Civerous | Maze Envy | 2024

American Death/Doom Metal

Artwork by Juanjo Castellano

Fugitive Maniac Record release show in Denton

TZOMPANTLI - Tlayohualli (From 'Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force' LP, 2024)

Parched & parcel

Things are getting noticeably heavier and weirder, and we're the better for it. Some metal, finally, paired with some fine Aussie experimental noise and a band that'll make you believe in the dream of NYC again. It's the best season for this kind of stuff, so dive in.

dprk, Shitville Tourist LP (Studio Fabrik)

May I introduce to you Shitville Tourist (title of the year) by dprk, apparently a duo of Nick Dan (xNoBBQx) and Richard Fielding (Severed Heads) with support from a few mates. It feels like a journey in time back to where Twisted Village and Kye once roamed, where the journey largely justified the end product and the listener could take it or end up spending big later. While there is no question this record took me a few listens to unravel, what didn't take much to pique my interest was the gentle loop on "Crazy Little Corkscrew," something that sounds like a lullaby played with a steel drum, being poked and prodded by various electronics over its seven minutes. The track, like all four tracks on here, doesn't really go anywhere over its duration, but floats, writhes, twists and soaks in the sounds being made: pure joy in the noise made by machines. The title track and "Blumen Schmerz" are darker, more cavernous, where synths bleep and blot and drum machines whirr and exhale steam, creating the illusion of life where there is none. The latter has some creepy guitar parts splayed out on the pulsing synth backbone, but the investigation leads to no further conclusions; there is no categorization here. The finale, "Gulag In Space," provides not only another great title but a track nearly worthy of dancing, especially after the mind-fuck of the first three tracks. The beat bounces off all surfaces, as slippery as the rest of the record, but there is a sparkle on "Gulag" that winks at the listener as Shitville Tourist winds down. Something magnetic, or just plain alien, about the whole affair, but whatever it is, the sheer number of times I've played this have more than justified the hefty price tag. Great debut; let's hope for more from these true underground freaks.

Excarnated Entity, Mass Grave Horizon LP (Nuclear Winter)

Greece's Nuclear Winter puts out a ton of releases, so much that I've seemingly looked them over in the last few years. But taking stock, they've been responsible for the physical releases of a number of near-and-dear U.S.-based death metal acts like Blasphematory, the mighty Anhedonist, and now, Excarnated Entity. Excarnated Entity features a former member of Anhedonist, and there's definitely a similar approach to death metal with the two acts: mournful, grandiose but without the heavy-handed use of keyboards or Gregorian chant-like vocals. Excarnated Entity is also singularly focused on the horrors of war - not to be confused with the glorification of such in war metal - and provides ample heft to the incalculable loss of life. The band's demo, also reissued by Nuclear Winter in 2020, was a good primer for their debut LP, but the LP is devastating. The instrumental opener "Abjection" runs an elegant Mournful Congregation-style guitar line into the ground, simultaneously distraught and triumphant, and sets the stage for the rest. For anyone paying attention to the recent death-doom resurgence, Mass Grave Horizon fits right in and sets itself up near the top of that heap. While I think that there's a bit of momentum wasted in the middle section of "Corridor of Flame," that's really the only complaint I can level at the record. Everything else is properly filthy: gurgling vocals over blastbeats slam headfirst into downtuned chugging riffs, and a elegiac solo rises from the cracks in the pointlessly blood-stained soil. It's between "Irradiated Shadows" (the part before the solo, yeesh) and the punishing title track for my favorites here, but there's not a dud in the bunch. It's worth noting that the band does four-minute sprints as well as they can stretch tracks out to twice that length - a versatility that elevates Excarnated Entity above the one-note lifers rehashing the same formula on every track. Bleak, miserable and, given the state of the world, timely death-doom is what you get on Mass Grave Horizon, and if you think you've heard it before, it's worth hearing again in this singularly focused and dimming light.

