aesthetic to their performance that makes it limitlessly repeatable for me despite a level of abrasiveness that outmatches just about anything I can think of that brings a vision beyond inaccessibility for its own sake to the field.

1. Thou – Rhea Sylvia

grunge/sludge

Sample tracks:
Deepest Sun
Restless River

In the broader picture of the band, 2018 might be remembered as the year when Thou lost their minds and pumped out four new albums and two splits, but Rhea Sylvia stands, for me, leagues above their feature release Magus, or anything else they’ve ever recorded, for that matter. The raw melody crafting on this album is mindboggling. Thou have never been shy about their love for the 90s grunge classics–one of their splits this year was a Nirvana cover album–but I feel like on this run they went all in for trying to actually write grunge music without changing any of their established doomy sludge tones. The result is Alice in Chains pressed under a ten ton weight, enhanced with the modern trappings of post-rock’s all-encompassing influence on metal over the past 20 years. I am blown away from start to finish.

Previous years on Shattered Lens:

2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017

My Top 15 Metal Albums of 2015

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Fourteen years posting a year-end list somewhere, and the rule never changes: odd-numbered years produce more good music. Thankfully, we just concluded 2015. 🙂

15. Deafheaven – New Bermuda
14. Peste Noire – La Chaise-Dyable
13. Mgła – Exercises in Futility
12. Veilburner – Noumenon
11. Botanist – Hammer of Botany

10. Enslaved – In Times (track: Building With Fire)

It’s amazing that after 24 years and 13 studio albums, Enslaved still routinely make it into my year-end top 10. They have continually evolved without letting go of their black metal roots, and the consequence lately has been a long stretch of memorable, prog-rock infused releases that keep up with the times and never grow stale no matter how often I resurrect them. If In Times won’t stick with me quite so permanently as Vertebrae in 2008, it still achieves everything I’ve come to expect of them lately and has managed to entertain me more than the vast majority of other albums I have heard this year. I think I have a bit of a subconscious inclination to prioritize newer bands, but #10 was as low as I could justify dropping this one.

9. Krallice – Ygg Huur (track: Wastes of Ocean)

Like any Krallice album, Ygg Huur takes dozens of listens to ingest. What struck me at first as a rather disappointing, spastic blathering of sound comes together much more coherently if you give it its due time. That being said, it is still a sharp break from their previous four albums, and it lacks that element of progression and overarching vision that has traditionally made this band, for me at least, infinitely repeatable. (I have listened to Krallice more than any other band in my life by a large margin, and they only came into existence in 2008.) Ygg Huur is a brief an meandering mood piece that does not, perhaps, maximize the band’s song-writing talents, but I’ve enjoyed it plenty never the less. More avant-garde than post-black metal, am I allowed to love it and still hope it was just a one-time experiment?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg530raHyuo

8. Ghost Bath – Moonlover (track: Golden Number)

This is a pretty gorgeous post-black metal album that I’m surprised more sites haven’t picked up on for their year-end summaries. It lacks a touch of refinement that might have earned it higher standing, but the song writing is fabulous. Moonlover delivers a well-rounded package of post-rock infused metal that seems to pay a good deal of respect to Alcest and Amesoeurs, but their undertone is bleak and depressing. It’s a sad album in a way that makes me think of Harakiri for the Sky’s Aokigahara last year, but peppered with little bursts of joy that will bring a smile to your face.

Oh yeah, metal’s not supposed to make me smile. Check.

7. Sumac – The Deal (track: Thorn In The Lion’s Paw)

I never really got into Old Man Gloom. Make what you will of that. The Deal certainly wasn’t Aaron Turner’s most well-received album, but I personally enjoyed it more than anything he’s contributed to since Oceanic. A lot of that has to do with Nick Yacyshyn’s brilliant mastery of the drum set, but I also feel like Turner’s chugging out riffs that really sink into my head more than I’m used to. It’s like a doom metal reinterpretation of Isis, albeit with less progression, and I love the subtle stylistic diversity he brings to the field on this one. It has moments that remind me of everything from black metal to Converge. (And it probably wins this year’s ‘most listened to in my car’ award. <_<)

6. A Forest of Stars – Beware the Sword You Cannot See (track: Virtus Sola Invicta)

Beware the Sword You Cannot See is one of the most eclectic albums I have heard in a long time that I still managed to really enjoy. If I could begin to put a finger on how to describe it, I would have reviewed it ages ago. Black metal at its heart, it weaves a wild mix of strings and spoken word and avant-garde breaks around that core. I like it, quite a bit, and I think the vocals and lyrics (at least, what I can make of them) might be its strongest selling point. I really don’t know what to say about this album. Hear it for yourselves, and be prepared to give an attentive listen–possibly many–if you want to soak it all in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4uPwXqgo2Y

5. Blind Guardian – Beyond the Red Mirror (track: Grand Parade)

It’s pretty hard to measure the worth of an epic power metal band on a list that is heavily dominated by innovative new styles of music. I don’t think I would have felt entirely comfortable with my positioning of this album no matter where I put it, but I tried to make the cutoff a sort of drifting point between albums that really made me reflect and albums that I just really enjoyed, because there’s never going to be a particularly deep hidden truth to a Blind Guardian track, but they’ve proven a dozen times over to be the ultimate kings of all fantasy-themed music. In the broad scheme of BG’s vast discography, I would probably place Beyond the Red Mirror fourth, after Nightfall in Middle-Earth, At the Edge of Time, and A Night at the Opera. That translates roughly to: it’s awesome.

4. Bosse-de-Nage – All Fours (track: A Subtle Change)

Am I a little biased since I got my initial rip of this direct from frontman Bryan Manning? Probably not, but in my weird little world that’s still a bragging point. 😉 Like Cara Neir’s Portals to a Better, Dead World in 2013, All Fours takes everything I love about screamo and turns it into post-black metal. This might be a coincidence. I’m pretty sure the band claims no direct screamo influence (don’t quote me on that), but the consequence is the same. These guys have worked their way into the top-tier of bands pushing metal in new directions today, and, more so than their previous albums, All Fours really strikes me as a well-rounded composition that possesses the maturity to fully deliver its vision. And Manning has a way with lyrics that’s… well… you just have to read them.

