Carcass & Deafheaven Live At Fete Music Hall in Providence, RI

Murdoc at Fete Music Hall

Murdoc at Fete Music Hall

Murdoc at Fete Music Hall

Murdoc at Fete Music Hall

Murdoc at Fete Music Hall

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Like all good mad scientists, Virginia's Torvus isn't afraid to mix a few unstable elements in search of a truly potent elixir. Their sophomore full-length The Innate Disease infuses torturous death-tinged doom with the inspired melodicism of traditional doom: two strains often left uncombined. But here together in the roiling climate Torvus provides, they yield a novel approach to the slower side of extreme metal that's still oogh-worthy but, quite often, fucking jams to boot. As proof positive, we're streaming the entire album in full ahead of its Friday release.

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The Innate Disease is, to be sure, a hefty album, clocking in at just over an hour. It's not a slog, though—it's more like a big stew that you get to savor for a long time, marinated with numerous influences and disciplines and brimming with tasty riffs to chew on all the way through. Entirely self-produced and self-recorded, there's a live and unrefined sound to this: this rawness especially shines on "Ice," which is probably the best example of the 'fucking jams' aspect of the record: the gnarly, super-slow death here bounces and grooves with unholy furor. Though at times I think beefed-up production could really sharpen things up, if I could hear every note of "Ice" with crystal-clear precision, there's no way I'd feel so strongly about kicking over my coffee table. Highlighting the power of their genre cocktail, my personal favorite track "Somber Dreams" opens with a blackened melodic riff, blastbeat and all, that somehow trades off with scornful doom passages and even some chord progressions backed by clean guitar to open up the structure. It wraps up its runtime with a rejuvenating return of that life-giving blastbeat, elevating heart rates and refocusing just in time for the thoroughly nasty follow-up track "Boda Seya." Longest track "Pallor Eyes" takes a similar tack, hiding fun twists and frills within a seemingly massive chunk of abhorrent filth: in several cases, a sudden bridge with clean guitar and choral-like vocals takes the mood from a cavernous stomp to proggy Cathedral-style doom. Even more strangely, the album closer "Worldly Relief" brings in a lead piano line, and I'll be damned if it doesn't kill. Delight blossoms within disgust, and we are all the more sicker for it. The Innate Disease serves as a checkpoint of sorts for the band: several songs they'd demoed earlier return here, reworked into an ultimate form, along with some tracks that also made it onto an earlier split. This is essentially the definitive Torvus sound—for now. Darkened, grievous, and exultant, this massive offering only stokes my anticipation for what could come next. From the band:

The Innate Disease is our second full length album, solidifying the three piece lineup that has been the core of the band since 2018. Torvus started with Bill & Joey meeting early on in high school and deciding to start a band that paid homage to their favorite Death & Doom Metal groups from the 80s-90s. After various lineup changes, Zak was eventually recruited as lead vocalist, before switching to bass & backing vocals. With this lineup, we started working on the material that would become 'The Innate Disease.' Delayed by the pandemic, we started recording the album in October 2020 and spent the following months mixing and mastering. The album was recorded and produced entirely by the band in Arlington, VA. All photography was handled by Albert Alisuag of Et Mors, and the album cover was designed by Zak.

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The Innate Disease will be self-released by the band on February 27th via their Bandcamp page.

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In a world where youth—and perhaps more crucially, the idea of youth—has been fully commodified and monetized, the notion of dangerous, subversive rock and roll seems downright quaint. Nobody's parents are banning rock albums from the house; especially not when Johnny's YouTube reaction videos are paying the mortgage. Still, some of that original spirit continues to seep down through the generations, curdling the stale beer and dirt weed on the floors of dank practice spaces the world over. It burns a little brighter in Bloomington IN, the little big town that Wenches call home. See for yourself with our premiere:

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An amalgam of local punk and metal acts, Wenches live in the same fun, loud, obnoxious sonic neighborhood as Lecherous Gaze and Nashville Pussy. Their full-length debut, Effin' Gnarly, is exactly that: all rough edges, go-for-broke pacing, and little regard for convention. Opener "Mama, Wake Up" kicks the door in with a Nugent-worthy riff and foot stomping groove before scaling back to a "Shout!"-style buildup to rouse the titular mama from a drunken stupor on the floor. "Truck Stop Tank Top" and "Bad Man" deliver a few quick shots of Motor City madness straight from the MC5 Rock Academy, which leads to a pitch-perfect cover of AC/DC's "What's Next To The Moon". It would be easy for Effin' Gnarly to lose steam after a breakneck side A, but the energy level never dips. The back half of the album includes the manic "Break Up To Make Up" and monster groove of "Slip Slidin'", and lets off the gas just a tad on closing track "100,000 Years" if only to show off a Don Brewer-style drum solo and confirm that yes, Wenches has the talent to back up the passion. With James Plotkin (Pelican, Earth, ISIS [the band]) on mastering duties, the album is crystal clear without sacrificing the inherent grit a band like this needs. Because Wenches go where a lot of rock bands don't anymore: into the streets, smashing bottles, irreverent and free. Check out an interview with James (vocals) and Jarod (guitar) below.

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The songs on this album crackles with live energy. How was Effin' Gnarly recorded? James: I'm stoked to hear you say that since we did actually record the skeletal tracks ‘live' in the studio at Russian. The engineer, Mike Bridavsky, is very good at what he does and I've worked with him numerous times. His studio is one of the best in the Midwest and I'm so happy we recorded all of the instruments there. The way the band was set up still allowed for everyone to vibe off of each other and I thought they totally ripped it. I ended up recording the vocals at my studio because I can be a bit meticulous about how I sound. Of course, also having James Plotkin master the whole thing was just the icing on the cake, so to speak. I would never consider going to anyone else. Is "What's Next To The Moon" a collective AC/DC favorite, or was there other reasons you wanted to cover it? James: When Jarod and I started the band we talked about how we could mix in the influences we had from the punk and hardcore records we loved like Antioch Arrow and Portraits of Past with bands like ZZ Top and really early AC/DC. I think we knew right away that we wanted to cover a Bon Scott-era song and I think we picked 3 songs to choose from and the whole band collectively settled on What's Next To The Moon. Those Bon Scott albums are definitely some of the greatest rock n' roll records to have ever existed. Jarod: That song is sick, why wouldn't we cover it? There is a lot of the old-school upper Midwest/Detroit music scene in Wenches' sound. What bands do you consider influences, and who currently would you think of as peers? James: The motor city sound is and has always been an inspiration to me. Of course, The Stooges and MC5 go without saying, but for me it's actually Motown, aka Hitsville, USA. I'm a huge fan of Motown records and soul artists from Detroit like Jackie Wilson and Stevie Wonder. When we started I wanted WENCHES to have that gritty soulful rock n' roll blues sound with a punk and metal twist, if you know what I mean. Jarod: If I were to name some principal northern Midwest influences they would be Death, The Gories, Negative Approach, Sam Cooke, Thoughts of Ionesco, Stooges, MC5, Prime Movers, Dead Boys (Cleveland), and Bob Seger. I hate to say it, but even The Nuge has some killer riffs, though I'm not a huge fan of him or his music overall – just his guitar playing. Aside from musical influences though, I'd say the riffs are more conjured from the same thing those bands were influenced by. Being from Fort Wayne Indiana, a northern rust belt factory city, I think it's just something that feels natural. The upper Midwest is full of poor blue collar families with overworked pissed off dads and tough mothers that raise their kids a little rough and gritty. Many old generations migrated from Appalachia, and have backgrounds in bluegrass, blues, and gospel and then passed that along to their kids. Really, I just want to create music that makes my deadbeat father roll over in his grave. Who is "Break Up To Make Up" about? James: That song isn't really about one person in particular. It's about all of the collective exes that play "mind games" that most of us have been familiar with at some point in our lives, I'm sure. You know how early in the relationship you get into arguments and then the making up part can be so romantic and fun, right? Well, what if that becomes all you have and the real attraction just revolves around that twisted ritual that keeps you together? That's not too healthy and eventually somebody is just gonna snap and end it. The freak out part of the song in the middle with all of the voices is that moment of losing it just before snapping. It's a really fun song to play live. Though I'm sure the crowd thinks I seem a bit crazed out which, I guess I am. How is Wenches managing the pandemic, and what are the band's plans once it has passed? James: We are sitting tight for the most part and being as patient as we can. We're trying to get everything lined up to hit it hard as soon as we can get back together. We can't wait to play as many shows as possible and write some new music. The time away has definitely been trying but also inspiring and we are itching to reunite so we can effin' rock again!

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Effin' Gnarly releases February 26th, 2021 via Master Kontrol Audio.

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There's a lesson to be learned when understanding music as creator's art versus professional's product. Even though both angles coexist with some degree of harmony, you can strip everything away (PR blurbs, label marketing, even the cover art) except the music and, well, still have the music. And that's what we are here for, no? Yes. And while services like Bandcamp have helped level the playing field between "one-man DIY extreme metal project" and full bands with far more structure and support, we still mentally distinguish "signed vs. unsigned" or "home studio vs. real studio." I am not here to tell you this distinction is bullshit, but that we cannot ever take for granted an important fact: even with absolutely zero outside support or structure, perhaps even without listeners, heavy metal will continue existing. It's because the artist creates not for you, but for themselves, ultimately. This is literally the beating heart of why I love exploring for new music, especially heavy metal which is already DIY in ethos even when it's not always in practice -- all told, few things in life come with this level of genuineness or purity. I've felt this way about Tampa-based deathgrind project Estuarine ever since stumbling upon their Bandcamp page a few years back. Those days, project mastermind Hydrus was penning sprawling deathgrind epics (over ten minutes long per song sometimes) with distinctive "creatively loose" guitar riffage and absolutely bonkers drum programming -- the contrast here with the subgenre's lack of attention span was stark, as these songs required quite a bit, and paid off in spades for it. Now Hydrus is back, and as gnarly as ever, with a huge change: all the songs on their upcoming album "Nyarlathotep" (out next month) feel like spastic reverberations from the prior, lengthier work, almost like accelerated feverdreams from an already all-encompassing experience. The album indeed comprises a selection of these explosive and technical forays into deathgrind, still avant-garde but less obviously so. It's almost over before it begins, and that feels like the deathgrind way. Estuarine has super-elevated their percussive and complex riffing style, opting for one-two punches now instead of playing the long game, which translates into an absolutely infectious listen. It's amazing to see projects like these ever-shifting as they discover not only new sounds but new ways of manifesting their vision -- here, it feels like Hydrus has discovered the bare mechanics of their talent and placed it on display as context for both the past and future of this project. Hear (and see) all this for yourself with a new single and playthrough video below.

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https://youtu.be/Ej2m_8__-yo

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Watch other Estuarine videos here, here, and here. Nyarlathotep will release independently on March 19th, 2021 via the band's Bandcamp page.

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Moving forward as a musical entity doesn't always mean growing more complex, and it doesn't always mean adding on. Sometimes, as is the case with Swiss atmospheric black metal group Profond Barathre, the only way to go is down: strip your sound down to the essentials and, in that simplicity, find a new focus. After nine years, they're back with a new album that shows how subtraction can ultimately lead to a greater whole: Tinnitus is an austere, captivating journey that crashes down from the stars into fertile earth. Take that trip now with our full-album premiere.

