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.

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Jon Rosenthal

Decoryah

Fall-Dark Waters

Operating somewhere between gothic metal, doom metal, and darkwave, Decoryah’s fairly singular final album Fall-Dark Waters is a moody masterpiece. Gathering influence from Projekt Records’ ’80s-’90s output and Paradise Lost alike, Decoryah did the unthinkable and made… actually gothic metal. This isn’t a vampiric affair, nor are there castles or lace-clad characters, rather this Finnish trio took influence from the music that actual goths were listening to at the time (and before) and made it heavy. Fall-Dark Waters is an overwhelming listen, often deeply orchestrated with many layers of keyboards, violin, and then, of course, the canonical rock band format, resulting in deeply emotive music. While listening to it this morning while writing this paragraph a bit too late, I found myself pausing to simply proclaim just how good this album is. Decoryah broke up in 1997, a year after releasing this album, ending what was supposed to be a seven album deal with Metal Blade two albums in, but apparently songwriter Jukka Vuorinen reformed Decoryah in 2019. What happens next remains to be seen.

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Ted Nubel

Funereal Presence

Achatius

While editing the soon-to-be-posted “Best of Q1” feature, I happened to reread Luke Jackon’s UMR blurb for Spirit Possession, which described the band as a sort of “Funereal Presence without the cowbell.” First of all, this triggered a vital neuron connection in my brain that finally helped me remember the name of this damn album, and secondly, I felt a great pang of sadness. Black metal needs to be moving toward more cowbell, not less, and if there’s any album that proves it, it’s this one.

Combining moody and generally just odd black metal with reverb-drenched, acrobatic heavy metal, Achatius feels like an ancient, unearthed mystery. Every part of it feels delightfully cryptic, draped in intrigue and ready to reveal horrifying, yet dazzling secrets of the past. Speaking more plainly, the long-form tracks offer a sense of immersion that has yet to be truly outdone by anything that came after this album–granted, it’s only about four years old, but never have I heard a black metal album (or any genre, really) that made cowbell feel so… magical.

I don’t branch out from metal like I used to on Invisible Oranges — part of an initiative former Editor-in-Chief Andrew Rothmund and I started to help re-center this website to be more within the scope of founder Cosmo Lee’s vision. We are “The Metal Blog,” after all, and yet… I find myself not listening to as much new metal like I used to. I don’t feel that ravenous desire to find recent or upcoming metal: a side effect of simply being overwhelmed with the weight of so much mediocre “quarantine metal” that I simply do not care as much as I used to. Now other things excite me beyond the scope of “just metal,” but I still look for similar qualities in new music: heaviness, emotive weight, quality songwriting, an entrancing character, all of which manifest in the new release from Coastal Californian duo Fetters, titled We Deserve to Die.

When I was first introduced to the Fetters project however many years ago, vocalist and synthesizer player W Ross Major, also of Nemorensis, At Dusk, and dungeon synth darlings MalFet, described it to me as “lighter death industrial.” For the uninitiated, death industrial is a style of music which calls upon intense textures and harrowing vocals, most notably played by artists like Brighter Death Now, Trepaneringsritualen (which I spelled from memory, nice), and Ramleh, but Fetters is incredibly different from these genre champions. Calling upon elements of dark electronica, darkwave, and other elements of gothic music, the duo of Major and fellow synthesizer player Maya Bayhan take death industrial’s pulsing, pitch-dark negativity and filter it through this goth pop catalyst in favor of crafting something catchier and more accessible than their own influences, all the while maintaining death industrial’s incredible levels of negativity.

We Deserve to Die, the duo’s long-awaited and long-composed debut full-length, positions itself in a unique point on a musical spectrum thought not to exist: somewhere between power electronics’ horror and post-punk’s dark pop sensibilities. Featuring notable guest spots from members of Some Ember and Kælan Mikla, Fetters’ own stance as a gothic project is certainly tangible, but Major’s harsh vocal performance and some of We Deserve to Die‘s noisier elements show that this duo is something else. Not quite death industrial, not quite post-punk, and definitely not metal, Fetters seems to be an odd choice for Invisible Oranges, and yet the intensity brought forth on this album places Major and Bayhan right alongside the extreme metal we present to the reading public.

Listen to an exclusive full-album stream of We Deserve To Die below.