3. Obsequiae – Aria of Vernal Tombs (track: Orphic Rites Of The Mystic)

When I first heard Obsequiae, it was one of those rare moments where I went a-ha, you are that band that’s going to pioneer the style I have always desired but been too inept to create myself. I can guarantee you without much doubt that, of all of the albums of 2015, Aria of Vernal Tombs will find its way into my playlist the most for the longest period of time. Ten years from now, I will probably still be listening to this album when its competitors are all but distant memories. Like Summoning, they fit a unique mood for me that no other band has really begun to approach. (Perhaps Opeth’s Orchid crosses into this terrain, briefly and insufficiently.) A collection of captivating medieval melodies that press themselves upon you by-and-large through euphorically well-mixed guitar and bass (the bass on this album is absolutely gorgeous) rather than traditional instrumentation… my god, I’ve been waiting so long for a band that sounds like this, and they’re easily my favorite new discovery of the year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JBe6JA-DBc

2. Panopticon – Autumn Eternal (track: The Wind’s Farewell)

It’s amazing to think that, in the absence of one album this year that won my heart in a landslide, Panopticon could have taken my #1 slot in 3 out of the last 4 years. To put it bluntly, Autumn Eternal is Austin Lunn’s best album to date, and Austin Lunn is arguably the most accomplished metal artist of the 2010s. An incredibly versatile musician who can sample uninhibited from the melting-pot of styles that is post-black metal, Lunn’s newest offering is a mindblowing amalgamation of post-rock and black metal that leaves the more popular bands of this persuasion choking on his dust.

1. Liturgy – The Ark Work (track: Kel Valhaal)

What can I say…. it didn’t make Pitchfork’s top 25? I will probably look back on The Ark Work as one of the most underrated albums ever recorded, and I think its merits have more in common with Radiohead than with anything that has ever derived from heavy metal. It constantly threatens to collapse into a blundering mire of amateur garbage, from the excessive bell tones to Hunter’s marshmallow-mouthed rap vocals. This might be the turn-off for so many listeners, but it is necessary, and the key to this album is in how Liturgy always manage to somehow hold it together. It’s the musical equivalent of your kindergartener handing you a crayon scribble that, on second glance, turns out to be a Picasso.

On Aesthethica, Liturgy explored a very explicit reinterpretation of black metal that found quite a bit of inspired company among bands who were beginning to recognize and explore the similarities between black metal and post-rock. That album helped to define a movement, but it only achieved the band’s vision in a very direct sort of way: through rhythm and melody and progression. The Ark Work nails Hunter’s vision home with an extremely more robust and precise pallet, bringing lyrics and glitch effects and atypical instrumentation and a totally unorthodox approach to metal vocals into the fray. If you listen to a track like “Vitriol” and can barely take it seriously, that’s part of the point, but barely is the key word. Every risk and gamble they take ultimately works, and I am unabashedly unashamed to blare Hunter’s trap beat ‘occult rap’ at max volume out my car stereo. 😀

You might listen to The Ark Work and hear some childish clusterfuck, but I hear absolutely brilliant attention to detail–a musician completely in control of the degree to which his work teeters on the brink of nonsense. Top 20 all-time contender? I could go there. Leave your fear of speaking too fondly of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix at the door and just embrace this album with the assumption that he knew exactly what he was doing. You won’t be disappointed.

Previous years on Shattered Lens:

2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014

Review: Bosse-de-Nage – All Fours

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Bosse-de-Nage (pronounced something like “Boss De Nazh”) are a four-piece band from San Francisco. They pumped out their first three albums in a span of three years, between 2010 and 2012, and then took their time getting this one together while cultivating a friendship with Deafheaven that lead to a split 12″ and some enhanced name recognition. All Fours was just released via Profound Lore Records last week, and any serious student of extreme music owes it to themselves to check it out. Just when I thought nothing in 2015 could be more stylistically unorthodox than Liturgy’s The Ark Work (ok, that claim probably still stands), Bosse-de-Nage turn up with an album that’s going to leave me scratching my head for a long time to come. What’s so interesting about All Fours is that you can walk away with a totally different impression of what the band is doing depending on your personal musical background.

Track: At Night

The album kicks off in post-metal mode, ebbing and flowing through a brooding, pessimistic mire beneath Bryan Manning’s desperate screams. Two minutes and change in, the song transitions to the sort of pounding fuzz that might call to mind Converge’s “Jane Doe”. As things continue to change, you get the feeling that it’s progressing towards an ever more desperate state. Black metal seems to play a major role in that intensification, with earlier passages reappearing in a more tightly packed onslaught of notes. The ending, for instance, revisits that Jane Doe sound, but the once cymbal-centric drumming is now competing with blast beats. “At Night” is a song in constant flux, and it could have been an erratic mess, but instead it’s strikingly fluid. Bosse-de-Nage manage to keep a thread of accelerating emotions taut throughout the long chain of ideas and influences that comprise it.

The next song, “The Industry of Distance”, sends a similar message. A simple, clean guitar lick repeats over bassy feedback for the better part of two minutes. Drums sneak up into a slow roll to cue distorted drawling guitar chords, and soon the song explodes in one of those beautiful melancholy post-black metal anthems we’ve been growing accustomed to. Instead of lightning quick tremolo and blast beats though, the drum and guitar initially seem to execute at half the frequency while Manning screams in his uniquely heartbroken style. It creates a sort of oscillating effect for an ear expecting black metal, every other note appearing to be missing. This eventually fills out into full speed tremolo and blast beats to complete another build-up through higher stages of emotional breakdown.

That’s my general metal take on All Fours. While a lot of what we’re calling post-black metal today diverges melodically from the genre’s origin, Bosse-de-Nage go further in exploring the techniques that characterize it. The drumming especially diversifies the package. Tremolo guitar and blast beats signify climaxes in a post-metal progression rather than perpetual constants, and a lot of care is given to make the development taking us there feel natural and captivating. Instead of the instant gratification of say, Liturgy or Krallice, Bosse-de-Nage effectively tap that post-rock tradition of “building up” to it.

Track: Washerwoman

That is probably a more accurate approach to understanding this album, because the band is firmly rooted in black metal. Manning at least has stated that he’s never heard of a lot of the other bands Bosse-de-Nage has been compared to lately. But the more this band diverges in technique from black metal, the more they find themselves labeled screamo and post-hardcore. If you’re familiar with that world of music, it’s a pretty fascinating truth. When bands play with the framework of a classic style, the boundaries of genre dissolve. Yes, “Washerwoman” could easily pass as a post-metal/black metal hybrid. Around the two minute mark it begins to sound strikingly similar to Isis. When the song breaks at four, they could be toying with black metal guitar by letting some of the notes ring out–a precursor to the proper bm onslaught that comes at five. But is that what you hear? Or do you hear a song straight off A Dead Sinking Story by Envy, peppered with spoken lines a la Indian Summer? It depends on where you’re coming from.

Envy-worship is actually how my brain interpreted “Washerwoman” on first listen, and I made immediate associations with other screamo acts throughout the album. I am not alone here. In the early reviews I’ve found so far, this album has been compared to Orchid, City of Caterpillar, Heroin, Moss Icon… Almost every track on All Fours feels extremely influenced by screamo. But it is not. It’s the same sort of thing that happened with Neige on Le Secret and Souvenirs d’un autre monde, when the pioneer of “shoegaze black metal” came out that he didn’t have a damn clue what “shoegaze” was.