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https://youtu.be/nfvaOK1YRzc

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There's no vocals and synths to be found here, just the resolute necessities of guitar, drums, and bass. On their previous albums, such as Snaar, those extra elements bolstered the band's atmospheric nature, but what remains has gained renewed emphasis that more than compensates. The bass, particularly, plays a huge role in the album's sound, cooperatively driving the melodies with guitar. More bass in black metal is always a good thing, I maintain. How Profond Barathre approaches the field of atmospheric black metal with a limited toolset here is refreshing. It's simple, perhaps, but not minimalist: tracks like "Spiritus" have colossal walls of sound where interweaving motifs are backed by drumming that focuses on emphasizing meta-rhythm versus sheer power. The tremolo riffs, which can certainly border on staleness in some implementations, are given a dynamic cadence through how the rhythm section interprets them. Every note and beat here matters, and nothing is buried. Could a more varied, vocal-backed sound have worked here? Perhaps, but Tinnitus is an awe-inspiring work on its own that needs no additional touches. It's no-frills in a genre space that often finds itself bogged down in complexities and needless layers. Below, find the band's thoughts on the album and each track.

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About the album: "Tinnitus" has been conceived just after we wrote "Quod Erat Faciendum" with Euclidean. This record was intentionally theatrical, especially on the vocal arrangements. I personally took care of the concept and racked my brain over it. With "Tinnitus", we wanted to create something different, a lot humbler in its conception and also more focused on the instruments themselves. You can always try to wrap your music in the most etheric concept, and adorn it with devilish incantations. If you do it well, it will certainly benefit your project. For our part, we had the urge just to listen to the few instruments we were playing, and not to drown anything in an ocean of tracks, as we did before. We wanted to focus exclusively on their sound, and capture it as it is: natural and powerful at the same time. We recorded the album by ourselves, in our rehearsal room, with actually quite simple gear. And the work that Raphaël Bovey (MyRoom Studio, Lausanne) made on the mix and the mastering is staggering, at least in my opinion. These are the reasons why we reawakened a long-time sleeping project. Profond Barathre never meant to be something else than the unfiltered musical expression of our innermost being. In that perspective, it suited our purpose better than Euclidean. At the time we wrote it, we were harassed by the tinnitus, to such an extent that one of us had to definitively stop playing. The time had come for us to record something simultaneously mature and unostentatious. So that’s how I would define this album: a modest farewell to the scene we have been active in for so long. If it is definitely over and done? A few words about the songs: §1 – Stella: The first of all beings is an infinite brightness. Unlocated and still everywhere. The Bishop of Lincoln was right. Adam and Eva are for the fool. The supernatural light is the true Eden, and the origin of all things. Matter and Heat are nothing but offspring of a metaphysical luster. The thousand Seraphs are united in existence. Endlessly moving but fixed at same time. Lightening the void. The cauldron of all essence. §2 – Spiritus: A pure substance emanates from the first element. Yes, dear Ḥasan, it is true: the eyes do not see. But the brain does not see either. Only the spirit is the real and immeasurable vision. Only the unworldly can stare at the divine light. The perfect self-contemplating existence does not know any darkness. It is perpetually illuminated by the stellar glow. There could have been hope for mankind. §3 – Anima: Why does the primary unity have to be shattered? The spirit’s radiance was too strong not to burst. Two entities were born from the incorporeal quintessence. The first is beset by obsequiousness, the second is beset by pride. They do not have any desire though; they do not know concupiscence or lust. They never rest. They do not need words to speak. But the former is too weak not to love and the latter too free not to hate. §4 – Corpus: Through hate matter came into existence. Dark. Heavy. Unwieldy. The souls entered into their prison and because of their hopeless rebellion against the cunning gravity, endured a never-ending agony. §5 – Terra: All lights are gone, all air has perished, all pain has ceased. Terra. It is not whence we came; it is nevertheless where we are going to.

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Tinnitus releases February 26th, 2021 via Hummus Records.

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In an era when every subgenre and sub-subgenre has seemingly been identified, catalogued, and put on a shelf, it’s refreshing to hear something one just can’t pin down. Drawing influence and inspiration from disparate places is nothing new; it’s all about what you do with those things. Metal, hardcore, noise, post-rock, sad trumpet(?), sludge, soundscape dirges: what your local record shop might have as a half-dozen different sections, Black Sheep Wall combine to craft their latest wrecking ball, Songs For The Enamel Queen. This is not Black Sheep Wall throwing random shit on a canvas and hoping it sticks in a cool, artsy way. (Unfortunately there’s always a surplus of that kind of tedium, especially in this pocket of the music world.) Early albums I Am God Songs and No Matter Where It Ends were built on a solid and reliable Neur-Isis foundation, with the band and its subsequent incarnations using that merely as a jumping-off point to explore just what ‘sonic devastation’ can mean. By 2015’s I’m Going To Kill Myselfm listeners could hear Earth, Slint, and Swans snaking their way into Black Sheep Wall’s now-singular sound. Songs For The Enamel Queen uses all of those building blocks and injects them with an added layer of emotional, resonant intensity that bleeds through the speakers. After the brutal introduction of "Human Shaped Hole," vocalist Brandon Gillichbauer makes quick work of showing exactly where he’s at on the 13-plus minute behemoth "New Measures Of Failure":

I am The failure that feeds you But the biggest mistake I could make Was trusting the shithead that was me.

Feedback, off-kilter drums and lurching riffs provide an appropriately dissonant backdrop before the song dials back the distortion and dips into a spoken word interlude. This all happens before the halfway mark, but it never feels forced or overstuffed. Gillichbauer returns during an even quieter moment to bellow "I hope I make you embarrassed, I hope you’re afraid. I hope you keep me a secret. I hope you’re ashamed." Subtlety, who needs it? Songs For The Enamel Queen brings back the floor punches with "Concrete God" and "Ballad Of A Flawed Animal," which both gets the blood flowing and allows drummer Jackson Thompson to show off his considerable talent. The closing suite of "Ren," "Mr. Gone" and "Prayer Sheet For Wound And Nail" is over a half hour of Black Sheep Wall pushing their collective capacity for songwriting prowess to its very limits. From grandiose walls of distorted sound to the aforementioned melancholy brass, sparse ambient sound to Pinhead vocals, whirling tension bomb riffs to an overdriven shoegaze-on-steroids finale, Songs For The Enamel Queen leaves listeners in a much different place than where they started. It really is a journey, one unlike much else out there, and each trip is a revelation. Listen to an exclusive, pre-release stream of Songs For The Enamel Queen and read an interview with Black Sheep Wall below.

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It's rare to find a band as aggressive and abrasive as Black Sheep Wall with songs that pass the ten-minute mark. Is that a conscious decision, or does it just happen naturally via the process? Jackson Thompson (drums): I think in our teenage years there was some notion that we wanted our band to be associated with being especially heavy or abrasive, but I think more than ever we’ve let go of that. We aren’t concerned with writing music that is especially extreme as much as we want to write music we want to hear. I guess we want to hear things that are abrasive, haha. Jason Grissinger (bass): Writing this album with the band was a natural process. There would be multiple riffs that we’d jam on that were awesome, but didn’t always work well together. So we’d have to find ways to connect them, and in doing so, we’d create these really epic and textured songs that take you on a journey. Andrew Hulle (guitar): When we wrote Songs for the Enamel Queen time wasn’t a conscious decision when we would get together to work on our new material. A lot of times we would jam on one or a couple of riffs and see where it naturally would take us. The end of the song "New Measures of Failure" is a good example of this. Those moments where we’re feeding off of each other and letting feeling decide the route the music takes are, personally, some of my favorite parts of the album. Most of the time we would end up with a song approaching or surpassing the 10 minute mark. At the same time we have a 2.5 minute and 3.5 minute song on the new album that was a new change of pace for us, but they worked well within the context of the album as a whole. Was the long hiatus after I'm Going To Kill Myself intentional or just a matter of life getting in the way? Jackson Thompson: It was unfortunately unintentional, but I think very necessary for us to be at the point where we are now. There are circumstances in which only time can offer a potential solution, and not even that is guaranteed. We’ve had the instrumentals for Songs for the Enamel Queen done for four years now and there were periods since then that I didn’t think we’d ever finish the album. It’s a great lesson in patience to know now that this was worth waiting for. Jason Grissinger: When I joined the band in 2014 it was because they had some shows coming up and no bass player at the time. For a while after that there wasn’t a focus on writing an album, we were just playing shows, jamming and did a tour. When we started working on new material after that, we really spent a good year and a half or so just writing the songs before even going into the studio. The songs were always evolving and we always found new ways to shape them before we were happy with them. What led to the band signing with Silent Pendulum? Andrew Hulle: Our first release with Silent Pendulum was a first time vinyl pressing of our debut album, I Am God Songs. It was such a great experience working with them for that release that our relationship with them eventually and organically developed into what it currently is. Having a label that is genuinely invested in us and shares the same vision and uncompromising standards as us is really something we’re grateful for and humbled by. The experience we had doing the first vinyl release with them was definitely one of the motivating factors to finish and release Songs for the Enamel Queen on their label. We’re excited for what the future has in store for us and Silent Pendulum Records! A lot of the lyrics, especially on "New Measures Of Failure", feel intensely personal. Are they about a specific person (or persons)? Brandon Gillichbauer (vocals): The lyrics for "New Measures of Failure," as well as the album as a whole, are autobiographical and very personal. Probably the most honest I have ever been. There are a few illusions to other people in my life but the overall context is focused on my personal issues, both mentally, struggles with substance abuse, as well as acceptance of who I was and in some way will always sorta be. The trumpet on "Ren" is unexpected, to say the least. Whose idea was that? Scott Turner (guitar): That was me. From the get go I always wanted that section of "Ren" to have this almost sort of noir-vibe to it. I think from the moment that part of the song was fleshed out I could hear the trumpet in my head over it. Jackson has a treasure trove of musically inclined friends and suggested his buddy Brian Mellblom for the part. If I remember correctly, my only directions for Jackson to relay to Brian was that we wanted it to sound like Beirut… otherwise, Brian was free to create as he saw fit. He came to record the part without us ever having played together, or hearing it, and needless to say we were so happy with how it turned out. Many of the songs have a multilayered, almost cinematic quality. Is film an influence on the band, and if so, anything specific? Jason Grissinger: For me, not cinematic, but I really like melodic bass lines that have an emotionally driven feeling to them that aren’t just follow the guitar riff. I think on some of the songs off the album, that almost gives it a "cinematic" feel in a way and it’s different from previous Black Sheep Wall albums. These songs really take you on an emotional journey from start to finish because they have more depth and sonic texture throughout this album. I think "Prayer Sheet for Wound and Nail" and "Ren'' really highlight this feeling. Jackson Thompson: Film isn’t a conscious or intentional influence, but it’s there regardless. I consider film my personal favorite art form and I think many movies have challenged and changed the way I’ve thought about music, which is the only medium I participate in with any degree of seriousness. We have some song titles that are references to movies and whatnot, so they’ve made their way in there for sure. The following has left an impression on me in the way that I (and I think we) approach music: · The playing with expectations of David Lynch. He uses clichés and turns them upside down to create something unique and completely unexpected. · The bleakness and (what I consider) intentional boredom of Michael Haneke films. · The sarcasm and self-reference of Lars Von Trier. · The intersection of relationships and selfishness found in most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work. Brandon Gillichbauer: As far as lyrically goes, no… at least not intentionally. Film is a huge part of my life and I would be naive to think for as much as I love, respect, and admire film that it hasn’t rubbed off on me in some unconscious way. What are the band's plans for 2021 and beyond? Juan Hernandez Cruz (bass): Hopefully when things start to get back to some type of normalcy after COVID, it would be great to start playing shows again. That’s definitely the missing component for this release and hopefully that will be corrected in time. Beyond is a good question better left in suspense. Keeps you on your toes.

