Sophistication is the enemy! A FIST for you sophisticates! Leave the capes and top hats for King Diamond, swill wine from the sockets of a busted skull, and convince a 500lb shoat that truffles are buried beneath the badminton court in the middle of afternoon tea.

“Beauty may be skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone.” — Redd Foxx

!!BREEEEOOOORRRR BREEEEEEOOOORRRR WOOP WOOP WOOP¡¡

Metal is under gentle attack! Hooty flutes! Charm! Grandpa’s guitars! Commonplace gazing upon footwear!

Those already familiar with the band have a pretty good idea of what to expect: raw, old-fangled thrash that sounds as if it could rot walls whether it’s pushing full-throttle or mangling at a slower, more loose pace. The “black” portion of the thrash tag that steeped their early works still gets tromped out today, but the modern version of Aura Noir mostly hints black metal in the same way Teutonic thrash did when it laid the foundation way back in the mid-80s. Well, Germany alongside a handful of other rascals from Switzerland, North America, et al. At heart, Aura Noir reveal an honor student’s dedication toward the study and preservation of the sort of maliciousness mid-80s thrash and speed perfected, and it’s clear that the band’s principal design continues to honor that tradition.

Something particularly beneficial with regard to Aura Noire that’s likely to be appreciated right off the bat is the production. Beyond any doubt, this is the most ideal mixing and mastering job the band has experienced to date, and, as luck would have it, the promotional materials give zero indication of the party(/parties) responsible for accomplishing said advantage. Nevertheless, the production is glorious—an equal amount of spotlight placed on drums, bass (oh, glory to the Highest, you can hear the BASS on this record!) and the riffiest guitaring this side of Mt. Miland Petrozza, plus a clear, incredibly potent sense of live rawness that makes it sound as if dropping a needle to the record might very well deliver the band directly into your living room to rip through these songs with a demon’s intent. Be sure to plate some fresh snickerdoodles in advance.

ELEGANCE IN TOILET

The music Aura Noire serves up is a boozy brew that’s equal parts vulgar groove and jackhammering speed that’s further polluted by a scraping voice that sounds a bit like what one might imagine a guy named Nocturn O. Warrior would achieve while barking at a congregation about the comforts of going to Hell for eternity. So, yes, delightfully loathsome, and not terribly dissimilar at times to the speedier moments of Circle the Wagons era Darkthrone, but with a greater emphasis on coloring within the rigid lines of mid-80s thrash with just two crayons: fuck and you.

Some cuts emphasize velocity as mission one—the fiery second half of the succinct “Shades Ablaze” and the positively Frosty (in more ways than one) “Cold Bone Grasp,” for example, or the blast furnace homage to Power and Pain at the heart of the vital “The Obscuration,” a song that stands as an early contender for 2018’s coveted “Song Most Likely To Cause Unpleasant Aliens To Sidestep Earth In Fear Of Having Their Stupid Faces Rupture In Nuclear Fire Due To The Combustible Nature Of A Particularly Threatening Thrash Song” award.

Other tracks underscore a touch more darkness and allow the poison to soak in more gradually, and they also indulge a decidedly Voivodian sense of noisy panache to color the edges—the steely strike of “Mordant Wind,” for one, and the sensational “Hell’s Lost Chambers,” which features the album’s most memorable bass-run immediately following a relatively quiet and eerie midpoint.

Truth be told, picking out specific high-points on a record like this isn’t terribly easy because every song does the job of putting a boot to the neck with grumpy riffs, unhinged drumming, and loads of impolite woofing. The aggregate pattern is what’s crucial, and the whole of Aura Noire does a hell of a job of reminding the listener that the ugly side of life is always looming, and that a truth such as this doesn’t necessarily demand restraint. Embrace the gnarly, loose and madly raw side of life, my repulsive friends, and let Aura Noir provide the soundtrack for your journey into the cold dirt.

