Though the title paints a grim-enough picture, the actual contents of The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face, the debut from Lee Bartow’s Theologian project, use conventional metal misery as merely a springboard. The ends form the expected stew of claustrophobic suffering, but the means show Bartow to be a most cunning doom practitioner.
Ghost: “Con Clavi Con Dio” [audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Ghost_Con_Clavi_Con_Dio.mp3|titles=Ghost: “Con Clavi Con Dio”]
Sweden’s Ghost is a purposefully mysterious sextet propagating an overtly Satanic message. With a tongue-in-cheek press release making bold claims about subverting the minds of adolescents who have a “void in their life,” it’s tempting to dismiss Opus Eponymous as ironic kitsch. However, the songs themselves are wildly catchy and full of melodic twists in the school of King Diamond‘s 1980s compositions.
[audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/07-2-Then-The-3.mp3|titles=Bruce Lamont: “2 Then The 3”]
Having spent a decade as the voice and one-man horn section of post-metal outfit Yakuza, Bruce Lamont’s name has become synonymous with “metal plus saxophone,” an all-too-oversimplified yet all-too-useful shorthand description of that band’s output. But outside of his main group, Lamont has readily (and more frequently) contributed to a number of distinctly non-metal productions, resulting in a body of work that has little in common, sonically speaking, with his most commonly identified (and most actively self-identified) act.
With Feral Songs For The Epic Decline, Lamont’s first proper solo album, the elements that he has always brought to the table remain fully intact, yet never in a predictable way. Though the foreboding atmospherics persist, Lamont has foregone most conventions of common (and even uncommon) metal and assembled something closer to the spaced-out soundtrack to some kind of indescribable psychological nightmare: less physical aggression but considerably more mental warfare.
Since its inception, German post-metal collective The Ocean has relied on over-the-top lyrical ambition as much as straight-ahead musical progression. Earlier this year, the group began its long-form, anti-fundamentalism diatribe with Heliocentric. With that album’s counterpart, Anthropocentric, The Ocean brings its musings full circle, and brings a unique (if sometimes difficult) vision of metal back with it.
The album’s opening title track fires full-bore with pounding toms and a throat-shredding roar, but by the end of its nine minutes, the primal rage has yielded to a swaying, almost anthemic coda. The obvious comparison is to peers Isis or 3, but at its heart, the band more closely follows Iron Maiden — not just because the group doesn’t hesitate to peel back the layers mid-song, but also because it doesn’t hesitate to remind listeners that its members read books (Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to name only the three overtly referenced authors).
Initially formed as a thrash band in the ’80s in Colombia, Inquisition developed a buzz-saw, black-metal sound by the mid-’90s while simultaneously relocating to Washington. Its trademark became lightning-speed, grinding power chords and an atmosphere of ritualistic Satanism.
Since Into the Infernal Regions of the Ancient Cult in 1998, Inquisition has stuck to its sound with a Motörhead-like tenacity. Its newest effort, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm, is its strongest output since Magnificent Glorification of Lucifer in 2004.
Intronaut made its name in forward-thinking metal circles by understanding that pure metal moments hit harder by sandwiching them between other styles — in this case, passages that are closer to fusion or jazz. Rather than a guitar spotlight, the group reaches for a fretless bass solo; in lieu of a unison run, Intronaut deploys a spacey, percussive breakdown.
But whereas the group’s previous releases (especially Prehistoricisms in 2008) suggested a band poised squarely in art-metal territory, Valley Of Smoke shows the band moving simultaneously toward and away from modern metal. It’s moving toward in its increasingly overt nods to the group’s sonic peers (Neurosis, Isis, and, at times, Pelican), but away in its refusal to ever really stick to one thing at a time, resulting in a disc that’s not easily classifiable as metal, but not easily classifiable as anythingelse either.
When Goodfellow Records folded this year, Italian grindcore/black-metal quartet The Secret found itself momentarily without a label following a pair of raging, nihilism-fueled full-length albums. Those releases suggested (if not insisted) that the group had something new to bring to European metal’s increasingly crowded table.
In the wake of the former label’s dissolution (and the band’s countless lineup changes since), The Secret attempts to regain its footing on Solve Et Coagula, its first outing for Southern Lord and an album almost workmanlike in its sound, structure, and unwavering metal attack.
[audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/03.-The-Watchers-Monolith.mp3|titles=Agalloch – The Watcher’s Monolith]
Although Agalloch dons its album covers with images of winter and writes songs featuring tremolo-picked minor chords and shrieked vocals, the Portland quartet is best understood as a heavy progressive-rock band rather than a black-metal band.
Since the late 1990s, the group has released purposefully genre-blending music with a somber, melodic bent. Marrow of the Spirit, just the band’s fourth full-length album, must be compared to the work of black-metal-gone-experimental artists like Ulver and Enslaved, but a better reference point is the work of ’70s prog-rock bands like Comus. Songs are sprawling layers of riffs that meander between different themes and styles, touching on blast beats, acoustic breaks, and atmospheric post-rock passages.
[audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Atheist-06-Tortoise-the-Titan.mp3|titles=Atheist – Tortoise the Titan]
Atheist’s first two albums are landmarks of technical death metal. These recordings represented a visionary take on metal composition conceived by injecting jazz-fusion riffing into the more structurally integrated style of death metal. Though under-appreciated during their time, these albums — Piece of Time and Unquestionable Presence — have since become part of the extreme-metal canon.
[audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/06-Discovering-the-Enshrouded-Eye.mp3|titles=Sargeist – Discovering the Enshrouded Eye]
Finland’s Sargeist became orthodox black-metal torch-bearers with the release of the 2003 album Satanic Black Devotion. After missing the mark with its last full-length, the band has returned to form with Let the Devil In, another compelling creation of harmonically dense black metal.
The Rival Mob: “Hardcore for Hardcore” [audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/01-Hardcore-for-Hardcore.mp3|titles=The Rival Mob – Hardcore for Hardcore]
The Rival Mob has collected all sorts of praise with its approach to the New York hardcore sound of the late ’80s, and it doesn’t hurt that vocalist Brendan Radigan splits time playing drums in niche-loved Mind Eraser. Although everyone knows not to judge an album by its cover, the lush, conflict-laden painting adorning Hardcore for Hardcore, the band’s new six-song seven-inch, primes the listener adequately for what lies within.
In 2010, long-haired Swedish young-adult males are still releasing melody-infused death metal, and they’re still donning denim and puffy sneakers for their graveyard promo shots. In 2010, this music is still engaging, especially when it is executed as cleverly as Morbus Chron‘s debut seven-inch.
Detest Records has made a name for itself by releasing compelling vinyl offerings of death metal that very well could have been conceived in 1989. Morbus Chron does not buck this trend. Earlier this year, the band received a much-coveted shout-out from Fenriz of Darkthrone on his “Band of the Week” blog, and it also graced the pages of the Vice Magazine blog. Although its demo was slightly under-formed, this EP, though short, demonstrates a keen song-writing instinct.
Theologian: The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face (Crucial Blast, 11/9/10)
Ghost