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Songs for the Enamel Queen releases February 26th via Silent Pendulum Records.

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It's 7:30 AM and I've just finished my first cup of coffee for the day. I am invincible, a machine built entirely of speed and pure, raw energy. This feeling happens every day, and yet it isn't mundane; my addiction to what is essentially speed (caffeine) keeps me alive as I enter each dual work day (I'd be lying if I said I didn't work on Invisible Oranges stuff during my day job's downtime). The issue with becoming a radiant being of caffeinated energy every morning is: what the hell do I listen to? Generally speaking, I listen to black metal, but so much of my library is atmospheric and pensive; what I really need is something as outrageous as how I feel, something as profoundly awake and ready to destroy the world as I am. Enter Tennessee deathgrind band Knoll. Knoll fits into a special category of music: over the top. Over the top music can be any style or of any persuasion, but what makes it go "OTT" is a) execution, which must be as intense and "extra" as possible, and b) songwriting, which much feature either as many notes as possible or convey an emotion to its furthest extremes. On Interstice, Knoll's debut full-length album, we find a convergence of Over The Top music's two halves. First and foremost, Knoll is pissed. Utilizing chaotic discord, wild vocals, and nonstop battery to convey a disappointment with the world at an extreme level, Interstice grips the listener and screams into their face for almost 35 minutes, nonstop. Second, Knoll is incredibly proficient, playing as many notes using as many musical techniques as possible. Note that I never really called them a "technical" band, I think this would do them a disservice. In an interview which can be read below, Knoll declares their technicality a result rather than an initial goal, and it shows. This is clearly passionately written music and not a collection of shredders' exercises, which makes Interstice's various musical adventures all the more interesting. Bouncing from style to style and emotion to emotion, Knoll's debut, which can be streamed in full below, basks in its own powerful glow. It is 7:30 AM. I am awake.

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https://youtu.be/92TjD7Z6lkg

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When composing technical music, is it your goal to craft proficient music from the start, or rather is the proficiency a result of how you write music? Definitely a result. Some pieces require intricate playing - tapping, notey runs, extreme beats, etc., and some require droning and fewer elements. It depends on what we find most powerful in the moment of creation. I do think that the desire to push ourselves mentally and physically creates a tendency towards technicality, though. Your album is self-described as a commentary on the grotesque nature and actions of humankind. What led to this conceptual angle? I feel like a lot of it is due to our environment and the overwhelming negativity of the current global climate. It is easy to foster an intense disdain for all forms of spirituality and religion when growing up in the southern US. Not that we’re a band that just writes about hating Christianity or whatever, but you can feel the symptoms of atrocity anywhere you go. I fall into the peril of grandiose thinking often, and the weight of greater insignificance and defeat is prevalent on this record. Is there a link between the music and the concept found on Interstice, or did the concept come after composition? The concept came far before the final composition - of a continuous voicing to overpower all else surrounding it. We are definite perfectionists and over preppers, so there wasn’t much room to budge conceptually or musically. There were, however, things that became more apparent to us during the recording process. We were fortunate enough to find ourselves in a connective headspace and struck a balance between sparking improvisation and managing time. The album itself has a star-studded collaboration lineup, from recording with Andy Nelson to having Kurt Ballou mix the audio and Ethan McCarthy craft the artwork. What made you decide to work with these people specifically? Did you initially have these people in mind during the writing process? We’ve been fans of Andy, Kurt, Ethan, and their respective bands since before we formed. We knew for sure that we wanted to work with Andy and Kurt as they have been key players for a ton of other bands that we admire. We solidified that before the writing of the album was complete, though we didn’t hit up Ethan (and later Frank Huang, who did our videos) until after the record was complete. We wanted to interpret the full atmosphere of the record before we settled on artwork in order to really capture something that we felt accurate to the sound. What we got from Ethan immediately struck me in awe - we had to pull over on the side of the road to stare at it when we got the first draft - I don’t know of anyone else that I’d be comfortable with handling these extreme thoughts and portraying them. It was a deeply rewarding and personal experience for all of us, I still can’t believe that we worked with them. Creating and performing intense music is draining, especially when done in long strides. Do you find yourselves exhausted with your own music upon completion, or even during the process? Physically and mentally. We hammered these songs into the ground to prepare them for the studio. For me, the process of writing vocals and lyrics is a migraine-inducing process of self doubt and general unhappiness. I have to be completely isolated because I just get in the worst moods. I know the guitarwork and drums are equally laborious. However, I don’t want to do it any other way. It is easy to throw in cookie cutter lyrics or riffs and call it, but I am ultimately after something that is taxing to recreate live. It has to be true to us and as intense, in whatever way, as possible. However, we won’t be taking any breaks or burning out. I think that not having an outlet is infinitely more debilitating than the struggle of making this kind of record.

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Interstice releases February 26th. Purchase the album digitally or on vinyl here.

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Each Friday, Editors Ted Nubel and Jon Rosenthal will share their picks for Records of the Week — not necessarily what's out this week, just whatever's on our mind or on our record players.

Ted Nubel

American Draft

The Rescue

The release show for The Rescue was a highlight of 2019 and certainly a bittersweet thing to look back on now, over a year later when I've seen just a handful of other shows since that night two Novembers ago. The band was performing at the Burlington Bar, a hotspot for weird progressive music in Chicago's Logan Square, and had gotten a visual artist to put together a crazy projected backdrop. That resulted in some wild visuals to accompany the band's unusual mix of progressive rock and post-rock/metal, and the performance helped cement this album as one of my "go-to" comfort records, and I happily snagged a physical copy on my way out.

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Side A lays out American Draft's chop-heavy and dynamic capabilities, ranging from the jarring metallic hookiness on "Running Scared" to the yearning progressive leads that sparkle through the sunny "Solace of Light." Heck, they even pack in an ambient track, "Blades," for a penultimate build-up. These songs flow together like a single entity, but they're different sides of the band's prismatic sound. It's all unified on side B's monolithic "The Rescue," which, over an 18 minute runtime, entwines some of the heaviest and lightest moments on the album into a spiraling, cathartic conclusion. Pulling out perhaps the final stop, a guest vocalist even shows up to contribute the only vocals on the album -- a risky move that pays off.

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Jon Rosenthal

Empyrium

Über den Sternen

Empyrium in 2021 is an entirely different beast when compared to the band's earlier musings as a metal band in the mid-'90s. Though there is reverence to both A Wintersunset… and Songs of Moors and Misty Fields's fusions of folk music, doom metal, and black metal there, something multi-instrumentalist Markus "Schwadorf" Stock carries with him throughout this journey of self-rediscovery, new album Über den Sternen, Empyrium's first in half a decade, shows a band completing itself through maturation. Comparisons can rightfully be made to earlier material, but Über den Sternen's both aggressive and laid-back approach looks inward with years of musicianship and studio work with other projects, fueling itself in perpetual, Romantic motion. Though the Byronic naivete which defined a lot of Empyrium's earlier work has been replaced with something more learned and experienced here, this is undeniably Empyrium, and, to this writer's surprise, is the band at their strongest.

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Deiquisitor has always been a tiny bit of a mystery. An ancient band in a modern age, they formed in Denmark in 2013 and largely kept off the internet until very recently, which always made it hard to promote their music or recommend them to friends. This shroud of olde occultism that surrounded the band was not necessarily ideal for their overall popularity, but lent itself to a certain air of wonder and secrecy that just doesn’t exist often in the internet age. Years later, Deiquisitor has finally given over to the tide of time, and are available for consumption on Bandcamp and other streaming services—just in time to talk about their newest EP, Humanoid. Deiquisitor's sound stretches across the sea to some extent, and is perhaps most reminiscent of suffocating bands a la Drawn and Quartered or Immolation. Humanoid’s frantic, ugly riffing carries a sense of urgency, a need to deliver blasphemous riffs at top-speed right down the gullet of unsuspecting death metal freaks. Harrowing vocals (much improved since the start of the band!) howl over a whirlwind of furious drums, and for a three piece, Deiquisitor have enough wrath to match a much larger lineup.

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Though Humanoid is being called an EP, it’s almost as long as an Undergang record, and more than 25 minutes of devastation can be found in the playtime. The band uses that time to the fullest, packing in a series of tempo changes that go from chunky doom riffs into swirling tremolos into powerful pummeling at a moment’s notice. One of the biggest make-or-breakers of a band playing in this style is the drumming, and Mr. Bestial Butcher has a great sense of when to change from blasting into skanks into evil hammering, aiding in a sense of dynamics that carries throughout the entire EP. Deiquisitor resist being easily lumped into a single category, and there’s a little something of everything for fans of all creeds of evil metal of death within each release. Deiquisitor will never be called “progressive,” but they play a much more nimble take on the genre than the average band, and the improvement that they’ve made over the years has been a joy to see in a genre where most bands take the exact opposite approach. It means that after years of wondering, it was time to finally ask the band questions that I had for years. Full interview below.