RAW
IS
LAW

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Not only did 2004 see the release of Salvation, Isis’s Panopticon, and Pelican’s The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, but also Neurosis’s second-greatest album ever, The Eye of Every Storm. With Rosetta’s The Galilean Satellites and Red Sparowes’s At the Soundless Dawn close behind in 2005, there was a brief moment where the scene’s saturation hadn’t yet blunted its impact. But ultimately, if we’re being uncharitable, the entire scene can be understood as Mogwai for metalheads (in much the same way that Mogwai was metal for sad indie dweebs). To put it another way, Cult of Luna always seemed, for better or worse, like the sort of band that would spend more time putting together an artfully designed projection installation for their stage backdrop than they would writing riffs.

As such, Cult of Luna’s pristinely monolithic sound is not an immediate match for Julie Christmas, whose vocals have historically splayed and stretched to fit the messier, artier, noise rock-leaning contexts of Battle of Mice and Made Out of Babies. Regardless, Christmas is one of heavy music’s most transfixing and compelling voices, so having her back in front of a full band for the first time since her excellent solo album The Bad Wife was always going to be an affair of sky-high expectations. Although one’s appreciation of Mariner depends somewhat on whether one approaches it primarily as a Cult of Luna fan or Julie Christmas fan, each party brings more than enough of their core strengths to the collaboration that fans of either should be satisfied.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mariner is strongest when Christmas is given the freest rein. Album opener “A Greater Call” is a fairly standard Cult of Luna piece, with meticulous sound design and somewhat rote bellowing, but it settles into an intriguingly petulant kind of march for the Christmas-led chorus. Three of Mariner‘s five songs feature Christmas on lead vocals, but almost independently of her overwhelming vocal charisma, each of those three songs is more interesting musically than the other two. “Chevron” lets Christmas run frantic and wild against a pounding midsection that features the album’s most teeth-grittingly massive riff, but it also pulls way back into a brushed, psych-synth spaciness for its last few minutes, reminding the listener that for all their bluster and excess, both Christmas and Cult of Luna thrive on dynamics. Here and on several other occasions, Mariner sounds a little like the wounded twin to the Gathering’s How to Measure a Planet?

Christmas’s vocal range is on fullest display in “The Wreck of S.S. Needle,” where her voice commands respect and conveys a steely resolve at the same time that it reveals pain and vulnerability. In fact, listen closely enough and you can hear her using her breath not just to punctuate her lines, but as a percussive and expressive instrument in its own right. The song is the album’s finest moment by far, and Christmas’s repeated command – which eventually becomes more incantation – of “Put me down where I can see you run” is thrilling and strikingly memorable (something not often true of Cult of Luna).

Album closer “Cygnus” occasionally threatens to fall into overindulgence and under-excitement over its unnecessarily stretched 15 minutes, but it ultimately redeems itself gloriously. The prog-synth noodling almost three minutes in is a nice touch of Zombi-esque otherness, and those slippery tones allow Christmas’s vocals to lead with a firm foothold. The song’s quiet midsection is nothing new for CoL – close mic’d, naturalistic drum cadences and distant washes of guitar and cosmic ambience – but Christmas adds some much needed unpredictability. Accordingly, when the full weight crashes down from the 9-minute mark or so on, it is a physically taxing culmination, like something dredged from a deep, painful place. The final minutes of the album are an emotionally charged cacophony laden with the kind of movement and determination that this style too often neglects.

If Mariner wins over even one more fan to the Julie Christmas cause, then it will have served a noble purpose. Cult of Luna’s contributions are confident, capable, and even comforting, but at every turn they are either recitations or slight refinements of moves this band has been making for quite some time. The fact that Mariner is still deeply satisfying more often than not is, to be sure, mostly a result of Christmas’s presence, but it also reaffirms that those moves, no matter how familiar, can still be potent tools in the right hands. The received wisdom that post-metal is dead isn’t wrong, exactly, but that doesn’t mean the style can’t produce electrifying reminders of its power during the long tail of its decline.

