Mizmor (מזמור) - Mizmor (2012)

Lo-fi Lowlife

We've just about reached the point where, having once come from the same fecund nest, all subgenres of extreme metal have gone full circle and started incestuously converging again. Death/doom has since quite a while proven to be mutually compatible and has become as much of a genre as its constituents are, while the black/death batallions count so many members that it's honestly a tad disappointing they all tend to sound so alike. It's to the coupling's credit, then, that black/doom lacks such an easily recognizable sound. מזמור (or Mizmor), solo project of A.L.N. from Salem doom cult Hell, sounds nothing like Barathrum's groovy devilry or the expansive ambient tearscapes put forth by Nortt. Imagine something like a stripped-down Rain upon the Impure-era Ruins of Beverast covering Khanate, and you're closer to the mark. And what a mark it is.

Its seventy minutes of feedback-riddled misery divided into four numerically-titled songs running from eleven to twenty-six minutes, Mizmor is an odd and very very sad duck. The body of the songs consists of mournful doom plods, passionate barked wails and the gravest, most pregnant clean chords this side of the Great Depression. All this is held together by a khamsin's worth of reverb, noise and riffless droning, drowning out all musical structure and reshuffling Mizmor's musical landscape when it subsides. Add a very cymbal-heavy drum kit to the mix and you've accounted for all tools present on this album; neither keyboards, nor samples, nor any other newfangled tricks make an appearance to palliate the rough edges.

The album is a journey through dreary wetlands and over dead hills, the noise and static swarms of midges against the backdrop of endless expanses of empty wilderness. The resonant cleans which open "III", standing out against the buzzing like dead trees, etch their mournful melody into you before fading out of earshot again. Every song – from the primarily black "I" to the doom-dominated leviathan that is "IV" – follows a meandering, organic pattern of pensive riffs toiling away amidst their own background noise. Aside from the dignified and melancholic tremoloing opening "I" and "II", the album has very little hooks, and humming along with it would resemble refrigerator droning more than anything. Simple chord progressions and competent drumming, reasonably vivid but never coming to the fore, are what make up this solemn voyage.

Like some old-timey Marlboro gent, this music doesn't particularly care whether you keep up with it or not. It knows where it's going and has its own story to tell – not particularly refined technically, lacking big climaxes and major turnarounds, and on top of that it has no qualms taking its bittersweet time to ultimately arrive nowhere. It's in this field that the comparison to "Rain upon the Impure" really comes into play: although not really sounding a lot like each other, both albums are governed by a similar mulish conviction that if the listener is to get anything out of it, they'd better be prepared to set aside some hours to take it all in at once.

Satisfying as all of this is, the album could've been handled better. The recording is demo-grade; everything sounds more than a smidgen trebly, cymbal splashes have a tendency to clip and the clean guitars in particular are blurry. This is especially noticeable when played back-to-back with any of Mizmor's other releases, on which the mix has gotten siginificantly roomier. Clean guitars sound physical and present, the snare packs a punch and doesn't get overpowered by the noise, and the bass returns un-neutered and persuasive. When stuck slogging through the wastelands of the self-titled I tend to forget these issues, but judged from a distance the band clearly cut some corners which could have heightened the impact. The very samey nature of the songs would arguably benefit from a more dynamic mix, especially in ears of less faith.

Despite the archaic production and limited palette, I can't hide I'm taken with Mizmor. Uncompromising in its vision, challenging to the listener, engrossing while it lasts and you may even go so far as to say pretty unique, Mizmor started out its carreer with a lot of promise, and went from strength to strength.

70%

https://mizmor.bandcamp.com/album/-

Yoga - Megafauna (2009)

Pineal Gland Transmitting At Full Strength

There are countless bands producing excellent albums, and countless more that can pride themselves on having a strong, auctorial character, and it's at the Venn intersection of these sets that a release can fulfill the promise implied in its name by piercing through the veil of musicality and dissolving into pure sonic transcendence. Once tuned in to the frequency of such a band (my prime go-to example will probably always remain The Angelic Process, but the French Murmuüre, in all its polychromatic, ritualistic ecstasy, took a valiant stab at that title in 2010), every first spin of an album becomes subconsciously driven by the hope that, maybe, these guys too have snuck in through that tear, or at least frayed open one adjacent to it.

