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

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