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What makes an EP? According to the powers that define albums for tracking sales, an EP is either an album that’s under 25 to 30 minutes or somewhere from 3 to 5 tracks, and maybe specifically four (this varies from UK to US definitions; if you care about the specifics, Google is your friend). This, of course, is a fine definition when it comes to pop music, where most songs are no more than 4 minutes long. In the heavy metal world, things get a little bit fuzzier, since some bands (e.g. grindcore) produce songs in the sub-two-minute range, while other bands (e.g. doom) produce songs so long that you forget what you’re actually listening to. It seems almost arbitrary, sometimes, how record companies choose to assign the LP and EP labels. For example, the Finnish pagan band Moonsorrow’s 2007 “full length” release V: Hävitetty not only has three fewer tracks than 2008’s “EP” Tulimyrsky, it’s actually thirteen minutes shorter.

Of course, the guiding light defining the difference between LP and EP tends to be “the band releases something other than strictly new original music.” Just to continue using the same example, Tulimyrsky contains one original song, two cover songs, and two re-recordings of previously released songs. The fact that the original song happens to be 29 minutes long is what puts that particular album into this critic’s “favourite ridiculous examples” category. Most metal bands use an EP as an opportunity to do something strange. So when a band that’s already as strange as Solefald puts out an EP, you know it’s going to be very weird indeed.

Norrønasongen – Kosmopolis Nord is 38 minutes long, and contains five songs. Indie Records apparently pressed it to vinyl, and it’s listed on Discogs as a “Vinyl LP EP.” See, weird. The main track is “Norrønaprogen,” an eleven and a half minute little ditty that sounds mostly like the Solefald we’re used to. It (along with the entire album) is sung in Norwegian, so it’s a little bit difficult for this non-Norwegian speaker to identify specific parts of the song, but that isn’t to say that it’s not completely enjoyable. The song is about equal parts grave and jocular; the chanted verses in the beginning remind me of the Icelandic Odyssey albums, while the bouncier parts of the song sound a bit more like a Korpiklaani drinking song. Overall, it’s a strange song, but nothing inherently stranger than what we heard on any of their past albums.

That changes dramatically when the second track rolls around. “Det Siste Landskap (An Icelandic Odyssey Part IV)” kicks off with a shimmering little guitar chord and a driving synth drum line. This song bears no resemblance to the past “Icelandic Odysseys” (not even the strange little song “Waves Over Valhalla (An Icelandic Odyssey Part III)”). That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sound Norwegian, because it undoubtedly does (if you listen to Norwegian electronic music, which this critic does). “Det Siste Landskap” is quite groovy, and definitely immersive. A full album of this kind of material from Cornelius Von Jackhelln and Lars Are Nedland would actually be an exciting prospect, although I suspect that the duo would get a slightly better reception if they chose not to use the Solefald name for such a thing.

“Norskdom” is a chant standing by itself. It sounds very much like the chanting heard in “Norrønaprogen,” but without a lyrics sheet, this critic cannot be sure if that is just because all metrical sung Norwegian sounds the same to his untrained ears or whether it really is all the same. The final two songs, however, clearly revisit many of the same musical themes, if not necessarily the same lyrics. Both “Norrøna: Ljodet Som Ljoma” and “Songen: Vargen” are listed as “Solefald VS. Sturmgeist & The Fall Of Rome,” and are odd electronically manipulated pieces. These two songs make up Side B of the LP/EP. They both have an extremely hazy, drugged feeling about them. If “Det Siste Landskap” feels like a dance track, Side B is that same party on some serious quaaludes. The electronic manipulation is much more reminiscent of Oranssi Pazuzu’s latest work than anything we’ve heard by Solefald before, and that sounds like a good thing but mostly it makes one want to listen to Valonielu again. These aren’t “bad” songs, but they feel incredibly simplistic after the strangeness of “Norrønaprogen.”

In the press release that went out with the promo for this EP, Nedland stated that “[this EP] sets the scene for the forthcoming album Kosmopolis Sud by being nothing like it. We’re Solefald after all!” They are indeed. Listening to Norrønasongen – Kosmopolis Nord has this critic ready and waiting for new music from Norway’s most experimental metal duo, so mission accomplished.

The post Solefald – Norrønasongen. Kosmopolis Review appeared first on Last Rites.

