THE DEVIL'S MONTH: September 2023
Every first Thursday we round up some of the finest releases of the previous month.
Feels entirely appropriate that the band pic we chose to illustrate this month’s main cover image for our THE DEVIL’S MONTH feature is the new-look Hexvessel. As the weather begins to turn cold (well, hopefully, at least), and we stand weeks away from being under one more polar veil, one more year turns on the big wheel, and so the music we love keeps on reinventing itself - just like Hexvessel themselves have on this remarkable new record -, every month offering us new reasons to be excited every time we press play on whatever it is we have loaded next on our playlists. With this, the September edition of the collaboration The Devil’s Mouth and Mondo Negro started way back in January, we’re now up to 45 records that we have recommended you, coming in all styles, shapes, sizes and shades of alternative music, and many more will come until the end of the year when we’ll wrap it all up with our usual and long-awaited best albums of the year list. So when you get one of those annoying friends moaning about how all new music is shit and everything good was made before 1972 or whatever, you know what to throw at them. That’s right, a brick, straight at their forehead. And when they’re lying down bleeding, show them all of these 45 records. Thank you.
Els Focs Negres
Martiris Carnivors: Hymns Per A Um Nou Apocalipsi
(Firecum / RagingPlanet)
Honestly not much to add to what we’ve already told you about these delightfully deranged Catalan-speaking Portuguese heavy metal nutters when they were picked as Band Of The Week the other day. On this, their second album, Els Focs Negres, featuring the masterminds behind classic acts such as Filii Nigrantium Infernalium or Dawnrider, have turned into an even weirder and more fascinating proposition than before. As fire and brimstone hail all around you in an (anti-)religious fervour, massive blackened heavy/speed riffs are laid down and insane deranged-preacher vocals wail and screech, you’ll feel both disoriented and like you’re having the time of your life, like riding on an abandoned rollercoaster from hell with all of Satan’s little minions poking you as you go.
Frankie And The Witch Fingers
Data Doom
(Greenway Records / The Reverberation Appreciation Society)
The best thing about doing this article in conjunction with a record store is that the people who own a record store are bound to throw you the odd gem here and there, no matter how know-it-all you think you are about the music you dig. That’s exactly what happened here, when I showed master Odair from Mondo Negro some of the possibilities for this month’s list, he mentioned ‘Data Doom’ as his September favourite, and upon following that tip, whaddya know, it’s become one of mine too. Already Frankie And The Witch Fingers’ seventh album, this is a fantastic mind-bending mix of apparently unmixable things, bopping and grooving along with surprising energy and even heaviness, picking up shards of psych, punk, funk and prog like a big ball of rock vitality getting bits of gum stuck on it as it scrapes along the sidewalk.
Hexvessel
Polar Veil
(Svart Records)
I’ve been lucky enough to have access to this record quite early and after several months living with that miraculous promo I can safely say this will be among my top ten albums of the year. Even months before I heard it, when producer Jaime Gomez Arellano told me in absolute secrecy he had just been recording the next Hexvessel album and, with a wink, told me this and only this about it: “it’s going to be a black metal album!”; even then I kinda knew it was going to be something really special. It is a black metal album, yeah, but at the same time it’s not, it’s still very much a Hexvessel album, and within that clash lies the magic of it. In a way, it’s like Mat McNerney freshly re-assimilated his old Kvohst black metal personality and let all of his musical past and present mix together to create something new and different that is nevertheless familiar and even nostalgic at times. He still sings cleanly like only he can, and the whole vibe is still a very Hexvesselian one of frolicking through the woods, except the buzzing wash around him means it’s not a frolick during daylight in spring, and you don’t feel like you’re going to run into Tom Bombadil at any moment anymore. No, now the forest has fallen silent under a wintery polar veil (there we go), it’s the dead of night, and you frankly run more the risk of bumping into fucking “Natassja, my beloved satanic witch” than any pointy-eared friendly creature. The final piece of this icy puzzle was actually only completed a couple of weeks ago, when the band played (only for the second time ever) these songs in a live setting at this year’s Amplifest, and it crystallised everything you’d expect after listening to the album, the now-four piece playing in darkness, laying a peaceful yet restless blanket of ice over the audience. A major high point of 2023, don’t miss it.
