There are lots of remarkable things about this latest Xasthur disc. It was released on his own Disharmonic Variations label for one thing, instead of Hydra Head, his home for the last few records. It features the vocals of folk chanteuse Marissa Nadler quite prominently, which was definitely a bit of a surprise! Even more surprising is that according to Malefic, the man behind Xasthur, now referring to himself by his given name Scott, this is the very last Xasthur record. EVER. He's not giving up music, just black metal. Which might seem less surprising once you've heard Portal Of Sorrow. Whose sound is at once a continuation of the last few Xasthur records, but at the same time, a total departure. Right out of the gate, the title track, is all acoustic guitars, and cooing wordless vox, more some sort of ethereal depressive doomfolk than black metal. Haunting atonal chords, folky guitar strum, wheezing organs, everything warped and warbly and really quite beautiful. Some more 'metal' guitars enter into the picture but they just serve to add filigree to the folky gothic dirge. Pretty weird and fantastic for sure. And for sure to bum out legions of true grim black metallers. The second track is more black metal, but if anything it's WAY weirder than the first track, with what is either the worst, or best production yet, the guitars detuned and atonal, the drums insanely produced cardboard box thumps WAY up in the mix, Nadler's often wordless vocals again soaring and dramatic, while Malefic croaks along in the background, a gloriously stumbling bit of blackened freak folk buzz, moody and murky, with some serious chug part way through, but that chug is accompanied by PIANO, which renders it more some sort of blackened chamber music.
And so it goes, the whole record is not only strangely composed, but the sound itself is totally alien, it sounds accidental, but a sound this twisted and warped and idiosyncratic MUST be by design.
"Shrine Of Failure" begins with clean guitars and floppy bass, a constantly descending melody, the vocals singing right along, before the heavier guitars kick in, but instead of making the song heavier, they seem to float above the already in progress weirdness, adding a layer of distorted buzz, and alternately wild psychedelic squiggles of tangled lead guitar. "Stream Of Subconsciousness" is another washed out doomic dirge, driven by Nadler's angelic croon, and Malefic's warbly guitars, the swoonsome synths, leading to an ambient drift, and then more murky stumble. "Horizon Of Plastic Caskets" is all minimal drumming, swirling synths, distant vocals, a sort of black ambient post rock lope, peppered with Malefic's maniacal screams, which do nothing to take away from the track's haunting cinematic vibe.
"The Abyss Holds The Mirror" opens with some seriously lovely multitracked vocals from Nadler (she's credited with "choir, vocal flashbacks, vocal instrumentation") before the song proper kicks in, and it's a dirgey doomy deathmarch, with church organ, croaked demonic vocals, all set to a heartbreakingly melancholy melody, the whole second half is just organ and vocals, and is the last thing you'd expect to hear on a black metal record.
"Released From This Earth" is all struggling drumming, atonal piano pound, and more of Nadler's heavenly crooning, in some ways, this almost plays out like a Marissa Nadler record, with Xasthur as his band, no disrespect to Malefic, in fact, that's what makes this record so good, it's less about having some token guest vocals, and more about true collaboration, which is exactly what makes this record so fucked and far out and special. Even at it's blackest, it's about as far removed from black buzz and grim blast than you could imagine. Which is what keeps us from mourning the death of Xasthur, and instead has us anxiously awaiting the future rebirth, and phoenix like ascension of whatever comes next.
This Record Of The Week from last year, now available in the vinyl format, via Kemado! Limited. numbered, gatefold sleeve, download code. Here's what we said about the original compact disc edition:
There are lots of remarkable things about this latest Xasthur disc. It was released on his own Disharmonic Variations label for one thing, instead of Hydra Head, his home for the last few records. It features the vocals of folk chanteuse Marissa Nadler quite prominently, which was definitely a bit of a surprise! Even more surprising is that according to Malefic, the man behind Xasthur, now referring to himself by his given name Scott, this is the very last Xasthur record. EVER. He's not giving up music, just black metal. Which might seem less surprising once you've heard Portal Of Sorrow. Whose sound is at once a continuation of the last few Xasthur records, but at the same time, a total departure. Right out of the gate, the title track, is all acoustic guitars, and cooing wordless vox, more some sort of ethereal depressive doomfolk than black metal. Haunting atonal chords, folky guitar strum, wheezing organs, everything warped and warbly and really quite beautiful. Some more 'metal' guitars enter into the picture but they just serve to add filigree to the folky gothic dirge. Pretty weird and fantastic for sure. And for sure to bum out legions of true grim black metallers. The second track is more black metal, but if anything it's WAY weirder than the first track, with what is either the worst, or best production yet, the guitars detuned and atonal, the drums insanely produced cardboard box thumps WAY up in the mix, Nadler's often wordless vocals again soaring and dramatic, while Malefic croaks along in the background, a gloriously stumbling bit of blackened freak folk buzz, moody and murky, with some serious chug part way through, but that chug is accompanied by PIANO, which renders it more some sort of blackened chamber music.
And so it goes, the whole record is not only strangely composed, but the sound itself is totally alien, it sounds accidental, but a sound this twisted and warped and idiosyncratic MUST be by design.
"Shrine Of Failure" begins with clean guitars and floppy bass, a constantly descending melody, the vocals singing right along, before the heavier guitars kick in, but instead of making the song heavier, they seem to float above the already in progress weirdness, adding a layer of distorted buzz, and alternately wild psychedelic squiggles of tangled lead guitar. "Stream Of Subconsciousness" is another washed out doomic dirge, driven by Nadler's angelic croon, and Malefic's warbly guitars, the swoonsome synths, leading to an ambient drift, and then more murky stumble. "Horizon Of Plastic Caskets" is all minimal drumming, swirling synths, distant vocals, a sort of black ambient post rock lope, peppered with Malefic's maniacal screams, which do nothing to take away from the track's haunting cinematic vibe.