I first mentioned screamo and black metal in the same sentence when Drudkh released Microcosmos (2009). “Ars Poetica”‘s climax screamed Orchid and The Kodan Armada and a half dozen other names to me as it slid up and down the neck with drum accents to punch it home, introduced by that classic clean guitar over tense, snare-centric drumming. Deafheaven’s Roads to Judah (2011) resurrected the idea, and Portals to a Better, Dead World (2013) by Cara Neir ultimately sealed it, making black metal screamo crossovers a certain reality. But was there any actual direct influence in any of these cases?

I used to think there was, and I know that Liturgy at least has a post-hardcore background, but any of these bands might have landed on their sounds totally independently. All Fours really sends that message home to me. It’s a window into natural affinities between genres. When Bosse-de-Nage break down the components of black metal into longer, more ringing tones while maintaining that post-bm sense of desperation, they are essentially playing screamo, and the way they seamlessly fuse it back into black metal instrumentation uniquely highlights the similarity. They’re playing post-black metal by definition, but in their approach the two styles are totally indistinguishable save through the cultures surrounding them. When a band can give me a new perspective on an entire genre of music, hey, that’s pretty cool.

Track: The Most Modern Staircase

Of All Four‘s seven proper songs, I am sold on all but “In a Yard Somewhere”. Each builds its way through catchy melodies and interesting stylistic digressions to a convincing emotional climax, and they do it differently from what I have heard before. That it is unique is obvious by the fact that so many people are tossing around band names from way outside of the box in an effort to define it. But there is one other hidden gem in Bosse-de-Nage that stands them apart from the crowd: the lyrics. Bryan Manning has an impeccable flare for the grotesque. From facepalm punchlines about poop and hookers, to really disturbing tales of insanity, to poems that make no discernible sense whatsoever yet pretend to hide some esoteric truth, nearly everything he writes is a ride in itself, independent from the music. Their previous album, III, defies any attempt I could make to describe it, and you should really just go read it all right now. Whether he’s meditatively contemplating a contortionist entering a box or explaining why turning yourself into a human tree was a bad idea, the wording is totally surreal.

The lyrics on All Fours are a little more difficult to decipher, because the stylized sleeve included with the album, for all its artistic appeal, is kind of hard to read. You lose focus trying to dig through it. But The Most Modern Staircase struck me most when I first skimmed over them, and knowing what he’s screaming (not the sort of emo laments his tone of voice might suggest) really enhances the music for me:

I traveled to the province of staircases. The great variety of balusters, railings, finials, and steps filled me with awe. Many looked welcoming, while others were intentionally obscured or blocked up, and some were decorated with vibrant warnings to anyone who might ascend. I found the most modern-looking staircase and climbed. After a while, I stopped on a landing to rest. This extraordinary landing was home to dozens of living statues–obsequious stone gods begging for spare hands. As I explored, a loud commotion with historic consequences occurred somewhere behind me. When I looked back, there was a curtain drawn around the event. I turned to the statues for answers, but they remained inert and silent, their jagged stumps eager for relief.

All Fours: another formidable stalwart in a year that’s been crammed with way more stellar releases than normal. Pick up a copy on Profound Lore Records.

Review: Sumac – The Deal

Posted on by necromoonyeti

The funny thing about Isis is that their legendary status among metal bands has only escalated since the break-up in 2010. Mainstream rock artists sport their t-shirts, Wikipedia editors irrationally credit them as the founders of post-metal, and pessimists grasp at straws to sling negative criticism. They went out at the top of their game, and the fact is you will never hear a mediocre Isis album. They quit before that could become a possibility. The downside is that everything frontman Aaron Turner has contributed to since unfairly finds itself treated by the media as a sort of side project.

Maybe Old Man Gloom avoided that fate. The success in 2014 of The Ape of God (and its sister album, The Ape of God) finally got people to start talking about them as a proper band, not just another project involving “that Isis guy”. Sumac will have a harder time escaping the persona, because it is essentially a two man project between Turner and Baptists drummer Nick Yacyshyn. (Brian Cook of Russian Circles and These Arms are Snakes provides the bass as a “session member” and probably did not contribute to the actual song writing.) But regarding Old Man Gloom or Sumac as secondary projects implies a primary one. Isis is dead, and Aaron Turner most certainly isn’t. Sumac deserves to be taken seriously.

Besides, if The Deal is any indication, Turner is still well within his prime. This album is, for me at least, the best thing I’ve heard him contribute to since Wavering Radiant, and his style merges perfectly with Yacyshyn’s highly acclaimed drumming. I want more. I want The Deal to be the first entry in a long and productive discography that puts Sumac on the map permanently as an outstanding musical collaboration.

song: Thorn in the Lion’s Paw

The biggest negative comment I’ve heard about The Deal is that it sounds bland on first listen. While I never personally felt that way, it might be worth asking “what Isis album didn’t?” Old Man Gloom have written some pretty explosive material, but if you’re familiar with Turner at all you should be prepared to dedicate multiple listens for the album to grow on you. My initial impression of The Deal was of something blissfully even-keel. It generated that feeling of perpetual flowing motion that I always got off Isis albums, and for that it amassed way more plays than The Ape of God ever managed before I even got around to giving it close attention.

The “if Isis were really heavy” interpretation of Sumac definitely holds up over time, but what grows on me most is Nick Yacyshyn. If you take, for instance, the passage from 4:00 to 6:00 in “Thorn in the Lion’s Paw”, Turner’s sequence of brief repeated phrases could definitely border on bland were they the complete picture. They were never meant to be; he found a drummer in Yacyshyn who could plug the void with a really imaginative progression. In managing to somehow feel modest even when erupting into blast beats at the end, Yacyshyn lets you enjoy the build-up without being swept away by the intensity. It’s a tall order for music this extreme. It’s easy to forget how mellow Isis was in comparison until you go back and listen. The next track, “Hollow King”, focuses on Yacyshyn throughout, centered around a 3 minute drum solo over drone guitar that goes wild on the toms in a manner reminiscent of Atsuo Mizuno from Boris (speaking of post-metal legends).

song: The Deal

“Blight’s End Angel” has garnered the most attention, with its rewarding 10-minute progression that feels perhaps the most classically “post-metal” of any track on the album, but it’s the title track that stands out to me most, for better or worse. Throughout The Deal we hear Turner playing around with some mathy licks, enough to make me wonder if he’s been listening to a lot of Converge lately. “The Deal” brings this out more than most, along with maybe a touch of Mastodon and a pretty groovy if short-lived stoner metal beat down at 3:30. Nearly 14 minutes long, the song never really develops so much as it devolves, ending with an even slower tempo than its initial stretched-out plod. But its lack of speed, coupled with intermittent breaks into undistorted, mostly drumless transition passages, all serve to emphasize the real crunch and intensity of Turner’s guitar tones on this album. Compartmentalized into distinct movements rather than smoothly progressing, it really lacks the rest of the album’s flow. That does not really help its case, yet I do really like Turner’s math/prog tendencies in small doses, and the track makes sense in context. The break from the album’s smooth sailing isn’t an accident; it’s an end. The only remaining song, “The Radiance of Being”, is a rather pretty, minimalistic outro.