KEN mode
VOID
(Artoffact Records)
You gotta wonder where the limit is for KEN mode, right? Over a decade ago we were being punished by the aural assault of fantastic records like ‘Venerable’ or ‘Entrench’, the band’s fourth and fifth albums respectively, and even by then we were so rubbed raw by the vicious Unsane/Today Is The Day bad vibes they exuded that it seemed there was little more room to manoeuvre without eventual repetition. Well, colour us super-wrong and just a little naive, because a shitload of awesome records later (‘Success’ in 2015, ‘Loved’ in 2018 with the best artwork ever, ‘NULL’ last year), the Canadian band keeps on evolving, keeps on finding new ways to pummel the crap out of us, and keep on growing as both a studio band and the crushing live entity they are these days. I’ve seen them twice this year already, at Roadburn and Amplifest, and I’d go tomorrow again if there was another show nearby. ‘VOID’ is actually a sister record of sorts to ‘NULL’, both of them written and produced at the same time throughout the pandemic and recorded by the great Andrew Schneider in the fall of 2021. While it does make sense once you know, as there is a natural continuity between the two, it wouldn’t be shocking either if they were just two normal separate records, as there are also significant differences. KEN mode are seasoned enough as songwriters by now to make each song a nasty, creepy individual little universe of its own anyway, and when going through the relentless chaos of ‘Painless’, the menacing melancholy of ‘These Wires’, the Cop Shoot Cop-ish rumble of ‘He Was A Good Man, He Was A Taxpayer’ or even the smokey, jazzy closing chapter of ‘Not Today, Old Friend’, you’ll be long past trying to draw any comparisons to any other record, or any other band for that matter.
The National
Laugh Track
(4AD)
Just like KEN mode’s pick for this devil’s month, ‘Laugh Track’ is also a companion album to its predecessor. Don’t know if that’s a trend developing throughout the music industry, but for now, I’m good with it if it keeps being used with bands of this quality, with material that is indeed too good to sit unused in a cutting room (or, well, let’s be 21st century about it, on a forgotten cloud folder) somewhere. So yeah, apparently ‘Laugh Track’ features a whole bunch of tracks written alongside the ones that showed up on ‘First Two Pages Of Frankenstein’, the band’s ninth album released about five months ago on April 28th. I’ve seen it mentioned on several reviews and articles that ‘…Frankenstein’ had a sort of a “muted” reaction, which as a The National fan really bothers me. I suppose that’s what you get when you reach the kind of universal exposure The National have throughout the years, headlining mainstream festival and suchlike - the masses probably aren’t going to be super excited by a rather grey, subdued, subtly melancholic record. Cave-dweller me, on the other hand, is happy as a rotten peach when they do go this way - my favourite record of theirs, and one of my all-time favourites of any genre/band/whatever, happens to be ‘Trouble Will Find Me’, a monochrome piece of sheer genius that is a resident fixture on every music-playing device/outlet I own (phone, computer, stereo, turntable, car, DJ sets, you name it) that most “normal” The National fans tend to consider a little boring at best.
Well, ‘…Frankenstein’ easily slid under my skin in a very much unmuted way because it sounds the most like ‘Trouble…’ of any record they’ve done since, and this companion piece is about to leap in front of it the more I play it. Even the amount of “featuring”s, something I honestly abhorr with The National’s music, doesn’t bother me at all this time, as even Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers and Rosanne Cash seem to have buckled under the unbearable lightness of the soft, morose, downcast bummer that contaminates this entire record. ‘Dreamer’ or ‘Space Invader’ in particular could well have been ‘Trouble…’ outtakes, Matt Berninger at his absolutely despondent best both lyrically and murmured-vocally. “I think our feet are gonna slip / I think our hands are gonna shake / I think our eyes are gonna cry / I think our hearts are gonna break,” he sings alongside Bridgers on a verse off the latter Leonard Cohen-like title track. That’s exactly how I like you guys. Keep it up (down).