Favorites this week:
Dola - Dola
Dola make black/doom metal, sure, but at their loosest (and they get pretty fucking loose) they sound a lot more like Ceramic Dog than anything on Season of Mist. A diverse range of influences seems to have shaped this music, from krautrock and psych to Tuvan throat singing and a kind of pan-European folk music. This is all presented against a crushingly heavy backdrop of blackened doom, though, and at times they sound not unlike Earth in their spacey droniness. Sometimes the music gets particularly spaced out with the drums the sole instrument propelling the machine forward, and you’d swear you were listening to Neu! or Can or something. The vocalist is working with an overstuffed bag of tricks; he has one of those cavernous black hole voices like Attila, balancing void-like intoning with angry, raw, classic black metal vocals, the aforementioned throat singing, and piercing, pained yelps. Also, for all their chaotic, noisy energy, Dola can still write a killer riff (see "Gdy wszystko się skończy Oni nadal będą chodzić" for undeniable proof). Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in weird metal.
Agnes Obel - Myopia (Deutsche Grammophon GmbH)
Listening to Myopia, made up as it is of whispers, piano, a range of plucked instruments, various unidentifiable sounds, and strata of fog, is like entering a lush garden at night and finding it teeming with delicate flowers and ghosts. It’s a darkly beautiful and dramatic record, centering Obel’s lovely but tortured voice and enveloping it in swirling layers upon layers of sonic mist. Obel’s voice is the centerpiece, but as an instrument and not necessarily a conveyance of lyrics — words and syllables seem slippery; they morph and liquefy as they repeat and move through time. Melodies and vocals occasionally recall Radiohead at their gloomiest, and “Myopia” with its giant, echoing timpani is a Kate Bush-esque moment. “Broken Sleep" takes us, with its buoyant pizzicato string backdrop, to a lighter place than some of the other tracks, but is equally complex and harmonically rich to the others. Obel has created a dense, hazy world of her own, and it’s a thrill to be able to spend time there.
Sightless Pit - Grave of a Dog (Thrill Jockey)
An album (possibly named for a Skyrim location?) by a supergroup (has the meaning of “supergroup” devolved into “a band comprised of people that are also in other bands?” Not saying, just saying) featuring Lee Buford of The Body, Kristin Hayter of Lingua Ignota and Dylan Walker of Full of Hell. Dealing with themes of excruciating struggle, futility, and mortality, it is immersive and varied, and kept me genuinely excited to hear what came next at the end of every single track. Grave of a Dog starts off quietly, with clean vocals chanting in harmony, then brings in electro beats followed by a heavy whirlwind/noise wall and layers of synths. There’s a consistently engaging mix of sounds (some seeming to imitate South Asian musical styles, perhaps specifically Sufi music — it’s a vocal affectation I’m not sure about, and one I haven’t seen many folks comment on). A lot of the songs, like "Immersion Dispersal," gain and gain intensity as they go on, but they’re at their peak when Hayter allows her voice to soar cleanly and powerfully over the melee in a high register; her scream is transcendent at any pitch. In some ways, it isn’t what a fan of these artists’ main bodies of work might expect from this project — there is not an audible guitar here, for example, though there are plenty of beats; though some of the music is intentionally punishing (“Miles of Chain” in particular is a vicious storm), the majority of it really isn’t that abrasive — there are always clean, etherous layers partially obscuring the harshest moments.
Other stuff released this week:
Iron Column - Power From Below
In brief: lo-fi, one-man anarchist black metal from Leipzig featuring a Men Without Hats cover (?!). Primitive in the extreme, it hits sometimes (the last riff on “Modern Life” rips) — like an A.I. bot trained on raw black metal, it more often than not doesn’t quite tick all the boxes in the right ways. My main complaint about this is that the songs have a tendency to end abruptly, and not in a way that seems like a choice with thoughtful intention behind it (“Fortress of Evil” just drops off a cliff with an awkward click at the end — I checked my headphones; “Workers of the World Awaken” allows a multiple-minutes-long single note riff to fade out over a one-and-a-half second span). “Antarctica” (the aforementioned Men Without Hats joint) is kind of an inspired choice and works surprisingly well in this format; this and the ambient sequence in “No Friends But Mountains” are the high points here. Will love to hear this project after the addition of a drummer and some mileage.
Wiktor Stribog - Lutym EP (1106544 Records)
Largely composed of minimal and repetitive keyboard and modular synth motifs describing a fittingly winter-esque mood (“Lutym” means “February”), this LP from animator and composer Wiktor Stribog is sometimes jaunty and optimistic — sometimes, though, we view the optimism through the veil of a tonal shift or distortion that implies something unknown but sinister and unexpected is lurking nearby. These are incredibly simple tunes presented in layers; individual parts composed of just a few notes each are stacked on one another, with one theme seeming to take the lead. I can see these minimal, laid back tunes as evocative of the kind of still fun of wintertime; the cozy ennui of being forced to stay in. i'm not that excited by these in any way, but concede that they could make excellent soundtracks to animations. My favorite, and something I’d wish for more of, is the closer, “Koniec” — here we get a beat, as well as cascading, tumbling, twinkling sounds channeling chimes or snowflakes or ice — so nice, but melts away far too quickly.