The album’s issues don’t so much stem from how Blood Tsunami offers nothing new – Nekromantheon could slaughter fields of cattle with a mere 10 seconds of their totally derivative thrash – it’s that they’re actually less good at doing what they do than many of their countrymen. Primary vocalist Pete Evil is your standard hoarse thrash yeller, coming across as a dry-throated Rob Dukes when he isn’t attempting something a tad harsher. (One of the album’s better tunes, “Grave Desecrator,” benefits from his raspier tones.) The riffs, whether they are taken from Slayer, early Exodus, or Discharge, come from great sources, but only occasionally offer the kind of brashness and personality necessary to elevate the material. Likewise with the soloing; often a good time, never standout. Faust is a merely serviceable thrash drummer, sounding like more of a session hand than a guy that lives and breathes the metal within, and rarely providing even the slightest of a wow factor. Even the production is dry and lacking in depth, as if the studio treatment had to get in on the effort to make this album universally third tier.

All of this being said, the album is far from terrible, and perhaps the best aspect of For Faen! is its compact design, coming in at a just over a half hour in length. This is not meant to sound dickish, the material offered up by Blood Tsunami – limited that it is – still finds a way to be violently impactful at this length. It is in this way that For Faen! remains an enjoyable album, but one can’t shake that nagging feeling that there is nothing Blood Tsunami can offer that another band cannot do better. It’s fun, but thrash needs to be more than just fun, it needs to be exciting in some way, to have some twisted personality, and those aspects just aren’t here. A certain group will certainly find plenty of appeal within, but overall this lacks that something special needed to get Blood Tsunami out of the Norwegian thrash basement.

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We all ruminate on death. From that first moment when the truth is swallowed, it can never be avoided again, before the doom finally consumes. Imagine if the band you formed not only focused on this grim, inevitable reality, but whose existence was literally precipitated by an untimely demise. This goes far beyond losing a crucial core member at the height of success — a Cliff Burton or Randy Rhoads — Windir was essentially Valfar’s solo project, whose two 21st-century releases were backed by the four present members of what would become Vreid. Strom’s rejoining his former band members has in recent years developed into surgical axe work, with 2011’s V heralding a more memorable, riff-driven, war-torn monster.

And it’s the very spectre of war which looms most heavily over these sons of Sogndal. Where Windir’s sense of heritage ventured clear back to the Battle of Fimreite, Vreid stays relatively current when drawing their pointillistic shades. They exist not between two worlds, but rather in a sort of “reverse Pangaea” of several diverse regional styles converging into a single dark art.

Vreid have done away with virtually all synthetic elements of the band (read: no keyboards) but such subtle touches creep through, like the robotic harmonization in the chorus about midway into “The Ramble”. We shouldn’t be surprised by now — they’ve been this way nearly ten years to the day, experimenting with a variety of styles, increasing dynamics… oh, which reminds me: the mix feels off in a few spots. Nothing too major, but for example, the last two minutes in “Way of the Serpent” would benefit from stronger presence from the lead guitar. Odd, considering it’s front-and-center in “The Devils Hand” which immediately follows. There, everything sounds so properly placed: the enthralling three-part harmonies; the explosive blast beats; the efficient arrangements.

Impressive thought I Krig was, my first exposure to the band yielded some solid songs, but not a full album of gems. This all changed with, Milorg, which fast became a 2009 favorite as a late-year dark horse. Both are clearly concept albums about the struggles and perseverance of Norwegians during WWII, and while V closely followed this tradition, it reflected life from a more philosophical standpoint. However, the cover art unifies all, specifically with the flag of Norway proudly displayed in three different two-tone incarnations.

By contrast, Welcome Farewell looks ostensibly stark, but has more depth and a broader color palette than ever before. Although the image appears confusing since: Death directs people from his porch; down a winding path they’re already on; through an open gate and into the woods; where a line somewhere forms; in which they wait for the Devil to read them something at a glowing tree. This is likely one of the many things reportedly inspired by Vreid’s local community — its environment, culture, history — which may be initially lost on outsiders, but the beauty of our growing global collective is accessibility above all else. Xenophobia be damned.