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We Deserve To Die is out today on Pacific Threnodies.

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

Witchfinder General

Friends of Hell

I haven’t listened to too much music this week, I’m afraid—at least, not that I haven’t already written about. Whenever I get busy, I generally tend to retreat to stuff that I can count on to boost my spirits, and Witchfinder General’s Friends of Hell is at the top of that pile. Though they sounded a lot Black Sabbath (to a degree that I notice more and more with repeated listens), the short-lived band (with a similarly short reformation) put a huge mark on heavy metal with their preceding record Death Penalty as well as this one—there’s a reason that they’re cited by an enormous amount of bands as an influence. Rather than just wholesale copying Black Sabbath, they extracted and developed a specific slice of the titanic band’s appeal, shaping it into their own sound. Instead of focusing on the slow and evil side of Sabbath, they generally picked up on the hard-rock-driven proto-metal edge, dialing it in with equally colossal tone and groove to deliver Iommi-tier riffs that set a damn high bar for the future. This wickedly creative, raucous heavy-metal-meets-doom sound is one of the trademark sounds of the NWOBHM, and for good reason.

Capable of both moving, if bizarre, ballads in “Love on Smack” and “I Lost You,” as well as bimodal doom sagas like the title track, Friends of Hell seemed a little disconnected to me when I first listened, expecting through-and-through doom and not really appreciating the rock elements of their sound. I’m still probably not going to vote “Music” as my favorite song on this record, but I do recognize that the shifting tone on Friends of Hell is one of the things that lodges it in the brain so effectively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EPNR26w7Yo

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Jon Rosenthal

Lycia

The Burning Circle & Then Dust

It was only a matter of time before I wrote about a not-metal album, but let’s be fair, the world outside metal is so fucking vast that to simply put “not metal” into its own (truly massive) bucket is super solipsistic and silly. I’ve made this point before. Did you listen?

Lycia is a darkwave/goth band from Arizona who has been active since the late ’80s. Mike Vanportfleet and Tara Vanflower (and occasionally David Galas) craft dark, gauzy atmospheres using heavily effected guitars, keyboards, and very powerful drum machine beats, resulting in music which is both very active and truly passive. When I first discovered Lycia through double album The Burning Circle And Then Dust single “Pray,” I was immediately blown away, but not in the way one would think. “Wow, is this what U2 would sound like if they were good?” I thought… it must have been 2006. I quickly learned that “Pray” is not indicative of Lycia’s normally very moody, lace-enveloped, slight songs which take the idea of “goth rock” to an ambient extreme. The two hours which comprise The Burning Circle & Then Dust seem like a daunting listening task, but there is something so entrancing and enchanting about it that I could honestly listen to it back to back… twice in a row (If I’m in the right mood)!

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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

Earthride

Vampire Circus

The most difficult thing about this column is, ironically, the lack of restrictions. Turns out, picking any record to talk about is monumentally more difficult than having boundaries! Anyway, sometimes you just need to go back to the albums that have stuck with you, and Vampire Circus is one of those.

I discovered it before I really got into full-album listening, actually: Pandora would play a few tantalizing songs from it, including the title track, sparking a thirst to hear the whole thing. So, I ordered the CD and discovered Earthride’s magic. At the heart of the band is some of the best stoner-doom riffs ever put to tape: the type of simple, yet compelling stuff you can loop for an entire song. And they basically do do that, with generally a few riffs per track (plus excellent solos) serving to be more than enough backing material for Dave Sherman (Spirit Caravan, The Obsessed) to sing over, his gravelly voice making every song’s chorus heavy and unforgettable. Simple words, true now and forever: “All this darkness / has got to give.”

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Jon Rosenthal

MonumentuM

In Absentia Christi

An absolute classic of underground gothic/doom metal from the mind of a very important person in underground metal. The brainchild of Wounded Love/Avantgarde Music’s Roberto Mammarella, who released my pick of the week from this column’s last installment, MonumentuM’s (stylized, as always) early fusion of doom metal, gothic rock, and darkwave still makes for an enchanting listen 25 years later.