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Hey guys, thanks for taking the time to do this! To start, you guys had a new EP come out last week- your second EP since 2019’s Towards Our Impending Doom full-length. Why another short-length instead of working towards your fourth album? What draws you to the EP format? Hi, Thomas from Deiquisitor here, thanks for letting us do this interview. We did actually have enough material for a full-length album, but we decided to make 2 EP’s instead for several reasons. First of all, because we’ve always wanted to make a 12” EP played at 45 rpm, we are convinced that the sound quality is superior in this format compared to a 7” and even a normal 33 rpm Record. Second because we have been experimenting a lot with our sound, using different studios and producers, we didn’t feel that the production on our previous releases represented us quite like we wanted, too far from our live and rehearsal sound. On Humanoid we feel that we are pretty close to achieving that. Third reason is that the 2 tracks we put on the EP “Religiously endorsed masochism” are but about the same theme, the self-tormenting and submissive perspective on life practiced by religious fanatics. Where the lyrics on Humanoid are more about science, technology, conspirations and are even a bit political in a way. When the band started it was difficult to check out any music digitally, let alone buy it, and everything was really limited to physical formats. What is your relationship like with digital music, and why did you decide to start moving towards it? Have overall sales seemed to improve since you guys went digital? Well, I am a bit divided about that. In a way I really liked how it was back in the 90’s. Back then it was a bit exclusive when you got your hands on rare albums, and could introduce unknown bands to others in your circle, nowadays everything is available to anyone. The good thing about that is that you are able to spread out your music to a much larger audience, check out unknown bands, and then if you like what you hear, buy their stuff. And for us, also selling our releases as digital downloads has improved the sales a lot. You can be pretty sure that you can find almost any record ripped on the internet already the day after it has been released. Often in very poor mp3 quality, and with a low-resolution scan of the cover artwork. Now you can offer them a download in high quality Wav files, all cover artwork in high resolution, to a very fair price. We are glad that a lot of listeners apparently choose this option. Bad sound quality kills good music. Deiquisitor has from the start operated as a three-piece. Will that ever change? What are some advantages to having a compact lineup? I can see that there are a lot of advantages in a bigger line-up, especially as a guitarist. The guitar sound can be much more massive, and you can incorporate a lot more details and leads in the songs when there are 2 guitarists, and it can be a problem live when playing leads, it’s like a lot of massiveness disappears when I start doing solos and leads. So that why I always make my solos so short. But there are a lot of considerations associated with recruiting an extra bandmember, one of our biggest strength as a band is how well we know each other, and a friendship that goes back almost 30 years. Even Daniel who’s the youngest one of us, have we known for like 15 years. So, it has to be both someone we know very well, and a person that shares our ideologies and taste in music. That is hard to find, I can only think of a very few, and they are active in other bands. But again, in a way I think that there’s something “magical” about being a trio. Most of the lineup played in several active bands at a time until just a couple years before Deiquisitor’s inception. What led to the overall drop-off in multi-band activity and increased focus on a single songwriting outlet? The short answer must be, not enough time. We have always enjoyed jamming new ideas and experimenting with different styles of metal. And we felt that some of these projects really had some potential, and resulted in some interesting music. But instead of using these ideas in our main band, we decided to release them as a project bands under a different name. Until 8 –10 years ago, we were a part of a sort of ideological band alliance which we called “Order of the Nonagram”, this alliance led to some great side projects with members from these other bands involved. Unfortunately, we all moved in very different directions both musically and ideologically, so this order no longer exists. Most of the band has been making music for a long time, even back to the ‘90s. How has the extreme music scene changed for both better and worse over the years? As I see it, the metal scene is growing strong again now, after being a bit dormant for almost a decade. Thanks to some very dedicated concert arrangers, underground zines and a rapidly growing underground metal scene, there are a lot of excellent Danish bands these days. In many ways the scene nowadays here in Denmark, reminds me of how it was back in the early 90’s. Things were going so great until last year, more and more sold-out concerts, great foreign bands, an increasingly intense audience. But then came Corona, hopefully this pandemic will end soon, and we can start gigging and experience some great concerts again. The band has been with Night Shroud Records since the beginning, with the label handing most of Deiquisitor’s vinyl releases. Is Night Shroud Records the band’s own label? What’s the relationship there? No, Night Shroud Rec. Is not our own label, but is owned by a very good friend of ours. He has supported us and believed in us since the very beginning, and has done an excellent job with the creation of each album, we really appreciate all the support we have received from this label, along with Extremely Rotten Productions who has released all the tape versions of our albums, and are co-releasing the vinyl version of our newest EP. We did have our own label some years ago, Phlegm Productions, and did actually release a lot of stuff, but it has been laid to rest now. We didn’t have the necessary promotion network and promotion skills to successfully run a label selling physical medias. But all the releases we managed to put out are all available as digital downloads from our “Order of the Nonagram” Bandcamp site. How did you guys get in touch with Matt Calvert and Dark Descent Records? Are you happy with your work with them? I think it was Extremely Rotten prod. that got us in touch with him. We needed a label to release the CD versions, and since our music is influenced by the American old-school way of creating Death metal, it made good sense for us to try getting in contact with an American label. And no doubt, Matt has helped us a lot. His promotion has been incredible, and Dark Descent Records has become both a known and respected label worldwide, so we are indeed very happy to work with him. What made you guys decide to embark on this path towards suffocating death metal after your previous bands? After 20 years of Black metal, we reached a point where we felt that we were in danger of starting to repeat ourselves. In Blodfest we were pretty much following this theme, to write lyrics about the ancient Danish kings that ruled Denmark from the town Lejre where we actually live and where our studio is located. Their battles, rituals and pagan beliefs. But after writing lyrics about this for 9 releases, you reach a point where you feel that what you had to tell, had been told. It was more or less the same we felt with the music itself, so we decided to end this chapter with our final album “Gastabloss” which in fact hasn’t been released yet, though it was recorded in 2012. The production is very raw, and the song probably the most extreme we have ever made, but one thing I think makes the labels hesitate, is that we are using growling vocals on this, instead of the more traditional Black metal way of doing vocals. Maybe they find it hard to categorize us on this one. But then after ending Blodfest, my brother MFJørg wanted to focus 100% on making experimental electronic music and painting. Henrik and I wanted to continue playing metal, and like went back to our roots in Death metal, trying to create our new interpretation of old-school Death metal. That was in 2013, one year later we recruited our old friend Daniel for the Bass guitar, and the line-up was complete. Another reason for us to turn our backs on Black metal, is how it has developed. I’m sure a lot of readers will get pissed by me saying so, but I feel that this style has totally stagnated. I haven’t heard any band contributing with anything new for years, all repetitions of the ideas from the old classics. And many of the bands represent themselves in a way we can’t relate to, or will be associated with. What’s next for Deiquisitor following the pandemic? Hopefully a lot of gigs, we really enjoy playing live gigs. It’s really difficult for us to go on longer tours, like for months or so, but shorter tours for weekends or perhaps a week, are just perfect for us. So this is what we hope for, the opportunity to do this. Will you guys ever make it over to the United States for some shows? We sure hope so, that would be a great experience. But like I said, for a week is the longest we can be away from Denmark, and it is my impression that when a Danish band has to travel all the way to the States, it has to be for a longer time to balance the travelling costs. But maybe we are given this opportunity one day, that would be cool. Do you have anything else to talk about or promote? I definitely have something to promote, all the excellent Danish Death metal bands that’s around these days. Bands like: Undergang, Phrenelith, Taphos, Chaotian, Strychnos, Ascendency, Septage, Had, Sulphurous, Hyperdontia. I’ve probably forgotten to mention some, sorry for that. And when all these damned corona restrictions are over, come to the shows, that’s where you’ll hear what the band really are made of. Humanoid released on February 5th, 2021 via Night Shroud Records and Extremely Rotten Productions.

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I'm a sucker for a good compilation. There's something about hearing the progression of a band, even in a short window of time, that's just so intriguing. So, it's not at all surprising that I immediately fell in love with the Canadian duo Fumes' new compilation Assemblage of Disgust, which examines the band's two 2020 demos Within Mental Ruins and Towards Degradation on top of a brand new song called "Drain the Ichor".

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Fumes covers a lot of ground within the five songs on Assemblage of Disgust. The tracks off their debut demo Within Mental Ruins showcase a more straightforward death metal approach in the vein of Ulcerate, while Towards Degradation's material feels like Fumes grew tentacles and reached out into the skronky world of bands like Gorguts. Right in the middle of the compilation is "Drain the Ichor", whose runtime encompasses everything Fumes had done across the first two demos, along with cleaner and more atmospheric sections that would feel right at home in a Mournful Congregation track. "I have a ton of influences but the main ones during the writing process were Gorguts, Wormed, Morbid Angel, and Artificial Brain," said multi-instrumentalist Daniel Bonofiglio about his writing style across all five songs. Through all the different moods and styles Fumes weaves into their sound, the duo said “Surfeit of Rancor” is their favorite track. "'Surfeit of Rancor' because I really enjoy the interplay between the two guitars," he said. "I think it’s a great representation of the sound of Fumes." Despite the deluge of new material Fumes has been releasing, the duo is working on a full-length record hopefully due out this August or September. Bonofiglio said they've just wrapped up writing the first new song for the release.

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Assemblage of Disgust is available digitally and on CD through Morbid Chapel Records. Fumes is also planning a special cassette version of the compilation, with different artwork and potentially another new track. I also encourage everyone to check out Fumes’ split with Thorns via Life After Death, whose two tracks were not included on Assemblage of Disgust.

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It’s been a fair bit of time since our last podcast interview, which aired back in November with the very gracious Andrew Lee (Ripped to Shreds/Houkago Grind Time/more). No time better than the present, then, to rekindle this aspect of our programming as we extend our technological reach out to the infamously wintery black-metal-inspiring lands of Norway to chat with Thomas Eriksen of Mork. While Mork is a four piece live band (when live performances can occur), Eriksen is the lone founder and composer of the project, having started well over a decade ago. He's now on the precipice of releasing his fifth full length album, Katedralen.

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Back in the “great before times,” when bands could play live without the fear of spreading the worst plague to hit humanity in a century, I actually got to meet and chat with Eriksen in person after Mork’s debut US performance at Psycho Las Vegas 2019. Their uniquely melancholic yet ferocious evolution on Norwegian black metal’s storied sound, especially of the isolated and rarely playing live sort, was a thrilling experience to wake up to around noon after a day of already punishing festival antics. The interview I conducted later in the day was my very first feature piece for Invisible Oranges and I look back on it still with a chest full of pride. I also recall us crossing paths a number of times during the rest of the day while witnessing all the other great bands performing. Eriksen and I stayed in touch since then, and it was with great pleasure that we were able to hold an even more extensive chat where we discussed not only his upcoming album but a range of topics including his own turn as a podcaster during the Covid age. His connections to the Norwegian metal scene have allowed him to interview numerous important figures from there and around the world, including Gaahl (Gaahl’s Wyrd, ex-Gorgoroth, etc), Silenoz (Dimmu Borgir), and both members of the legendary Darkthrone. Tune in as we dive into some bone-chilling riffs and hearty warm laughs with one of the leading figures of contemporary Norwegian black metal.

--Joe Aprill

Stream the episode here or see below for other ways to listen:

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Katedralen will release via Peaceville Records on March 5th. You can check out The Thomas Eriksen Podcast on the Mork homepage and on most podcasting platforms.

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Listen and subscribe to Screaming Bloody Oranges: The Invisible Oranges Podcast on the following platforms: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Podbean

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While our original goal this year was to do our Co-Editors' Choice column monthly, in light of the fact that we entirely forgot to do one in February, we're going to tweak our goal a bit. Let's go with "mostly monthly" -- say, in all months with more than 28 days? The theme this month is "change," and, since this is a music blog, we mean change in the context of musical groups, not our self-determined publication schedule. The deltas between a band's past release and their latest one are always a large focus in coverage -- and that makes sense, since those shifts and evolutions are what sets the new work apart. However, in criticism there's a tendency to be conservative here: significant changes are attributed to selling out, losing focus, or creative bankruptcy, so much so that a band changing its sound and still being "good" is lauded as a surprise. While there are some changes in direction (Cold Lake, anyone?) that were definitely ill-informed and generally disastrous, many "new eras" of bands simply don't get their deserved acclaim due to nostalgia or being held up to unrepeatable innovations as a standard. It's not Tony Martin Black Sabbath's fault that the Ozzy-era albums defined the damn genre, so go listen to Headless Cross! Below, Jon and I discuss two of our picks for bands that have wielded change as a weapon for growth, often facing an uphill battle in the process.

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Ted Nubel

Elder My introduction to Elder was their self-titled full-length, which was epic-feeling stoner doom, and progressive only in the sense that it was interesting and unique in a time when much of the genre was… not. Songs like "Hexe" take the pentatonic riff to its crunchiest and grooviest potential, and "Riddle of Steel Pt. 1 / Pt. 2" channeled a battle-doom spirit that would, by other bands, be molded into ridiculously heavy stuff.

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That wasn't the route that Elder took, though, instead incorporating more and more progressive rock and Krautrock influences over the years. Dead Roots Stirring was still stoner rock for sure, but expansively atmospheric and hinting at the thoughtful influences that ran below it like waiting undertow. Cleaner vocals and cleaner tones offered a dynamic journey through the realms of riff rock like not much else, so it's pretty easy to see why this one tends to be a fan favorite. Lore only continued this evolution, and Reflections of a Floating World introduced the most blatant progressive rock segments yet -- "heavy Yes" was now a valid way of describing a band that had, just over ten years earlier, debuted on a split with the shamanistic and surreal experimental stoner group Queen Elephantine. It wasn't really surprising in the big picture, even if you couldn't have predicted the exact shape of things: from day one, Elder was always weird, and ten years' worth of growth has yielded much stranger developments in the history of heavy metal. Then, last year, we got Omens, which wasn't so much a further shift from Reflections of a Floating World as it was a full-bodied development of it. Synthesizers and other, non-fuzz textures take their rightful place in Elder's sound -- there's always been some of that around, but really step into their own here. Langdon Hickman summed Omens up excellently in his review, noting that "[this album's sound] is a type of music that, when done right, becomes the lifesblood of many a band's career, with numerous groups within the canon of prog, psychedelia, and space-rock living comfortably within these halls for decades." Elder could stay in this space, or they could also continue on their journey -- signs point towards the latter. Unsurprisingly, this is a point of contention. Fans, depending on their tastes, want more of Dead Roots Stirring, or they want more Lore -- they don't want some new unknown. That ship has sailed, though, and other artists are now exploring the fertile grounds seeded by progressive rock and stoner doom. I sympathize with wanting more Lore, believe me, but Elder is no longer the vehicle for that.

