Age of Woe - An Ill Wind Blowing

By Ulla Roschat. Age of Woe is a quite young five piece band from Gothenburg/Sweden. They founded in 2010 and An Ill Wind Blowing is their 2nd full length album. At first listen the album may appear unspectacular, but if you allow it to unfold its active substances to take hold of your brain through several listens, you may also find it magically varied, skull crushing and

By Ulla Roschat

Artwork by Magda Piech.

Age of Woe is a quite young five piece band from Gothenburg/Sweden. They founded in 2010 and An Ill Wind Blowing is their 2nd full length album.

At first listen the album may appear unspectacular, but if you allow it to unfold its active substances to take hold of your brain through several listens, you may also find it magically varied, skull crushing and spine tingling in an unobtrusive, unpretentious and subtle way, wrapped in a smooth mix of crusty HC, Death Metal, Doom and Black Metal.

The riffs are trudgingly heavy as well as they are catchy. The leads are driving as well as they are melodic. Pummeling, propelling drumming, passionate, creaky vocals, distorted, but grooving guitars and well placed word samples … all drenched in downtuned filth and crusty rawness.

In 36 minutes and seven songs Age of Woe conjures the 'Ill wind', tempestuously blowing or mephitically looming, but always evil and destructive. The only moment you could possibly recover your breath would be in the melancholic instrumental "Kiñe Weza Kuruf Konkey", but just for about one and a half minutes, before it gets cut off violently by the next track to destroy all hope for any stable calmness (this is one of the best transitions between two songs, ever).

Although the basic atmosphere is utterly dark and depressive throughout, it is constantly infused and mingled with different moods, be it a somewhat old fashioned occultish horror feel, a more unnerving and abrasive industrial vibe, a slightly disturbing chaos or a melancholic despair.

The term “active substances“ I chose deliberately to evoke associations of drug usage, because the album somehow works like weed. All the moods you can possibly find in the album are in a well measured balance. If you want to focus on one, you can happily do it. You want to get crushed immediately? Turn up the volume, feel the groove, bang your head. You want to feel the creepy, cold fear and despair? Sit down and let it crawl through your ears into your brain. But you can as well just let it all flow and enjoy to get blown away.

The track "Heavy Clouds" is featured on The Wicked Lady Show 134.

The cut above: a look back at 2016 part 2

By Bryan Camphire. Coven, or Evil Ways Instead of Love, the 2016 album by Polish black metal horde Cultes des Ghoules, has five songs and clocks in at one hour and thirty-eight minutes. To refer to this record as epic is no cheap use of hyperbole. The songs are dynamic and feature frequent change ups.

By Bryan Camphire.

Artwork by Mar.A.

Coven, or Evil Ways Instead of Love, the 2016 album by Polish black metal horde Cultes des Ghoules, has five songs and clocks in at one hour and thirty-eight minutes. To refer to this record as epic is no cheap use of hyperbole. The songs are dynamic and feature frequent change ups. The bass is particularly prominent, and there are even occasional drum and bass breaks, a feature that feels almost more punk rock than it does black metal. This music is raw. The production feels like it is going for as close to a live sound as possible. The effect is to give the feeling of being in the room with this evil coven of sadistic Satanic musicians, witnessing their heresy live as it happens. The singer of this group is known as Mark of the Devil (Is his given name Mark? One wonders... because that would be pretty clever...). To me, he has every bit as much character and originality as Ozzy Osbourne brought to the genre of metal some forty-five years ago. Mark of the Devil cackles, croons, chants, grunts, growls, screams, whispers and sermonizes with extreme gusto. He does his job with a depth and thoroughness the likes of which I haven't heard equaled among other hordes of blasphemers. This man truly sounds like a evangelist for Satan preaching from an altar top adorned with a prostrate virgin oozing blood from every pore. Highly recommended devilry.

Artwork by Trine + Kim Design Studio.

Virus are among the stranger acts making heavy music at present. In fact, their guitar work is predominantly clean, so it is difficult to even categorize the music they make as metal. The devil being in the details, it’s in the group’s sinister use of harmony where the real mischief lies. Put another way, if one were to take the work of Virus transcribed as sheet music and feed it into a synthesizer, no matter what patch one might try to apply (How does this music sound transposed for brass instruments? Or, how might this sound if played on an accordion?), the result would sound much more menacing than most metal music on the market today. This group has been perfecting their craft for decades, and it shows in the strength of their songwriting. This music exists in a delirium entirely of its own.

Cover Art by Raul Gonzalez.

Here we have the genuine article in contemporary American black metal. We take a look at the front cover of this record and we see cold deep blues and blacks everywhere, lightning striking, storms raging, swirling mystical mists, craggy pathways leading downward toward perdition laden with stalactites dripping dreary deathless doom. At the center of all of this is Death Fortress. What secret lies beyond those dark castle walls? How does this horde reign supreme in the realms of the Unyielding? The magic is in the breakdowns. I’m talking about those sections of music where the band plays in half time. The drummer smacks the bell of the ride so hard it sounds like broadswords clashing. The listener pumps her fists and thinks it might just be time to go burn down a church. Listening closely to the tempo changes on this album, one marvels at the rhythm section’s deft balance of tempo changes.