"The Abyss Holds The Mirror" opens with some seriously lovely multitracked vocals from Nadler (she's credited with "choir, vocal flashbacks, vocal instrumentation") before the song proper kicks in, and it's a dirgey doomy deathmarch, with church organ, croaked demonic vocals, all set to a heartbreakingly melancholy melody, the whole second half is just organ and vocals, and is the last thing you'd expect to hear on a black metal record.
"Released From This Earth" is all struggling drumming, atonal piano pound, and more of Nadler's heavenly crooning, in some ways, this almost plays out like a Marissa Nadler record, with Xasthur as his band, no disrespect to Malefic, in fact, that's what makes this record so good, it's less about having some token guest vocals, and more about true collaboration, which is exactly what makes this record so fucked and far out and special. Even at it's blackest, it's about as far removed from black buzz and grim blast than you could imagine. Which is what keeps us from mourning the death of Xasthur, and instead has us anxiously awaiting the future rebirth, and phoenix like ascension of whatever comes next.
What a long strange trip it's been for Malefic and Xasthur. What's even stranger it seems, is that he ended up finding a new home on the very hip indie label Hydra Head. Sure HH has released its share of dark heaviness, but black metal, especially of the ultra personal, cult and grim kind, is so concerned with staying true, and not selling out. So it's a bit of a coup that HH nabbed Xasthur. Especially after a whole mess of records on Moribund, Total Holocaust Blood Fire Death, Profound Lore and Southern Lord. There has apparently been a bit of a backlash in the true cult BM underground. But fuck 'em. Hydra Head is a killer label and Malefic probably just got tired of being screwed left and right. Plus, oh what a joy it is to watch the true grim warriors weep at the loss, their corpsepaint smearing in long grey streaks. But it really is their loss more than any one 'cuz damn if this isn't the best Xasthur record since Nocturnal Poisoning. And that's saying a whole lot considering how much we've loved pretty much everything he's ever done.
The thing With Nocturnal Poisoning is that it was this perfect mix of sorrowful melancholia and black buzz, the sound was murky and muddy and fuzzy, but above it, were delicate melodies, dreamlike minor key filigree over a bottomless black pit. It was that strange juxtaposition that made it so special. Take that pretty element away, and you're left with just another black disc of Burzum worship. It's a little like the oil paining on the cover. You could see the texture of the canvas and the individual brushstrokes beneath the art. And with the music, it was the same thing, you could see the various elements, feel their texture, see the thick grainy backdrop upon which Malefic placed all of his dreamlike melodies and murky anguished howls.
Every record after that contained similar elements, and amazing songs, but it seemed like the recordings got more brittle, lots of high end buzz, not so much of that glorious malefic murk.
Subliminal Genocide almost sounds like it was recorded right after Nocturnal Poisoning and shelved for the last few years. It's THAT heavy and dreamy and melancholy and murky and goddamn beautiful.
There's not a lot of black metal that you might consider truly beautiful, but the songs on Subliminal Genocide, aren't just blasting thrashing metal, they are gorgeous lilting laments, epic and majestic and minor key. Taken out of a black metal context, they'd sound like some sort of super emotional epic post rock, but as they are, buried under thick layers of blackened buzz and wrapped in huge swaths of fuzzy sonic fog, they become even darker and more desolate, lonely and mournful. Almost none of the record is faster than a loping midtempo, about half the tracks are slow motion dirges, downright doom, with the double kick coming in more as a thick black low end cloud than any sort of actual blast, and a handful of tracks are nothing but swirling whorls of sad black ambience.
And because of the fuzzy indistinct production, and the thick murky halo around every track, lots of Subliminal Genocide sounds like some bastardized black metal version of M83, or Tim Hecker, or a little like Jeck and Marclay spinning old scratched up Burzum lps slowed waaaaaay down.
This record is simultaneously so dark and depressed and utterly evil sounding, but also fuzzy and psychedelic and totally blissed out, it's sort of hard to imagine, especially listening to this right now, that there could ever possibly be a better combination.
Xasthur may just turn out to be the black metal Acid Mothers Temple. Seems like there's a new release every week. Of course, we're not complaining. Not at all. A world like ours needs as much bleak, suicidally depressive, magnificently brutal and buzzing, totally personal and painfully intimate black metal brilliance it can get. And Xasthur (along with his spiritual / sonic compatriots Leviathan, Draugar, etc.) is well up to the task. Suicide In Dark Serenity was previously released on vinyl in an extremely limited edition several years back and is now available on cd for the first time. And it's everything we've come to expect from Malefic, who is Xasthur. Epic tracks of dense, minor key metal misery: buzzing lightning speed blasts become mournful soul shearing blurs, sludgy midtempo dirges become musical death marches, fuzzed out guitars and anguished wails populate a barren, desolate landscape, grim and bitter. If that weren't enough to convince you that this is an essential purchase, then know this: there is a single bonus track, a totally immense, epic 16 minute rehearsal track from Xasthur's masterpiece Nocturnal Poisoning, that is almost worth the price of admission alone.
