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Thursday 17 March 2022

Reviews: Dark Funeral, Hell Militia, Shaman's Harvest, Wyatt E (Reviews By Richard Oliver, Paul Scoble, Simon Black & David Karpel)

Dark Funeral - We Are The Apocalypse (Century Media Records) [Richard Oliver]

Dark Funeral are a band that have always been consistent. Having formed in 1993 the band have only released a grand total of seven albums (including the new one) but Dark Funeral are a band that deliver quality and not quantity and that remains true with the bands seventh album We Are The Apocalypse. From their beginnings Dark Funeral have always had a sound that is vicious, frantic and hateful but there has always been a melodic sensibility about their brand of black metal which whilst melodically leaning never strays into fully fledged melodic black metal and always stays on the side of all things nasty and evil. 

The music on We Are The Apocalypse doesn’t stray from the formula already established by Dark Funeral but offers an album that offers some variation. Fans of all things fast, violent and blast-beat riddled will throw horns forth to songs such as Nightfall, When Our Vengeance Is Done and Beyond The Grave but these blasts of hate and aggression are broken up by songs which take the foot off the pedal a bit and allow the listener to breath such as Let The Devil In, When I’m Gone and Leviathan which are slower, broodier and with a lot of atmosphere and are positively seeping with evil. The guitar work from Lord Ahriman and Chaq Moi is nothing short of stellar whilst the ferocity of the drumming from Jalomaah is truly something to behold and a reminder that he is one of the finest drummers in extreme metal. 

Heljarmadr returns on vocals for his second album with Dark Funeral and impresses with a vitriolic performance where the vocals are almost spat forth with such rage and darkness but also have a lot of clarity to them. Dark Funeral remain their consistent selves with We Are The Apocalypse which is another strong entry in their discography. There is a nice counterbalance between the fast and aggressive songs with the slower atmospheric ones meaning that this is an album that keeps you interested throughout. Dark Funeral aren’t wildly changing their sound on this album but showing that there can be different textures and shades to their sound whilst still remaining true to themselves. 8/10

Hell Militia - Hollow Void (Season Of Mist) [Paul Scoble]

Paris based Hell Militia have been making extremely nasty music since 2001. The band have released 3 albums before Hollow Void; Canonisation Of The Foul Spirit was the bands debut was released in 2005, 5 years later in 2010 brought us the bands second album, Last Station On The Road To Death, and two years later came album number three, Jacob’s Ladder. The band is made up of Dave Terror on drums, Arkdaemon on guitar, S on bass, RSDX on vocals and Saroth on guitar; Dave Terror and Arkdaemon are both original members, whereas S, RSDX joined Hell Militia in 2013, and Saroth joined in 2015; so for the three that are not original members this is their first Hell Militia album, which may explain the longer gap in releasing this album. So, after a ten year wait for album number 4, is Hollow Void any good?

Hell Militia play a very Orthodox and Lo-Fi type of black metal. So, loads of Second Wave influences, and a fairly basic sound of guitars, bass, drums and vocals, the same template that Hellhammer created way back in 1983. Over the years I have bought Lo-Fi Orthodox black metal albums and the sound remains very similar whether the album came out in the eighties, nineties, naughties, teens or twenties. The Orthodox black metal template has remained the same, probably because the sound in question has a very narrow criteria, and straying from that template, even a little bit, and you are not playing Orthodox black metal. So, don’t expect anything groundbreaking or startlingly original, that would be completely missing the point, the point is; is this a good Lo-Fi Orthodox black metal album? To which I have to answer, Yes, very good!

The sound on this album is nicely nasty, harsh, very distorted guitar and bass, battering drums with a snare sound that is reminiscent of a machine gun, and very extreme, harsh vocals. No soft or acoustic guitars, no clean vocals, definitely no keyboards, just savage blast beats, and dissonant and very nasty slow sections. The structures are simple as well, most of the songs vacillate between blasting and slow and dissonant, there are variations in speed and intensity, but the basic sound remains the same. So, we get tracks like Lifeless Light, where the balance is towards the savage and fast, with only a couple of short slow and heavy sections. or tracks like The Highest Fall, where the balance is closer to blackened doom, slow, nasty, black as pitch filth that feels deeply noxious, the track comes to an end with some extremely savage blasts that feel even more unhinged as they are juxtaposed with very slow and dissonant material.

Due to the narrow template that Orthodox black metal has, there are similarities to other bands on this album, and in keeping with the quality that is evident on this release the similarities are only with the best of black metal. I can hear some similarities with Darkthrone’s In The Shadow Of The Horns on title track Hollow Void, Thorn’s Aerie Descent on Dust Of Time, and Gorgoroth’s Incipit Satan in the track Veneration. Hollow Void is a great piece of Orthodox black metal, it’s harsh, nasty, blasting and deeply unhealthy. You won’t find massive amounts of progression or originality, but if you are looking for that in this kind of black metal, then you are looking in the wrong place. This album is about taking an existing form, and creating the best album possible, whilst staying in the realms of Orthodox black metal, and judged on that criteria, this an excellent album. 8/10

Shaman's Harvest – Rebelator (Mascot Records) [Simon Black]

It’s been a while since anyone’s heard much of these Missouri alt rockers. A quick read of the PR pack tells why, and quite frankly they’ve had a pretty tough time of it since 2017’s Red Hands Black Deeds album hit the world. You name it – it’s been thrown at them. Vocalist Nathan Hunt has had troubles with a long-term leg injury that needed constant surgical intervention over the years and nearly had to be amputated – then a bout of throat cancer needed to be got through. Then there’s the biblical barrage of floods and tornadoes that nearly wiped their town and studio off the map, some money problems and … oh yes, a global pandemic, so we can forgive them for taking their time on this one. 