So when Yoga's Megafauna first cast its spell upon me, I thought I'd struck upon the work of a spiritual acolyte of Murmuüre. Something in the way the wispy, processed-beyond-recognizability surrogate vocals – were they ever even vocals? – on opener “Seventh Mind” are constantly pitch-shifting, or how you can't tell whether they complement the guitar lines or whether it's the other way around is just so incredibly reminiscent of the French project that I was wholly incredulous and a tad peeved when I found out Megafauna preceded it by a year.

Once past the surface of that first song, however, the albums don't really have all that much in common. Half of the songs on the album can be categorized as a chaotic blend of the repetitive industrial noise rock pioneered by Matthew Bower – keep eyes, ears and mind open for Pure, Total and Skullflower – and traditional minimalistic black metal, while the other half consists of short, soundtrack-ish ambient pieces on which the guitars give way to diffuse keyboards and various indeterminate atmospheric artifacts. The synths and the unceasing, uncanny noise pervading the album are the key to Megafauna's eerie charm: without these, the more rock-oriented songs like “Encante” would have been a simple, unoriginal rehash of the mid-paced black metal of the 90's – this in spite of its fantastically hooky main riff, which Bergtatt-era Ulver would have been jealous of. Yoga, however, clearly prioritize atmosphere over song structure and masks it with a tumultuous cloud of blaring chaos.

This atmosphere is intrinsically tied to the release's larger concept which – the absence of any intelligible lyrics notwithstanding – rises to clarity through the song titles and paranormal cover art: Megafauna is an auditive cabinet of curiosities, showcasing both modern and ancient legends; from Icelandic elf-folk to South-American shape-shifting dolphins and the Amerindian thunder bird. Yoga succeed wonderfully in evoking a dense, swampy and always-progressing murk which doesn't so much sound creepy as it does enticing and mysterious, like some long-abandoned tropical shrine in a mosquito-infested mangrove. Just go ahead and try “Fourth Eye” – perhaps the strongest song on the album: as synth loops gurgle upwards like bubbles in an overgrown bog, the triumphant guitars create a spectral bridge to a hazy sun. As the song comes to its end, the discerning listener can just make out flutes amidst a climax of chanting voices and nondescript noise.

The major weakness of Megafauna is how front-loaded it is, even though it barely rounds forty minutes in length: after the appropriately-titled “Treeman” – four trudging, doomy minutes that shamble by in a positively zombie-like manner but make up one of the less compelling and diverse songs on the album – we're left with the weirdly medieval clarion-driven “Warrior”, the non-song that is “Haunted Brain” and the morose “Chupacabra's Rotting Flesh”, none of which can match the intensity of the previous tracks. It is fitting, in a sense, that an album like this should bleed out like it does…

If we're judging Megafauna purely based on its ability to bring urban legends and paranormal events to life, it still loses out to Megaptera's The Curse of the Scarecrow or Alpha Drone's unsung self-titled masterpiece, but looking at the first half of the album by itself Megafauna's excellence is undeniable; it's one of those albums which sound is uncommon and virtuous enough to survive not being wholly consistent – and as long as Murmuüre stay dormant, beggars can't be choosers.

80%

https://yoga666.bandcamp.com/album/megafauna

Aastyra - Aastral Projections (2007)

Astral Paroxysm

You know, I consider myself pretty open-minded when it comes to outré metal subgenres, but when the crunchy leaves/footsteps/pebbles/sticks and bells segue into chirps, playground singing and flutes one does wonder exactly what Aastral Projections' envisioned target audience is and whether this deranged fever dream doesn't just put them at the risk of going permanently over the edge.