Vreid is more than melodeath, beyond black and roll, and forging a route to greatness. Welcome Farewell is honest and sincere, fun and adventurous, daring and disciplined… goddamnit. They’ve rarely been this catchy, yet the music still seems challenging, but not remotely a chore. If this is your last hike, it’s worth it.

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For those of you left standing, I applaud you and your willingness to experiment with something that addresses heavy metal with what some would consider a bit of an outsider’s approach. That, in a nutshell, is Altaar. According to my handy little press sheet, the band flashes “an avant-garde approach to attacking conventional doom” by mixing in sounds from “the classic psychedelic era.”

While I’d agree that this record does indeed flash elements of doom and psychedelia, it is a FAR cry from, say, something like [insert retro-doom band of your choice right’chere], because the overall sound also incorporates extensive use of adjectives such as *drone-y* and *noisy* into the formula. (That’s noisy, not nosy, so no, it doesn’t sound like the aural equivalent of your little old lady neighbor peeking out from behind the curtains of her front window.)

Here’s how things shake out…

“Tidi Kjem Aldri Att” (20:38) – I believe that roughly translates into “Did you just call me a hipster? Pistols at high noon, you twat.”

Both tracks on Altaar represent fairly contrasting moods. “Tidi Kjem Aldri Att” plods from the gate at a slow & woozy clip, with just enough of a dustiness in the pedal effects to give it that “dark Western” Earth – Hex mood. Drums, bass and cleanly strummed guitar schlepp cooly and repetitively for the majority of the trip, but it’s the smoothly blended specimens of miscellaneous noisiness, and the manner in which the center of the tune gradually builds that beautiful tension to a final Colt-blasting showdown at 13:10 that really sells the picture. By the end, one slinger stands the victor, with the last three minutes bitterly winding down alongside a creepy ambience and a repeating strike of a lone drum as the defeated cutthroat’s filthy lifeblood gradually pumps its final essence into the cold, unforgiving dirt. Or something along those lines, anyway.

“Dei Absolutte Krav Og Den Absolutte Nade” (14:13) – I believe that roughly translates into “Holy shit, take the water out of the survival pack, my XboX doesn’t fit.”

The other side of the coin pushes a decidedly contrary slant. There’s still a c-hair’s worth of dustiness when the guitars occasionally strum cleanly, but this cut’s comprehensive delivery feels like a slightly darker, noisier post-apocalyptic affair. “Gradual” is still the name of the game, but “Die Absolutte…” puts a more immediate emphasis on beating up ears with a turbulence that’s mostly driven by the album’s first offering of crudely shouted vocals around the 4-minute mark. (Think Castevet-ish vox? Post-harcore-ish? It’s honestly a bit outside of my typical wheelhouse.) And we also get a flash of genuine speediness around 7:15 before the tune eventually winds down with various bits of swirling noise during its closing few minutes.

Really a pretty cool album for those looking to test metal’s boundaries without falling completely outside of our cozy little confines. I’d say that terrifically bizarre cover artwork (courtesy of Sverre Malling) paints as good a picture of what’s in store as I could ever put into words: Just a couple of odd, self-flagellating priest-like dudes out on the town and taking in some art with their pal, a giant floating heart with streamers nailed all over itself. No big deal.

Here’s a teaser for cut #2 to help get things started:

The post Altaar – Altaar Review appeared first on Last Rites.

The touches of variety that God Seed offers up on I Begin work so brilliantly because they made sure to inject them into every facet of the music. Guitars whirl in tremolo action, flutter strum, machine gun fire, gallop, and chug. Keyboards range from quirky oddball effects and grandiose symphonic metal all the way to sounds of a Hammond B3 straight out of a Deep Purple album. The drums follow suit, blasting, rocking, driving, and generally setting the stage. Gaahl himself offers up a varied performance, screeching, singing, and whispering to fit the passage. And of course everything is crystal clear and perfectly balanced without offering an ounce of sheen that would betray God Seed’s death-by-icicle-to-the-eye-socket intent.