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Jon Rosenthal

Beyond Dawn [Editor's Note: for brevity's sake, compilations will not be discussed.] Generally speaking, when people think "chameleonic Norwegians," Ulver comes to mind, and that is perfectly fine. However, there is another. Beyond Dawn sat quietly in the underground for a long time -- until their (disputed) demise in the 2000s -- ever-seeking the progressive vein which ties death/doom metal to pure electronic music in a bizarre evolution. Featuring members of the legendary Virus and the obscure, but very enjoyable Two Trains, Beyond Dawn were, at their impetus, outcasts in the Norwegian scene.

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From their early demos (especially the Longing for Scarlet Days release, which is technically an EP) through their debut Pity Love, Beyond Dawn was a death/doom metal band, sort of. Featuring odd, electronic loops, prominent brass accompaniment, and a varied, emotive vocal performance by dual attack Tore Gjedrem and Espen Ingierd, first-era Beyond Dawn lasted well over half a decade, the longest amount of time the band dedicated to a single sound (though it would eventually deconstruct over time, as evidenced by Pity Love's adventurous nature). Soundwise, Pity Love followed in the Peaceville 3's footsteps, especially My Dying Bride, but with Beyond Dawn's own experimental bent, which adds to the emotive nature of their music. Heavy, but still thoughtful, the melodic and progressive Pity Love (and Longing for Scarlet Days, which should see a vinyl release on drummer/multi-instrumentalist Einar Sjursø's Duplicate Records imprint this Spring) left an underground mark on death/doom, but, more importantly, it truly set Beyond Dawn's bizarre career in motion.

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Revelry, Beyond Dawn's sophomore effort, reared its head just three years later, and, in doing so, revealed the band's new sound. Though Encyclopaedia Metallum refers to this era as "Metal/Alternative/Gothic Rock," whatever that means, this album's true source is obvious: Swans, and, more importantly, The Burning World-era Swans. There is a folky aspect to this album's impenetrably dark rock which just screams "Michael Gira!" Hell, more than a few vocal passages sound like his deep, rich baritone. Is it bad that Beyond Dawn suddenly pivoted to sounding like a Swans contemporary? Not exactly, mostly because what was already a niche market in the United States was even more infinitesimal in Norway, and, beyond that, it's not like Beyond Dawn were shameless. The music's bizarre nature, something which would follow Sjursø to Virus (and even, for a brief spell, Ved Buens Ende, when the band first reformed in 2006), sets Beyond Dawn apart from their influences. Strange chords, unexpected melodies, lots of brass, and a distinctly Norwegian despondency makes Beyond Dawn more than just a Swans or Peaceville worship band.

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A stop-gap between evolutionary points is a dual album In Reverie, an "unplugged" album, and Electric Sulking Machine, a "rock" album, which followed just a year later. A beautiful album of minimal songwriting and textures, In Reverie is inextricably connected to its predecessor, essentially taking the dark gothic folk rock of Revelry and presenting it in as skeletal a form as possible. I don't want to write this album off as "the unplugged version of another album" because In Reverie is definitely more than that in the Beyond Dawn oeuvre, but in the context of "change" and "evolution," this one isn't much more than taking the distortion away from the guitars and Sjursø favoring hand drums and delicate electronics over his drum kit. Placing more importance on the sadness over the strangeness found in what can now be called the "Beyond Dawn sound," In Reverie zeros in on a single aspect of the Beyond Dawn sound and blows it up.

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Electric Sulking Machine, which was released around the same time, goes into familiar territory, but with a freer sort of uninhibited nature guiding it. Jangling and morose, this album is "the other half" of Beyond Dawn. That is to say, Electric Sulking Machine moves Beyond Dawn forward without the heavy sadness which defined Revelry, and even In Reverie. I find myself listening to this one more than In Reverie if simply because it sounds more like Beyond Dawn while still being inherently different from its predecessors. Falling into almost a slowcore type of vibe, Electric Sulking Machine is a far cry from Pity Love and Revelry's heaviness (note the cleaner and not-as-bass-heavy sound here), and there are shades of the electronic music to come (note Sjursø's [acoustic] use of the Amen Break toward the end of "Addictions Are Private"). With Peaceville Records' recent bout of "obscurities repressings," this writer hopes for this album to receive a nice vinyl pressing. Finally.

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From Frysh onward, we find Beyond Dawn's final form: a general sound which would follow them to their demise. Now calling their music traumatic electro rock, the electronic minimalism-meets-alternative rock which defined Beyond Dawn on this album (and discography-closing follow up We're Down with Species of Any Kind, a remix album) is hypnotic and, as is the case with every Beyond Dawn release, sad. The head-bobbing, foot-tapping pulsations found on these two albums can draw comparisons to big-budget bands like Interpol, or even Editors., but Beyond Dawn still toiled in obscurity until eventually fizzling out without any sort of full announcement of their disbanding sometime in the 2000s.

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What makes bands like Beyond Dawn (and Elder) so special is their strong sense of identity, something which follows them throughout a sonically-vast discography. What defines Beyond Dawn? A feeling, mostly. When listening to this band, there is an overarching, deep sadness which pervades each (very) different album. Does Frysh sound anything like Pity Love or even Revelry? Not a chance. In fact, they could be made by different bands, though Beyond Dawn boasted a mostly stable lineup from 1990 through the mid-to-late 2000s. The emotive nature of their music, not genre, is ultimately what defines them, and that's what makes bands like Beyond Dawn so immensely special. The music world can learn a thing or two from Beyond Dawn about untethering from expectation or genre. Do yourself a favor and listen through the Beyond Dawn discography, there is bound to be an album, or even just a song, for you.

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I distinctly remember thinking I had Flesh of the Stars figured out right after I hit play on their 2019 full-length Mercy: initial walls of rumbling fuzz, laid-back drumming, and a 22-minute opening track pointed the way towards unusually melodic, but sonically and stylistically conforming doom. Less than two minutes later, I was proven to be exceptionally wrong: clean guitar, keys, and powerfully melodic vocals took over, channelling progressive rock's mystifying energy in a way that I'd never heard doom metal try. Bewilderment turned to appreciation, and appreciation to something closer to worship as Mercy executed a fusing of heaviness and melody with mind-boggling complexity. Though bands like Elder have popularized the idea of merging progressive rock and doom, nobody does it like Flesh of the Stars. Their song structures lean towards the sprawling progressive rock of the 1970s, and the band excels in—revels, even—swapping between bombastic dirges and much softer explorations, rather than trying to maintain some consistent, single-ready hybrid. Sonically, their somber amplified guitar tones contrast with the sparkling clean ones, and not dialing vocals all the way up in the mix lets the rest of the extremely intricate orchestration shine—very rarely the case, even in the most progressive-minded doom bands out there. On Mercy as well as their past records, Flesh of the Stars has continuously produced a strain of heavy music that you can't get anywhere else. To prove that point even further, the band's new EP Mirror / Vessels tweaks things again: crafted as a pairing of song suites and composed in lockdown, the added electronic touches retain the band's delicate, tear-jerking doom sound while showing a new side as well. We're extremely pleased to offer the entire EP here for you to check out before its release this Friday.

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"Mirror" eases into the band's sound, first soft and then starkly loud. There's less of a surprise factor here, but the impact of that first amplified chord might be a shock, and the subtle use of harsher vocals stacked with clean ones further complicates the sonic profile of the track. Like past releases, the EP is densely layered and full of surprises, but it feels more modern and immediate, eschewing Mercy's pastoral atmosphere for a sort of near-futuristic tension. Nestled between the heavyweight tracks are two interludes; as guitarists/songwriters Matt Ciani and Mike Fox discuss in the interview below, each of them wrote a core song and then wrote an accompanying piece for the other's song, resulting in this extremely-EP-friendly intertwined structure. These are lush, synthesizer-packed ambient ventures, taking the band's fondness for building rich textures and moving it into that same retro-future territory that "Mirror" and "Vessels" explore. Combined, these two interludes are still shorter than either song, so they don't spend too long building this ambiance before moving on. "Vessels'' takes a more rock-focused tack than "Mirror," emphasizing the vocal melody and creating plenty of space for creative drum work. It fosters a windswept, icy atmosphere at first, but that grows increasingly superheated by the red-hot guitar work that moves into dominance partway through. The air of tension that "Mirror" creates remains a factor through the rest of the EP -- fitting, I think, for a work composed and recorded in the vacuum that the pandemic left in our lives. However, the powerfully written songs here embrace that tension, express it, and process it through some of the least pigeon-holeable heavy music that I've encountered. Check out an interview with guitarists Matt Ciani and Mike Fox below, discussing the band's past, their influences, and the inspiration and process behind Mirror / Vessels.