Over all, The Deal is pretty solid. The first 35 minutes drift along with a surprisingly pleasant vibe, given the levels of distortion and intensity. The title track is a bit harder to swallow, but its seeming lack of cohesion took a while to actually rub me wrong; it sounded just as good at first, but wore out faster than the songs before it. That’s easy to forgive. Of the post-Isis Aaron Turner projects I’ve heard, Sumac is easily the most appealing to my personal tastes. He and Yacyshyn make an outstanding team, and I would love to see them commit to a long-term partnership that builds off this album.

Pick up a copy of The Deal by Sumac on Profound Lore Records.

My Top 10 Metal Albums of 2014

Posted on by necromoonyeti

I don’t think a New Years rolls by that I don’t say something amounting to “odd-numbered years produce better music”. The trend inexplicably holds true once again. I actually listened to a good bit of new music this year–far more than I did last year at least–but when it came time to recap, my options felt… a bit lacking. The best of the best are still grand indeed, but the quality drifts away rapidly if I dig beyond a top 10. I’m pretty happy with the list I ended up with though, and I hope you’ll find something new and inspiring in the tracks I’ve sampled below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco5QNfpbIw

10. Agalloch – The Serpent & the Sphere (track: The Astral Dialogue)

Marrow of the Spirit was a pretty bold divorce from everything we’ve come to expect out of Agalloch over the years, for better or worse. On The Serpent & the Sphere, the band make a return to a more direct evolution of their regular sound. The album offers a nice mix of vintage Agalloch and further dabblings into the post-rock/metal sphere. It didn’t grab me by the balls and thrash me upside the head like say, Pale Folklore or Ashes Against the Grain, but it’s definitely a solid entry in the band’s formidable discography.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqevYzJrhks

9. Cormorant – Earth Diver (track: Daughter of Void)

I was a bit more critical than complementary of Earth Diver when I reviewed it a few months ago, but that mostly boiled down to the feeling that it could have done with better production. Honestly, if I don’t own the cd proper I have no business speaking of such things, because for all I know my copy is just a bit lossy. The raw songwriting on this album is stellar, and I hope to hear more out of this band in years to come.

8. Bast – Spectres (track: Outside the Circles of Time)

I am not sure where Spectres would have placed on my year-end list had I had a bit more time to listen to it, but it could only have moved up from here. I’ve only had about two weeks to check this out and make a call, but I was dead convinced that it belonged somewhere in my top 10. The freshman album by this dirty doom trio does it all, and better than your band. With ease they develop a post-rock build-up into a bassy doom dirge, bust into a stoner metal rockout, and then fuse it into some pretty sinister black metal sounds. When black metal leaks its way into headbanging rock, really awesome things happen. Case in point: “Outside the Circles of Time”.

7. Blut Aus Nord – Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry (track: Clarissima Mundi Lumina)

A bit more down to whatever planet these guys hail from than the 777 trilogy, Saturnian Poetry is still a bizarre journey into another dimension that only Blut Aus Nord can seem to access. Its constant whirlwind of motion blasts us into a haze of celestial chaos, wherein the band’s synth chords and clean vocals command us to stare in awe and reverence. Few black metal bands on the market can claim to have forged as unique a sound within the genre as Blut Aus Nord, and they’re still breaking my brain in 2014.

6. Saor – Aura (track: The Awakening)

I tend to think of Aura as a straight-forward album that serves its purpose beautifully. Top-notch woodwinds and string paint a majestic Scottish landscape where the old gods still tread in all their glory, at one with the earth and its people. Without ever really breaching any new territory beyond the tried and true boundaries of pagan metal, Andy Marshall has managed to craft what is probably the most grand Gaelic/Celtic variant of the genre I have ever heard.

5. Boris – Noise (track: Melody)

I fucking love Boris. You know that. They could literally shit on an LP and I’d claim it shear brilliance. But thankfully, they keep pumping out one masterpiece after another instead. Noise is so layered in the band’s two decades of perpetual evolution that I don’t think you could begin to grasp what the hell is going on here if you didn’t already know half their discography by heart. It’s a little bit of everything they’ve done before all crammed together in yet another novel new way. No other band in existence sounds anything like this, and at the same time few bands have borrowed more liberally and diversely from other musical scenes than the bastion of badass that is Boris. Boris Boris. Boris! God damn, this is awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePHvl9vFmeo

4. Woods of Desolation – As the Stars (track: Unfold)

As the Stars is 2014’s Aesthethica, albeit of more modest proportions. If the obscure Welshman known simply as “D.” could append to his public image anything approaching the epic douchiness of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, it might even be popular. (Ok, I’m one of the few people who’ve actually read Hunter’s writings and think he makes some valid points, but whatever.) This album is a bloody mess in the least figurative of ways, and it’s exactly the sort of raw sincerity that I love about post-black metal. In a new scene that divorces black metal’s brink-of-the-abyss soundscape from its machismo closet-bound harbingers, the bands that play with their hearts on their sleeves tend to touch closest to home. As the Stars offers neither the epic intensity of Liturgy nor the refined sound quality of Deafheaven, and the metal world is sure to forget it in time, but my brief love affair with Woods of Desolation will be remembered fondly. Its humble reach is part of what makes it endearing.

3. Harakiri for the Sky – Aokigihara (track: Jhator)

I hold my top three choices for 2014 in a league far above the rest. Aokigihara is an absolutely enormous bastion of sound that presses the weight of its world on your shoulders from start to finish. And that world is heavy indeed, because it is firmly rooted in reality. Harakiri for the Sky doesn’t play that tried and true metal game of glorifying violence. It shoves some real modern nightmares in your face and says “this is really, really terrible, and there’s nothing we can honestly do about it.” I can see this album attracting a “DSBM” label, which is typically shorthand for “wallowing in self pity”, but Aokigihara is the real deal. If it doesn’t leave you feeling a little sick inside, you aren’t paying enough attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7gOluNjyrs

2. Spectral Lore – III (track: The Cold March Towards Eternal Brightness)

At more than a dozen listens through this album, I am still not sure what to make of it. 87 minutes of music crammed into seven tracks is pretty hard to swallow, and to make matters worse, the first two tracks are its weakest by far. I find it next to impossible to commit myself to a full attentive listen from start to finish, and it’s not an album that offers much on the surface. Yet, I can’t escape the feeling that something really special is going on here. My mind may drift away for three or four minutes at a pop, but I am always drawn back into some beautiful synergy that dances on the brink of euphoria. 2014 might be at an end, but I haven’t finished listening to III by a long shot. I am going to keep plugging away until I’ve got it fully within my grasp, and when I do I think I might regret passing it by for the #1 spot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDswlTV0Vhg

1. Panopticon – Roads to the North (track: The Long Road Part 3: The Sigh of Summer)

The first time I heard Roads to the North, I was routing a rather lossy early leak through my Droid into the particularly horrendous sound system of my wife’s Mazda 6. (My 2006ish Nissan Sentra has godlike audio and the car was half the price. What’s up with that?) I definitely did not think on that initial listen that it would end up my favorite album of the year. With a properly purchased copy through my headphones, it’s easy to tell why an album as subtly mixed as this would translate to crap when pushed through crap. I am absolutely captivated by the melding of sounds on this album. It’s simply beautiful, and you couldn’t ask for a more conscientious artist to craft its folk, post-rock, black metal, and melodic death metal melodies than Austin Lunn. The lyrical and thematic content of Kentucky showed him to be one of the most honest musicians in the metal scene. On Roads to the North, he translated the spirit of Kentucky into sound. Kentucky is the album I think about. This is the one I actually listen to, over and over and over again.

