11/14/22 Music Roundup

It’s been a weird week for music listening here, as I spent the first half in Victoria, listening to almost exclusively physical music, particularly vinyl, but we still got some pretty good cuts in here.

Nocturnal Effigy - The Moonlit Branches of Powder

This was a real standout from our visit to Victoria, really cool like gentle synth stuff that feels like you’re in the badlands at dusk, wandering under mesas and hoodoos. Manages to transcend the often goofy (if loveable) dungeon synth aesthetic.

Gas Chamber - Hemorraghing Light

Another Victoria pickup, I bought this album on vinyl at a record fair based on like 5 seconds of listening on my phone speaker, as well as the incredible art, and the fact it was put out through Iron Lung records. Iron Lung weren’t lying when they said they know what they like and what they don’t like, because this album is fucking incredible. Blending some weird, proggy bass and creative guitar riffs with that stop-start powerviolence fury had me making weird faces for the entirety of it’s duration. The 10 minute closer “Pigeon” is absolutely harrowing, not what I would call easy listening. Incredible record that I’m so glad to have stumbled across.

Pissgrave - Suicide Euphoria

This is admittedly not a new listen for me, but a very fond return, which is just as, if not more important than a first impression to me. One of the best things I ever did for my music listening was clearing out my entire “liked songs” playlist on Spotify, it’s forced me to return to so many albums I love that I had put on the proverbial shelf. This album is unreal, it is such a perfect synthesis of extreme metal in it’s own special way that I can’t help but smile when I hear that guitar tone or those vocals. I think it was Spencer Hazard of Full of Hell who called Pissgrave either his favourite, or the most exciting death metal band a few years ago, and they are absolutely on that short list. Combining the most hateful characteristics of war metal, death metal and some black metal into this compact and savage musical package, all set to the most in-your-face album art of any death metal band, period, makes you understand why this band is special. They aren’t exciting because they are pushing the boundaries in the way an Effluence is, but because they have synthesized extreme metal into a near perfect expression of itself, on it’s own terms. And for that, I will always respect and love this album as a work of art, it bows to absolutely no one, and positions itself as a genuinely unique vision.

Unyielding Love - Flesh of the Furnace

God damn, there’s nothing quite like hearing a band really elevate themselves and go from “huh that’s cool” to “holy shit this is great, like I will look back on this as a great album”. Unyielding Love released a nice little EP in 2016, as part of this crop of bands that were absolutely ripping off Full of Hell, but in a good way, like Knoll. That’s no knock on Knoll, Full of Hell is a good band to rip off, I’m pretty much always going to enjoy the formula of noise + grindcore + some other weird shit like a trumpet. Back to Unyielding Love though, their stuff was good, but I’d only listen to their EP in full like once or twice, it wasn’t going to become part of my main rotation. But this new album is just fucking spectacular. They were always sort of a black-grind band, but here they have shed the grind for full on, suffocating black metal. They remind me a bit of Portal at times, some Altar of Plagues (Unyielding Love are also Irish, more on them later) and maybe even some Aeviterne. Overall, it’s an impressively mature piece of black metal, complete with great songwriting, weighty production and some great song titles. Bowing Loams of Glass and Lot’s Wife fucking rule. Also, is Pyrrhic Sons the new failson? That joke sucked sorry.

Altar of Plagues - Mammal

I have been slowly and haphazardly, as is my wont, making my way through the Altar of Plagues discography over the past month or so, and I’m thoroughly enjoying myself. I first heard Altar of Plagues years ago, and was mostly hooked by how God Alone has like one of the best riffs ever written. Just listen to that thing fucking heave, it’s spectacular.

Anyways, I heard White Tomb a while ago and quite liked it, and have now found myself digging into more of the Cork Ireland band’s music. Mammal is their 3rd album, before their final opus Teethed Glory & Injury. This album is quite a different beast from the winding, halting and heaving Teethed, it’s much more straightforward in it’s structure, but is by no means rote. Whereas Glory & Injury feels like it stops and starts, this album feels like it sways, songs like Feather and Bone never feel rushed or frantic, they feel strangely serene and patient, despite the blistering pace of the guitars and the ebbing-and-flowing blast beats. It feels like you’re in a torrential downpour, but you can see perfectly, it’s hard to explain. This album, like much of Altar of Plagues, feels like a force of nature, and its really so wonderful to let it wash over you. If you listen to anything at all from this roundup, listen to this (or Nocturnal Effigy that’s fun too).

Thanks for checking this out, and maybe even listening! It’s really hard to find the right words to describe music when you have no background or interest in music theory, so its a fun challenge. Who knows what metaphors I’ll have to use next time.