Aastyra, a side project from one of the Canadians behind Prophecy-signed act Finnr's Cane, is a bit of an enigma. One part high-speed computerized symphonic black metal á la Limbonic Art, one part Coil-esque sound collages, some early Tangerine Dream cosmic meandering – and yeah, I'm sure we can fit those high-octane retro synth soundtracks in somewhere as well, bring it on. Oh, and let's keep it wholly instrumental, except for the parts where ethereal female crooning comes floating through. I don't want to do a track-by-track description, but Aastyra's constant genre-hopping antics more or less force my hand.

Aastral Projections is kicked off by a short, abstract soundscape featuring industrial clanging and blaring that might as well have fallen out of Nurse With Wound's, uh, wound, before the listener is run over by “Interstellar Death Race” – which title, you'll find out, really says everything about both this song and the only two other tracks that are unambiguously metal: although saccharinely synth-dominated – and gloriously so, repetitive but fluid melodies bleeping and blooping their way up and down the cosmic canvas while guitars, almost trumpet-like by virtue of their braaap-y texture, pump the song forward with one-note riffs – it's lightning-fast, features machine-gun percussion and even though its cheese requires some suspension of disbelief, it's worth your while. With regards to the other two BM songs, “Xenopia” keeps the synth-monsoon but allows the guitars a tad more freedom and dynamics, while the vicious “The Mechanical Womb” relegates the electronics to the role of background ambience to make space for Thorns-style industrial savagery – complete with apathetic mantras and the only occurence of harsh vocals on the album.

But that's only the sane side of Aastral Projections. After “Interstellar Death Race”'s sci-fi mayhem, we get “Terra”, which I alluded to in the first paragraph: is this muzak for schizophrenics? The heavily jingle-and-loop-dependant structure of the song contrasts starkly with the sylvan scene it's supposed to represent, and brings to mind images of the internet in its puberty, trying to simulate a glade, or something. It's without a doubt the most unique track on the album, but its random nature and tonal awkwardness detracts from its replay value, and after the initial novelty has worn off I can only see it remaining interesting as an ASMR-track, not as a song. Following “Terra”, “Of Spirit And Captivity” takes things back to relative although unimpressive normalcy by presenting the listener with three mournful minutes of ghostly, reverberating wailing, which, while rather dragging (and that at only 3 minutes' length), does set the scene for “Wanderer Of The Postapocalypse” – a pensive, synth-driven ambient piece moving forward at a glacial pace, evoking images of abandoned space stations and distant nebulae. Over the course of nearly ten minutes (the longest running time of any track on Aastral Projections), it gets reinforced by the sighs encountered in the previous song – not nearly as irritating this time around – until, just after the halfway mark, it gets propulsed into a shimmering rhythm, as if the vessel's systems suddenly start flickering into activity again. By the end of the song, everything's online and whirring, and the whole thing just sounds cohesive and cathartic and cool. The most intricate and succesful ambient piece of the album, no doubt.

“Adversary”, then, matches predecessor “Xenopia”'s thrill and pace, but channels this through fast-paced synthwave/electro/whatever, not unlike the French Perturbator – which project, coincidentally, also enjoys quite some popularity amongst the metal crowd. It's well-written, contains lots of little details and, weird piano-loop outro notwithstanding, it succeeds in its retro ambitions. Finishing the album is “Shadowmirror”; a moody synth-fest recalling cosmic carnival tunes (what else did you expect, with such a cheerful title) where some guitars might lie buried beneath the waves of fuzz, but I honestly can't tell.

So, does Aastral Projections work? A comparison to Thy Catafalque – the closest project Aastyra has to a genre-mate – reveals that the album lacks flow: the description should already have made this obvious, but there is next to no continuity in the songs' transitions, which the extreme diversity certainly could have made use of. Many songs on the album also exhibit the curiously contradictory double defiency of both being overly repetitive and causing a sensory overload due to the sheer amount of impulses at any given second, both of which result in headaches. Everything sounds inspired and fresh, to a certain degree; the metal parts are accomplished, the synth compositions are way above arbitrary black metal interlude quality, and there's undeniably a sense of purpose to all of this – the problem being that this purpose has no regard for the listener – but in the end I'm quite ambiguous in my feeings towards Aastral Projections. Give it a listen for novelty's sake if nothing else and, if you're a fan of any of the bands mentioned, maybe you'll find something to like here as well.