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You've got a new EP coming out in March, Mirror/Vessels, and it's your first non-full-length EP release since you guys formed in 2015. Can you tell me how that came together? Mike: Yeah, we were at a Black Lives Matter protest, and Matt and I were talking, it'd been about a year at that point since Mercy came out and our friend and live drummer Sam Corman Penzel was moving and he'd never been on a Flesh of the Stars release, so we decided that we wanted to put together a nice split or a good EP as a send-off to him. Matt: We were more or less like, why don't we write a record? Mike: Yeah, that's true. Matt: Because Sam had been in the band for as much time as he was in college, and he had never appeared on a release, which seemed like a crime. Mike: Sam basically started playing for us shortly after Anhilla came out in 2017, and hadn't been on anything, so... he maybe did some drum overdubs on Mercy and that was it. So, who did drums on Mercy then? Matt: That was our other drummer Nico Ciani, my brother. He's played on all the records, he did the artwork for this, he did our bandcamp redesign, he's doing all the new merch and stuff. So he's pretty much still involved, just this time we didn't fly him in to play drums. Mike: For obvious reasons [laughs]. So, you've got the two tracks, "Mirror" and "Vessels" and then in the middle you have these two ambient, heavily synth-driven tracks, one that's kind of connected to Mirror and one to Vessels. Could you talk about the structure and the role those play? Matt: So, the casual way that this came about and the way that we were working on stuff on our own, primarily, and we only had a little bit of time to get together, meant that an otherwise probably more collaborative process ended up being me writing a song, Mike writing a song, and then sort of as a psuedo version of that collaborative process, we each did an electronic interpretation of the other's song. And obviously we contributed to each other's full tracks, but also it was an opportunity to do something we haven't done since Hide, uh, where we have these synth interludes that I always really liked doing, and also, I don't know, interpret each other's work in a way that we didn't really get to do in person. Mike: Yeah, that was the other big driving force for wanting to do this style of EP. I think the way that Flesh has worked since we started the band was like 2015, I wrote some songs, Matt wrote some songs, and then Hosanna came out and we basically did the same thing. And then Anhilla, mostly I wrote that record and then Mercy, mostly Matt wrote that record with, like, each of us contributing a track or two or something for those. And then, this time I think it just kind of broke [laughs]. It would be nice if we actually wrote songs together, and we almost did. Matt: Yeah, we had a week and did probably more collaboration on the actual big songs than we ever had on the previous records. Matt: I always say it, and I said it for Anhilla and I said it for Mercy and I'm saying it now: this is the band record, this is the one where we sound like a band, finally. Mike: Yeah, I concur with that. This is the first time it felt like we were actually making decisions as a group, and not just like "Okay, we're done recording, now everybody else clear out so Matt and I can spend three weeks talking about what we want in our respective tracks. That drives to one of my other questions. With Flesh of the Stars, your music is kind of unique in that it's really heavily melody driven and there's a lot of interweaving strands of stuff going on at the same time. I was wondering what the songwriting process looked like for Mercy. Sounds like it was that, with the "three weeks"? Matt: Mercy is a record that I feel like expanded my brain to almost dangerous levels. The amount of time that I spent writing Mercy, the title track especially, was, I mean, psychotic. Mike: Matt showed us a version of Mercy, we were maybe a week and a half away from finishing and releasing Anhilla... [laughs] and then it took like, another two years basically. Matt: I feel like it's a really organic process of just kind of playing a lot of guitar, which is like so boring to try and talk about. Like, oh, I sit and sometimes I practice new scales, and you know. One of my good friends famously started playing guitar without ever learning chords, and he would just put his fingers on the fretboard in a way that sounded good. And he never learned the names of anything, just like did it. I really wanted to get back to that type of playing guitar that he would do when he first started playing guitar, but add in the knowledge that I have, obviously, I've been playing guitar for like 20 years. Mike: It's funny you should say that, too. I think about him saying that a lot, and I was making a note of that when I was writing "Mirror." Matt: Who wants to write a bunch of theory songs? That sucks. But that's also a big part of it, the way that Mike and I have been able to work together is that we're both fairly theory-heavy musicians. So, the way that it gets built might be this very organic thing, but from recording our basic skeleton on it's just like talking specifically about the "tension" of the chords and things like that. Mike: Yeah, how is the voice leading working on this track? [laughs]

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Do you start with the guitar, and go from there or does it depend on the song? Mike: I think it depends. Almost always, guitar is the instrument that things initially get written down on. That's the territory I'm the most comfortable in. Sometimes I'll write things down on piano and go from there. Mirror was a lot like that. Typically though, with Flesh, it starts with guitar. Matt: For the EP, I was staying at my girlfriend's apartment for pandemic reasons and only had a guitar there. So, that was what I had to do. And then it kind of grew into this drum demo I did that sucks, but is instructive of what the song is trying to do. I'm trying to think if anything on Mercy was born -- there was a Rhodes piano at the old studio that I think I wrote the song "Procession" on, because that was like the most amazing piano I've ever played. It felt like butter to play, and we had this huge keyboard amp so the low notes would just explode. It was really conducive to writing a doom track on this really pretty instrument. It feels like all the instruments and all the tones, on each song across your releases, are chosen really carefully because they work together so well to create an atmosphere. Is that something you figure out while recording or something you know ahead of time? Matt: Both. Mike: Yeah, it's a little bit of both. Matt and I have fortunately been on basically the same track as far as Flesh developing goes. I think both of us have an idea on the kind of instrumentation we want when we start. I've bought things specifically because I wanted them to show up on Flesh songs, like the piano that's on this record, I bought that piano because I thought it would be nice to have on a Flesh track because we haven't had one since Hide really. Matt: We were recording at my parents' old house, back when they had a piano. That's where that piano came from [laughs]. Any record-making process for me, like if I'm engineering my own thing, which is 99% of the time at this point, is having this idea of what I want to do in my head and then chasing that with the things that I have and trying to see what gets the closest, and I think this one got pretty close to where I pictured it. But you don't anticipate buying a Roland string synth and wanting that to be on everything [laughs], so you have to leave it open to the possibilities. As far as the development part goes, to what you were saying, Mercy felt extremely pastoral, maybe ecclesiastical to me, and Mirror/Vessels takes a lot of that sound but it also kind of adds an electronic edge and maybe a bit of harshness. Did you go into recording with any "this is what we want to do now" ideas or was it maybe more an evolution? Matt: We were talking a lot about trying more stuff, doing things differently than our normal orthodox, all the way back to the way that Sam recorded his drums -- it's different than the way that I normally record drums. I come from a 'close mic everything, everything super deadened' school like these 1970s drums. The way that Sam plays drums -- he has a million drums and a million cymbals. Mike: You can never have too many cymbals. Matt: Super resonant, you know, nice live room and making it sound like a drum kit. It was, as weird as it sounds for a metal band, a new process. And I think a lot of the rest of what we did for building this out followed along these lines. The things that we do specifically and have done for the last four records, what if we just did like 15 percent different? Like, what if we had Travis screaming at you? What if we had some screeching synthesizers instead of pleasant Prophet pads? Mike: This whole record felt like both a good jumping-off point and a good way to look back. It ended up feeling a lot like we had kind of fully internalized everything that we did for the past five years or something. We had the opportunity to tweak that and kind of fuck with it. There's a lot of things on this album that to me seem very "Oh, this is so Flesh of the Stars, this is a very Flesh of the Stars thing to do," but like Matt was saying, I think we fully knew what we were doing and then decided to fuck with it a little bit and twist it around. One of the things about Flesh of the Stars that I dig the most and that a lot of people have noticed, you have an interesting way of fusing that progressive feeling with that heavy doom atmosphere. What led you to that approach? Mike: I love prog, baby! Matt: Yeah, I mean progressive rock is probably the most elemental music to my understanding of how to make a rock song. Listening to Rush, in particular -- Rush was my favorite band for a decade of my life. They're probably not anymore, because I've swung in a pretty different direction, but I still probably know how to play most Rush solos, including the synthesizer phase, by heart, if you gave me a guitar right now. Alex Lifeson is king. I feel like the doomiest aspects of the last one, at least, the EP, came out of just wanting to do loud shit in a room with my friends. You live this life of quiet solitude while the world explodes around you, and suddenly you're in a room with the amount of firepower that our amplifiers have, how could you not make a doom song? Mike: How could you not want to hit every distortion pedal you have and then crank up the Orange past the breaking point? I agree with what Matt said, but I also want to add that I'm not a Rush person. Matt: You want to distance yourself from the Rush branding? [laughs] They're in the press release! Mike: I'm not trying to offend the Rush fans, I think it's worth saying that I'm more of the Pink Floyd end of prog. I love Floyd and I love Yes -- Yes is like my favorite prog rock band. And like, King Crimson. I was going to ask about your favorite prog bands, and... that starts to cover that. What's your favorite Yes era? Mike: I like, like early 1970s Yes. Like Relayer, that kind of stuff? Mike: Yeah. I get some of that, I also honestly get a large King Crimson, In the Wake of Poseidon kind of vibe from Mercy, not sure if that's in your interests or not? Matt: I actually need to listen to some more King Crimson. I "save" bands for myself, sometimes. I did this with David Bowie, where I intentionally didn't listen to David Bowie because I knew I would love it and I need to portion out over what I anticipate being the rest of my life, these moments of discovery of something that fucking kills. If it's the coolest shit ever, and I know I'm gonna think it's the coolest shit ever, I think King Crimson sits firmly in that territory for me. When I need it, I'm gonna break that glass and I will talk your fucking ear off about King Crimson, but right now I do not know. Mike: I'd say yes, though. King Crimson was a big influence for me with "Rites". That's where my head was at. And like, Warning. It's fifty-fifty. Matt: Was there ever a time when we weren't listening to a lot of Warning? Mike: No. [laughs]

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What doom bands do you have as shared interests? Mike: Oh boy. Matt: The talk of the band chat has been Thou for the last two years. I think all of us -- I don't know about Mike, but the rest of us -- have that Thou collab record in our top 25 for 2020. Obviously, Warning... who else do we all like? Mike: Like, Pallbearer. Sam is farther off... Matt: We love Khemmis. Mike: Khemmis is fucking rad. Mike: Elder's great, and Electric Wizard, though... I haven't listened to them in the past couple years. That's very fair. Mike: Yeah [laughs]. Matt: I gotta say, Time to Die was actually one of my favorite records of theirs, but I don't think I've even heard the ones after that. Mike: Boris, Sleep, the kind of typical... well, I don't know if I would count Boris as a doom band, but something that the chat talks a lot about. As far as Chicago goes, you guys played a few shows last year -- wait, not last year, the year before that -- Matt: We lost a year. [laughs] Unfortunately, I couldn't make it, and then there was the pandemic... fuck me... but what have been some of your favorite shows here in Chicago? What's your live experience like? Matt: I think the most recent show was one of my favorite ones, right? Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean was the last show, at Empty Bliss. They're so fucking loud, and we got to share their cabs, so we got to play loud. We're so used to being the quietest metal band on the bill, just because in order to hear your monitors you need to be at a somewhat reasonable volume and harmonies really don't sound good unless you sing them right. Mike: In the footage of that show, the guitars sound amazing, but it's clear that Matt and I are very... [laughs] Matt: I'm just going on feeling -- the tension in my throat, let's hope that's an "A". Just turn the amps up louder, it's fine. Matt: Exactly. That show was sick, we got to see them play their Death Cab for Cutie cover, which I loved. The Schuba's show was really fun, that was a couple years ago. Mike: That was dope. And Underground Lounge, baby! Matt: I miss the Underground Lounge. I'll get shocked by that microphone any day! Don't put me talking shit about them in this. I'll redact it. Matt: I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we were supposed to - it was on the books - do a show that we were all absolutely losing our minds over -- Elder, at Reggie's. We'd never played Reggie's before and I was so amped just to be in that room and to be on a bill with a band that we all like. That got bumped twice, now I don't think it has a date anymore -- understandably. Am I just imagining this because I want the poetic aspect of it -- am I imagining that we recorded the EP the same weekend that the show was supposed to be? Mike: You're right, we did the initial sessions for going over the material that weekend. Because when we were recording, Sam would just stop and go "Fellas... right now, we would be playing a show. It'd be two more days." And he did that like, eight times. Matt: I miss live music, even if I didn't get to play it. My ears are probably happy that I haven't seen many shows, obviously. Mike: Yeah, my hearing has recovered significantly in the last year.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZkD5iFf35c

