Avant Garde – Page 11 – Wonderbox Metal

Locrian – Infinite Dissolution (Review)

Locrian are a US Experimental Post-Metal band and this is their latest album.

Featuring an album cover that makes me feel uncomfortable and like I’m going to go insane, (courtesy of David Altmejd), this is music that caters to people who want more from the bands that they listen to, and more is what Locrian provide.

Locrian play Post-Metal that contains Avant-Garde, Black-Metal and Industrial elements. Electronics, keyboards, piano, samples and a whole host of other instruments grace this album in addition to the standard instruments. Two songs also contain guest female vocals as well. All of this should give you an insight into how much depth, variety and interest there is to be had here.

Elements of Drone, Noise, Industrial, Post-Metal and Black Metal all clash into a wonderful melange of music that reminds of some twisted cross between Russian Circles and Blut Aus Nord.

This is a highly textured and multi-faceted release that requires repeated spins to really make its wonders known. There’s a lot of different things going on here and it’s easy to miss some of it the first time around, especially as there’s a lot of subtle sounds and effects going on in the background, almost behind the main event, so to speak.

There’s a resplendent darkness that seeps from this music like a sentient and malevolent oil stain that’s searching for ways to get into your body. Something here doesn’t have your best interests at heart and it’s subtle, insidious and unfaltering in its desire to do harm.

This is music to get lost to and get lost in. The band have a talent for creating soundscapes that sear your thoughts and burn the mind.

Highly recommended as your dose of something different and sublime.

Void Paradigm – Earth’s Disease (Review)

Hailing from France, this is the second album from Black Metallers Void Paradigm.

Here’s a band who come from the Deathspell Omega school of Black Metal. They’ve learned from the masters and have now applied what they know to their own creation. This is music that’s hypnotic and warped.

Straight from the start the band show that this is abrasive, discordant Black Metal that sings to its own twisted hymn sheet set to music that shouldn’t rightly exist in our reality.

Corrupted riffs spread their strange melodies and nefarious, atypical sounds abound throughout these five songs. The creative flair of a flawed genius is clearly on display, clashing with the ingenuity of a madman.

Speaking of madmen, the singer would certainly seem to qualify. His emotive-but-jarring shouts will be an acquired taste for some I’m sure, but his performance level and passion of delivery cannot be doubted.

So, this is not your standard Black Metal affair and Void Paradigm should be applauded for this. Earth’s Disease features a treasure trove of interesting ideas and different sounds. The songwriting of the band is unusual but the result is very pleasing.

The aesthetics of the band are familiar even if the music is not. That these have been filtered through the prism of a very creative and aspiring band makes Earth’s Disease a release to be savoured and enjoyed at length.

The dark, swirling core of the music is augmented by Avant-Garde elements and there’s enough stimulating and inspired flourishes here to really impress. Progressive and Experimental elements also combine with these aforementioned aspects of their sound, firming up Void Paradigm’s mastery of their chosen dark art.

It’s an off-kilter and disturbing world that the band have carved for themselves across these 39 minutes, and one that cries out to be explored; just be wary on your travels.

For Black Metal that’s individual, charismatic, esoteric and wonderfully obtuse, look no further, for Void Paradigm are here.

Corpo-Mente – Corpo-Mente (Review)

Corpo-Mente are from France and this is their début album.

Now this is something a bit different, a bit special.

This is exotic, sensual music that combines Dark Rock, Trip-Hop and Electro Avant-Garde.

This is powerful stuff that grips from the start with its highly individualistic sound.

The songs seem to slip and slide through the musical landscape and they seem to pulse with a deeply vibrant internal heat. The way the album moves through the running time is almost carnal in nature.

The vocals are operatic in nature and yet somehow still manage to remain intimate and personal. The singer has a strong voice and is extremely talented at what she does. She injects personality and charismatic inflection into the singing which results in the music avoiding the trap of rather faceless, impersonal operatic vocals that some bands who employ them can sometimes fall into.

The music is multi-textural and richly evocative of sumptuous soundscapes. It’s also filled with haunting melodies and quite beautiful compositions. There is a definite darkness here, sometimes quite menacing in tone.

With enough “hair-standing-on-end” moments to stop anyone in their tracks, this is a must. What a highly accomplished collection of songs!

If you like bands like Ulver, Lethe, Manes, etc. then this is a definite highlight to be seized.

A surprise and a pleasure; Corpo-Mente have made a firm fan here.

Porta Nigra – Kaiserschnitt (Review)

Porta Nigra are from Germany and this is their second album. They play Black Metal.

This is atypical, eccentric Black Metal that has a marching, martial feel to it as well as diverse other influences lurking around its dark underbelly.

The largely mid-paced assault is of a more individual variety than the usual Darkthrone-influenced one that you might expect.