VoidCeremony, Threads of Unknowing LP (20 Buck Spin)

I've got to give Nic at Repressed Records credit for pushing this one, as anything combining descriptors like "jazz" and "prog" with "metal" usually makes me run for the hills. But, this new VoidCeremony LP is checking all the boxes while flirting with all of the above, while (as Nic notes) throwing in a fretless bass solo on nearly every song to boot. The band plays death metal, firstly, and while there are some space-y outros and instrumentals, everything feels of a piece rather than forcing together disparate parts. The label press mentions that the band plays "with the gliding, controlled chaos and smooth fluidity of a jazz quartet," and that checks out, but I don't smell anything particularly jazzy about the record. Rather, I get a big whiff of Gorguts when listening to this record, another band that seamlessly combined progressive, thrash and death metal with grooves, resulting in something impressively complex without making it feel like a homework assignment. "Writhing in the Facade of Time" probably best displays all of these aspects, from the fading-in tech-death opener, to the sky-scraping guitar solos, to the crushing close of the track before the group's whisked away on a mystical Moog coda. The band shifts from strength to strength without any bloat, and just as importantly, without any clean vocals. Threads of Unknowing is my go-to workout record this year, the fluidity of the drumming providing blastbeat stress and necessary space in equal measure. Strap in, take a trip; whether you buy into the lyrics or overarching theme is up to you, but either way it's one of the most thrilling death metal records of the year.

Weak Signal, War&War LP (12XU)

Cool "reissue" of an album digitally released in 2022, hopefully given a wider reach with the push of 12XU. War&War is Weak Signal's third LP, and it sounds like a band comfortable with themselves, their capabilities and their sound: they can rip off a garage-punk track like "Don't Think About It" and slow things to a simmer on "Consolation" with ease. That the band sounds so self-assured did make this record feel a little too easy the first few times; but, like label mates Lewsberg, the complexity of the tracks shines through on iterative spins. Seemingly small choices like the backing vocal melody on "Names" or the sparkling Cass McCombs guitar on "Spooky Feeling" begin to feel like bold, powerful moves amidst the background of resignation/resilience across the album. The mostly spoken, barely sung vocals paired with the often bluesy guitar lines give the record a rough, workingman feel - which, for me, means that things ain't going your way but what are you gonna do about it - but there's no glory in it, just a general disdain for how things are. It's definitely a bit of a downer, though I think the band would prefer "realist," and two lyrics from the middle of the record seem illustrative of the this approach: "I'm no weirdo/I'm no freak/but things keep happening to me" from "Songworld," and "If you think I care/that's where you're wrong" from "Yr Deal." I don't find that the lyrics convey apathy, rather an infinite patience or aplomb in the face of everything spinning uncontrollably off-axis. War&War feels similar in spirit to what True Widow was doing on the heavy sigh of As High as the Highest Heavens..., though without the depressive bent of that record. A bit of despair creeps in on the cover of Johnny Thunders' "It's Not Enough," which bleeds into the gray, abstract noise of the title track, but the band puts their dukes up again on closer "Who the Hell Are U?," a fitting end to the record to reinforce the group's street savvy instincts. Weak Signal's delivered a doozy, and one of my favorite new-to-me discoveries of the year so far.

Civerous — Maze Envy (20 Buck Spin)

Photo by Juliet Guzman

Civerous is one of those death metal band names that seems as if it should actually be a word in the OED, likely something along these lines: “Civerous, adj. Of or in the manner of a predatory quadruped with enormous incisors and canine teeth; voracious; possessing an outsized appetite averse to regulation or restraint.” Unbound from the specifics of an actual definition, it’s a lot of fun to imagine those sorts of usages, beasts and other linguistic contexts for the word. It’s decidedly less fun to listen to Maze Envy, Civerous’s first LP for the prolific death metal label 20 Buck Spin, but fun is not among the priorities motivating music this heavy and intense. It bites.

The band seems to be characterizing that intensity with the inventive subgenre tag “caustic death/doom,” and this reviewer can stipulate to the caustic properties of the guitar tone that dominates Maze Envy’s heaviest passages — it’s tasty. But we should note that guitarist Daniel Salinas and vocalist Issaiah Vaca also play in heady post-black metal band Aylwin, and there are aspects of Civerous’s sound that create textures notably removed from the gruesome down-tuned disgust of death/doom. See the George Crumb-like glissando strings that shimmer and keen through “The Azure Eye,” or the guttering glow of the clean plucking in “Endless Symmetry.” Those two tracks function as introductory passages to longer, more dour and (yep) caustic songs, “Shrouded in Crystals” and “Labyrinth Charm,” respectively. But the intro tunes frame the longer compositions with what feel like arch ambitions. Are those gestures post-, or are they proggy?

Some listeners (hello) do not respond productively to the conjunction of “prog” and “death metal” — and to be clear, it’s not Civerous invoking the problematic p-word. There’s a pummeling toughness in Maze Envy’s heaviest minutes (see the opening of the title track, or the closing three minutes of “Shrouded in Crystals”) that’s akin to the growling, blatting, thunderous approach of a biker gang. Those passages ground the record in doom metal’s traditional grit, a gravid muscularity that struts and glowers. The results are more than adequate to banish the preening peacocking endemic in prog’s valorizations of technical mastery.