Just keep some aspirin handy.

65%

Princ Persii - Princ Persii (2014)

Hyphenated Virtuosity

This album I've been aching to review for a long time. Princ Persii, a now-defunct Saint Petersburg band, took shape after the dissolution of a screamo project sometime in 2010, played a few shows, quietly plopped out a self-titled 25-minute digital release, and promptly disappeared again. Their members are unknown, their internet footprint is a negligible blip on Russian social media, and non-existent in the west; not counting a limited cassette release earlier this year, no labels have ever been in touch with the band. What I'm trying to convey here is that the public eye/ear hasn't been very kind to Princ Persii, and I fear their contribution to the so far predominantly western post-black scene has not yet and will not for a long time receive the acclaim it deserves.

That is a massive shame, because Princ Persii has created a unique, invigorating piece of work here. The sludgy guitar texture and pummeling, low-end riffs characteristic of post-metal – think Omega Massif – are melted down and poured in a mid-paced post-black mould, imbued with crusty/post- hardcore rage redolent of Ancst and tempered in a shower of mournful atmospheric flourishes. You would think a style requiring so many hyphenated subgenres to describe would sound either inordinately contrived or wholly untethered, but by virtue of Princ Persii's meticulous craftsmanship it's kept solid, concise and riff-centric all the way through.

Out of the murk that is “L” – a dark ambient piece with what I'm assuming is a female spoken-word sample from a Russian-dubbed film – a despondent bass guitar arises, etching out “IX”'s simple but hooky main riff, which is then engulfed by the twin guitar surge – rhythm and lead guitars bifurcating in palm-muted chugs and gritty, soaring highs and reuniting again to deliver the key chords. Over the course of two minutes this chord sequence is repeated, tweaked, broken up and filled in, until it collapses in a morose, vocal-driven dirge – never just milling about but always determinedly moving forward, aided by the excellent percussion, which is crisp and has a knack for finding gaps in the rest of the instrumentation to caulk with fills.

While “C” and “F” are more simple, subtle ambient synth pieces – interludes without the ambition or need to be more than that – “II”, “I” and “VIII” tread in IX's footsteps; “II” with less focus on The Big Riff and more on song dynamics – fury and melancholy, hold and release, short bursts of intensity followed by protracted swathes of dark alluvium – while “I” takes this post-rock quiet-LOUD philosophy to its logical end and seamlessly alternates between frenetic episodes of high-speed battering and introspective, clean noodling. It's also on “I” that the vocals – like a less constricted, more slavic relative of Altar of Plagues's rasps – shine the brightest, furiously exhorting and punctuating the guitars and occasionally breaking to reveal the human beneath.

Marks are detracted for the marginally less interesting closer “VIII” – which, in its atmospheric-intro-into-blasting bipolarity, stands out against the dynamic songwriting prevalent in the other songs –, but otherwise Princ Persii is a stellar achievement, exuding a confidence and self-knowledge seldom witnessed in bands so young and underground. The mix helps with this, every instrument getting equal room and utilizing this to the fullest, and while the lower end of the percussive spectrum may occasionally get buried in the action, these blurry teeth do not significantly detract from the engrossing wonder that is following how the fine cogwheels of Princ Persii's watch interlock and swivel. Sound-wise, comparisons can be made to the earlier-mentioned Altar of Plagues and the Czech ██████, but with interesting stuff happening all the time, which immediately brings Vattnet Viskar's self-titled EP to mind: both bands opt for conciseness and heaviness over the atmospheric vistas characteristic of the genre, and manage to convey this with not just aggression but also sophistication.

If metal with any post-elements appeals to you, do your duty and give Princ Persii a chance. 