The blackened California onslaught continues... When one looks at the state of metal today, you could be forgiven for thinking California was the last bastion of true, evil, completely fucked up black metal genius. Norway? Sweden? Pfah! The new Leviathan is easily one of the best black metal records of the year. The forthcoming Draugar threatens to be the weirdest. And then there's this, the excellently-titled Telepathic With The Deceased, the latest chapter in suicidal sonic blackness from Xasthur. Hailing from Southern California, Xasthur is Malefic, another tortured one man band, who unlike his blackened brethren, focuses less on 'shredding', strange song structures, or bizarre parts, and more on mood and ambience, which is why Xasthur more than anyone, comes closest to the simple fuzzy midtempo buzz of nordic legend Burzum. Where Leviathan rules some fiery pit, and Draugar is floating around a black star in the ether, Xasthur howls in agony from a damp and filthy, cramped basement, bitter memories and unknown horrors piled high around him, a four track the only outlet for his misery and anger. Sonically, Xasthur also stands apart in his unique and unlikely method of mixing/recording that somehow involves burning cd-r's of multiple tracks and re-recording the cd-r's back onto the 4 track! Lending the finished product a burned out, fuzzed out decayed veneer. Definitely one of the best black metal records of the year!
Newest release from AQ black metal favorite Xasthur, who was responsible for the godlike Nocturnal Poisoning album a couple years ago which was a buzzy droning slab of Burzumic grimness that rivalled almost any black metal we had heard. Xasthur is just one man, a misanthrope called Malefic, who carves bleak crushing black metal buzz-scapes from sheer wells of blackness and despair. While Nocturnal Poisoning was a monochromatic wash of midtempo Norwegian style blur, with lots of sonic murk and low end rumble, The Funeral Of Being adds more uptempo numbers and a lot more treble. Yep, treble. Harkening back to ear shredding classics like Ulver's Nattens Madrigal and any old Darkthrone, this is a drill to the cranium of high end mosquito swarm guitars, splattery buried-in-the-mix drums, and barely audible anguised howls. In fact the production is really quite strange, considering how weirdly lush the first record was. It's as if Malefic thought that Nocturnal Poisoning was *over produced* and prurposefully set out to make this new recording as RAW as possible. And raw it is. Even the ghostly keyboard breakdowns are under a fuzzy layer of hiss. But the production only enhances the beautiful grimness of The Funeral Of Being. Rarely is an artists tortured soul so perfectly laid bare by the cacophonous sound of his instruments but then Xasthur is indeed a rarity.
Finally, a new release from the mighty and mysterious black metal entity Xasthur. After a recent spate of reissues, all of them amazing and essential, Malefic, who alone IS Xasthur, has finally deigned to unleash this blackened beast into the world. And in a world like this, we definitely can't get enough music this abject and lonely and dark and personal. As always, Xasthur's world is a bleak and depressive one, pinned beneath a thick, smothering sonic blanket of Burzumic riffing, midtempo mournful melodies, insane double kick drumming and this time around, grand and melancholic keyboards, adding a much more epic and dramatic darkness to the proceeedings. We always end up comparing every Xasthur record to his debut masterpiece Nocturnal Posioning, for the obvious reason that it's one of the best black metal records ever, but thankfully, To Violate The Oblivious takes a lot of what we loved about that record and moves forward, instead of just making Nocturnal Poisoning part two. Present are the gut wrenchingly minor key melodies, the fuzzy wall of blackened riffs, the loping midtempo rhythms, but the keyboards somehow manage to make everything that much more mournful, and the songwriting is more introspective and melodic, making this almost a doom metal record in black metal clothing. It's depressingly glorious to listen to the blackend fruits of Xasthur's labor of love (hate?) as he sinks further into cultish oblivion and obsessive loneliness.
Xasthur may have flown the Moribund coop and ended up roosting in the spiffier Hydra Head henhouse, having just released the mind meltingly brilliant black classic Subliminal Genocide a few months back, but it seems that Moribund have a few blackened odds and ends left over, some of which they've now seen fit to release as this self titled ep. Three tracks, 24 minutes, an instrumental, an unreleased track and a track from 2005, it does sort of smack of cashing in, but we'll be the first to say it, Xasthur castoffs are better than 90 percent of other black metal bands best material, and this disc pretty firmly drive that point home. The opener, titled simply "Instrumental" is a seven minute sprawl of arpeggiated minor key guitars, bursts of stumbling double kick, fuzzy layers of black guitar, a haunting refrain that sounds either like processed vocals or keyboards. Thick and fuzzy and gauzy and beautiful. Actually, it sounds remarkably like an instrumental version of one of the songs off Subliminal Genocide. Which might bug the guys at Hydra Head and Malefic himself, but is not such a bad thing for the listener. For those of you who like the sound of black metal, but can't get around the howling shrieks, this track could very well be your gateway to all things black and grim. Without the vocals, it sounds even more like a more evil M83! The second track, "Bubonic Plague" is classic Xasthur, muddy and murky, and so so so buzzy, the melodies are cold and mournful, the guitars snarl and drone, the vocals are so buried in the mix that they just sound like another guitar, buzzing right along side the riffs. The rhythm plods and lopes like a death march, in fact more than ever, this is Xasthur in his doom metal in black metal's clothing guise. Mournfully miserable and blackly bleak. The final track starts off as fierce as Xasthur ever gets, a gloriously blown out black buzz, vocals harsh and up in the mix, the guitars sharp and jagged, the whole thing a swirling chaotic blast of grim fury, but before long the song unwinds into a blackened waltz, with more fingerpicked guitars, distant double kick, and a wooozy hazy ambience, culminating in a stripped down clean guitar and drum coda. So good.
