Bull Elephant - Created From Death

By Calen Henry. Anonymous UK collective Bull Elephant's sophomore album picks up where the debut left off and this time the band are less cagey about the subject matter, giving a pretty clear overview of Created From Death's narrative.

By Calen Henry.

Anonymous UK collective Bull Elephant's sophomore album picks up where the debut left off and this time the band are less cagey about the subject matter, giving a pretty clear overview of Created From Death's narrative.

The album's eight songs switch between the story of the eponymous Bull Elephant, now in human form, and the build up of tensions during World War II, both on conventional and unconventional fronts. The Cult of the Black Sun, self-professed descendants of a corrupted god, seek to re-enlist the bodies buried in mass graves as an unending undead army. To combat such unholy creations the creature goes "from beast to human to beast again". From reborn human flesh, the essence of the creature known as Bull Elephant is transferred into the form of a great whale, and on that note the album ominously ends. They'll have to go far to top Mastodon's Leviathan for "battle whale concept album" but I'll definitely be along for the ride.

Just as the the story for Created from Death is a bit more succinct than Bull Elephant so is the music. This time around the band digs deeper into groovy doom-sludge, leaning more on the melodic "almost-a-scream" style of vocals and keeping the really heavy and really atmospheric sections for key story moments. The change makes for a more cohesive album than Bull Elephant. Created From Death flows better, has deeper grooves, and more memorable riffs but owes a great deal to the debut. The sequel wouldn't work without the set up from the first album. Bull Elephant introduced the whole mythos, where Created From Death gets to dive right into the next chapter.

The ridiculous multi-album concept (there's clearly going to be at least one more part) may not be for everyone, but Bull Elephant deliver the goods, both in riffs and concept. Sign me up for album no. 3.

Mesarthim - The Degenerate Era

By Calen Henry. The meta is extremely consistent for Mesarthim albums. A new one drops with no warning, giving no information, with a title referencing an esoteric cosmic concept. It always musically iterates on the last album but remains extremely divisive in the metal community and it always gets a nice dynamic master.

By Calen Henry.

The meta is extremely consistent for Mesarthim albums. A new one drops with no warning, giving no information, with a title referencing an esoteric cosmic concept. It always musically iterates on the last album but remains extremely divisive in the metal community and it always gets a nice dynamic master. The Degenerate Era is no different. It's the band's space trance metal at its finest and this time the cosmic concept refers to the cosmic era after the current one, when protons will decay leaving nothing but black holes, presumably what is shown in the album art.

Despite being the opener, the three part "Laniakea" is the album's centerpiece. The title refers to the Laniakea supercluster of galaxies, of which the Milky Way is part. The movements refer to the Great Attractor, the central gravitational point in the supercluster, the Zone of Avoidance, the portion of the cluster that is obscured from view from earth, and Dark Energy that is hypothesized to ultimately tear apart the Laniakea supercluster.

Underneath these cosmic trappings The Degenerate Era continues the shift towards more epic lead-guitar driven songs that started on Ghost Condensate while also harkening back to the more symphonic sound of .- -​.​.​. .​.​. . -. -​.​-​. .(Absence). Track length also splits the difference between those two albums with one 14 minute suite and four tracks ranging in length from four to almost nine minutes. Though the shift and references back through the band's catalog are almost seamless, there are a few transitions on The Degenerate Era that seem to lean to far on stop time, with just a fraction of a second too much space before the next passage begins, something I didn't hear on any prior releases. It can't hold back the album's epic heights, though, with great riffs and leads and the return of pick slides giving it a weird, but great, space punk edge.

Though it's impossible to discern the actual lyrics for a Mesarthim album, there's clearly a cohesive concept. From the album title through the "Laniakea" suite to the album closer "618" (a reference to one of the largest known supermassive black holes) complete with a Morse code message spelling out "Planet Nine Located", there are mysteries yet to discover in The Degenerate Era and the dynamic master (DR 12) makes repeated listens a joy.

Vassafor - To The Death

By Bryan Camphire. To the Death is Vassafor's grand statement to glorify Satan and all that is evil through music. The album - the band's third studio recording - is a high watermark in uncompromising black metal being released today.

By Bryan Camphire.

To the Death is Vassafor's grand statement to glorify Satan and all that is evil through music. The album - the band's third studio recording - is a high watermark in uncompromising black metal being released today. You'd be hard pressed to find music that sounds this aggressively malignant produced by guitar, bass, drums and voice.

Vassafor achieves this apex of malevolence by a raw, loose-limbed performance that is sharp, forceful and urgent. The live sound they have captured spews forth at a rolling boil, yet still contains ample nuance beneath the surface. The riffs knock the listener into a trance-like stupor and then they just keep coming. More than half the tracks clock in at close to or well past ten minutes, altogether amounting to over an hour of extreme relentlessness.

By some sleight of hand and a lot of attention to detail, every time the listener is lulled into thinking they know what to expect, Vassafor break out with some strange secret ingredient that keeps each song in a perpetual state of transformation. To the Death unfurls itself like a powerful explosion belching flames aimed the heavens: a colossal spectacle of blasphemy.

The title track comes first, and it's a definite highlight. Three minutes of dirge at the beginning make way for some truly bizarre guitar harmonics that bludgeon the listener into submission just as the blasting begins and the tempo takes off. It's a raucous gallop from there, chock full of wild twists and turns along the way. Here's a demonic fast-picked arpeggio, there a stomach churning dive bomb, next without warning come some witchy cackling chants. Hard panned wraith-like whispers whirl across the sound field to dizzying effect. Finally, at eleven of its twelve minutes, the track climaxes in seemingly the weirdest way possible: with a bass solo. This writhing busy twisted bass passage somehow sounds like the song's very entrails are unspooling into your lap, all noxious and inky black.

Raise the volume and you begin to notice all sorts of hidden strangeness. Track three, "Eyrie" - the title of which may refer to the nest of a bird of prey - features a melting solo thirty seconds in that smears two sections together like a space-time rip. This dimensional bleed-through motif returns six and a half minutes into the song, once again smudging your perception yet sticking with you like so much shrapnel after a blast. At eight and a half minutes, monastic chants creep in low and slow in the mix and last less than ten seconds, like phantoms stealing their way through your subconsciousness. Did they ever really exit anywhere, or have they been sneaking in and out all along? Turn it up and try to find them again.

Vassafor's lead songwriter, VK, is a noteworthy sound engineer, who's worked with heaps of underground bands of the darkest caliber. This skill set and experience imbues Vassafor's sound world with its own distinct atmosphere, enveloping the listener in a bewildering shroud of hate. To the Death charts a course deep into the darkest realms of black metal, one with plenty of left turns in its gnarled twisted paths.