THE DEVIL'S MONTH: August 2023
Every first Thursday we round up some of the finest releases of the previous month.
I hate summer, so much so that I recently made a playlist for TDM’s collaboration with Veil of Sound featuring sad, bitter and/or miserable songs about this wretched, sweaty season that is only getting worse the more we fuck with the planet’s climate. One of the many, many reasons that I have for this hatred is also that, at its peak, namely August, there’s usually a lot less music releases, since everyone is either getting skin cancer at the beach or going to big summer festivals, bands and pundits alike. That doesn’t mean, however, that the choice was easy for this edition of The Devil’s Month - less releases there might have been, but as always, if you look hard enough, a few remarkable gems still stand out. So, as always powered by our good friends at MONDO NEGRO, here are the five records that helped define August for us:
An Autumn For Crippled Children
Closure
(Prosthetic Records)
Fifteen years and ten records later, not to mention still zero idea about their identities, An Autumn For Crippled Children are hinting that this might just be their final album. Not that we don’t want any more music by this mysterious entity, but if the aptly-titled ‘Closure’ indeed turns out to be their final chapter, it has to be said they are bowing out with their typical graceful elegance, rounding off an artistic arc that always made absolute sense every step of the way. Drenched in melancholy as usual, achingly beautiful but also harsh and unforgiving when the songs ask for it, it could be argued that AAFCC have succeeded in perfecting the delicate balance between longing black metal and pastoral shoegaze to an extent that Deafheaven themselves never achieved during their more obvious “blackgaze” period. As the feedback dries out at the end of quietly euphoric closer ‘Here Comes Sorrow’, you actually feel something in your gut, a sense of unspecified loss - when was the last time a bunch of sounds made you feel like that?
Besta
Terra Em Desapego
(LifeForce Records)
It’s always been clear that Besta have never been your typical rule-adhering grind footman, and this new album is the most obvious evidence of that so far. Whereas in the past, six minutes could have given you time to blast six or seven Besta songs, after six minutes of ‘Terra Em Desapego’ we still haven’t left the crushing dynamics of death/thrashing opener ‘Olhar Seráfico’, and the rest of the album offers similarly diverse, longer bouts of pissed off rage. That’s the main thing - Besta still earn their name, they’re still a prowling beast, taking check of all social injustices and wrongdoings and lashing out against them with no holds barred, perhaps in an even more efficient way than before. Though most of these 41 minutes can still be classified, musically speaking, as grindcore, the pace variations and the added depth to the songwriting make everything much more perceptible and allow them a greater field of expression. They’ve always had great riffs, even if they lasted for mere seconds never to return again on some 00:49 song, but now it’s like a veil has been lifted for everyone to realise the intrinsic value of these songs, not just grindheads. And hey, even most black metal bands would kill for some of that angular creepiness that pops up sometimes during ‘Veias Em Catarse’, for instance.
Drab Majesty
An Object In Motion
(Dais Records)
‘An Object In Motion’ is “just” a mini-album, but whatever. Not only is it a very respectable 32 minutes long, more than many full-lengths, but even if it was just ten minutes it would warrant its presence here, as it more than satisfies the itch of waiting for the successor to 2019’s wonderful ‘Modern Mirror’. Well, for now, at least. Another significant leap in the duo’s artistic trajectory, these four songs further reinforce that uncanny feeling of weightlessness Drab Majesty have always infused in their music, somehow it’s like this music is coming to you straight from the air itself, a flowing and strange dream sequence refreshingly free of any overblown pathos, content just to be, yet still offering profound emotional weight for those who decide to stay in the dream and run it over and over. Even the sparse vocals seem to blend in the sounds happening around them, and if it wasn’t for the very clear upfront vocals in ‘Vanity’, you’d almost be forgiven for thinking this is an instrumental record if you hear it rather distractedly, or in any other tranced-out state, for the first couple of times. In a way, even if, apparently paradoxically, it features decisive contributions by Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, M83, Air), and Ben Greenberg (Uniform, Circular Ruin Studio), this is so far the closest Deb Demure and Mona D have come to the ultimate goal of removing any human trace from their songs. And isn’t that, in itself, one of the most human things there can be?
夢遊病者 (Sleepwalker)
Skopofoboexoskelett
(Sentient Ruin)
When one of the 夢遊病者 band members kindly showed me the advance song for this record, ‘Silesian Fur Coat’, I went proper nuts about it and shared a whole essay about it with you guys. Not wanting to be lazy about it or anything, but multiply that essay by four and you’ll have the full appreciation of ‘Skopofoboexoskelett’ before your eyes. Make it different essays though, because as much as they stick together like ravenous wasps bathed in glue, each of these songs could also easily have been made by a different band on a different record on a different decade. On a different planet, also, maybe. Genres and categorisations be damned. The closest I’ve managed was halfway through the very first listen of that song, and it goes something like “it's like they did a split release with Earth and then just played the two sides at once,” so good luck trying. How all of this manages to hang together and make a perfectly cohesive, even if very disorienting album, is completely beyond me, but maybe that’s the whole point. Yes, there’s a whole universe to discover behind each musical and lyrical detail of this, but the best way to experience it is, in my opinion, to not think too much about it, to let it wash over you again and again until you feel you’re in, organically, without much intellectualisation. Then it becomes easier to explore this evil eye, the concept of which is central to the record. “‘Skopofoboexoskelett’ focuses on the notion of self-reflection, intuition and the outward and inner manifestations of phobia as they relate within that singular world,” they explain, sort of. Just go listen to the damn thing.
Spirit Adrift
Ghost At The Gallows
(Century Media)
Spirit Adrift’s switch from their early doom metal to proper, fist-raising heavy metal has been a wonderful thing to behold. It’s not like records like ‘Chained To Oblivion’ or ‘Curse Of Conception’ weren’t great, they were, and if main man Nate Garrett had kept at it, we’d probably be praising their new doom monster right here in the same place. But great, original-sounding, proper heavy metal that walks that fine path between modernity and old-school with effortless class is a very precious commodity these days, and I’d dare say we need more of it than another doom band, great as they were at it before. When we had Nate on the podcast, ‘Enlightened In Eternity’, the crucial transition record, had just come out, and he himself wasn’t sure if the band’s future would bring more records in that vein or not, though he did seem tempted to keep exploring this rich vein of metal. Fortunately he did, and after a couple of stopgap - but brilliant nonetheless - EPs in 2021 and 2022 (‘Forge Your Future’ and ‘20 Centuries Gone’, respectively), ‘Ghost At The Gallows’ now emerges as a sort of mature crystallisation of everything that made ‘Enlightened In Eternity’ awesome. Honestly, eight minute opener ‘Give Her To The River’ is enough for you to realise how great this album is, and how right the decision was to keep sailing the shores of heavy metal. Possibly the greatest song Nate ever wrote, exhaling an air of grandeur that would sit right on a recent Iron Maiden record for example. And no, this is not an analogy that can be thrown around lightly. It’s not a question of peaking early either - from the deeply emotional, ethereal balladry of ‘These Two Hands’, to the razor-sharp Metallica-esque (do you see the level of comparisons we’re dealing with here?) ‘Death Won’t Stop Me’, right up until the closing title-track, which shows they haven’t lost their mastery of slower, stomping doom-adjacent metal, the level of quality and engagement is consistently high. The world isn’t fair, and the music industry even less, but if Spirit Adrift aren’t stalking the biggest stages the metal genre can offer within a couple of years, then people really need to pay better attention to them.