Killer artwork too, some monstrous looking cave formation on the front, a milky white dripping stone beast, and on the back a field of stalactites looking like some ancient torture chamber.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
In addition to getting the brilliant new Xasthur full length back in (see elsewhere on this list), we finally managed to get copies of this amazing split (now out of print!) between AQ black metal fave Xasthur and the unknown to us and now defunct Acid Enema. Xasthur offers up more of his grim, bleak, depressive blackness: buzzing guitars churning in a murk of tape hiss and amplifier grit, barely audible anguished howls, relentless drumming, all weaving melancholy melodies and dark fugues into epic and harrowing soundscapes of abject misery and soul ripping hatred. Blasting Burzumic squalls give way to loping melodic breakdowns with finger picked guitars and mournful keyboards. So gorgeously grim. Seems everything Xasthur touches turns to black. The Acid Enema tracks take the buzz and dirge of Burzum and Darkthrone and add some industrial weirdness and damaged brutality. Razor sharp speaker shredding guitar tone and big boomy drums underpin some seriously demonic howls. A whirling, blood-red pool of sonic chaos, threatening to crush and blacken your ears and your heart and your soul. Some weird melodic ambience and then a DHR worthy industrial cover of Mayhem's "Deathcrush" with rigid hyper-distorted beats and punch-to-the-skull machine gun rhythms. Now out of print, so when these are gone, they're gone for good.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
While we all wait patiently for the new blackened masterpiece from Southern California's one man blackdoomkult Xasthur to drop, here we've got a little blast of suicidal bleakness to hold us over, on this split. The sound is HUGE. A massive wall of black gauzy haze, murky ambience, and blistering fuzz. Two new tracks that give us a glimpse of what to expect from the upcoming full length as well as an older tune "Funeral Of Being, a creepy, Goblin-esque, almost romantic, minor key ambient dirge! Xasthur finishes things off with a buzzing midtempo Wigrid cover, pretty true to the original, but just tweaked enough to sound like it's all his. And Germany's Angra Mainyu are the perfect foil for Xasthur, with a creeping, plodding, wintery blackened doom very reminiscent of old Burzum. Occasionally songs erupt into a wash of blazing and buzzing and blastbeats but the majority of their half of the split is spent trudging along through huge drifts of black thoughts and utter despair, wrapped in a swirling fog of impenetrable buzz and finger picked minor key guitars. So cold and dismal, dark and creepy. And so fucking good.
Been trying to track these down for ages, and finally managed to get a handful. Two new tracks from longtime aQ fave Xasthur, and one from Swedish one man black metal horde Black Circle.
The Black Circle track is super simple, raw, old school, primitive depressive black metal, midtempo, murky muddy riffage, growled guttural vocals, simple drum plod, definitely a bit grim and frosty, but more sort miserable and moody.
The Xasthur tracks, both sound like fragments, maybe parts of a bigger, never realized epic, but they're pretty kick ass parts, if you've been digging the direction Malefic's been taking the sound of Xasthur lately. Washed out guitars in the background, everything woozy and warped, depressive and abstract, definitely less metal and more atmospheric, tangled atonal guitars, warm muted synths, soaring strings, croaked barely-there vocals (courtesy of new Xasthur member M.H.), everything ULTRA lo-fi, plenty of buzz and hiss, but that only adds to the atmosphere. The second Xasthur is actually a cover or interpretation of a song by Tiamat, but we couldn't tell, still sounded like a Xasthur jam to us.
Limited to 888 copies, each one hand numbered, they come from far far away, so when we do run out, we may not be able to get more, and even if we can, it might takes us a while to restock.
Back in stock!!! Last list's RotW...
We normally don't make "now available on cd" releases Record Of The Week. But there are plenty of reasons to do just that with this one! First off, C'MON! It's LEVIATHAN and XASTHUR! On the same disc! Two of the most important, and musically creative black metal one-man-hordes in the new wave of west coast black metal (NWOWCBM?) teamed up for the ultimate NWOWCBM one two punch. Singlehandedly (doublehandedly?) putting USBM back on the black metal map, and completely redefining the genre, grim and brutal and black for sure, but also totally bizarre and avant and experimental. Plus even you folks who picked up the vinyl versions will need this, as there are 4 bonus tracks, three of them are from Xasthur, a brand new unreleased track, a rehearsal track from 2004, and a Katatonia cover! The other bonus track is Leviathan's amazing version of Judas Iscariot's "Where The Winter Beals Incessant"! But even without the bonus tracks, this clash of the black titans is totally essential, some of the most beautifully blackened and furiously fucked up black metal you are ever likely to hear. Xasthur from Southern California and Leviathan from right here in SF are blackened brothers, both exploring similar themes of hate and misery, darkness and death, but coming at 'em from completely different sonic angles. Xasthur is more about mood and atmosphere, with thick swaths of fuzzy riffery, galloping drums, rumbling bass and agonised howls of despair, all dense and dark and claustrophobic. Leviathan is much more technical and a lot weirder, but no less moody, with ultra complex and bizarrely arranged parts, insane drumming, buzzing riffery, and hints of doom and progrock mixed into his bleak and blackened metalscapes. ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL!!
Realistically, if you all are anything like us, a one line review is all it will take for you to know in your heart of hearts, that not only do you HAVE to own this, but that it will rapidly and immediately become your favorite record. OF ALL TIME!!