The first track, "Enthroning the Oppressor," goes full tilt for four full minutes of blistering blast beats until that breakdown finally comes in glorious half-time. In the next track, "The Erasure Of Species", Death Fortress seems to sense the lust for blood in the audience, and the breakdown comes forth right at the two minute marker. One can feel the boots stomping along to this deathless march. Then along comes "Mercyless Deluge", and the band careens forth until just one minute and twenty seconds before a riff is played in half time… only to reveal itself as just a fraction of a larger phrase, which speeds up and then slows back down and then speeds back up again, like some unearthly carriage racing around corners driven by mad rabid beasts unyielding in their drive towards the beyond. "Scourge of Aeons", the fourth track, speeds along unremittingly throughout its entire length.

This is where things start to get interesting into the record’s B side. This is where the breakdowns turn into dirges. Track five, "Power Beyond the Stars," plays it’s first minute and a half slowly, really letting the bass come to the fore, and the band just builds and builds from there, upping the tension more and more. "Trail of Graves", the penultimate track, starts fast before devoting its entire last half to an evil menacing dirge. The last track is the record’s title track, clocks in at ten and a half minutes, with drums changing all over the place - which, by the way, is becoming something of a trademark style of Shawn Eldridge, the same drummer of Ruinous, who plays like an undead hellspawn. Get this record already, now that I’ve broken down nearly every breakdown for you. "Enthroning the Oppressor" will never feel so good outside the confines of the unholy Death Fortress.

[Check out Bryan's playing in Bloody Panda and Traducer]

The cut above: a look back at 2016 part 1

By Bryan Camphire. With Krighsu, Wormed shattered the ceilings of what had been done in brutal death metal. Not since Nourishing the Spoil by Guttural Secrete has a record raised the bar for this extreme subgenre quite so much. I imagine these guys must have eight hour band practices three or four times a week in order to get this tight.

By Bryan Camphire.

Artwork by Phlegeton.

With Krighsu, Wormed shattered the ceilings of what had been done in brutal death metal. Not since Nourishing the Spoil by Guttural Secrete has a record raised the bar for this extreme subgenre quite so much. I imagine these guys must have eight hour band practices three or four times a week in order to get this tight. On top of that, the songs sound like they were made using some William Burroughs style cut-up method. The rate at which the parts change isn’t simply blistering, it can sound downright maddening. The band almost sound like robots reading stock market fluctuations scrolling across the ticker in real time and converting this information into death metal. To think of this music for what it is, as highly rehearsed and extremely exact, is to marvel at this band’s prowess and precision. The stuck-pig vocals aren’t for everyone, it’s true. That said, this band is truly a cut above. Purists often tend to complain about how drum triggers take some of the humanity out of metal making. To that, I say, listen to Wormed, they play inhuman music in the best possible sense.

Clean vocals in heavy metal have become so anomalous that there is a metal blog entitled No Clean Singing. Vocals - especially cleanly sung vocals - can possibly, at best, convey feeling. Sinistro packs more feeling into one tune than most bands pack into an entire album. Lately, across the myriad subgenres of extreme metal, some of the boldest bands are experimenting with clean singing, and the results are often fantastic. Bands like Bölzer or Batushka or Temple Nightside deliver crushing metal with the use of clean vocals without sacrificing a shred of darkness or menace. With Sinistro, the vocals propel the funereal arrangements behind them to produce something truly transcendent. This is extreme metal that you could play in the car with your mom or at other times when Grave Upheaval might not exactly fit the bill. Semente was largely misunderstood and overlooked by the press, and that oftentimes can be a great indicator of a monumental record, so good that people had to sleep on it because they just were not ready.

Cover art by Daniel Corcuera.

For my money, Ruinous set the bar when I think of the real deal in contemporary death metal. I do not intend to throw out hyperbole while acting as though these matters are not completely subjective. I’ll just talk about what sets Graves of Ceaseless Death apart from the masses for me. And the production is as good a place as any to begin the adiscussion. The bass is high up in the mix, which seems to be a trend in metal these days, and I love that. The tones of the guitar and bass are menacing and in your face. The drums are live and direct. The frequencies are a bit compressed, at the expense of things like cymbal decay and dynamic range. Still, this is, after all, a death metal record; which is to say, the dynamic range doesn’t have to be gigantic for the band to sound heavy as all get out. The effect of the kind of production in play here is to make the listener feel like he or she is in a small basement club in the front row, as opposed to a cavernous hall where the sound is coming more from the PA system than from the band’s amps. It feels like being hit by a truck.

The performances on Graves of Ceaseless Death are phenomenal. What is most impressive to me is that the band chooses to leave tiny mistakes in the tunes, rather than whitewashing the performances in the editing process. The result is that the blood sweat and tears that went into the music truly comes across in the playing. As far as the tunes go, repeated listening reveals the fineness of detail contained in this music. The drums seem to change patterns every eight bars or so. Shawn Eldridge is one of the fiercest drummers I know of in metal at present. His drumming sounds truly unhinged and apoplectic. And the riffs are always blistering. The third track, "Dragmarks", is one of the best death metal tunes I’ve heard in recent memory. My favorite part in the entire record might be the riff immediately following the three minute marker in "Dragmarks", because it sounds like the band is about to go careening off of a cliff. Graves of Ceaseless Death is a beast of a record, a tremendously impressive full length debut. One can only imagine how this band will ramp things up going forward.

[Check out Bryan's playing in Bloody Panda and Traducer]