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So, in 2019 you released your fourth full-length album Mercy, if I can count right. It was my first experience with you guys and it seems like it was extremely well-received. How did it go from your perspective? Mike: It fucking slapped, dude. It was nuts. Matt: Yeah, I was shocked. I was proud of that record, I think we did a good job -- I spent an enormous amount of time working on that record, so to actually have it received well was truly one of the most rewarding things in my life up to that point. It was a very special and cool thing, and we got to hear from people whose writing we read, about our own music. I mean, I don't even know how to describe that, it's just so fucking cool. Mike: It was mind-boggling. We got in "Black Market," and I had several friends that I hadn't talked to back in Ohio reach out to me and were like "Dude, this is you guys, right?" Matt: Yeah, as a high school Stereogum reader, that was like a new era of my life, pre and post that. Mike: We didn't like, there was no crazy blow-up or benefit outside of feeling like we got to connect with a lot of people. I think that's the driving force behind making records for us, most of the time, outside of just like creative expression, for me it's not like we expect or seek to make a ton of money, obviously, because we're in music. But yeah, it's just dope, it's cool to hear from people who like what we're doing and who we like what they're doing. Any plans for a physical release? You know people would buy that, right? Matt: That's my favorite question. I'd like to think so. We're working on it. Yeah, I mean, we're a DIY band, so we're to a degree stuck in this idea of doing this on our own, pressing vinyl. We have plans, but we don't have funds yet. I mean, that sucks as an email that I have to send all the time, it's like "Yeah, we just can't afford to press vinyl yet." Mike: It's that, and the touring question. Before the pandemic hit, people would always be like "Come to South America, come to Germany," and it's like... "Dog, we would love to." We've been saving up for a physical release, more or less we've had plans to do that since Hosanna really. It's just really expensive to do it the way we want to do it. Matt: We talked about it for Mercy, and then we made the record a really unwieldy length and structure, so the size wouldn't make any sense. So that kind of fucked us up, there. How do you even press Mercy? If you're looking for something cheaper, you could do CDs. Mike: Hey, Matt, what do you think about CDs? [laughs] Matt: I've long said, if you want a CD, give me your mailing address, pay for postage, and we'll burn you a CD and print out the album art for you. That is what I hold true. Our other band did tapes, and I feel like I like the idea of tapes a lot because I like the culture a lot. Mike: If we were gonna do tapes, I would almost want to do Hide and Hosanna on a tape, I don't know if I would do Anhilla and Mercy on a tape, though. Matt: That sounds kinda fun. Mike: We're just very picky. I've been surprised how much people like CDs these days. Mike: I'm not against CDs, I like CDs. One of my roommates, and a separate bandmate of ours in our other group, work at Reckless downtown, so I get a lot of really great old media detritus [laughs] from both of them. Back to Mirror/Vessels, could you tell me the themes that these songs explore? To be honest, I love the vocals in your songs, but I understand... not that much. Mike: Yeah, let's go in order, I guess. "Mirror", the lyrical content is mostly inspired by... it's metal, so it is what it is, but I was reading "Endurance," which is an account of an expedition to the Antarctic that went horribly, horribly wrong. Everybody survived, but basically they lived on the ice for two years and then had to go through this crazy process of taking a lifeboat across the most turbulent ocean to the nearest populated island to get help. That was a big inspiration, and then partially, more generally musically and thematically, I was really inspired by Angel's Egg, if you're familiar with that. It's this OVA [laughs], this old anime thing from the 1980s that's this really beautiful, super fucking wild surrealist film. It's dope. It's all dark and very Gothic, just super fucking crazy to watch. Matt: Mike, can I tell the story about the tape machine band? Mike: Fuck, I can't believe we almost forgot! Dude, I forgot that that was the inspiration behind the very first lyric. Matt: Okay, so I used to have this old tape machine, a Tascam 388, that is like this old reel-to-reel machine, and I bought it from a guy that my dad knows, and he sold it to me really cheap on the stipulation that I was going to digitize his son's band demo, which only existed on tape. So, I had to repair the tape machine and digitize the demo, and he sold it to me for like, no money basically. I actually did fix the tape machine and digitize this tape, and two things were interesting about it. One, the tape had really, really bad "sticky shed," which is like the back film of a reel-to-reel tape being made with plastic. Really shitty 1980s plastic, would melt onto the magnetic front of the tape and strip the magnetic film off of it as it would unspool, as it was being played. So, you get like crazy dropouts, and by the end of it, at the end of the tape at the end of this demo, this psychedelic, ambient sound. It was like this wash of noise that didn't really sound like anything, and knowing the beginning of the tape where they just sound like a kickass rock band... it's like, I know that's what the band sounded like when they recorded this in, but it became this experimental ambient tape just because of the physical medium degrading. But the relevant part of this is that they have two songs that I was able to get off of the sticky tape intact. Both of which absolutely fucking kick ass -- they are so good, this kid sounds like... it's like 1970s, I compared it to like Iggy Pop played at 45 RPM instead of 33 RPM, because it's like a pre-adolescent singer. But the songs are fucking awesome! And the first line on the first song is the first line on our EP. Because we were inspired by this fucking amazing band of kids on this old tape machine. Is that available anywhere? Mike: Nope. Matt: I always say, I want to put it out. If they'll let me, I want to put it out. Mike: We've talked about starting a label. Matt: God, we could piss off Flesh of the Stars fans so much if we press that, but not our records. [laughs] Mike: Congrats, guys... enjoy! [laughs] Matt: I'm the only person who can hear this kid's band right now. You're like the keeper of some ancient secret. Matt: Yeah -- the ancient secret being "It's time for a change, it's time to rearrange, baby." Mike: "Look in the mirror... [falsetto] who do you see?" Matt: "Vessels" is sort of a salad of imagery and stray narrative bits that all center around some kind of summoning ritual. I had this whole mapped out thing about a group of grieving people floating out to a mysterious at-sea locale, offering meaningful binding objects et cetera, et cetera, but I tried to keep the thread fairly indirect and ambiguous. I’ve always been drawn to lyrics with a lot of mystery to them, and especially in 2020 anything too direct in its narrative sounded like it could be read as a comment on life in 2020. That was the last thing I wanted to do!

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To wrap this up, what's next for Flesh of the Stars? Do you have release plans for Mirror / Vessels? Mike: We talked about putting this out. Yeah, walking into this I think we were a little unsure if this was gonna be LP five, so our real plan is to hopefully earn enough money from this release to actually press the next one. Matt: To make a record with vinyl in mind. Mike: Yeah, and have it be a real fucking banger. We haven't talked too much about exactly what LP five is gonna be. I think we have some initial brainstorming things, like I've got three or four sheets of paper upon which I've written... "here's some cool ideas, here's some things that we could do." I'd also really like to tour if that's ever a thing for anybody ever again. Matt: I'd love to play even one more show. Mike: We've been a band for six or seven years now and haven't done a consecutive string of shows, let alone a tour. That would be cool. More riffs... Matt: Yeah, we're good at continuing to make stuff, so what's next is always like a kind of nebulous web of an answer and then if you asked us the day that one of us had "The Idea," we'd be like "Oh, I can tell you exactly what the tracklist is and the times of each of the songs, and half of the lyrics." [laughs] I've been cooking a lot of stuff, and we'll see... whenever one of us has the record idea, it's fucking off to the races. Mike: Both Matt and I probably have 50 or 60 riffs saved up on our phones, just melodic ideas, at any given time for Flesh. Matt: Maybe I'll just press a collection of those, put those on tape. "Flesh of the Stars: Voice Memos." Mike: Well, when we get our box set release... Matt: Our Numero comp. Mike: Yeah, the really bad bonus tracks that nobody wants to hear. You guys are making jokes about this, but I think there'd actually be interest in all these things. Don't underestimate Bandcamp nerds and their need for collectible media. Mike: We're putting out candles! Nice. Matt: Yeah, we have extremely cool merch. Nico is on a tear right now, he's just a fucking awesome designer, so I'm so excited to share the stuff that he's making for us right now. More where the album art came from, and I think it's very impressive and great. I'm as stoked about this as I am about sharing new music.

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Mirror / Vessels releases independently on March 5th. Pre-orders available via the band's Bandcamp page.

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We (or at least most of us) love band T-shirts. They're an opportunity to represent something beyond our physical or digital music collections on our person in the real world. It goes beyond the idea of being a billboard for a band and more like… connecting with the artist. You want to show that you enjoy and support them in a way which is literally on your person. Of course, the metal world is no stranger to bootlegs, with some as outlandish as Metallica shirts featuring famous cartoon characters to the more innocuous like using an album cover and the band's name in Gothic script as the whole design. T-shirts run the gamut, and the underground has a real bootlegging problem, but there are the few (and very proud) shirt designers and makers who go the distance and officially license merch from bands and labels, giving the world a new look at old merch, or maybe even a classic look at new bands. Portland-based T-shirt overlords Labyrinth Tower and Earth in Sound bring an air of legitimacy to the classic art of "the metal T-shirt." We spoke with both Labyrinth Tower and Earth in Sound about the T-shirt game at large, as well as what it's like to not be a bootlegger.

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Labyrinth Tower

Founder: Calvin [Redacted] Link: Shop Features: Lamp of Murmuur, Celestial Sword, Old Nick, and more "I personally really love a good album art shirt," says Labyrinth Tower proprietor Calvin, "as a kid before I ever even heard metal I was drawn to the album art of Iron Maiden and Sepultura in the record store, shopping based on album art once even led to a very disappointing purchase of a Molly Hatchet record at 14 that made me reevaluate the process." Labyrinth Tower, which operates on a preorder-on-demand and semi-perpetual printing business model (these are not limited printings), tackles a unique part of the underground, namely the rawer end of the black metal spectrum, but presents such intentionally crude music with a sense of class and clean design. Featuring shirts by such hyped artists as Lamp of Murmuur and Celestial Sword, the duality between Calvin's designs and the music presented is definitive, but fitting. Aesthetics are king in raw black metal, and a really solid shirt displaying the intent of the artist you want to represent as well as their aesthetic choices is really key. But what is it like to work with such hermetic, exceedingly anonymous artists? "They're just normal people who want to be left alone to work with other creatives for the most part," Calvin explains. "It's really fun working so closely with the artists because these individuals tend to be such endless fonts of creativity that a design will typically be the result of us bouncing ideas back and forth excitedly til some really cool stuff comes out of it. [...] It's a really great interaction of high collaboration and a really refreshing break from the mundane isolation of quarantine life." And what of bootlegs? "I wanted shirts for obscure bands and I wanted designs that I like," he says. "So often there will be like one shirt for a really great band and it will be either just the logo or some crappy unauthorized bootleg." He continues: "Honestly, having high quality, officially licensed designs widely available for the bands that I love the most is something that I have wanted for as long as I have been into music. So many times I search and search for any sort of shirt for a band that I love and more often than not either come up empty handed or find shirts that are poorly designed or are bootlegs, so I'm really happy that I'm at least able to start bridging that gap for not only my customers, but myself as well! I never print a shirt that I don't want for myself which is honestly how this whole thing started, I was booting one off single shirts for myself through those crappy print on demand sites where you upload your art which led to friends who are artists asking if I could make a shirt for their bands and the rest is history."

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Earth in Sound

Founder: Jason Walton (Snare of Sixes, ex-Agalloch, ex-Khôrada) Link: Shop Features: Nuclear Death, Ras Algethi, Disharmonic Orchestra, and more Filling in a different part of the metal merch niche is Jason Walton's Earth in Sound, dedicated to the stranger end of the metal (and related) spectrum. Boasting classic and new designs for such legendary acts as late-'80s/early-'90s proto-deathgrind act Nuclear Death and avant-death metallers Disharmonic Orchestra, Earth in Sound's initial presence is one of "the classics," though Walton very quickly plans on moving forward into the present. "I’ve been wearing band shirts almost my entire life," Walton reminisces. "I’ve noticed for years now that the quality and availability of shirts from bands I like has been on the decline. Every now and then I’d search for classic designs but was put off by shit quality, bootlegs and shipping from Europe. I want to make designs that I want to wear. I think there is a massive hole in the market and I want to change that. I can’t be the only one that wants a Ras Algethi shirt." As an artist whose work has been affected by bootleggers, Walton's stance is staunch: "I think it’s inexcusable, and cowardly." He then goes on to explain his licensing approach, highlighting the mundanity of the process: "Usually it just starts with a question: are they interested? I explain my idea and vision for the line and collaborate with them on what they want, what I want and we work it out from there. In the end we get a product we are both happy with. Each band has their own logistics as far as licensing and what they want but I try to make all parties happy. No real interesting interactions aside from a few bands being very surprised I want to invest in their art." There is a tenderness to Walton's work, too. "The other night I was hanging with my family and my two daughters and I were all wearing Confessor hoodies," he says. "Comfortable, well made, nice looking Confessor hoodies. I have always wanted a Confessor hoodie. That moment and that fact is what makes it worth it for me. I am producing the band merch I’ve always wanted. That and making items that have never existed before, from bands I love." What comes next for Earth in Sound? "I don’t feel comfortable revealing ones that aren’t set in stone," Walton explains, "but I can say that I am working with James Plotkin right now on an Old Lady Drivers design featuring never before seen artwork."