Happy New Year!

Review: Agalloch – The Serpent & the Sphere

Posted on by necromoonyeti

If someone asked me what the most significant metal band of the past decade was, I am not entirely sure which name I would ultimately drop, but the elite circle of finalists would definitely include Agalloch. Pale Folklore (1999) and The Mantle (2002) pretty much defined America’s brand of folk metal, influencing countless bands to come as that global musical movement picked up steam. Ashes Against the Grain (2006) gave us one of the earliest incarnations of post-black metal on record. It might not sound much like what that term conjures to mind today, but in its day it was monumental, and time has not lessened the epic weight of tracks like “Limbs”.

But then there was Marrow of the Spirit (2010). This album was ugly. I can’t think of any better word for it. I won’t go so far as to say it was bad, but it was sufficiently displeasing to my senses that I never engaged it long enough to responsibly draw that conclusion. I didn’t want to listen to it, and it left enough of a bad taste in my mouth that I didn’t really want to listen to The Serpent & the Sphere either.

Agalloch – Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation, from The Serpent & the Sphere

But I did listen to The Serpent & the Sphere. I listened to it quite a lot, actually, in the background as I worked or played games. It was pushing a dozen on my last.fm charts before I got to thinking “Hey, I ought to give that new Agalloch album a spin and review it.” Wait, have I heard this before? “Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation” had been lulling me into such a passive state that I must have forgotten I was listening to anything at all by the time its ten minutes ran their course.

It’s the antithesis to Marrow of the Spirit‘s “Into the Painted Grey”, in a way. Where that track summoned in me the instant urge to rip my headset off my ears and put on something else, “Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation” dug its way into the back of my skull and set its roots where I would barely notice them. It didn’t just get tuned out; it etched itself in my subconscious. And it’s no wonder. On my first really attentive play through, with the volume blaring, I find the track completely enthralling. It’s a brooding neofolk masterpiece best experienced without anticipation. If you listen wondering where it might lead, you are bound to grow impatient. If you just embrace it in the moment and let it consume you, you’re in for a treat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco5QNfpbIw

Agalloch – The Astral Dialogue, from The Serpent & the Sphere

The next track, “Serpens Caput”, is a gorgeous and rather brief acoustic instrumental, and then “The Astral Dialogue” kicks off like Pale Folklore was just released a year ago. The many inattentive listens before had engrained the melody in my mind without my knowing, and the familiarity was so strikingly similar to their 1999 debut that I found myself shocked to realize I had only first heard the song a few months ago. A dubious avant-garde interlude at 3:14 aside, “The Astral Dialogue” is old school Agalloch to a T. At least, I should say, the composition is. The feel is a bit different. Where Pale Folklore was as crisp as a cold winter sunrise, The Serpent & the Sphere has a much fuller sound. (Youtube, as usual, can’t hope to capture it all.)

The Serpent & the Sphere feels a bit frontloaded, with the opening 20 minutes being the most compelling, but “Dark Matter Gods” and “Celestial Effigy” carry on the Pale Folklore mid-tempo folk metal tradition. “Cor Serpentis” offers another fabulous acoustic interlude track much like “Serpens Caput”. I think the album loses steam a bit on “Vales Beyond Dimension”. We get a catchy hook at the beginning and near the end, but the plod in between feels a bit contrived.

Agalloch – Plateau of the Ages, from The Serpent & the Sphere

“Plateau of the Ages”, the final track before a brief acoustic outro, more than makes up for any second thoughts about “Vales Beyond Dimension”. It kicks along in the Pale Folklore tradition we are by now thoroughly reacquainted with until 4:20, when we hit a wall of post-rock. It switches back after a two minute taste of things to come, and we get the real grand post-rock exit from 9:30 to the end. It might not be the most breathtaking use of the genre that you have ever heard, but I love the way Agalloch take it and make it their own, masterfully fusing it to the sound that has defined them for years.

I have actually read a lot of comments suggesting that Agalloch lost their touch on The Serpent & the Sphere. It’s hard for me to see any grounds for that. I suppose it is not much like Ashes Against the Grain really, and not at all like Marrow of the Spirit, but I don’t regard those albums as Agalloch at their best. Ashes might have been their most significant work, but my heart was always for Pale Folklore. The Serpent & the Sphere feels like that album, more than anything they’ve released since it. Oh, it might not be quite as catchy, and it’s certainly not as raw or black metal infused, but it’s a pleasant blast back to the Agalloch I loved most.

Review: Cormorant – Earth Diver

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Cormorant are a 4-piece San Francisco Bay band formed in 2007. They released their third studio album, Earth Diver, back in April of this year. Lacking major ties to any other band I have heard of, it’s probably no surprise that they stayed off my radar until now, but this is a band that definitely deserves some attention. Their well-crafted mix of folk, progressive rock, post-rock, and black metal sets a high standard at the cutting edge of metal today. While Earth Diver may possess a fatal flaw, it offers a world of potential that few bands can hope to realize.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqevYzJrhks

Cormorant – Daughter of Void, from Earth Diver

Earth Diver opens with “Eris”, a two and a half minute instrumental folk guitar track with a bit of a Spanish flare. As nice as the song sounds in and of itself, I am not convinced that it was the ideal choice for their opener. The second track, “Daughter of Void”, kicks off acoustic as well, and with the two tracks combined, the intro just seems a bit overdrawn. Don’t worry though; that’s the last time I’ll be complaining about the album’s structure. The acoustic portion of “Daughter of Void” sets the stage nicely and gets us straight to the point without much delay, kicking the metal side of the song off theatrically. We start with a nice metal groove lacking any of the repetitiveness you might expect from a band with the “black” tag, and at two minutes their prog tendencies start to show. Black metal vocals give way to something reminiscent of Opeth or Mastodon, and the song shifts through a variety of genre norms without really breaking from the overall feel. The song hits a peak at 4:05 with an Amorphis-esque vocal melody and a really catchy rhythmic hook. The bending tremolo behind the vocals starting at 5:35 is sick, and they build on it further at 6:25. The song is just packed with little standout moments that never last long enough to seem like overkill. (The youtube video ends early, but you’re only missing eight seconds.)