90%

https://princpersii.bandcamp.com

Enthauptung - Adirondack (2015)

Cascadian Dross With Specks of Gold

The three albums I've reviewed so far were chosen based on my appreciation of them and the belief that their obscurity was undeserved; the challenge in their assessment hasn't been so much to point out the flaws as it was to articulate their unicity, of which I was already fully convinced long beforehand. Enthauptung's Adirondack, on the other hand, was laid in my hands as part of a Christmas review swap: I had no earlier knowledge of them, and would probably not have encountered them were it not for my fellow Archiver HeWhoIsInTheWater – cheers to you!

The non-musical aspects of a release should not have an impact on its final appreciation – look only to Brulvahnatu's Menstrual Extraction Ceremony to hammer home why one should judge neither book nor album by their covers – but Adirondack's façade made me skeptical from the onset. A blurry shot of (what I'm guessing is) a nocturnal grove with the RGBY-values tinkered with, the German word for 'decapitation' in a black-and-white logo styled as roots integrated rather lazily on top, and the album title itself in a fashionable spaced-out post-black-ish designer font: the message I'm getting here is that Enthauptung is more than a bit confused as to what they want to be playing and how they want it represented, because of lack of either inspiration or focus. Either way, it lacks vision.

With that in mind, three-minute inro “Earth Divider” and its bird samples, accretive layers of warbling guitars and climax-oriented song structure seemed designed to take away my apprehension with regards to the album being scatterbrained: this is cascadian black metal, without frills or experimental tendencies. Ash Borer and especially Fell Voices are some of my most beloved modern acts, so don't take me for a cascadophobe, but if a band plans to play in a style that's both inherently formulaic and long overcrowded they'd better bring some fresh ideas to the table – and it is here that Enthauptung falls short. “Earth Divider” is strong enough, and follow-up “Summoning Ancients” starts out with a hard-hitting tremolo riff and the sort of driving drumming that evokes images of hunting dogs whose leashes they sense are just about to come off, but after that initial peak the song quickly loses itself in mindless blasting and unconvincing, indistinct guitar work. As opposed to the bands mentioned earlier – alongside others more on the post-spectrum, like Altar of Plagues and Vattnet Viskar – the different movements in Adirondack don't flow over into one another but exist as monadic entities, independent and wholly interchangeable, and neither do they get the time or opportunity to develop – as if Enthauptung doesn't trust any single individual riff section to keep the audience's attention, so you're quickly redirected to a new one.

Adirondack's production is another victim of sub-par judgement. While the guitars sound fine – a tad grainy, and they drown out the bass, but such dense layering is a perfectly valid choice given the genre – the drums and vocals are actively hurt by it. Percussion is high-ish in the mix, always clear but also strangely sterile and lifeless – triggered, presumably? They remind me of Nagelfar's Srontgorrth in the way they're kept distinct from the rest of the instrumentation, but the Germans justified this by way of von Meilenwald's phenomenal and creative drumming, which deserves to predominate – the only thing Enthauptung achieves by shoving the percussion to the front is making the listener astutely aware of how boring the dry THWOCK-THWOCK-THWOCK that constitutes blast sections is. The most egregious boil on the face of Adirondack, however, takes the shape of Daniel Drexel's singing. USBM tunnel-shouting is an established trope, true, but this isn't so much a case of lo-fi aesthetics as it is of the vocalist having come late to the recording studio, being locked out, and having had to scream his lines from an adjacent room. The result is a constant monotonous, undynamic background wailing that's always dialed up to 110% concentrated cat-in-process-of-castration anger, regardless of the current tonal mood, and actively detracts from the efforts of the rest of the band. I honestly fail to see what the band was going for with his performance – its inclusion feels more like an arbitrary concession to genre norms than a thought-out contribution.