So here we go: Xexyz are a black metal band who use a Nintendo Entertainment System as their "keyboard" and who essentially have composed black metal songs around the 8-bit themes to Nintendo classics like Metroid and Rygar's Quest. Yes!! We were right, weren't we?
Anyway, Xexyz are a grim buzzing lo-fi horde of black warriors who just so happen to be video game nerds and who have decided that there is nothing more grim or more cult than the instantly recognizable buzz and beep of their favorite Nintendo themes. And you know what, it's sort of true. And it definitely works. Some folks here thought this sounded like the Muppets and Stereolab playing black metal, but it's so much more grim than that. A haunting 8-bit refrain bleeps maniacally under moaning black guitar buzz, while hateful hellish vocals rasp and growl over the top. The theme from Metroid rings out, one of the coolest, and weirdest video game themes ever (second only to Rastan maybe), the weird electronic pulse underpins a thick slab of distorted guitar, when the song finally kicks in, it almost sounds like a lo-fi version of THAT Burzum track, the black fuzz with the haunting keyboard figure in the background. But you know... with Metroid instead. And "Nightmare On Elm Street", is so awesome, the Nintendo theme is super fuzzy and haunting, and perfectly lends itself to some Burzumic buzz, creepy crawly and pretty damn black.
So totally amazing and weird and thus of course absolutely fucking recommended...
What we're about to say, we don't say lightly. Trust us. We may traffic in hyperbole. And our shelves may be stuffed with lots of 'best evers' and 'worst evers' and 'greatest evers', but this friends, is quite possibly the weirdest record we've ever carried. When we first threw it on, we were immediately struck with the realization, that what we were hearing, was either the most amazing thing we had ever heard, or absolutely the worst piece of shit EVER. Andee quickly decided on the former. And no matter how hard he tried, or how many repeated listens he was subjected to, Allan is sticking with the latter. But the more we play this in the store, the more the tribe of Xynfonica worshippers grows, Antaeus, Matt, Cameron, one can only handle a few listens before you're forever in its thrall. We're not sure how Allan does it, maybe there's some sort of chip in his brain, or maybe he's not really human at all, who knows. What we do know is we will wear him down, and just like you, faithful yet doomed reader of this list, he will eventually bow down to the damaged glory that is Xynfonica.
By now you're probably wondering what the fuck we're on about. Fair enough. So let's go back a bit. Not sure how we first heard about Xynfonica, but we got the disc in, it had an amazing cover, an old painting of some ancient battle, men on horseback, wielding swords, the record title: A Feast For Famished Ravens, song titles like: "From Your Father's Skull" and "The Viking Zodiac", a huge booklet jammed with more lyrics than could possibly fit in the three songs here, there are even footnotes!!! So we still hadn't listened to it, but we were pretty much sold already.
So we finally threw it on, and were greeted with some strange synthesizers, guitar synthesizers to be specific (we later discovered) and a growled demonic vocal, the synths, sort of atonal and detuned, like a demented Peter And The Wolf, the vocals, a strangled black metal rasp, so okay, we're thinking, a cool weird intro, so we waited for the band to kick in, and waited, and waited, and waited some more, scanned forward� So then we thought, okay, maybe the whole first track is the intro, so we skipped to the second track, which of course started with the raspy vocals and the seasick synths, but we gave it the benefit of the doubt and waited and waited, scanned forward, and then it dawned on us. HOLY SHIT. This was the band. There were no drums, no guitarist. It was just some trollish demon and his damaged synth, spewing endless tales of mysterious battles and lost civilizations. And suddenly, it had us. Xynfonica. Sure it's creepy and demented, and borderline retarded, and the synths sometime sound so wrong it makes us dizzy, so 'off' it makes our eyes water, the melodies are demented, alien, creepy ominous one second, bouncing cheerfully the next, but always those vocals, an everpresent demon storyteller, it's hard to explain exactly why we're so taken, but we are. Every time we play this, initial reactions range from confusion, to hysterical laughter, to anxiety to sheer unadulterated joy. Imagine if Jandek was the keyboard player in a black metal band and decided to make a solo record, or imagine Mr. Roger's neighborhood but Mr. Rogers is out sick, so the dude from Abruptum is filling in, or imagine the music files from some medieval video game getting corrupted, and then used as the intro music for some evil metal band. Well you know, what? There's no need to imagine. It's all right here. Xynfonica will give you all of that and more. With just a rudimentary grasp of the synthesizer, and a frog in his throat, all will be revealed, and we shall all revel in his stumbling, confusional musical brilliance.
Xynfonica. Xynfonica. Xynfonica. Xynfonica. Xynfonica...
Yaotl Mictlan are a strange bunch. Hailing from Salt Lake City, Utah (by way of Mexico), they play a stark and angular version of brutal buzzing black metal, and share a few members with hateful black horde Ibex Throne.
While the sound of Ibex Throne is more of a hyperspeed humanity-hating violence, the Yaotl Mictlan crew are a bit more diverse in getting their message across. They sing of the ways of the blood thirsty Mayans and the extinct world known as Aztlan and incorporate indigenous instruments from that period such as flutes, bones and drums giving the songs a sort of tribal feel. Even when the band is blasting away, they manage to find ways to mix melody into the din, while the vocalist roars along in Spanish, a painful howl telling telling the tales of a long lost civilization. Damn if it doesn't sound amazing, kind of like a Mexican version of Drudkh or something.
It's that good.
