THE DEVIL'S MONTH: February 2023
Every first Thursday we round up some of the finest releases of the previous month.
The new year signalled also the beginning of our collaboration with the Mondo Negro store, where you will be able to find many of the releases mentioned in this and other features, and tons more unusual/hard to find stuff. This sister/brotherhood already gave us our year-defining playlist, and the first round-up of some of the records that have most fascinated us the previous month. January had a few screamers, but it was still relatively quiet. During February though, the floodgates have started to open. The choice of five records was much harder this time - and a couple that I’ve already talked about like Siege Of Power’s or Volores’ have been deliberately left out for that reason -, so the challenge of keeping this a five-record thing will only grow in the next few months. Stay tuned to see how we handle that! But for now, enough jibber jabber - here is THE DEVIL’S MONTH - February 2023!
BIG|BRAVE
nature morte
(Thrill Jockey)
Loud minimalism seems to be the shortest and most to-the-point description of BIG|BRAVE’s music so far, but restless as they are, they’ve carved out quite a bit of wiggle room in that niche. The biggest piece was perhaps dug with the help of The Body on their collaborative ‘Leaving None But Small Birds‘ album (2021), an amazing folk-inspired piece which seems to have made a lot of not-quite-fans go “ah, now I get it!”. I admit I’m one of those, but the fact that not-quite-fans were still listening to their music, like, seven years into their existence says a lot about BIG|BRAVE. We might not have “gotten” it completely, but we knew there was something there that would click at any point. So ‘nature morte’ seems to have been somehow influenced by that release, according to the band, and while that makes sense, there is so much more to tackle here. And at the same time… so much less, too. The thing about ‘nature morte’ is that, despite the by now typical sparseness of these songs, it feels much more pointed and structured than before, which in their case helps immensely to get their musical points across. And boy, are those points dark and dreary this time. If you hadn’t gathered by the titles and the lowercase styling, ‘nature morte’ is fucking bleak. “The folly of hope” and “the consequences of trauma” are two of the subjects the band reveal are tackled, and in the same declaration, they use the word “unease” at one point, which just might be, this time, the shortest and most to-the-point description of what’s going on here. Even Robbin Wattie’s famously unhinged vocals seem to be stretched here to a point of ultimate desperation and anguish. Opener ‘carvers, farriers and knaves’, to give you a specific example, might be the most terrifyingly ominous piece of music you’ll hear this year and only brings to mind absolutely apocalyptic stuff that still haunts us like that one Neurosis & Jarboe track, for intsance. Approach cautiously. But do approach. Now.
Crawl
Damned
(Profound Lore)
“Terrifyingly ominous” and “approach with caution”, says the blurb up there on the BIG|BRAVE record? Well, that’s nice, no need to even interrupt the horrific screams from one band to another, because Crawl offer all of those wonders with this, their ninth release in just under twelve years of existence. Despite splits with Leviathan or Haunter, they never really broke into the bigger audience they deserve, but this intimidating behemoth of an album will surely do that trick. When I say they, though, it’s a singular “they”, as all of this descent into hell is the product of just one man, Michael A. Engle. If you don’t know Crawl, I know what you’re thinking, with that cover artwork and everything - dungeon synth, right? Well, no. Not really. Dungeon, yes, in a way, but more like “blackened dungeon doom”, which is the phrase being thrown around to describe them, and for once it’s pretty much accurate. There’s the lonely, drawn out you’ll-never-get-out-alive dread of the usual dungeon synth atmospheres, but there’s no plinky-plonky 80s horror soundtrack in sight. No, this is pretty much a monstrous, icy riff-based, harsh scream-fuelled 38 minute agonising torture of the senses. Music for playing Elden Ring to, if you know what I mean. Oh, and also, one man band doesn’t mean what you’re used to in this case. Engle performs drums, bass, vocals, and samples simultaneously all at once. Furthermore, he does this on stage as well. Fucking hell, right?