This is a band who’ve done well in recent years, so they will no doubt have been feeling the pressure to deliver a resounding follow up after two good strikes in a row. You needn’t have worried – all that angst has been well and truly lived through and rolled up into a bunch of songs that drip in emotion and angst from their pores. Musically I’m always amazed that there are only three instrumentalists here, as this is a band that deliver an incredibly rich sounding mix, but then that’s what good song-writing and a restrained ear in the studio can deliver. 

I guess when you’ve had five years of honing, you have the luxury of being able to separate the ear worms from the ear wax, leaving eleven songs that beautifully and precisely deliver a modest slug of Southern tinged alternative rock. Despite the generally radio friendly history of this band, they aren’t afraid to keep it down-tuned and dirty – the first track they dropped from this (their seventh) studio album Bird Dog showed that aspect clearly. 

However, May 2021 seems a long time ago to have dropped the first single, which is probably why it’s held back to the end of the disk. I can’t really fault any of the tracks on here, but Lilith is by far the strongest. It’s catchy, yet moodily haunting; pacey, yet well-paced ad with one of the most singalong choruses I’ve heard in awhile, with the only real dip in proceedings being the slightly cheesy ballad Mama. The band have worked hard to get back here after a really tough time, but this record is an absolute solid contribution to their catalogue and deserves to do well. 8/10

Wyatt E - āl bēlūti dārû (Stolen Body Records) [David Karpel]

Let’s take a trip. Let’s travel the deserts of Mesopotamia, over shimmering dunes and stretches of barren expanse where mirages lead the desperate to fatal fantasy and the shadows evade the sun in the ruins of history and myth. You can hear the sun baking the earth, droning sound waves captured on tremulous strings turned fierce, in the twisted bass grooves of cosmic desert trees, in the sallow wind turned dark and wild, in hollowed wood conjuring both the fleeting and the cavernous. You can hear the depths of sand bear the weight of the sun’s heavy heat down into the bedrock like doom riffs warming through your ribcage to grab your heart and change its beat. 

Barren as it may seem as far as the naked eye can see, the desert landscape of ancient Babylon is no wasteland. No less than a sea of history, a wilderness whose grains are the dust of civilizations, of millennia. Drone duo Wyatt E. take this desert in their able hands and release the grains ever so slowly–layers upon layers–to reshape the ancient narratives that inspire their work, creating electrifying musical landscapes that sensually pull you in deep, meditative breaths. 

The album title, āl bēlūti dārû (The Eternal City), is in Akkadian, a contemporary language of ancient Hebrew, and refers to ancient Jerusalem, which Nebuchadnezzar II conquered before exiling much of the Jewish population to Babylon for 70 years or so before they could return. This is the thematic foundation of the two 19 minute compositions: 1) Mushussu (meaning Furious Snake, a divine dragon-like creature associated with the Babylonian god Marduk) and 2) Sarru Rabu (The Great King, a title taken by many monarchs of ancient Mesopotamia). 

Mushussu begins with distant wind effects that waver and hover in the distance as a slow bass slithers a groove over a patient beat. Sparse and clean, the acoustics of the recording, mixed by Billy Anderson (Sleep, Om, Melvins), are gorgeous. A third of the way into the song, the wind picks up, a saxophone sings, the strings and percussion pick up volume, take up more space, the sax fades, the bass becomes ever more prominent, and all commence a whirring sandstorm, the passing of which is announced by a flute, a mere whisper. 

Only to begin to build again–that groovy bass, the steady, patient beat, the horns, a clean electric note over it all, triumphant, a banner’s tune, arrival, as the bass, beats, effects, and strings soothe us to fade out. While Mushussu is super contemplative and groove oriented, Sarru Rabu has a more martial feel to its historical soundtrack. While maintaining the meditative quality of the former, this second track is built around two main movements founded on a steady, foreboding march. The first steadily increases in volume and girth until visceral doomy riffs give warning that this is no mere exercise. They fade to the back and out, the song focused once again on the forward march, wind effects produce a sense of a looming unknown. 

This works well to keep us in suspense for the next and final voluminous climax, loud with percussion, guitars, and a relentless forward trudge to destiny, the final mystery, a denouement with loose ends. The fade out leaves us without answers: not triumph nor despair. What will happen to the troops? Will they make it home? Whatever does war answer for those who march for the king but whether or not it’s their turn? Wyatt E. have soundtracked a fascinatingly dusty time and place in history using traditional instruments like the Saz, rare and therefore emotively huge riffs, sound effects, and wind instruments arranged for an attentive listener. Ultimately, these two 19 minute songs, given the right atmosphere and perhaps enhancements, are together a ticket to ride the synapses of your mind. 8/10   

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