But not everything in Adirondack is gloom: while I don't feel any of the songs (other than the intro and interlude) work as a whole, some of them contain genuinely rousing sequences. Take the rather cool, varied riffcraft just before “Summoning Ancient”'s third-minute mark, or the misty synths that haunt the doom crawl a few minutes later, bringing to mind Lunar Aurora's Hoagascht – never a bad thing. The warbling, weirdly spectral protuberances at the lead guitar's fringe throughout that same song are something I seldom heard before and probably the most defining feature of the release, and give an album otherwise lacking in personality an edge. Moreover, the titular “Adirondack” features a magnificent break-and-buildup between 4:00 and 6:30 that smacks of promise – presumably helped by the absence of vocals, but, all cynicism aside, it was this sequence that convinced me the band has true potential. How to unlock this? I'm not sure, but ditching the adherence to the formulaic cascadian structure and going for shorter, more focused songs would eliminate a lot of useless fluff, while re-thinking the role of vocals could only help. As it stands, Adirondack is a basket of LEGO bricks that's fallen over, gotten mixed up with Megabloks and arranged to make a house that's already been built far too often. The aggression, speed and technical skill are here – what it's missing is vision, personality and coherence.

55%

https://enthauptung.bandcamp.com/album/adirondack

The Water Witch - The Heavens in Traction (2012)

Swamp Rave - Optimism Optional

If you're reading this, chances are more than likely you've already come across A Forest of Stars's gentlemanly footprints. Starting out in 2008, all black-and-white, unpolished and mesmerizing, aFoS has since refined their psychedelic, melancholy and oh-so-atmospheric brand of distinctly Victorian black metal into a colourful cavalcade of psychedelic chord sequences, carnivalesque vocals, slatherings of synthesizers and lyrics whose bitter irony would be unpalatable if it weren't for their poetic fortitude. The evolution of the albums' cover artwork serves as an apt visual metaphor for the music's, with the monochrome sparseness over time becoming saturated with colour and crowded with detail. While this constant updating kept their sound fresh and unpredictable, it did make the band push certain ideas with unrealized potential to the back, and the borderline excessive amount of cooks in this kitchen don't always synergize as well as they should.

But what if they had taken a different path – one not leading to Dickens's bustling marketplaces, where the hypocrite priest and morally bankrupt industrialist walk amongst the deluded masses, but rather one snaking its way between dewy marshlands and dark woods, beyond the reach of the city's illusory stability? The Water Witch, founded and led by original aFoS guitarist Jon Cumiskey, seems to have sprung into life as a way to explore these alternative roads – and 2012's The Heavens in Traction marks the first expedition. Cumiskey's repetitive, drawn-out riffs, which had all but disappeared by the time A Shadowplay for Yesterdays came around (the fact that he didn't play on this album is one reason for that, but the more hectic song structures and shorter lengths simply didn't allow for a whole lot of atmospheric repetition), are given room to breathe: songs like “Winter's Burden”, “The Soul of the World” and “Wilderness” revolve around but one or two uncanny, hypnotic riffs that serve as backbones, acquiring more and more sonic detritus as they glide through the paranoia-inducing marshes conjured up by the additional layers of wailing guitars. While keyboards do seem to make sporadic background appearances, oblique, foghorn-like guitar noise serves as the primary atmospheric padding – and, on instrumental interlude “Akasha Aflame”, takes the front stage. “Teeth of Oak”, as the penultimate song, does a marvellous job alternately alternating and combining morose violins – courtesy of Katie Stone, fellow aFoS'er – and harmonious unisex vocals with vicious, dissonant riffing and abrupt tempo shifts. Throughout the whole album, the drumming is accomplished and tight, varied without being overly flashy, and – thanks to the great production job – never muffled or overbearing while driving the songs along at an average-to-fast pace.

The vocal lines are quite noteworthy too. Mister Curse, aFoS vocalist, lends his considerable laryngal talent to this release – although it's never wholly clear who sings when, due to the eclectic performances of both –, with results ranging from clean, quivering monologues seemingly straight out of radio drama, snarls which straddle the line between shouts and black screams, and ghastly bellowing. The delivery of the lines gels really well with their lyrical content, and their pronunciation is clear enough to not require you to pore over the booklet, so that when you come across the following in “The Heavens in Traction”...