But still, Civerous makes an idiosyncratic variety of death/doom. It often feels like high-brow stuff (a decidedly proggy attribute), as interested in ornament as it is in ponderous power. The closest this reviewer can come to making sense of the combination of sensibilities is to compare the music to some transcendent visual moments in From Beyond (1986), Stuart Gordon’s hilariously esoteric sleazefest: see the spectacular death of Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree), or the initial glimpse of the mutated Dr Pretorius (Ted Sorel). Those shots are as gloriously hyperreal as they are confessedly fabricated with cheap foam latex and syrupy fake blood; they are comic and horrific, vertiginous and goofball. At its best, Maze Envy produces a similar collision of ill-fitting but effective aesthetic elements: a strange sort of good taste, and lots of ripping teeth.

Jonathan Shaw

Kommand - Death Age (2023)

Black Magnet - Body Prophecy

20 Buck Spin

2022

𝕯𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖒 𝖀𝖓𝖊𝖓𝖉𝖎𝖓𝖌 – 𝔖𝔢𝔠𝔯𝔢𝔱 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔢𝔣

Song Of Salvation / 20 Buck Spin / 2022

Mournful Congregation | The Exuviae of Gods - Part II | 26th May, 2023

Australian Funeral Doom Metal

Artwork by Karmazid

https://listen.20buckspin.com/album/the-exuviae-of-gods-part-ii

Fugitive ‘23

TZOMPANTLI

Tlazcaltiliztli (2022)

20 Buck Spin

Pomona / California /U.S.A. 🇺🇲

listening to this feels like getting your skull caved in by a lighting bolt spell cast by an evil wizard in a dark spooky tower

VASTUM - Indwelling Archon (From 'Inward To Gethsemane' LP, 2023)

Hulder — Verses in Oath (20 Buck Spin)

Photo by Liana Rakijian

There’s an interesting semi-cosmopolitan quality to Verses in Oath, Hulder’s second LP and first release for Pittsburgh-based label 20 Buck Spin (NB, when this reviewer remembers the label’s locale, he always flashes on the moment in Videodrome, when Harlan tells Max where the titular, explicitly violent, deeply unpleasant S&M television signal emanates from: “Pittsburgh.” No so cosmopolitan. But we digress). There are tones and textures attributable to the Norwegian kvlt canon, the equally legendary late-90s Greek scene, even some moments that recall more recent melodic USBM acts, like Ludicra — see the vocals and vibe of the opening minutes of “Hearken the End.” Is Hulder attempting grand synthesis, or is she just playing to established listenerships?

For an artist so early in her career, the project of reducing black metal to some designable set of common properties might seem like hubris. But there has always been significant skill (and a sharp sense for PR) in Hulder’s approach to carving a space out for herself in black metal’s overcrowded field. Some early promo images leaned into her conventional good looks and long blonde hair; there were spike-studded leather bras and some exposed midriff action. One can’t blame her. In black metal’s sometimes misogynist Guyville, sexiness can be cover or weapon. And when a more coherent musical profile seemed to clarify on Godslastering: Hyms of a Forlorn Peasantry (2021), dueling imagos of Hulder as waify farmgirl and as baleful, witchy demon sought to complement the music’s focus on the rural cultures of the European Dark Ages.

Verses in Oath is a more assured record, less invested in an overt thematics of Medieval forest and field, more interested in musical drama. The record’s second side is particularly effective. Check out the raging thump and boil of “Vessel of Suffering” and the sharp interplay between steely riffage and synthy mournfulness of “Cast into the Well of Remembrance.” Ultimately, though, any synthesis effected by the record seems more like an accumulation of safe bets. None of these songs wishes to move black metal forward into any sort of unfamiliar configuration — and for many, many fans of the genre, that’s just fine. Hulder’s PR smarts may be at work: She likely still has dues to pay in Guyville (an especially hidebound place among the black metal dudes) in order to score more Decibel covers and make her way to an even bigger label.

Those things are said without any particular stink on them. It’s never been easy to make it as a professional musician, to say nothing of doing that as a woman. In music’s currently confused conjuncture — economic and cultural — it must be really hard. One can’t blame Hulder for consolidating her chops and cred. But one can also hope that she’ll move her prodigious talents into more forbidding sonic terrain, sometime soon.

Jonathan Shaw