Having been released on legendary early second wave label Misanthropy Records and featuring guest vocals from Ataraxia‘s Francesca Nicoli, MonumentuM’s multifaceted sound pulls from a variety of sources, from Mammarella’s own groundbreaking labelwork to the library of extracurricular music he actually enjoyed (take, for instance, the Lycia album he just reissued). In Absentia Christi‘s mournful sound can be traced across the sea to the Peaceville sound, fine, but the dramaturgy found within this album in particular is distinctly its own monster.

Distorted guitars, pummeling drums, no bass frequencies. Black metal is pretty easily defined by its overall tone, but what if tone was superfluous? That is to say, maybe black metal is defined by something more, something… intentional. “Orchestral metal” (I might call them “black metal-inspired chamber music”) project Les Chants du Hasard take a strong stance in the world of intentional metal. Les Chants du Hasard take the ideals of what makes something metal and presents it in an entirely different fashion, maybe in a way we would hear metal if electricity would have never existed.

Utilizing solely chambered instruments (violin et al), woodwinds (flute et al) and the human voice, Les Chants du Hasard’s approach isn’t necessarily new, but the project presents “chambered metal” with new, stronger footing than their predecessors. Without distorted sound, upcoming album Livre Troisième offers a nuanced look into what exactly makes metal… metal, beyond the superficialities of post-production and armies of pedals. While still just as haunting as a black metal record, if not more, Livre Troisième‘s far more textured, harmonic approach relies entirely on the utilized instruments’ natural sounds and extended sound range to create possessed, enchanting music. Listen to an exclusive, pre-release stream of “L’oubli” and read an interview with composer and vocalist Hazard below.

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What first inspired you to make black metal-inspired chamber music?

Thank you for the “black metal-inspired chamber music,” that’s a new label I’ll add to my already big collection!

Now, joke aside, I’ve had this idea for a long time. I’ve always been attracted by violent and dark music and I’m also classically trained. As a teenager, I began to write a symphony. Needless to say, It did not go very far and I kept that for later. In the meantime I did some metal bands but always felt frustrated with only using guitars and drums. I could not properly bring life to the ideas and I ended up putting the blame on my compositional skills. So I took five years of proper classical composition classes the old way, by writing canons, fugues and chorals with a pen and paper. Little by little, this idea of “black metal-inspired chamber music” came back but I was still not sure it would work. The real trigger was when I saw the opera “Elektra” from Strauss, the most violent piece of music I’ve seen. I was then convinced this approach was a good idea.

Why do you feel these two disparate styles of music work together in harmony?

They don’t seem to me so disparate. I think that if you’re interested in violent and/or dark music, the first musical styles that come to mind are metal and classical music. What I did is start from an opera perspective and steer it towards a darker atmosphere by using the singing techniques used in metal, as well as the digital treatments obviously not available in the 19th century.

Do you find genre fusion to be difficult, or did the Les Chants du Hasard sound come naturally to you?

If you look at non typical “metal” outfits, for instance Apocalyptica, Profanum, Van Canto, etc, their common point is that they all include a drummer. It’s because this instrument easily makes a song dynamic and catchy. My biggest problem at the beginning was to keep having movements in the songs without relying on drums. In order to do that, each instrument of the orchestra has to carry a part of this movement. So I had to change my way of writing music to really think each line in terms of the movement it brings to the overall music.
Other than that, the music came naturally. The project is still evolving with every new release and with Livre Troisième I’ve found a clear path, straying away from the initial idea of orchestra with black metal vocals. There are other type vocals, with two operatic soprano and the overall approach is more nuanced. I’m also much more comfortable writing for orchestra than I was at the beginning.

There are other artists like Elend before you who have made this type of fusion approach but still languished in the underground (obviously Les Chants du Hasard is not an Elend ripoff, but the approach is mildly similar). To what do you attribute Les Chants du Hasard’s notoriety given the more difficult and unique style?

Well, I think Elend is still more well-known than Les Chants du Hasard, they released five albums on some quite big labels with much more PR support than I’ve had.

Still, I believe there’s an audience for such music. A lot of metalheads claim to be interested in classical music. It appeals also to people in other styles, gothic, experimental, ambient. It seems to me Les Chants du Hasard has a style not labeled yet, which will eventually consolidate, just like it did with dungeon synth or synthwave for instance.

Much like the other Les Chants du Hasard albums, Livre Troisième was first composed on piano and then orchestrated. What is your orchestration approach like and how do you approach texture when dividing the condensed sound into various instruments?