Tagged: Black Metal

Blaksmoke / Part 1: tiny packet of black metal energy


Blaksmoke, Part 1, Soulthief (2013)

Sometimes I wish most BM bands would deliver albums as tiny and packed full of zest as this one. At just over seven minutes, Blaksmoke‘s debut full-length deserves to be at least twice or even three times as long. Some folks might even wish for longer – there’s so much energy on this teeny-weeny record, it could sustain a much longer effort – but we could be pushing our luck. This is a raw recording of rock-out black metal, very punk in its production and in the furious energy it zings out in all directions. The percussion is wild and all over the shop and chainsaw guitars grind away in search of a victim to zoom over and cut up.

Each track seems a lot angrier and more abrasive than the previous track until everyone, musicians and listeners alike, can take no more. This isn’t to demean the first track, simply called “I”, which is a cacophonic racket of bashing drums and lawnmower guitar on speed. Deep vocals roar around the joint as if trying to gain a foothold on the racing music and finding none. Occasionally a rhythm develops but this is only temporary. The second track is a growling song of spiky string scrabble and evil demon groans. Like the first song, Track 2 ends quite abruptly – recording and production finesse obviously isn’t a big priority with Blaksmoke. Given that one of the Blaksmoke guys, Wikkid, recorded the music, produced the album, distributes it and has two solo projects (Alcutraz and Wikkid) to tend to as well, perhaps we should thank our lucky stars that he has time to issue product of a good consistent standard like this recording. The third track is more relaxed (well, at first anyway) and more death metal in its ambience and style though without the pummelling blast-beat rhythms of that genre. Past the halfway point, something spooks the two musicians and they go off on a bonkers chaotic tangent, drumsticks whacking furiously, strings shredding manically and vocals swept up in the storm. Wonderful!

This is a tiny pocket of roaring primitive BM and I wish - I dearly wish! – that there’s a lot more of it where it came from.

Contact: Wikkid, wikkidblackmetal@gmail.com


Official pack shot from http://depressiveillusions.com
Official pack shot from http://depressiveillusions.com







Contact: Depressive Illusions Records









Contact: Sepulchral Productions

The Last Winter: well, this could have been the winter to end all winters


Wintercult, The Last Winter, Ukraine, Urgrund Division, CD (2013)

Let’s hope that in naming their second album “The Last Winter”, this Siberian duo were only thinking of the winter that’s been and gone (2013 – 2014) and not the winter to end all winters. Some titles on the album don’t seem too hopeful about that. The music has a definite air of finality: a scourging blizzard guitar drone, backed by doomy percussion and accompanied by distant howling phantom voices, forms the backbone of Wintercult’s style.

The title track sets the scene for what’s to follow: squalling noisy tremolo guitar, moderately powerful drumming that in speed varies between slow and medium-fast and which drives the music onwards, and those eerie muffled vocals fighting to be heard through the guitar texture layers. The music tends to emphasise melody, a relaxed pace and a fairly solemn mood. There’s the odd episode or two of relative calm where a clear-toned guitar melody may play over and over again. “Taedium Vitae” introduces a rhythm with death metal blast-beat influences but otherwise isn’t much different from the preceding song and could almost be a continuation of it.

“Eternal Solitude” has some distinctive riffing and a wavering rhythm in parts so it stands out above the rest of the music but not by much. The singing becomes more anguished and despairing than it does on most other tracks. Most songs on the album tend towards repetition and don’t generate much tension or passion. The insubstantial and generally monotonous vocals may have something to do with the lacklustre mood of most tracks. The effect is that no matter how much the instrumental parts in the songs vary in their details, the voices seem to be repeating themselves across each and every track as though one song is being played in different versions. There is not much atmosphere on the album either and the mood seems so blank as to be unnoticeable.

As the album plods on steadily, it seems to lose some traction after the halfway point and listeners’ attention can start wavering. “Anabiosis” is a very long piece for what it does, given that it springs nothing that’s not previously been heard.

Eventually when all is said and done, and the wraith voices fall silent, the air around you feels no different than before you started playing the album. The music may have been good in parts and there were some good melodies in quieter sections. But you never felt completely immersed in whatever world Wintercult was striving to reach: the music was too monotonous, the vocals too limited in range and atmosphere was lacking as well. The entire album really does sound like one song repeated over and over in different variations. I’m beginning to wish this album really had been the winter to end all winters.