This is the sort of track you could easily remember from start to finish, if you could get in to it enough to care. If. The down side to “Daughter of Void” is a fairly mediocre production job that fails to really pull me in. I can hear everything clearly enough, but I can’t really feel it. They are going for classic low-key grit over big, booming sounds, and I get that, but it feels pretty washed out. The sort of sound Agalloch accomplished with Ronn Chick on Pale Folklore could have pushed this song from above average to outstanding.

Funny fact I didn’t realize until I wrote this: Cormorant actually do share some production history with Agalloch. They work with Justin Weis, who did a notoriously shitty job on Marrow of the Spirit. Go figure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoeqDqIvqwQ

Cormorant – Sold as a Crow, from Earth Diver

“Sold as a Crow” has a very different feel about it. We kick off with some delicious post-black metal. A pretty tremolo melody warps into a desperate cry as the distortion and blast beats kick into gear. The snare does not always feel quite on point with the guitar, but Lev Weinstein might just have me spoiled in that department. This is the kind of black metal I live for. I love the single-beat stop at 1:46 and 2:00. I love the harmony at 1:50 and 2:05. I love the octave shift at 1:52. I love the three seconds of guitar flare at 1:55. This constant barrage of subtle nuances tends to distinguish post-black metal from its ancestor, and it’s the reason I can recall every note of a 15-minute Krallice composition while an Immortal track might fade into the back of my mind in seconds.

At 2:36 the main melody returns with a sort of flowing, jazzy feel, and then the majority of the song repeats. We get some new variation at 4:03 as build-up to a minute of soloing to close out the track. Maybe because the ending doesn’t appeal to me quite as readily, the production of the album starts to eat at me again. It still feels a bit of a wash, lacking depth or crispness without a good reason. I can appreciate “Sold as a Crow”. I can love listening attentively to every note from every instrument, especially in the first two and a half minutes. But I’m left without that desire to hear it again, right goddamn now. I can never listen to a whole Krallice album at once, because I always get stuck on a track and set it to repeat ad nauseam. “Sold as a Crow” could have been a song like that, but its beautiful structure is not matched by compelling tonal quality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1XiAg0XDs

Cormorant – Broken Circle, from Earth Diver

What you’re not going to hear on Earth Diver is more of the same. This isn’t the sort of album where I can describe two or three tracks and feel like I’ve summed the collective up well. Every song is a masterfully complex beast unto its own. With Opeth always on the tip of my tongue, peppered by Amorphis, Agalloch, and Krallice, Cormorant manage to remind me of a lot of the most unique bands in metal without ever paralleling any of them for long or losing its own unique flavor. “Broken Circle” has jazzy acoustic guitar a la My Arms Your Hearse Opeth, straight-up in-your-face black metal, a break to a distinct Orchid-era Opeth sound at 3:29, brief allusions to math rock, and a world in between. When the singer isn’t barking in classic black metal fashion, he might be pulling off his best Pasi Koskinen or Mikael Åkerfeldt impression, letting out a bellowing roar, or even shouting at the top of his lungs (2:04). You can often catch the bass running wild, sounding especially like Johan De Farfalla during the Orchid moment (why oh why did Mikael fire that man?). But as many band references as I can throw out there, the majority of “Broken Circle” sounds like Cormorant’s own unique creation.

And yet. And yet I can’t pull this album in and hold it close for long. What struck me as mediocre production from the start begins to feel like a travesty in the face of such absolutely brilliant compositions. This album was robbed of its well-deserved glory by a quality of sound that totally ostracizes me. I keep cranking the volume up louder and louder, hoping that I am just not experiencing it immersively enough to feel the pull. But it’s never there. Oh, it doesn’t sound half as bad as the transcoded garbage you’re hearing in these youtube samples. It would be fine for an average, run-of-the-mill album. But Earth Diver is not that. It deserved above-average attentiveness–something carefully crafted to showcase their sound in all of its uniqueness. I can’t help but think that if Colin Marston had gotten his hands on this raw potential it would have been molded into the best album of 2014.

Review: Boris – Noise

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Black cat. Halloween. Coincidence?

But you shouldn’t have been looking at that. You should have been looking at the two words surrounding it, because it suggests something we haven’t heard much of in quite a while. Beginning with Japanese Heavy Rock Hits Vol. 1, Atsuo Mizuno, Takeshi Ohtani, and Wata have spent a lot of time playing at pop stars. Their really quality works of late have mostly been pop oriented, and in the world of metal they’ve been mostly playing around. Heavy Rocks 2011 felt like a joke–a quick fun studio session to take some of the stress off of recording New Album and Attention Please. Präparat offered us the total mindfuck known as “Elegy”, but “Method of Error” and “Bataille Suere” could hardly be taken seriously. We got the long-overdue Boris performing “flood” and a rerelease of The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked, but that wasn’t new material.

Boris deserved a break from their old traditions. Christ, they have 78 releases to their name, and like 95% of that has been beyond fabulous. But as good as their pop and chillout sounds of late have been, we’ve all been itching for some good old Boris noise. Not Absolutego drone. I mean I want to hear some “Heavy Friends”, some “Akuma No Uta”, some “Farewell”, some “My Neighbor Satan”, something to make my brain turn inside out and hug itself. Well, Boris did deliver. They did it last year, in the easily overlooked The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked Extra. In fact, it was so easily overlooked that I am only just now skimming through its tracks for the first time! I can already tell it is awesome, but that will have to wait. Tonight I spin Noise for the first time.

Boris – Melody, from Noise

If you are a Boris fan, this opening track needs no commentary. I suppose no track on the album does, really. But if you are not a Boris fan, picture yourself in our shoes for a minute: You have ridiculous, irrationally high expectations for this album. You can justify it, because the band has never let you down before. But you don’t have a clue what’s in store for you. The graceful drone in the opening 40 seconds could go on for the entire track, and it would not be out of character. Suddenly we’ve got a pretty, shoegaze guitar, and for a brief six or seven seconds your mind wonders whether they might be trying something akin to Alcest. At 47 seconds, a techno beat comes in, and we are on pace for something totally novel. Is it going to be some weird psychedelic technogaze? I wouldn’t put it past them, and I just might like it. But things are picking up… something is about to give….. and bam, at the 1 minute mark Boris unleashes everything I could have ever hoped for and more.

Takeshi slamming out a crushing stoner metal groove under Wata’s wailing blur of blissful noise, and in five seconds we find that techno beat wasn’t just an intro. What IS this amalgamation of mutually exclusive genre standards into an inexplicably majestic whole? This is Boris, doing what Boris always do: taking everything they’ve done before and making it even better. This is a band that remains totally aware of everything going on in music at large and has had twenty three years playing together to master their class. Wata has one of the most beatiful guitar sounds in the world. She slides around the neck with a grace that puts Billy Corgan to shame and rocks the effect pedals so keenly that “Paranoid Android” sounds amateur. Atsuo drums with a persistent intensity that rivals Jimmy Chamberlin (I’ve always felt a bizarre connection between Boris and The Smashing Pumpkins–two bands that defy all categorization.) Takeshi’s mastery of bass and distortion is as good as any stoner band on the market, and his vocal control has come miles from Smile and earlier works.