Hellripper
Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags
(Peaceville)
That old adage “you know what you’re getting with” still kinda applies for Hellripper, but that doesn’t mean the James McBain one man army isn’t evolving. Yes, just like the two albums and many splits/EPs before it, ‘Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags’ is fast, ripping, blackened speed metal, straight out of the school that Midnight, above all, helped reopen a decade and a half ago more or less, and has now produced into a whole string of awesome bands. More than any of those adjectives and subgenre terms, Hellripper is fun, whether on record or on stage. Any stage, mind you - I saw them last year at Amplifest, a festival better known for its forward thinking experimentalism and leftfield exploration of genres, and they still went down a storm, turning every hand in the room into a sign of the horns, no matter the musical background of their attached person. This record is all that, but it’s also a remarkable progression in terms of ambition. We’d happily listen to variations on an ‘All Hail The Goat’ theme forever, mind you, but having a sort of unified concept about Scottish history and folklore, and having a few more elaborate, longer tracks reflect the epic nature of that subject doesn’t hurt either. In any case, horns up!
HOST
IX
(Nuclear Blast)
Even if the player below was empty and this was all just an elaborate prank, the existence of this project would already be justified just to see that pic up there. 80s new wave Greg and posh “I have a bookcase with a rolling ladder” Nick look like they’re prepared to drop the best goth/synth/coldwave album of the year, and whaddya know, they just might have. Shake whatever your feelings about Paradise Lost’s polarising 1999 album ‘Host’ might be, first of all. If you didn’t like it, you’re wrong, maybe go back and listen to it again to realise so, but even if you loved it (kudos), don’t think this is just ‘Host 2’, despite the name of the project, because it isn’t. As much as it had fantastic songs that are still intensely hummable to this day, it did feel pretty much like a genre experiment, while ‘IX’ is more elaborate, more solidly written (without losing any of its catchiness however, opener ‘Wretched Soul’ alone will live rent-free in your brain for weeks), more diverse (check out the penetrating darkness of ‘Inquisition’!) and most of all much more transversal to several genres. In fact, I would venture that ‘IX’ is more comparable to ‘One Second’ rather than ‘Host’ itself, even in the way Nick develops some of the vocal melodies (and what a much more confident, more mature singer he has turned into as the years went by, right?). On a recent interview, Greg mentioned all of those genres we checked above, and even added stadium rock from the 80s to the mix, and some of the more anthemic songs really hark back to that golden age of the… genre? Yeah, I guess stadium rock could be called a genre of sorts. Anyway, that’s what you get with two decades of experience and exploration as songwriters. Especially considering the more extreme nature of the last few Paradise Lost albums, this is a brilliant and very welcome surprise.
Teksti-TV 666
Vapauden Tasavalta
(Svart)
Throw the word “krautrock” on the table, add “psychedelic” to it, and by now you’re probably imagining a long, drawn-out thing, like 23 minute songs that you can have an enlightening trip to, maaan, and things like that. You’re surely not imagining a Hüsker Dü-sounding riff that gets you up in the morning quicker than a bucket of black coffee opening a record like that, are you? That’s what Teksti-TV 666 are all about - sure, there’s the dependable precision of the motorik beats behind it all, and yes, a song like ‘TJ’ does bleed into the enlightening trip territory as it slowly swirls around your brain, so the descriptions you’re going to find do make sense, but what you really get out of ‘Vapauden Tasavalta’ (which aptly means “The Republic Of Freedom”) is the punk energy, the vibrant drive of the songs. When you spin the record, you don’t imagine a crowd of people with their eyes closed going on inner journeys - no, you imagine a bunch of jumping, sweaty bodies all screaming at each other with wide smiles on their faces. Imagine The Stooges playing abbreviated Can songs, or Wooden Shjips developing a weird tongue-in-cheek Finnish sense of humour and playing 78rpm unhinged versions of their songs. Or just click play on the damn thing and go dance around in your very own republic of freedom.