In recent months, I’ve come across a real treasure trove of Russian black metal bands – most of them either one-person bedroom depressive BM projects or post-BM acts with eclectic influences from around the globe - on Youtube; many of these bands are from right across the country including places like Cheboksary (Ural region), Ekaterinburg (western Siberia) and even Nizhnevartovsk (Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug). I don’t know much about Russia to be able to say what the abundance of such bands means – it could mean folks in some parts of the country really do feel bad about their circumstances or just that some young people have too much time on their hands during school and college breaks – and while the general standard ranges from abysmal to average and occasionally to astonishingly good, the popularity of the BM genre itself across the world’s largest country speaks well for its claim to be a global cultural presence.

Contact: Urgrund Division, urgrund.division@gmail.com

Wikkid’s The Intro: a movie-trailer to black metal psychedemonchaotica


Wikkid, The Intro, Soulthief Musick (2013)

This micro-album of five songs could be heard as one song of five parts that themselves might have been extracted from much longer tracks. Think of it as one continuous piece that could be equivalent to a movie trailer featuring the best scenes from an otherwise ordinary or mediocre flick. Even the album title suggests as much (err … not the “mediocre” aspect though). Of the five songs, only three can be said to be Wikkid songs, the other two coming from another project Blaksmoke which Wikkid main-man Wikkidiablo oversees with another musician.

Set to heavy pounding machine-gun rhythms, “Smokelessfire” is a strong opener with stuttery spider guitar noise-drone and wolf-like guttural vocals thrashing about in the background. This is followed by a slower and more tortured piece of howl and screech and bursts of squally guitar cloud in a song that may owe something to the infamous Swedish sadomasochistic duo Abruptum. “Torment” is another jerky stuttering attack-dog critter with echoing multi-voiced demonic gabbles and squealing high-pitched guitars. All three songs are fairly free-form (though the rhythms provide backbone for the guitar and vocal screams to hang from) and have a strong experimental feel. It’s a real pity that they’re extremely short and a couple of pieces could actually afford an extra couple of minutes each as they are to sound completely self-contained.

The second half of the demo is given over to tracks from Blaksmoke’s first album (which is shorter even than the recording under review) and these are more conventionally song-like, relative to the Wikkid tracks, in their structure. The drumming is dominant in both tracks and sets the pace for the guitars to follow. The vocals are not so prominent but exist as background menaces held on tight leashes.

Wikkid’s half of this recording is a varied and chaotic collection of very different though equally malevolent and barmy songs. The Blaksmoke tracks have a rock-out orientation with percussion going mushroom-cloud explosive and radioactive, powered by plenty of bashing of skins and cymbals. The production on all five tracks isn’t great but it does impart a raw quality. The atmosphere seems intimate as though we’re privy to a secret ritual, and dark at the same time.

Overall the recording promises heaps more of that enthusiastic and unpolished creative racket from where these songs came, though some listeners might feel a bit miffed that a couple of tracks from another project were snuck in to fill up the recording. Why not wait until there are more songs to bulk up a Wikkid and Wikkid-only album?

Contact: Wikkid, wikkidblackmetal@gmail.com








Contact: Wikkid, wikkidblackmetal@gmail.com








Contact: Northern Silence Productions

Verwüstung: a work of depressed black metal / ambient devastation


Moloch, Verwüstung, Acephale Winter Productions, cassette AWP011 (2014)

For sheer consistency and abundance, very few bands can beat this Ukrainian one-man black metal ambient act who has released at least ninety recordings including splits and boxed sets in a ten-year period. This is the twelfth full-length album from Moloch and the second (and presumably not the last, not by a long shot!) recording for 2014. Bookended by two all-instrumental brooding and sinister ambient drift tracks, the album is a harsh and intense beast with grim, ragged BM vocals, an aggressive sound, pounding drum-beats and an atmosphere of anguish and hopelessness.

“Blutmond” leads the way with a tight if chaotic presentation: the vocals are screechy and running amok while drums gallop and chainsaw guitars churn away. The feeling is desperate, close to hysteria. “Spiritueller Selbstmord” seems a bit more settled, a little less chaotic but vocalist Sergiy howls with the desperation of one who knows he is damned forever. The song has a tragic air close to haunting majesty. “Negativitat” is a solid track, alternating between fast and medium-paced, with a droning low-end guitar, a sense of extreme despair and some excellent drumming that mixes up its beats and rolls.

The next three songs are of equal length (just over 4 minutes) and the Burzum (“Filosofem”-era) influence is apparent in the thrumming tremolo guitar textures and rolling rhythms on a couple of these. The singing is as heart-rending as ever and Sergiy totters on the edge of hammy over-acting. The second of these songs is almost comic in its increasing vocal loopiness as the pain and intensity escalate.