Additionally, the extra sounds and noises in the form of samples, trumpets, keyboards and other instruments introduce aspects of their sound that further mark them out as different from the pack.

The vocals are varied screams and shouts as well as the occasional clean. Coupled with the charismatic music you never know quite what’s going to happen next on the album.

The songs have a Black Metal identity that’s further added to by elements of Heavy Metal, Punk and Avant Garde, depending on the whims of the band members it seems. It all sounds remarkably coherent however and as a whole the album works.

Lots of different moods and styles around these core musical themes are explored and Porta Nigra have impressed with their ability to create a diverse body of work on Kaiserschnitt.

This is a band who have completely stamped their own personality onto the Black Metal template and have produced an album that stands apart and stands strong.

Check this out today.

Wells Valley – Matter as Regent (Review)

Wells Valley are a Portuguese Post-Metal band. This is their début album.

Blending the claustrophobic swirl of Neurosis with the exploratory mindset of Tool and a touch of the Avant-Garde, Wells Valley have created an album that plays by its own rules and lives by its own aesthetics. I think the closest comparison would kind of be a cross between Rabies Caste and Scarlet.

This is not a normal album, and I mean that in an entirely good way. The band have chosen to take a sub-genre that has pretty lax rules at the best of times and experiment with it to create something that may not be entirely new but it’s as close as we can reasonably expect these days.

The band play around with the Post-Metal formula just enough so that Matter as Regent sounds innovative and fresh, but not so much that it strays to far from what makes Post-Metal such a compelling and interesting listen.

The music is involving and engages the brain as it twists and turns through its various incarnations. The band write songs that seem to be mutations of the standard template; it’s as if the music has been stripped back to the bare bones of the style and then rebuilt in Wells Valley’s vision of what this kind of music should sound like.

The emphasis on the diversity, dynamics and pacing of the songs on Matter as Regent is noticeable, both in the music and the vocals. They don’t seem to like to repeat themselves too often.

The guitars are set to a level where they’re intense and emotive without being overly heavy. Expansive riffs and atypical rhythms run the gamut from expressive to functional to esoteric; there’s enough instant appeal to be endearing but enough depth of composition to keep you returning for more.

Wells Valley have released an intriguing and ambitious album that not only largely succeeds in being greater than the sum of its parts, but also achieves the even greater accolade of sounding mainly like itself.

Quality.

Voices – London (Review)

This is the second album from UK group Voices. They play Progressive Blackened Death Metal.

Featuring former members of Akercocke, this is an album full of promise from the start as Akercocke were one of the best and most individual bands that the UK had to offer.

As soon as the dark acoustic opener Suicide Note starts I’m instantly hit with the feeling that Akercocke gave me in their more restrained moments. Then Music for the Recently Bereaved blasts out of the speakers and I feel warm and fuzzy inside and out.

If voices aren’t the heirs to Akercocke then I don’t know who is. They’re definitely their own entity but they channel the same primordial power and majesty that Akercocke did so well.

Blasting Death Metal, scathing Black Metal, Progressive Metal, Avant-Garde and everything in between make up these tracks. Progressive Blackened Death Metal is as good a term as any, but it seems so small. Voices are just bigger than that and have a whole lot more on offer than that mouthful of a genre tag implies.

The songs here are varied and full of interesting ideas and avenues for exploration. The band essentially just do what they want and I’m incredibly glad of this as it has resulted in a top quality album full of modern Extreme Metal that stands alone.

Growls, screams, cleans; the band do it all with style. It’s like Akercocke, Arcturus, Opeth and Emperor were crushed up together, digested and vomited up as a slick, professional, fully formed Extreme Metal machine. It’s classy and in a class of its own.

I love it when bands do their own thing and inject their art with personality and character. It’s even better when they do this with obvious talent and a passionate hunger. London is all of these things and more.

This is ambitious and hugely impressive. For a snapshot of everything that Extreme Metal should be these days then London is flawless.

In fact that’s all I need to say really; London is flawless.

Vyre – The Initial Frontier Pt. 2 (Review)

Vyre are from Germany and this is their second album. They play Black Metal.

Vyre’s take on Black Metal is one that includes Post-Black Metal and Avant-Garde influences. This results in an album that has plenty of texture and lots of content to offer the prospective listener.

The compositions on this album could almost certainly qualify as artistic Metal, with the ambition and scope of the songs to match.

Imagine the epic soundscapes of Emperor mixed with the occult stylings of Rotting Christ, a Progressive/Avant-Garde influence from Arcturus and the venomous bite of Satyricon…Vyre have produced a top quality Black Metal release that matches up to these lofty comparisons.

These tracks are hugely impressive, with lots of ideas and character included in the songs. Prime, Grade A Black Metal riffs and melodies are enhanced by atmospheric synths and sounds whilst a dark rasp edges out from the abyss. Disembodied cleans occasionally ring out and majestic leads fill the ether with molten Metal.