Stonergaze techno pop? Yeah, we can do that.

Boris – Vanilla, from Noise

The next track, “Vanilla”, is just as fascinating. For the first 40 seconds (55 in the official video) we get a vocal melody and beat that wouldn’t have been out of place in a mid-90s up-tempo rock track–it bizarrely made me think of the Foo Fighters–layered of course with Wata and Takeshi’s constant motion. Then we hit a deep, brooding pause with haunting synth, doomy bass crunch, and a spooky arpeggio loop that says this song is going nowhere near where we expected. The song quickly move back into rock mode, but now we’re expecting something. The guitars embrace a rhythmic metal crunch, and the hard shift to a bassy stoner/doom beatdown for six notes at 1:20 (1:35) makes your brain jitter. No other band would even THINK to do something like that. We’re back into the opening motion, then another break and… is Takeshi playing a death metal riff? Mmhmm. And it’s not like the trashy games they were playing on Heavy Rocks 2011 and a few Präparat tracks. It’s fully immersed and totally appropriate. Wata goes wild, and I am in bliss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GndQg8SsU1o

Boris – Heavy Rain, from Noise

I could narrate every track on this album and never be at a loss for commentary. “Ghost of Romance” might offer the fewest surprises–a traditional Boris chillout song with a pensive undercurrent brought to life with haunting guitar tones and a breath effect that suit the title. It offers a modest post-rock build-up to louder levels of chill, but never at the expensive of a full break from the main vibe of the song. “Heavy Rain”, my personal favorite on first listen, virtually demands you crank the speakers up to 11. Despite the tempo never changing and Takeshi’s heaviest tones coming out within the first minute, this song accomplishes a mindblowing progression. They manage to accomplish the build-up in reverse, putting forth a bunch of sound at once and increasing the suspense by slowly peeling it back. The moment we reach the point of dead silence, the explosion hits, and the rest is all driven by Wata’s ever-growing layers of noise and Atsuo’s knack for making every single percussion count.

“Taiyo No Baka” is a bizarre, sugary, initially minimalistic pop ditty that should confound anyone unfamiliar with the band. But far from filler, it’s quite delightful and has a lot of really interesting effects going on throughout. If I am going to keep the Pumpkins comparisons rolling, this might equate to Mellon Collie‘s move from “X.Y.U.” to “We Only Come Out at Night”. “Angel” is the traditional post-rock track of the album, with six minutes of minimalistic build-up to a crushing guitar plod spiced with Atsuo’s hyper-intense slow drumming and a crooning Wata solo. This in turn serves as build-up to a spirited, meaty rock-out at 9:30 peppered by a highly mobile bass line and some good old post-rock tremolo. We’ve still got over 7 minutes to go as this part winds down, and the rest of the track plays out with a lot of eclectic, melodic experimentation that has to stand among Boris’s best. I’ll be surprised if “Angel” doesn’t grow into my favorite track on the album once I’ve given it a good dozen listens.

Boris – Quicksilver, from Noise

“Quicksilver”, the second to last track, might be where Noise gets its name. Dirty, wild crust with classic tremolo solos encase a sad and pleasing heavy punk chorus. Takeshi’s sung vocals run totally counter to what you might expect in this style of music, and Atsuo’s accompanying screams are out of this world. This is only the beginning. The song is ten minutes long, and while I’ll humor the possibility that it does drag on without much variation at times–it could go on for an hour and I wouldn’t complain–this is the most punk song Boris has pumped out in years. I would die if I saw them play it live–possibly literally. At 6:20, the main thrust of the song climaxes with a monotone tremolo wail, a crusty three chord repeat from Takeshi, and a total Atsuo explosion that for all its collective simplicity doesn’t sound quite like anything I’ve ever heard in metal before. The last 3 minutes of the song are weird to the point of being a little creepy–totally out of character with the seven minutes preceding them and featuring a bubbling static sound that makes your hair stand on end.

The closing track is “Siesta”, and I have to think it was inspired by Atsuo and Michio Kurihara’s recent collaboration with Stephen O’Malley from Sunn O))) and Bill Herzog: Ensemble Pearl. It’s a slow, echoed, jazzy chill-out that wraps Noise up nicely. I would feature it here, but I couldn’t find a version on youtube.

So what do I think of this album? Do you even need to ask? It’s everything I could hope for. Sure, it doesn’t offer a killer stand-alone track like “Elegy” from Präparat or “Farewell” from Pink, but it just feels so complete. There is absolutely zero twiddling around, zero wasted time, just 58 action-packed minutes of every technique and style Boris has incorporated into their sound across their illustrious 23 year history. It is a really mature work–perhaps their most mature album to date–and I think it’s the most start-to-finish shear brilliance they have offered on a full-length cd since at least Akuma No Uta–maybe even since Flood. It doesn’t get much more original and imaginative than this.

/fanboy.

Review: Harakiri for the Sky – Aokigahara

Posted on by necromoonyeti

There are two reasonable places to start with Aokigahara. One is to point out that that album cover is going to give me serious nightmares. The other is to state that this is an album of contradictions, its Austrian origins being only the most trivial. It is the most over-the-top emo cheese ball of lyrics you could hope to stumble across, with lines like “I’m losing friends and above all, I’m losing confidence,” and “I feel so fucking lonely.” Yet it succeeds in making me feel really, really sad time and time again. And in spite of track titles like “Nailgarden” and “Gallows (Give ‘Em Rope)”, it is really quite beautiful.

Harakiri for the Sky – My Bones to the Sea, from Aokigahara

As one of my first reviews in ages, you could have easily guessed that it would fall firmly in the post-black metal category. But where my last review, Woods of Desolation, showcased a sort of innocent jubilee with limited care for production value and plenty of homage to Explosions in the Sky and Alcest, Harakiri for the Sky’s Aokigahara offers exquisite attention to detail and a “post” sound rooted more in the Agalloch side of the spectrum. The opening track’s plodding dirge offers a lavish soundscape that wants to encompass you in vibrations without ever upping the tempo to a blast-beat driven daze. Don’t worry; there is plenty of that to come. But this is an album meant to be swallowed from start to finish, and not a second of its 60+ minutes feels unwarranted or out of place.

I don’t know much about mixing or production, but I have to think it doesn’t get much better than this. (Youtube bit rates do not come close to doing it justice.) The most immediate and consistently striking feature of the album to me is how well all of the instrumentation melds together. The bass manages to wrap itself around everything and remain distinct no matter how much activity is layered over top of it. The percussion is pleasantly quiet (a modesty so many black metal bands lack) and offers a faint echo that seems to reverberate back into the bass and make the two whole. V. Wahntraum’s vocals maintain their depth even when he rises to the point of an all-out scream (6:20, for instance), and he picks his words to emphasize with care. You might not know what he’s saying, but he manages to convey a sense of sincerity regardless. The guitar seems to bleed into the middle of it all with no distinct range, fading into the doomy haze at its extremities. The end effect is a warm blanket of a sound that wraps around you gently, letting you experience every aspect of it as a unified force.