“I have seen the machinery behind the clouds

Vast cogs turning

Powering the night

Great skyships, carrying who knows what to who knows where

Enclosed in the mechanism we are

Ghosts in the machine and of the machine

I don't know what this means

...but I do know that this is fear.

There is fear.”

… it might just actually give you goosebumps. Mention is often made of how black metal singers primarily use their voice as an instrument instead of as a semantic vehicle, but here, The Water Witch manages to re-cross that gap by both making the delivery compelling and, you know, making the lyrics matter. I'm not going to go off on some ignorant sycophantic tirade about how black metal texts have only ever been shallow devil-worshiping or edgy hippy-ism and this hip new band will drag you from the bog of lyrical mediocrity, but TWW clearly establishes itself on the more original and thought-out side of the spectrum – or at least with this song. It's weird, but the simple fact that it doesn't clearly allign itself with a certain tradition – “Winter's burden” hearkens back to nonspecific pagan cultism and both “The Heavens in Traction” and “Teeth of Oak” touch upon the struggle between the natural and the artificial; by themselves not uncommon topics, sure, but they don't tread the same ground and neither can they be relegated to a single train of thought – that simple fact makes the more essential aspects of the lyrics stand out that much more: uncanniness, uneasiness, not-being-at-home in the world. Unheimlichkeit.

That this queasiness is supported so well by the instrumentation leads me seamlessly to my single piece of criticism: the album never really gives you a break. The Heavens in Traction isn't so much a descent from the city to the swamp as it is a tour of the marshes, never leaving its perimeters, and the only thing on the menu is soggy peat. Each song has its own perspective and disposition, but the setting and atmosphere remain constant. If you like to binge-watch David Lynch's more spectral or dream-like works I reckon this won't be a deterrent to you, dear reader, but I find myself not always able or willing to finish the album in a single session.

I won't do The Water Witch the discourtesy of writing it off as just a darker, less exuberant version of A Forest of Stars: it's not completely unwarranted, but the album has succeeded in constructing its own identity and is self-confident enough to step out from under the other band's canopy and be seen on its own terms. What it did remind me of was the German Fyrnask – both bands juggle visceral black metal and despondent (if not depressive) ambient vibes, not counting on immediate hooks but rather on the atmosphere – with an intuitive nose for not neglecting a single detail. The Heavens in Traction is a professional, cohesive and focused black metal record with a whiff of progressiveness and a peculiar atmosphere that I cannot recall having felt with an other album. Individual riffs may not stay with you for days on end, but the aggregate of their damp imprints will. Looking forward to more!

85%

https://thewaterwitch.bandcamp.com/album/the-heavens-in-traction

Thaclthi - ...Erat Ante Oculos (2013)

Beware of the Shrouded Ancestors!

Over the years, Avantgarde Music has established itself as a prime example of what underground metal labels should strive to be: instrumental in bringing genre-defining projects such as Thergothon and Darkspace to the limelight, it has resolutely kept its focus steady on unearthing authentic, forward-thinking metal music – Progenie Terrestre Pura, anyone? – instead of resting on its laurels and capitalizing on household names. Perhaps due to the label's diversity – with signed acts from genres ranging from funeral doom to industrial black metal and gothic/dark metal –, not all of their releases have gained equal acclaim, the result of which being that, over the years, parts of the Avantgarde backlog have been accumulating quite a bit of dust in the absence of popular interest.