One of our favorite purveyors of all things heavy, Gilead Media has been responsible for a ton of our recent obsessions � Kowloon Walled City, Krallice, False, Bastard Sapling, Geryon, and Thou, to name a few. They, along with Profound Lore, seem to be THEE go-to for current forward-thinking metal. Enter Brooklyn's Yellow Eyes, two brothers who, along with Mike Rekevics (also of Fell Voices, Vanum, and Vorde), recorded Sick With Bloom in a Connecticut cabin, the atmospherics of which spill into the tremolo-picked whirlwind riffage that takes center stage. At times they conjure the melodic melancholy of Rekevics' Vanum project, other times they sound more like the more hypnotic and straightforward passages of Krallice's idiosyncratic brand of black metal, but the end result is a sound that is no-nonsense, corpsepaint-free U.S. black metal that surely would have topped many year-end lists had it not come out in the very last weeks of 2015. No gimmicks, no pretension, no irony, just crushing, wind-swept black metal. Gilead does it again.
Ok, we've got one here for anyone into the sludgy, stoner sounds of the likes of Electric Wizard and Sleep!! Yob is perhaps your new favorite band. From Portland, Oregon, these psychedelic doom lords take their chosen genre's obligatory Black Sabbath worship to the extent of incorporating the swingin' jazzy/jammy aspects of the Sabbath sound that most doomsters tend to disregard. Nor do they skimp on the the meaner, rigidly metallic side of the Sabs, or on the mountains of the moon sized riffage doom fans require. Yob is slow motion, sweat leaf'd sludge to the max. Most notably, while their vocalist does dip into a demonic growl at times, mainly he soars like an insane, heavily effected hybrid of Ozzy and Geddy Lee. The result is a remarkably unique sound for a band that unquestionably wears their influences on their collective sleeve. The closest comparision would be to a spaced-out combination of Sleep and Dead Meadow. The three long tracks (18, 7, and 23 minutes) showcase a stoned style that even fuses funk with full-on dirge doom. There's a couple other fine doom metal releases on this weeks' list (Solitude Aeturnus, Well Of Souls). But while those bands' style is to build big castles, these guys tunnel through the earth, out the other side, and into outer space. Recommended.
We went a little nuts for the skewed not-quite-black-metal of the oddly monickered Yoga, whose split with Ghast we reviewed a while back. Their sound not really buzzy and brutal as much as warped and twisted and blackened, more like a blurry shadow of black metal, the murky muddy underbelly of a sound more traditionally buzzy and black. Or as someone here opined, it's not black metal, but it wouldn't exist without black metal.
We'd been anxiously awaiting more, having played that split to DEATH, this full length definitely one of our most anticipated records of the year, and an inevitable Record Of The Week. The band do not disappoint. Once again, exploring all manner of spaced out otherworldliness, the blackness more implied, the buzz doused in druggy FX and wrapped around twisted streaks of fragmented pop and sprawling deconstructed dronemuisc. The core of the sound a sort of blissed out, uneasy, lo-fi dronescape, infused with fragmented riffage, pounding drum detritus, and super effected howling vox. There are definitely moments on Megafauna where Yoga begin to resemble an actual and proper metal band, but even then the sound is ragged and off kilter, effects swooping and swirling, the repetitive buzz becoming mantra like, the various strands of melody unraveling before your ears, like a live, metal, Disintegration Loop, with sounds crumbling and falling to pieces, the sound of dissolution and destruction rendered in abstract sound.
Imagine Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck, filtered through a grim black bedroom black metal aesthetic. Or better yet, Jeck in full corpse paint, hunkered over a row of black turntables, candles guttering in the evening breeze, lit from below like some hellish visage, the sounds emanating from his warped vinyl manipulations, being these: fuzzy, gauzy smears of indistinct shimmer and ghostly shadow, haunted music box missives, grim buzzscapes underpinned by heaving swells of crumbling blackness, abstruse sonic alchemy begetting bursts of almost orchestral crush, as well as long stretches of fun house mirror hum and whir, all gathered into a loose songsuite that oozes and drifts, interrupted only by the occasional squall of buzzing metal pound, either looped and frenzied sounding, or lurching and doom-ic, the drums a murky plod, the guitar slippery and shimmery, the riffs melty and viscous, the arrangements endless and lysergic, the sound washed out and shoegazey, a sort of hybridized black metal space rock trip out, that may lumber or blast or crunch, but always eventually slips back into a sound more abstract and metaphysical, psychedelic and darkly dreamy. Yeah!
Originally released as an ultra limited cassette, and then available on cd as half a split with Canadian blackened doom noise outfit Ghast, and now finally available on vinyl for the first time...
Yoga is a pretty unlikely name for a black metal band. But then Yoga are a pretty unlikely sounding black metal band. So much so that we're not even sure they really are black metal. Or metal at all. But they are. Sort of.
The sound of Yoga takes the lo-fi practice space recordings of grimmest of the BM outfits, and combines it with the murky muddy noise drenched blur of bands like Wold. But then take it even further rendering their sound so muted and lo fidelity that even when they're blasting furiously, it still sounds like a busted music box or an old black metal 78. And then there's the fact that Yoga spend a good amount of their time not blasting blackly, but instead, crafting synth heavy Goblin style film music, all throbbing bass and buzzing synths, creepy minor key melodies and tons of haunting ambience. Those songs too are wreathed in a foggy night-on-the-moors sort of murk, which ties those songs closely to the more blackened ones.
The strange combination of grim and Goblin, the tripped out fucked up recording quality, the damaged arrangements, the looped hypnotic vibe, turn Yoga into something totally out there, most likely way too abstract and psychedelic and deliriously lo-fi to appeal to folks looking for grim buzzing blackness, but for the rest of you, if you can try to imagine some impossible mix of Philip Jeck, Wold, Goblin, the Skaters and some of the super weird EEE unblack bands, all produced by John Maus and Ariel Pink, then you're gonna flip out over this stuff for sure...