Harakiri for the Sky – Jhator, from Aokigahara

I must have listened to twenty new albums passively while I worked over the last two days, and my back-of-the-mind impression of Aokigahara was “that one that made me feel cozy”. It wasn’t until I engaged it with no distractions that the darkness of this album really set in. The album cover should have been my first hint. You see the baby fox–an endearing little thing, bathed in warm, fading color–lying dead on a bed of nails and arrows, a grimace of pain across its face. You want to pull it out of the image and hold it close. You want to comfort it. But even if you could reach it, get ahold of yourself. It’s dead. There is nothing you can do. It evokes your most altruistic instincts and denies their use.

The sound of Aokigahara is that same kind of warmth. It is the kind you feel but cannot share, though every ounce of your body aches to. Matthias Sollak and V. Wahntraum let you know this in subtle ways. My first question about the band was “what’s with all this Japanese nonsense if they’re two white dudes from Vienna?” It begs you to hop on Wikipedia. Maybe “Harakiri” isn’t as well known of a word in Austria as it is in America. If it isn’t, “for the Sky” might have given you a positive vibe until you looked it up. I googled “Aokigahara”. I got “Suicide Forest”, a location at the base of Mount Fuji where hundreds of Japanese go every year to end their lives.

So I took a second look at the track titles to this “warm” album of mine. Track two was “Jhator”. Wikipedia: “Sky burial”. Jhator is a Tibetan practice of giving one’s body up for food to sustain the life of others in death. The closing lyrics to the song are “There is only one decision in our lives we can choose on our own: vultures or worms?” That sick knot in my stomach doubled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2vCZb7iMXg

Harakiri for the Sky – Burning from Both Ends, from Aokigahara

And then I thought about the track title that had intrigued me the most before I started this little investigation. “69 Dead Birds For Utøya”. I didn’t know what Utøya was, conveniently. The track title kind of already had that simultaneous warm and disturbing feeling to it. Kind of. I think it was the “69” that threw me off at first though, before I started giving the album a serious listen. I instinctively thought it was one of those “when heavy metal efforts to offend get downright weird” moments like Spear of Longinus’s hit classic “YHWH Penis Abominator”. So I googled Utøya. …It’s the fucking island in Norway where Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 children and camp organizers.

With the present track blaring in the background, I stared into the album cover in a thoughtless haze, an overwhelming sense of sorrow creeping over me. I wanted to puke, or cry, or put my fist through my monitor, and all from a track title and a melody. Truly great art digs into us and unlocks our deepest, most powerful emotions, whether we want to feel them or not. It plants the seed and screams our reaction louder than anything we can muster on our own. This was no attempt to be “heavy” or “brutal”–no boast about abstract violence or atrocities long relegated to the subject of myth–no Elizabeth Bathory or Vlad Tepes to keep us cool and edgy. This was art doing its job, and while the experience might not always be pleasant, it is always something beyond what we can safely allow ourselves to feel on a constant basis. We forget, we ignore, we desensitize, but the feelings are still there within us. An elite few bands like Harakiri for the Sky have mastered the art of bringing them back to the surface.

Harakiri for the Sky – Nailgarden, from Aokigahara

I definitely started throwing around “best of the year” boasts too early in my last post. I should have kept my mouth shut until I’d done a good dozen or so reviews and not based my opinions on a bunch of superficial background noise listens, because Aokigahara has already struck me deeper than the last album I had a go at. The music is excellent from start to finish without a doubt, but it’s the underlining theme and presentation that tips it on the scale of greatness. From the song writing to the production to such typically afterthought factors as track titles and cover art, Aokigahara bleeds a common creative agenda. The warmth you feel and think and see is real, but any time you try to take it beyond yourself, you find only loss that you are helpless to counter. “I feel so fucking lonely, although I am never alone,” might be a cheesy lyric in and of itself, but Aokigahara manages to imbue it with substance. Real, brutal substance, like being totally impotent to stop a gunman from slaughtering helpless kids. Maybe the lyrical conclusions are flawed; there seems to be a hint of indifference in the end of every song–a resolution that life just isn’t that important. But it is not convincing. The overarching focus is the helplessness, not the apathy. It’s a 63 minute ball of compassion that you simply cannot share. And let’s be honest, who listens to black metal with their friends?

Ten Years #17: Isis

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
17. Isis (1,416 plays)
Top track (255 plays): Weight, from Oceanic (2002)

Boston post-metal masterminds Isis rose to 17th place on my decade-long last.fm list thanks to one of the most captivating albums ever recorded. A lot of bands have taken inspiration from Neurosis to forge a similar sound, but I have yet to hear anything in the genre that pulls it off quite so perfectly as Oceanic. Considering that I have accumulated over 100 plays on every track and a whopping 255 listens to “Weight” (it is, according to my charts, my third most listened-to song over the past ten years), I can safely say that Oceanic never has and never will tire out. Temperance was Isis’s key to success in 2002. From its most intense moments to its most mellow, Oceanic never gives way to bombast or wilts to a bore. It plods along like the sea in which it is thematically set, crushing through impartial waves of harsh vocal and chugging guitar; it mellows with the tide, diving beneath the surface to a world of echoes and subdued pulsations that never cease their eternal drive, varying only in degrees of perpetual, unstoppable force.

My favorite track, “Weight”, begins with a calm that is nearly complete but for a faint, echoing drum. There is nothing foreboding about its growing intensity, but rather, much like Boris’s similarly themed masterpiece Flood, the song manages to increase in mass without losing touch with its sublime and eternal setting. You experience the waves and lulls in a setting apart from time, never feeling a sense of danger, even as you are slowly immersed and dissolved in a weight that encompasses all. It is something like “Jane Doe” by Converge or “Dust and Light” by Krallice without any of the desperation or finality–an experience of dissolving into the eternal totally free of temporal regrets. As the song fades away and the album moves on to “From Sinking”, the transition feels natural; “Weight” does not need to be a closing track, because it is not an obliteration of time into the void. Time was never present to begin with, and the listener experiences the modes of something eternal as a participant, not a witness. I don’t think any other album this heavy could leave me feeling so utterly mellow.

Oceanic is apparently a concept album, telling the entirely human plot of a man driven by lost love to suicide through drowning. But I for one can’t make out the lyrics without looking them up, and the feeling for me is as if the story unfolds from the utterly disinterested eyes of the water itself. I feel immersed in Isis’s oceanic beast from start to finish, lacking all ties to the human realm beyond and personifying the waves themselves, not the sentient individual taken amidst them. It is not until the closing track, “Hym”, that the listener begins to envision the witness’s perspective, sucked out the waves themselves just long enough to be re-engulfed by the drowning.