Thaclthi's ...Erat Ante Oculos, released in the fall of 2013, is one such release. True to Avantgarde's ethos, the album defies immediate classification – Encyclopaedia Metallum shelves it under black/death/doom metal, which, while not wrong, is too broad a description to be useful. The Italians have probably taken a page from Disembowelment's book, seeing no contradiction in following up plodding doom stomps with frenetic blasting, while the very saturated wall-of-sound-aesthetic, bowed guitar-soundscapes and ethereal ambient effects swirling around and throughout the chaotic violence might betray The Angelic Process's influence. But actual doom riffs? Yeah, you get some chugging here and a drawn-out atmospheric black sequence there, but in general Thaclthi abides by a very liberal conception of “riffs”: whatever techniques Hinthu subjugates his instruments to, they primarily manifest themselves more as grainy, gritty, grinding waves of noise than as conventional riffage. As a consequence of the nebulous way these emanations flow over in one another, pace is dictated primarily by Rathlth's drumming – which I'll get back to later. The vocals, finally, don't accept labels either: Thaurx's hoarse, inhuman shouts approximate those found within hardcore circles, but she (!) just as well resorts to low growls that are more in line with black/death howling.

But enough futile categorization. Thematically, …Erat Ante Oculos draws heavily from stygian mythmaking – what with the song titles referring to respectively the ancient Etruscan word for “ghost”, an Italian horror movie about demons let loose and an occult hellgate –, and opener “Hinthial”, a six-minute ambient piece replete with whispered incantations, ominous droning and reverberating gong strikes, serves as the atmospheric atrium through which the listener must pass, putting him in the right state of mind to cross over into the rest of the album. After this initial tranquility everything is game, and “E tu...” smashes open the gates with a protracted, deafening drum-and-cymbal barrage from behind which a simple guitar line just manages to shine through. Ninety seconds later, the song decelerates into a vaguely middle eastern-sounding doom march infused with the slightest whiff of psychedelia, just until the drumming kicks it into second gear and the pace picks up again. Taken as a whole, however, “E tu...” is a languourous and drowsy affair with few highlights and gets bad marks for its monotonous – albeit intense – vocals and directionless impetus, with its general flow recalling that of an epileptic in a rocking chair.

Having said that, I urge you to totally disregard this negativity and bask in the glory of twenty-minute centerpiece “Ixaxaar”. While its comparatively faster-paced nature causes the at times overbearing cymbals to come more to the front than earlier, it allows Rathlth to showcase his vigourous drumming chops so much more effectively – an opportunity he takes with gusto, suffusing the song with creative fills and idiosyncratic solos. The guitars are likewise freed from their plodding cadence and coalesce into a haze of drone-y dust devils, indistinct riffs whirring around as if kicked up by the drums's footfalls, fading away when their own inertia gives out. Speaking of which, special mention should be made of the middle five minutes, where the sound and the fury gradually diffuse into a shoegaze-y, dreamlike interlude that – in spite of its deceptive tranquility – manages to keep an understated momentum developing instead of being an intrusive break. Indeed, when the violence re-awakes its sedation only proves to have given the song a sense of urgency and anticipation previously not there, and Thaurx's sulphuric vocals have never sounded this positively, passionately inhuman. As “Ixaxaar”'s edifice starts collapsing in on itself around the eighteen-minute mark, a frenzied and ecstatic build-up – which I cannot help but compare to those on Fell Voices's Regnum Saturni – is whipped up, leading into one of the most satisfying drum-dominated climaxes I ever heard.

Now, a mostly riffless album, drowned in its overbearing cymbal crashing, with only one song on it I would regularly listen to – I assume you, reader, do not see this as a shining endorsement. And yet it is and you should: ...Erat Ante Oculos contains so many ideas, influences and techniques that even when a song fails it does so in an interesting way – and when it succeeds, it's phenomenal. The amazingly energetic drumming, the ambient-ish drone-y not-quite-cascadian guitar storms, the occult Etruscan subject matter – I could and have tried pointing out Thaclthi's possible sources of inspiration, but taken as a whole, there really is no other album that compares. I can only hope that when (or rather, if – it's been silent in Thaclthi's camp, so far) they decide to release a follow-up, they will manage to balance out the production somewhat better – but who am I kidding: they show so much promise and originality that I'll probably buy it, regardless of the path they take.

And besides, it's only €2 on their Bandcamp page – you've got no excuse. Go and get it.

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http://thaclthi.bandcamp.com/