From our pals at Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin comes an Italian import of this minimal masterpiece, available on tape for the first time ever. Composed in 1962, recorded in 1984, The 2nd Dream Of The High Tension Line... is classic LMY, a sprawling longform field of tranced out, spiritual dronemusic, single notes stretched out for ages, a softly and subtly shifting field of overtones and microtones, drifting textures, an epic expanse of super intense, innerspace, deep listening, zoner, psychedelic, minimal drift bliss of the highest order, so simple, yet so sonically rich and deeply and melodically complex, seemingly static for long stretches but surprisingly dynamic and utterly and totally mesmerizing. Music to get lost in, to let carry you away, anyone into modern dronemusic who has yet to experience the music of the master, this is the perfect place to start.
EXTREMELY LIMITED!!! Nice full color J-card with minimal liner notes.
What do you get when you mix one part Swedish ultra dronelord Ondo, and one part French funereal doom sludge merchant The Austrasian Goat? Pretty much exactly what you might expect. And were probably hoping for. A sprawling expanse of abject sonic miserablism, huge heaving slabs of crumbling distortion and Teutonic rumble, thick swaths of buzz and rumble, tangled spidery minor key melodies, harsh hellish howls, extreme black ambience, or near glacial ultra doom, from the first track (of three) on, beginning with the above mentioned grim black crawl, the track seems to gradually ooze into something more drone than metal, the guitar chugs are blurred into long stretches of pitch black shimmer, eventually the track grows hushed, and ominous, a delicate drift of garbled voices and crystalline melody, all over a darkly swirling black sea of layered low end and slow shifting thrum. Eventually, things build back up with pounded reverbed piano, floating atop, ever escalating guitar drone incandescence, heavy and noisy, but weirdly pretty.
The second track, shortest of the three at a still impressive 16 minutes, starts off a billowing black cloud of sound, nightmarish ambience, laced with crackle and glitch, but mostly tranquil, if slightly malefic, the track explodes in a frenzy of almost black metal sounding fury, before slipping back into the blackened tranquility that preceded it, deep thick tones, slow motion melodies, echoing and filling the speakers with blackness, almost liturgical sounding, but some primitive black mass, some lost ritual, whispered voices lead the blackness, to a final climax of grinding crunch, lethargic riffage and chordal buzz, that gain manages to be lovely and heavy simultaneously.
Finally, the record closes with a soundtrack like sprawl of haunting otherworldly whisper and drift, tranquil, but foreboding, the piano returns, this time offering up haunting minimal melodies, while underneath, black winds whip and whirl, strings shimmer, all wrapped in a gauzey cloak of washed out buzz and distant low end rumble, like some strange hellish chamber music, or the soundtrack to some lost Italian horror film, gorgeously creepy and fiendishly evocative.
This one not so much for the doom metallers and sludgelords as much as for those who enjoy sounds both bleak and forlorn, miserable and depressingly beautiful, a creeping, soul stirring black ambient dronemusic, that is definitely heavy, but whose heaviness is tempered by the atmosphere, a soundworld grim and sinister, each of these sonic rituals a heavy black shroud for the dark of spirit.
Cool silver on black folded origami style sleeves, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Woah, this is some seriously filthy and hateful, damaged and demented, utterly raw black metal primitivism. A collection of long out of print demos from the tongue twistingly titled Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, a band/man the label refers to as "The French master of bedroom black metal", and who are we to argue.
Right off the bat, we should just say, that all of you who are into the weirdest of the weird, the damaged, retarded, stumbling, freaked out what-the-fuck black metal we can't ever get enough of, a la Necrofrost, Furze, Dead Reptile Shrine, Striborg, then this is pretty much ESSENTIAL.
The sound will also definitely appeal to folks who dig the ultra personal grimnity of the French Black Legions, but Zarach'Baal'Tharagh takes that sound, and douses it with noise, lets riffs unravel, lets rhythms unwind, songs collapse, and then suddenly seem to fall back together, the drums blast and splatter, stumble and shuffle, the guitars roar and buzz, the vocals a paint peeling rasp, and then there are the leads, wild and dizzyingly off kilter, somewhere between actual shredding and completely random noodling, but all wound up into the buzzing swirl, it sounds perfect. A massively head spinning unhinged blackened assault.
The slow parts are gorgeous and creepy, the guitars wavery and warbly, the drums a stuttery tattoo, some tracks are killer stretches of FX drenched ambience, vocals reverbed and delayed into strange sonic echoes, everything including the blasts of black are muddy and murky and ultra lo-fi.
The record is separated into three parts, Primitive Era, Apocalypse, and maybe our favorite El Borak, the harshest and heaviest of the bunch, the guitar supercharged, the four parts of El Borak, laced with completely wacked Buttholes Surfers style leads, spidery and chaotic, the four parts together forming a totally mesmerizing chunk of looped sounding black buzz, with some AWESOME riffing, but the riff is locked into an endless black groove, over and over and over, the whole thing dragged into some completely other dimension by the damaged lead guitar. So fucking awesome. Some of us around here can't help but think (even though technically this stuff is not 'new') that this could very well be a contender for black metal record of the year. At the very least, damaged demented outsider what-the-fuck black metal record of the year. Either way, totally recommended.