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I suspect I'm not the only one who, sometime this last month, looked at Facebook and got a reminder for a post I made last year about going to a show. Oh, sweet early-2020 us: we thought those shows we skipped due to bad weather, other obligations, or sheer laziness were just blips in a bountiful harvest of live music to be reaped throughout the year; but alas, the fields were barren. For many people it's been about a year without seeing shows, and though in some cases local shows are starting to be viable, they won't be anything like what we were used to, and certainly not at a normal scale for months to come. In the meantime, we have bands like Portland's experimental sludge outfit Alltar (often stylized as A//TAR) to tide us over, providing live albums and videos to kindle the flames of the underground music spirit in us while we wait for better times. Today, we're premiering the video for "Cantillate"—it was actually filmed two years ago at last year's Ceremony of Sludge, but the same track is featured on the band's recent live album Live at Ceremony of Sludge, so try this video and then hit the live album for more where that came from. For maximum authenticity while watching, grab a PBR (or an equivalently cheap and theoretically drinkable beer), throw on a hoodie, and stand in front of your computer screen—no sitting.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5UUovF1Qxs

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Groovy, angry sludge seethes at the heart of "Cantillate" (a fantastic word that means to chant or intone), but it's twisted into unusual shapes and textures through synthesizers and precisely-calibrated guitar tones as it bounces along. The middle section of the song shifts into a meditative, cleaner phase completely unlike the beginning, and a repeated invocation of "worship, cantillate," escalates the meditation into an amplified sermon, one conducted with cyclical riffing and increasingly unhinged screams. There's a large divide between "normal" and where Alltar's sound resides, and this kind of weirdness is something that comes across excellently in live shows. I'm always going to dig watching bands level rooms with full sets of loud, uncompromising riffs, but the quarantine has really whetted my appetite for strange and unusual offerings, too. As a band that offers both at the same time, we can only count the days until Alltar can grace the stage at events like Ceremony of Sludge once again. Check out a Q&A with the band below, talking about the allure of live shows and their approach to sludge in the thriving Portland scene.

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Your live sound on "Cantillate" is huge and hypnotizing, but it also has a lot of nuance. How do you approach live performances versus the studio -- do you aim for faithful reproduction or changing things up? Tim Burke: That is great to hear! We like to sound huge and hypnotising! We want to sound as good live as we do in the studio, and much about that has to do with everyone in the band being meticulous about the sound of their own instruments. It’s critical that everyone in the band is trying to make sure they sound awesome because it allows us to come together sonically as a band. Have you had that experience where you see a band that sounds amazing on record but fails to deliver live? That can be really disappointing for a fan. We want to be able to deliver live as much as on record and it is something that is important to us as a band. It is more of a personal goal than anything. The tones and sounds really start off live. Much of this is from our pedigree as people who have been performing live for decades. Many of the places I have played over the years have less than professional PAs, so I learned long ago that you want the band to be able to match the volume of the drummer and sound awesome without anything going through the main PA. That way the PA can be dedicated to vocals and overall, the band sounds a lot better. It certainly is a treat to get to play better stages where the PA is proper and you have good monitoring. In the studio we get to spend a lot more time getting things perfect. I often have a sound I am going for in my head. It starts with thick meaty, yet articulate drums, usually, the bass comes next, guitars are layered in, and then keyboards, vocals, and any samples are layered on top of that. I used to want to preserve my live sound as much as possible, but these days I am more willing to experiment in the studio with sounds. Using multiple amps for different sections, layering on effect and getting them dialed in just right. There are certainly parallels in that we are trying to do the same thing live as in the studio, and that is to achieve that perfection. I always feel like I am close, asymptotic to that perfection, because can anything in the real world truly be perfect? And if it was, would it suck the humanity out of it? Playing live, the show must go on, but in the studio you get to take your time, at least if you have the budget anyway. 2020's Ceremony of Sludge took place pretty much right before live music stopped due to quarantine. Do you have any memories or stories about the show to share? Burke: We really miss the community of musicians and bands that come together for Ceremony of Sludge every year, and generally for shows around time. There is certainly a coming together of the community when both the local bands as well as touring acts and the local legends play. I remember the days when it seemed like three fourths of the audience at YOB shows were local musicians. A lot of us were chasing what Mike Scheidt and YOB achieved. I remember seeing YOB years ago and being like, “well damn, they are already doing what I am trying to get to.” It made me reevaluate what I was doing musically and the result is A//TAR. This year is particularly hard because Ceremony of Sludge would be happening right around now if it were not for the pandemic. I really miss being able to hang out without everyone, to be crammed into a room with a bunch of people, and of course hugs. I personally didn’t realize how much of my life and my mental health was tied up in live music. It was my place to forget about the problems of normal life and just have fun, and it has been really difficult for me personally. I know that a lot of other people are feeling the same way, and in many ways I am very lucky in other aspects of my life, so I truly empathize with what we all have lost due to the pandemic. I do believe that the community will return once things open back up. What has the quarantine and pandemic period been like for the band? Burke: It has been a hard time for the band, there has been a lot of personal change for all of us to varying degrees. I think this is hard on everyone and it threw a wrench in our routine. We usually spend a lot of time working together in the practice space, hashing out new material, trying out ideas and wood shedding. It is always about doing that live, together, and in person in the rehearsal space once a week at least. But with the pandemic, we suspended practicing because of the close quarters and enclosed space. We tried early on to do file exchanges to keep working but we haven’t been able to make that work. I suppose it is an extension of how we have worked as a band because we have a lot of songs that are not fully formed that we have abandoned for one reason or another. I have always believed in trying to choose the best ideas, and the best songs to work on, cutting ideas that are not as good at multiple times during the process of writing new songs. It can be hard to let go of something you have poured a lot of yourself into, but it makes the material stronger. We have been trying to get together in smaller groups over the summer to keep working on things, but with the weather changing, meeting in garages and porches is much less hospitable. I want to see us figure out a way to make progress though. Hopefully the vaccinations and reduction in cases will allow us back in the room soon.

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What do you miss most about live music? Do you have any post- or pre-show rituals you're itching to get back to? Burke: So many things I miss! I’ve realized that going out to a show is one of the things that really helped me cope mentally with the pressures of modern life. There is a social aspect to that for sure. But there is also the experience of seeing so many musicians expressing themselves in the music they create, and how they communicate themselves though performance. I enjoy keeping up with what other musicians are doing. Sometimes you see a band and you just know right away that they have it, whatever it is. I think of the first time I saw Bell Witch. I already loved their demo, but the live performance was simply mesmerizing. There is also the other side, I sometimes see bands that pull large crowds and people seem to really be digging, but they don’t connect with me. That is a dig per say, not every person is going to be into whatever band or artists is creating, that is a part of creating art. The whole show experience is the ritual I want to get back to personally. Playing shows is always focus for me, I am focused on being ready to perform, and having everything ready to go. Going to shows is much more relaxed because I just get to be there and enjoy the performances. For playing shows, I miss the post show beer and food at 2 AM after all the gear is loaded and you still have the energy cursing through you from playing a show. There is a Sizzle Pie, the local chain started by the guys who founded Relapse Records right near my house, and I miss dropping but there for a slice and a pint after in the early hours of the morning. It’s like all the things you don’t get to do in the pandemic rolled into one. Juan, you and Nate are also in the PDX stoner rock band Tigers On Opium, which I covered a single from a while back. If I hadn't looked up lineups, I would have had no idea you were the vocalist for both projects! Can you talk about your approach to vocals here in Alltar, versus in Tigers on Opium? Juan Caceres: The real magic in making art/music, is that there are many ways to do it. I love making visual art and making music. So any time I get to try different things, I take full advantage of the range of skills I have worked on. Alltar’s approach to music is a mix of doom and heavy post/metal with influences of mysticism, so I tend to play more towards the esoteric elements of heavy singing… Drone chants, screaming, and dark melodies mixed with a poetic element to the lyrical content. In Alltar I also don’t “write” the music, more so I play a producer style role in helping tie the music together with the vocal/keyboard content and lyrical concepts. In Tigers, believe it or not, the majority of the material starts in more of a singer/songwriter approach as I tend to write the songs/riffs/vocals on an acoustic or electric guitar sitting in my little home studio. My approach with vocals for Tigers tends to stay away from metal style screaming and I like to focus on hooks and catchy melodies. Also the majority of the material is about everyday stuff that I like to write about… From things that have happened in my personal life, to interests I have like magick and the occult, or Portland’s seedy history, along with fun stuff like cars, motorcycles, babes, and smoking weed, drugs and drinking. [laughs] Regardless of the project I am working on, I almost always have a notebook with me and am writing songs and lyrics, and I keep a running list of ideas on the notes app on my phone. Aside from having just released a Tigers EP in January, and this Alltar CD in February, I just finished tracking guitars for a new studio recording project collaborating with Adam Pike (ILS/Red Fang) and Justin Lee Henry that’s all death/tech/sludge style metal songs about golf! [laughs] Then in March I will be entering the recording studio with Tigers to record our first full length album and to finish a couple things for the second EP/volume of the 503.420.6669 series. Immediately after that I will be going back into the studio to record my first solo album in the style of folk/acoustic. Working with different genres of music keeps me fresh and excited to work within the confines of a particular style.

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"Cantillate" can be found on the band's recent live album, Live at Ceremony of Sludge, available via their Bandcamp page. They can be found on Facebook as well.

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From the snowy Minnesotan North emerges atmospheric black metal band Tvær. I'd first heard of them a few years ago, but, unfortunately, their debut EP got lost in the miasma of new releases and band announcements. This was an unfortunate mistake, as their upcoming record Uvær is an absolute monolith of "classic" style USBM, but with the band's own twist. Of course, when I say "classic," I suppose that warrants an explanation. Though black metal in the United States has been well-defined since the early '90s, from a critical standpoint black metal didn't really hit the public eye here in the States until the 2000s in that weird sort of post-Weakling era (though Weakling never saw any sort of non-local fame during their tenure as an active band) when becoming more atmospheric and adventurous was the norm. To clarify, Tvær doesn't sound like Weakling, but they share a similar sort of progressive spirit, and the band's debut Uvær's folk melody-infused sounds are reminiscent of the bouncier, almost happier "Polish sound" fed through a distinctly morose, American filter. What is especially interesting concerning Tvær's sound is the lack of frills; it's all riffs, though they play the long game. Lacking the post-rock and filler which is generally left in a post-Weakling world (even though the primary source material lacked any of that to begin with), Tvær's ripping, emotive feels like something otherworldly more than sounds like another band. Let Uvær's numerically-titled second track whisk you away in snowy, forested atmospheres in an exclusive pre-release stream below.

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https://soundcloud.com/invisible-oranges/tvaer-ii/s-Re4NHCH5RG3

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Uvær releases this Spring on Bindrune Recordings.

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