I love the obvious amount of work that has gone into crafting these songs. There is literally so much to enjoy here. Every time you listen to it you’ll notice something new. It’s heady stuff.

These tracks have been forged to near-perfection by a very talented band. This is Black Metal that’s been effectively coloured and influenced by Progressive and Avant-Garde Metal without losing any of its inherent darkness or attack.

I had never heard of Vyre before this but I’m so glad that I have now. I strongly recommend you get this album. Listen to it over and over again and let the darkness of the void seep into your brain.

Anatomy of Habit – Ciphers + Axioms (Review)

Anatomy of Habit are from the US and this is their second album. They play Experimental Post-Metal/Doom.

This is music that will probably be dismissed by a lot of people as not being immediate or conventional enough. Their loss.

How to describe Anatomy of Habit ? The share a similar very individual stylistic space with bands such as Swans, Neurosis, Fantômas, Burning Witch, Skullflower, etc. This is music that’s slow, Doomy and with lots of personality.

The vocals are a large part of the personality of the band. That’s not to denigrate the music of course, as this definitely has its own flavour, but vocally we’re in territory that’s reminiscent enough of Mike Patton to be instantly recognisable and familiar but not too similar so that it sounds like a rip off or bad copy. Couple this with an Avant-Garde feeling akin to Manes/Arcturus as well as the odd harsher scream and you have a performance that puts most singers to shame.

There are two tracks here and both of them are very finely crafted examples of how you can play Post-Metal and really have your own sound. Both are over 20 minutes long.

Radiate and Recede is a Drone Doom epic that is as hypnotic as it is powerful. I really love this kind of crawling, quirky, slowness that’s repetitive enough to become engaging but dynamic enough to keep the interest. It finishes with an extended Doom workout that would do Esoteric proud before the main vocals end it totally.

Second track Then Window continues the stylistic theme developed in the first song but with a slightly different spin on it. We’re still in Doom territory but the music is slightly more colourful and upbeat in a way that’s still subtly sinister.

Taken together, Ciphers + Axioms is a very enjoyable album that allows a creative band to flex their musical muscles in a worthwhile and involving way. They really have crafted a remarkable album.

I love music that’s a bit weird, a bit different and yet still remains a bloody good listen. Anatomy of Habit fit this description perfectly. They get a big thumbs up from me. Well done!

As Light Dies – The Love Album – Volume I (Review)

As Light Dies are from Spain and this is their third album of Black Metal.

Atmospheric and moody, As Light Dies create darkly melodic compositions that take the Melodic Black Metal theme and add some interesting twists to make it their own. Avant Garde and Gothic/Depressive Black Metal influences come together across this very professional album.

Mournful cleans accompany jagged screaming growls on their journey from tragedy to tragedy, like dark tourists in a town of pain.

Quality guitar work is apparent from the off with Blackened rhythms being performed alongside emotive leads. The songs aim for maximum emotional impact whilst retaining the bite of their Black Metal core.

The album has a good sound and everything sounds clear and punchy, allowing the band the room to spread their creative wings with freedom.

The keyboard highlights work with the music instead of dominating it and add texture to the already expressive guitar work.

This album is well-written and well-performed. Check them out.

Manes – Be All End All (Review)

Manes are from Norway and this is their fourth album.

Following on from their last release Teeth, Toes and Other Trinkets, which was an anthology, this is the first new Manes album in seven years.

Manes play a beguiling blend of artistic Rock, Darkwave Trip Hop, Avant Garde and 80’s-style Pop. It’s subtle, charming, disarming and insidious.

These songs have a laid back quality to them that’s almost detached from the actual music; as if something has been created by the music that hovers just out of view yet its effects can be felt by a lasting aura of deceptive comfort and false familiarity. This lends the songs a certain flavour of the otherworldly and the different.

There is a low-key catchiness to the tracks as well. Again, it’s a subtle affair, as even though the songs obviously contain hooks the first time you listen to them, it takes multiple listens for them to fully work their magic. Such is the nature of all great albums that have true longevity and depth.

There is so much to experience here. Manes create across a vast canvas using a rich palette of colours. There’s a lot that’s easily missed on first glance and only after taking it in for a good amount of time can you really appreciate what they have done here.

The singer’s captivating vocals are on strong form and the bleak-yet-uplifting-yet-not melodies that he uses complement the instruments perfectly adding layers of emotion to already emotive and layered songs.

This is music for dark nights and even darker activities. This is music that drips with soul and is ethereal in nature.

Fans of bands such as Arcturus, Ulver, Lethe, Dødheimsgard, Green Carnation, In The Woods…, etc. will lap this up, and with good reason.

It’s time to enter the world of Manes.