Q3 Metal Roundup!
Six very different varieties of heavy
Before we begin: Two fantastic reviews of In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor have just been published.
George Grella, a writer whose work I know a little (I quoted him in the book, and I have read and can recommend his 33 1/3 book on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew) wrote a really nice piece for the Brooklyn Rail; here’s the link.
Jack Kenny (a writer I don’t know) posted an equally favorable review on AllAboutJazz. Here’s that link.
The book is available now; get it from Amazon or direct from the publisher.
As I explained when I did one of these six months ago, I spend a lot more time listening to jazz than metal, but my heart continues to pump out blast beats and double-kick-drum thunder. So every once in a while, I like to catch up with the genre that’s kept my head banging since I was 11 years old. And 2024 has been a very strong year for metal. (Read my writeup on the latest High On Fire album, if you haven’t.) Here are six records — one more than in the Q1 roundup! — that have been kicking my ass good and hard the last few months.
I haven’t thought about French trio Aluk Todolo in years. Back in 2012, I reviewed their third full-length, Occult Rock, for The Wire, after which guitarist Shantidas Reidacker contacted me and we conducted an email interview, which you can read here. Their new album LUX is their first in eight years, following 2016’s Voix. Their music, as always, is entirely instrumental and blends black metal, noise-rock and psychedelia into a swirling, trance-inducing sound unlike anything else. Drummer Antoine Hadjioannou lays down rumbling, thunderous rhythm beds like Can’s Jaki Liebezeit attempting D-beat hardcore, as Reidacker and bassist Matthieu Canaguier journey to the outer fringes of space and deep into the earth’s core at once. If you love the cosmic stoner rock of Slift and the brain-scraping psychedelic improvisations of Fushitsusha, you’re ready for the next stage, which is Aluk Todolo.
When was the last time you heard a metal album open with a drum solo? When was the last time you heard a metal band with such a light, almost dare I say it jazzy snare drum sound? Demiser are from South Carolina, and their label describes their sound as blackened thrash, but this is speed metal in the grand and glorious ’80s tradition. The guitars shred and soar, the drums are fast and furious, the bass is…in there somewhere, I’m sure, and the vocals are hoarse and manic. There are a bunch of songs about Satan and destroying Christianity, but it all seems to be done with a wink, an impression strengthened by the fact that there’s also a song about driving real fast, and at least one about their dicks. I’d put these guys right in the sweet spot between Goatwhore and Demiricous (who I wrote about here in 2022). As I said of Demiricous, Demiser make music for doing donuts in high school parking lots at two AM, screaming “Hail Satan” out the window.
Bassist Asahito Nanjo has been one of the most prolific musicians on the Japanese underground rock scene since the late ’70s. In the 1990s, he was a member of a number of incredible, mind-destroying bands including High Rise, Musica Transonic, and Mainliner. All three of these groups pumped out ultra-distorted garage rock in a post-Stooges/Mudhoney style, though Mainliner in particular were given to long, long jams, letting guitarist Kawabata Makoto solo himself into another dimension. High Rise, who existed from the late ’80s to the early 2000s, were a more disciplined outfit; their songs were mostly in the three- to five-minute range, but still had the power to lay waste to the listener’s psyche, mostly because they played at extraordinary volume and with speaker-shredding levels of distortion. Disturbance Trip is 64 minutes of previously unreleased live action from 1992, featuring versions of HR classics like “Induced Depression”, “Psychedelic Speed Freaks”, “Sadducees Faith”, and “Pop Sicle” that’ll tear your face off and throw it in your lap.
Ingurgitating Oblivion are a German duo (guitarist Norbert Müller, who also produces, and guitarist/vocalist Florian Engelke) who haven’t released an album since 2017’s Vision Wallows In Symphonies Of Light. Their new release, Ontology Of Nought, is the kind of record you need to listen to at least once a day for about a week to even start developing a solid memory for all the elements and tiny musical occurrences (“events” feels like too big a word) stuffed into its five epic tracks. (The shortest is 10:24, the longest 18:47.) Vocals are spoken and sung, in French and English, cleanly and in hoarse death growls reminiscent of Brutal Truth’s Kevin Sharp; there are strings, piano, flutes, and vibraphone, and long passages of progressive rock guitar indulgence with jazzy bass burbling in the middle of the mix. This is technical death metal that nods to Pink Floyd and Opeth, and feels symphonic but dissonant at the same time, like if Dimmu Borgir decided to become Ulcerate. It’s a lot.
Wolfbrigade are a Swedish hardcore act who started out as Wolfpack, but changed their name to avoid association with a neo-Nazi prison gang. Since 2001, they’ve released eight albums, including three — 2012’s Damned, 2017’s Run With The Hunted, and 2019’s The Enemy: Reality — on Southern Lord. Their latest, Life Knife Death, is on Metal Blade, and it sounds exactly like their entire back catalog. Which is exactly what you want from a band like this. Wolfbrigade play D-beat hardcore with all the stylistic trademarks: minimalist drumming; grinding, distorted guitar and bass; and harsh, furiously declamatory vocals. But they add a few flourishes drawn from metal and noise-rock, so if you’re a fan of Entombed, latter-day Motörhead, or even Unsane, you’ll find yourself headbanging and fist-pumping with a grin.
Are Spain’s Wormed the Autechre of death metal? Like that English electronic duo, they seem to make music based on an inscrutable system that frequently yields results that sound like a room full of machines entertaining themselves based on an utterly alien aesthetic. And yet, like Autechre, they’re still somehow grounded, still human on some level. When you listen carefully to Autechre, you can hear elements of ’80s electro, snippets of field recordings, or ultra-distorted voices wriggling their way out of the dense, crunching mix. And Wormed are at their core a slam metal band, cranking out dissonant, sliced-sheet-metal riffs over frantic blast beats and the occasional sub-bass explosion, as their vocalist alternates between squealing like a pig and gurgling like a broken toilet. But it’s the weirdness that launches them out of the slavering horde and straight into space. These songs are always stopping and starting, suddenly lurching sideways, and it’s hard to know why; the drummer has a light, almost jazzy touch and an improvisatory flair; and the juxtaposition of their abstruse astrophysics-derived song titles and the barbaric vocals make me picture a panicked caveman running around an abandoned spaceship.
As you have no doubt noticed, all of these albums are available on Bandcamp. And since tomorrow is Bandcamp Friday, the day on which the site forgoes its usual cut and passes all sales revenue directly to artists and labels, it’s a perfect time to grab up whichever ones appeal to you.
And if you want to stop by burningambulancemusic.bandcamp.com and leorecords.bandcamp.com, where we have tons of new releases available (see here for details), that would be greatly appreciated, too.
That’s it for now. See you next week!
That Wormed album is another monster. IO’s new album almost incomprehensible, especially initially. Like someone tried to shove a German opera inside a Gorguts song and the thing exploded. More, please.
Among other outstanding new albums are those from Pyrrhon, Scarcity, Skelethal, and Noxis.
That new Ulcerate album, released back in June, is magnificent as well.