The title track is a completely different beast altogether: whereas previous songs were tight and well-composed, “Verwustung” is unstructured and holds together loosely. It is quiet and restrained where the rest of the album was noisy and verging on excess. Experimentalism with sound and space replaces raging music. The piano sound is very clear and has a stark uncompromising sound.

After churning out 90 – 100 recordings, you might think Sergiy must have overworked himself with little left to give but this album is a raw and intensely emotional creature, almost with a mind of its own. The ambient tracks are at a far extreme from the rest of the album and provide an insight into Moloch’s musical range and compositional skills. The songs slump a bit after the halfway mark with too much screechy singing from Sergiy’s shredded tonsils. The desperate mood throughout the album seems sincere and the album holds together as a unit in spite of the musical contrasts. The production may not be the best (although listening to the album on cassette with its limitations isn’t ideal) but most instruments can be heard clearly and the vocalist’s pain and desolation are very keenly felt by listeners.

Anyone who has yet to encounter the tower of releases made by Moloch would do well to start with this album and work backwards through his 90 or so recordings if you need something to keep you off the streets.

Contact: Acephale Winter Productions

Depressive Black Metal Plague: abandon hope, all who follow Moloch

Moloch, Depressive Black Metal Plague, Acephale Winter Productions, cassette AWP005 (2013)

Signing off at less than 20 minutes in length, this EP could easily be missed in a body of work totalling well over 90 releases. The very stark black-and-white packaging with its neo-primitive minimal style gives some indication of the raw, abrasive, no-nonsense music residing within. And this really is raw depressive black metal, very slack and disheartening music with a dirge-like feel, stumbling percussion and a general air of apathy . So apathetic is it that the Moloch man couldn’t be bothered to give the four tracks on offer proper titles so they’re just called “Plague I” all the way to “Plague IV” – well, at least he cared enough to use Roman numerals from 1 to 4.

First track lumbers by with torpid drumming and squally noise guitar, over which a voice harangues away in Ukrainian or Russian. The song becomes buzzier as it progresses and the atmosphere becomes delirious before it all fades away. Track 2 has an even more distorted and harsh texture and the song’s background ambience is dark and menacing. The singing is more anguished and melodramatic. The drums seem to be buried deep in a shaft somewhere as the cymbals are only just audible and the beat of the bass drum is probably the only other part of the percussion we can hear. Extremely grim and with a sound that rips paint off walls in long strips, this song could rob listeners of the will to endure. Carry on we do though with Track 3, piling on the distress with wailing and begging against a background of droning, churning guitar and drums that drunkenly veer all over the joint.

The final track seems a more streamlined and free-form piece with gritty droning guitar churning away and the drums following their own piper in contrast to the steady drone feast. Everything goes along without much change until it all deflates and dies away.

The atmosphere on this brief recording is very draining, almost vampiric: as soon as the first bars of “Plague I” start, you feel unmotivated to do anything other than just lying flat on your face while the EP plays. The singing is quite impressive in its desperation and lack of hope though in the second and third tracks it veers dangerously close to melodramatic excess. The guitars are limited to a constant raw ‘n’ sore bleeding noise drone in all tracks, allowing the drums to wander where they will: this gives the music a very loose, rough-hewn improvisatory style. Any minute now the music might soar off on a delirious tangent of hypnotic immersive psychedelic black metal mayhem – I sort of hoped it would. Above all though is the dejected and hopeless emotion that hangs over the entire recording, a feeling that life is so bad and so painful, it just isn’t worth living any more.