On one hand, this shows off the various talents of the members of God Seed, but on the other, more important one, it serves to make this album feel alive. Opener “Awake” moves from its hyper-blasting beginnings to proggy hooks and wacky keys straight from latter-day Emperor, all while building towards a raging finale. “Alt Liv” is a showcase for Ghaal’s preaching side, setting the stage with mid-tempo symphonic work before he delivers a determined chorus. “Hinstu Daga” lets him do a bit of crooning, “Aldrande Tre” brings the fucking guitar flurry, “Lit” offers what could be brooding blackened doom had it been slowed by about 40 BPM, all before “The Wound” kicks it up with its blend of Dissectionesque melody and catch-and-release riff violence.

It seems as if God Seed wanted to indulge all of their various musical ambitions but still stay true to what was expected of them. They have done just that and more. While purists (who live in their grandparents’ basements) may scream foul that this isn’t just Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam Pt. II, the rest of us can sit back and feast on the veritable bounties within. Thoroughly compelling, masterfully crafted, and strictly professional, I Begin lives up to the expectations without necessarily obeying them. Gaahl and King ov Hell could have just made a raw, single-minded, blistering black metal album – it likely would have kicked an army of ass – but instead they chose the more difficult path, and in doing so have reaped greater rewards.

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Nidingr spends as much time forcing punchy chugs down the listener’s throat as they do crafting swirling, intersecting tremolo lines, and that’s the beauty – they are as adept at penning accessible brutality as they are at ascending the fiery heights of Nightbringer. Slight dynamic touches – in the form of soft passages or the off-kilter riffing heard in “All Crowns Fall” – add variety, as do the occasional, ever-so-slight touches of theatricality. The latter can be heard in certain passages of “Vim Patior,” which feel just a symphonic element away from getting into Emperor (or, gasp, 90s Dimmu Borgir) territory. However, even in these brief moments when the knife is removed, there is little doubt about Nidingr’s murderous intent. There is nary a passive, merciful moment to be found.

The album’s frequent rhythmic shifts between swarming tremolo work and homicidal force mean that Nidingr must excel at transitions, and the use of phrase-ending “hooks” – such as the jagged up-picked dissonant chords that Deathspell Omega utilizes – are employed frequently and effectively. Transitions between songs are handled equally well. The softer outro of the title track directly gives way to the chaotic start of “All Crowns Fall,” and the somewhat reserved chugging at the end of “O Thou Empty God” is a perfect lead-in to the slithery beginning of the utterly insane(ly addictive) “The Balances,” creating a welcome amount of flow that is rarely heard in such a relentless style.

Full integration of a skilled rhythm section (bass as an actual moving part and as much blasting insanity as is required of the drums) adds to the fact that Greatest of Deceivers just feels complete. But even with all of the instrumental prowess on display here, the real star is vocalist Cpt. Estrella Grasa, whose tortured, emotive half-preaching delivery gives the album a boatload more depth than a standard screech job would. Combined with some of the more melodic moments, his work gives off a bit of a Code vibe, albeit without Kvohst’s frequent (and impeccable) singing. A guest appearance by Garm in highlight “The Worm is Crowned” is a doozy, creating a moment of such grandiose Arcturus glory that might actually come a bit early on the album, as the final three, perfectly fine songs feel a bit underwhelming in comparison to such a linchpin of a passage.

Greatest of Deceivers isn’t perfect – they rely on the DsO up-strummed riffs a mite too much, and it probably goes on a tad long – but any faults are largely inconsequential. This thing rips, in exactly the way that fans of ripping black metal like their black metal to rip. Riffs, vehement attitude, grandeur, and pure malevolent force define this beast, and just because Nidingr didn’t invent the game they play doesn’t mean they can’t compete with the big boys. By nature, Greatest of Deceivers won’t end up on as many best-of-2012 lists as more ambitious works, but being a critical darling doesn’t always equate to being a safe purchase. So feast, ye hungry blackened horde, on the malice of Nidingr.

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