Not sure how we managed to sleep on this record when it came out last year. Had we heard it then, it doubtless would have made it into the year-end top tens of many of the metalheads here for sure. Fortunately, we did eventually get a clue - we realized we had to check out this Greek one-man-band after reading the interview with Zemial in the latest issue of Chips & Beer, 'cause any supposedly 'black metal' outfit that name checks Karlheinz Stockhausen*, John Cage, and Magma drummer Christian Vander, amongst others, sure sounds like something we'd dig here at aQ! And dig we do.
So, here's Zemial's 2013 opus, Nykta. Majestic, propulsive, spacey, epic, catchy, hella weird, yeah, Nykta is right up our alley. Zemial has actually been around since 1989, but this is still only the band's third full-length album - and it's a doozy if you like extremely original 'extreme' metal music. The guy behind Zemial, multi instrumentalist Archon Vorskaath, is into modern composers and prog/jazz fusion drummers, but he's also big into Bathory. So this has got to be one of the only 'progressive metal' albums we've heard that's chock full of raw, dirty riffing and gruff vocals that sound right off a Venom album. But there's also out-there spacey synthscapes, Eastern-sounding exoticism, esoteric lyrics, suddenly prominent prog rock keyboard parts, and tons of uber talented and effective percussion from Vorskaath (that's his specialty, having played percussion professionally in an orchestra). And, he's pretty impressive in the vocal department, too, doing some semi-melodic, 'clean' but not too clean singing, with heaps of gusto and strangely effected weirdness.
Zemial really manage thee perfect, hithero unattempted synthesis of savage, driving riffage and tripped out experimentation here. We don't think we've ever heard a metal band that sounds so 'old school' and yet so avant-garde and original at the same time. We fear we can't do this album justice in this review, it's one of those that we just gotta say, trust us, it's brilliant and weird and kickass and totally recommended to open-minded metallers (and non-metallers too), especially fans of Absu, latter-day Darkthrone, and Enslaved (circa Mardraum). Blizaro too - the moody, bombastic synth instrumental "The Small", at least, sounds a lot like something they would do.
By the way, there's nothing wrong with your stereo - the final track here is an homage to Cage's famous composition 4'33", and has thrown a lot of unknowing metal reviewers for a loop, being of course (almost?) totally silent. Hey, it could have been on that Sounds Of Silence lp we made Record Of The Week a while back! (Note to Vorskaath, however: placing the silent track at the end of your album is less effective than if you'd put it right in the middle!)
*In that Chips & Beer interview, Vorskaath talks about how he's played with Stockhausen's jazz musician son Markus, in a piece that involved the musicians fasting and meditating for, like, two straight days before getting on stage to improvise - now that's extreme!
Battle Of The Peak is the crushing epic debut release from this Tolkien-esque psychedelic prog-doom noiserock from Portland, whose debut is in fact fucking amazing, not just sonically, but visually as well, more on the over the top ridiculous packaging in a second, cuz musically, it's hard to imagine an aQ metalhead who wouldn't freak out over there guys, epic, sprawling 15+ minute songs, classic metal riffing, big pounding drums, yowled bellowed vocals, the whole thing straddling the lines between classic metal, doom, noise rock, and black metal buzz, which makes sense as the mastermind of Zirakzagil is also the man behind two Northern BM bands of note, whose most recent records were both reviewed on the aQ list not too long ago, but Zirakzagil is a whole different beats, the band unfurling long stretches of tranced out riffing, surprisingly melodic, super dynamic, lurching stop/starts, some seriously soaring leads, at times it sounds a bit like the Fucking Champs, slowed down and stretched out into some psychedelic noise rock doom, at other times it's full on metallic prog, intricate, tangled arrangements slow builds, dense, and intense, the drumming super wild and chaotic, the songs will chug and churn, before slipping into some super melodic passage, and some of the leads, super emotive old school classic shreddery, and while there are vocals, bellowed bearded noise rock howls, most of the record is instrumental, the instruments doing all the heavy lifting, whether it's heaving swells of churning riffage on opener "The Birth Of The White Wizard", the woozy psychedelic shuffle of "Durin's Bane", or the weird mathy psychedelic breakdown near the end of "The Endless Stair", which ends up sounding like a more metal, and more mathed out Don Caballero!
This rules! And it's DEFINITELY not black metal, heck it's really not even that doomy, it IS sludgey, heavy, mathy, proggy and totally epic!
And speaking of epic, the packaging is ultra epic, and NERDY! The title and the cover art are of course beholden to Lord Of The Rings (where would metal be without Tolkien?), but then that stuff is designed into a faux Nintendo game cartridge, the fonts, the label log, the layout, the oversized clamshell case, it looks just like a Nintendo game, and open it up, and the liner notes are deftly worked into the game's instructions, even including a picture of the game controller, adorned with the Zirakzagil logo! Includes a patch and a sticker too. And of curse, EXTREMELY LIMITED! ONLY 98 COPIES, and we have about a dozen...
Weirdo black metal (?) from 2004, long out of print. How can you resist a song called "Black Narcotic Obfuscation"? The flip is "Birth, Sex, Death" so this pretty much covers it all. On Vendlus, also for fans of the left-field stuff on Garm's Jester label.
Second album from this post-Emperor supergroup, as good if not better than their debut.
Norwegian black metal supergroup featuring "Z"amoth and Trym of Emperor, and Destructhor of Myrkskog. Plus vocals by Daemon of Limbonic Art and Trickster G (aka Garm) of Ulver. Together they present the devastating debut of Zyklon, which they claim 1) is a