Contact: Acephale Winter Productions

Heavier Than Air

Drive My Temple Car

Got the fourth album by Queen Elephantine, a distinctive metal band who are situated at the “experimental” end of the genre, but working hard to martial their forces and weave a potent doomy brew from their massed guitars and two drumkits, while still retaining the iron grip of sturdy “minimalism” – in so far as that term can apply to rock. The band originally formed in Hong Kong in 2006, but only the guitarist Indrayudh Shome remains from that first line-up, and the band now reside in Providence, suggesting that the band now comprises a mix of Asian and American doomsters. Scarab (HEART & CROSSBONE HCB 047) contains four lengthy and lumbering cuts, all of them pushed along by drumbeats as hard as concrete, and where much effort and sweat is expended on summoning up a vague form of “tribal-ceremonial” vibe while still keeping all four of the elephant’s feet planted on the grim and doomoid terrain; it’s as though the religious procession and all its priests and pilgrims were being slowly dragged down into a deep black marsh, to the accompaniment of hammered gongs and the rich scent of incense. If that sounds depressing, remember that they died willingly, for a cause they believed in. Queen Elephantine’s group sound isn’t actually as ponderous as I make it appear; none of that excessive amplification and distorted guitars malarkey for them, thanks very much, and all their notes are uttered with a deathly, minimal precision, much like a slowed-down and less uptight version of Om. If this team were archers, then you’d better be wearing body armour. The presence of the tanpura (played here by Srinivas Reddy) certainly adds an additional exotic / psychedelic flavour to the general unhinged drone, while an uncredited vocalist adds a harrowing plaint from his perturbed throatal zones, paying scant regard to matching the tune or rhythm, just as long as the haunted tone is in the correct area. It’s also mightily impressive how the band maintains their murderously slow processional pace throughout, even in the teeth of pain and suffering; fans of interminable torture-filth like Khanate are advised to check in, and prepare for an endless ride on the Ratha Yatra temple car (or juggernaut, as some will have it). The quasi-mystical cover artworks are by Adrian Dexter. From 01 July 2013.

Fear and Loathing in Stockholm

In the same envelope, we gots a reissue of I, Guilt Bearer (HCB 046), a 2012 album by the Swedish black-sludge death metal combo This Gift Is A Curse; it’s a joint release with Discouraged Records (MMICD19), Black Wave (BWP003), and Ecocentric (E.R. #185), and includes four bonus tracks taken from the band’s self-titled EP. This Stockholm four-piece specialise in serving up large gobbets of hatred and abomination, flailing wildly as they scream out their extreme alienation, disaffection, and mean-spirited contempt for the world and all that’s in it. Even the label (which has a deep love of unlistenable, obnoxious grindcore) admits it’s a pretty “punishing” listen, while revelling in its psychotic qualities, and while most of that pathological evil stems from the constantly-hysterical screams of singer Jonas, the guitarist Patrik supplies a good deal of musical horror and alarm from his pitch-black instrument, veering wildly from full-on paranoia to terror-stricken claustrophobia. You get the feeling he could start a panic attack just by walking into a music shop to buy a new set of strings. I’ve no problem with confronting all of these wild negative emotions running around the room like red and green speed demons, but I still find this album a bit of a monotonous listen; every track is tuned to the same root note, pretty much played at the same speed, and the dynamic range throughout is extremely – erm – limited. It seems churlish to complain on these grounds though, as this is probably largely the point, and I’d imagine that great catharsis awaits any listener with the fortitude to endure to the end of this “hell ride through the disparate sicknesses of mankind”. Cover is adorned with various ritual Satanic imagery, involving bloodshed, flesh piercing, etc. in a forest at twilight. From 01 July 2013.

Godzilla vs The Kremlin

While still partial to the taste of excessive guitars and drumming, I turned with some delight to the Moweton mini-album Guitaroid Vs Megadrumster (INTONEMA int007). This duo, charmingly named as FX’d Ibby R-ock G-uitar and Trashy Soft, manage to squeeze 26 ultra-short tracks onto their 3-inch CD, and perform a strange species of mega-fast experimental hardcore mathrock, tempering the overall mayhem with unexpected jazzy major seventh chords, funky riffs, and avant-garde electronic noise. It defies rational sense how they manage to get away with violating so many musical taboos in such a small space, but they pull it off with gusto and zeal. The listening experience alternates between having six-inch nails hammered into the forehead at great speed, and being force-fed a series of small energy pills about the size of Smarties. A vitamin-enriched painfest it be. Moweton illustrate their work with one of the naffest and trashiest sci-fi disaster movie airbrushed visuals ever created, but don’t let this prevent you from investigating their insanely hyped-up music. This record sent from Russia is packaged together with…

Tickling Valmiera, performed by Astma featuring Edgars Rubenis. Just one track on here, shy of eight minutes in length, performed by the wonderful Alexei Borisov and Olga Nosova, joined by said Rubenis. This strange growling murk, enlivened with multiple swarms of electric bees, was made using guitars, bass, percussion, effects and electronics, and it inhabits a curious zone – a zig-zagging gaseous stormcloud of musical noise, throwing out strange bolts and shimmering like a vast, inedible fruit jelly. Apparently it’s an edited fragment from a concert the trio performed in Latvia in 2011. Why haven’t we got the whole gig? Maybe it was deemed to dangerous for human consumption. Now that I look at the cover drawing by Erik Shutov, I have to admit that his perceptive pen has come very close to illustrating the exact nature of the spiky abrasive sound herein. Very good. From 01 July 2013.