TOP 10 EPS of 2023
Oh, he's still at it.
You know, the stuff I usually say when I start to post the big list? Oh, there might be a list of EPs or demos or whatever, if I can be arsed, maybe, etc. And then I can obviously never be arsed because once I’m done with the big list I feel like just never writing a word again. But this year writing has been particularly cathartic, and whaddya know, I actually kept track of EPs that I liked throughout the year, so yeah, this is the one time I could actually be arsed to do that EP list. Hope you can find something you like on it. Here we go.
10.
Cavalera
’Bestial Devastation’
(Nuclear Blast)
So yeah, everything I said about the ‘Morbid Visions’ re-recording is naturally valid for its little bestial brother right here. It makes no sense that this exists, by all reasonable expectations it should suck hard, but through some kind of weird dark magic, call it the authenticity and the belief the Cavalera brothers still have in this stuff, or maybe some of us miss the proper good old Sepultura so hard that anything that takes us back there will drive us insane and incapable of rational thinking, I don’t know. What I know is that this is a fucking blast. Now with the announced end of the band that has been passing for Sepultura all these years, hopefully the Cavaleras can seize the opportunity and make a new, glorious Sepultura-sounding album under their name next? Maybe, whatever, I might be delusional. In any case, this rocks. Don’t let any re-recording prejudice keep you from it.
09.
Брахмаширас
’Брахмаширас’
(Caligari Records)
Or Brahmashiras, if you’re a wimp and you prefer everything to come in your neatly understandable Latin alphabet. Whatever you call them, make sure you listen to the thing. It’s their first EP, a trio of Russian anarcho-punks making punk-infused raw black metal. It’s not as inaccessible as that description makes it sound though, as there is also a very groovy rock’n’roll vibe to the whole thing, making it a punkier Bathory kind of thing. Songwriting is really cool, lean and hard, and you’ll surely be replaying these intense sixteen minutes more than quite a few times.
08.
Wasted Death
’The Prequel To Evil’
(APF Records)
Wayne Adams (with whom we had a lovely chat on a podcast episode last year) was already involved in our #02 album of the year, and he pops up on this list too, as part of the delightfully filthy Wasted Death. As a huge fan of their two initial 2021 releases, ‘Ugly As Hell’ and ‘Ugly As Hell II (Uglier Than Hell)’, I was a little afraid that Wayne (the band consists also of Charlie Davis from Beggar and Tom Brewins of USA Nails, by the way, lest we focus on Wayne too much) would return to his many other projects and just chalk Wasted Death up as a pandemic distraction, since little was heard from the project after those two excellent EPs, but fortunately there still seems to be some gas in the grime tank. What impresses the most about Wasted Death is the solid musicality behind it all. What should be a sloppy, furious, noise-ridden, disgusting slab of punk/metal violence is all of those thing except the sloppy. There’s seriously great songwriting and performance here, all without losing that slimy coating over every note. So dive in fearlessly. You’ll need a shower afterwards, but it’s worth it.
07.
All Hell
All Hail The Night
(Terminus Hate City)
File under “mandatory if you’re into Midnight or Devil Master”, or especially Hot Graves, since All Hell also feature that meaty black metal rasp, particularly on this EP where Nate Garnette from the mighty Skeletonwitch contributes with some of his typically excellent vokills. Recorded and mixed by Black Tusk’s Chris Adams and mastered by Toxic Holocaust’s Joel Grind, you know it’s going to sound awesome too, with just the right amount of filth being poured in your ears without any kind of compromise in power and clarity. Thrashing black’n’roll at its best!
06.
Wolves In The Throne Room
’Crypt Of Ancestral Knowledge’
(Relapse Records)
It’s no surprise that this rules, but it’s more than that, as it shows a somewhat different approach for Wolves In The Throne Room. Don’t worry, it’s not an ambient album or anything like ‘Celestite’, which you might think given the EP format and the length of the songs, and that’s exactly where the main interest of ‘Crypt Of Ancestral Knowledge’ resides. WITTR had only done two EPs before, a BBC Session playing already existing songs and 2009’s ‘Malevolent Grain’, which featured two of their typical ten minute-plus songs. Well, these four songs are done in the usual atmospheric black metal style of Wolves In The Throne Room, perhaps a little more obvioulsy synth-heavier (expertly used, however, creating truly gorgeous melancholic vibes), with a couple of pleasing acoustic passages here and there too, but as you can see on the player below, songs are much, much shorter than usual, from three to six-something minutes long. And yet, they don’t feel underdeveloped, or lacking in any way - as epic and as expansive as any of their classics (‘Twin Mouthed Spring’ is particularly awesome and worthy of being added to any setlist), it’s like they were able to condense their art in a more succinct and to-the-point fashion. Something to explore on the next album? The future will tell.
05.
Fluisteraars
’De Kronieken Van Het Verdwenen Kasteel - I - Harslo’ / ‘De Kronieken Van Het Verdwenen Kasteel - II - Nergena’
(Eisenwald)
I know, I said I wouldn’t pile releases on the same list position this time, but bear with me, it’s part one and part two of the same thing, okay? Plus I said I wouldn’t do it on the big album list, not on this one. Whatever, the point is that you should immediately go listen to these two and also part three of this proposed trilogy when it comes out sometime this year. Or, I would venture, pretty much anything Fluisteraars put out, since their record so far is absolutely unblemished. Not only are they (they’re a duo - Bob Mollema on vocals and some keys and Mink Koops on everything else) one of those acts that captures exactly the real essence of what made the early years of black metal so exciting and so important for those oldies among us who lived through the whole thing, but they are also able to infuse deep feelings in their apparently raw and cold musical core, to an extent that “warm” starts to seem like a better description for most of it. There’s howling despair, there’s beauty and melancholy, there are epic, rousing passages, everything coated with a grimy, very crusty punk approach. As simple as the music seems, it ends up sounding like absolutely no one else. Oh, and as for this EP trilogy specifically, ‘De Kronieken Van Het Verdwenen Kasteel’ means The Chronicles of Vanished Castle, and the band say they were “made in the deep caverns of old Bennekom under the influence of old damp castle dungeons. Each Chronicle takes the listener on a wander through a vanished Bennekom stronghold. The fortresses, mostly built on forgotten pagan shrines, have ancient stories. We went into our mental dungeons to unravel those stories. We found exiled pagan gods hidden deep and cast away from daylight. Through the chronicles, we act as their mouthpiece.” Okay, that works for me.
04.
Transilience
’Nervesaw’
(Alone Records)
Strangely ignored by the metal press at large, this EP actually represents a very important comeback for a band that was way ahead of their time during the first period of their existence. The more cult-minded among you might remember a record called ‘Mouthful Of Buildings’, released in 1989, a fantastic Voivod-ian piece of “futuristic thrash”, full of odd time signatures, jazzy parts, an overall funky vibe and a totally unique vocal approach. However, they also maintained an aggressive, crushing kind of heaviness that Voivod themselves were kind of leaving behind at the time already. Unfortunately Transilience ceased to exist shortly after, with frontman Spookey Ruben embarking on a very fertile, oddball solo career filled with delightful weirdness (seriously, check him out). However, right before the pandemic hit, Spookey decided to get back on the Transilience horse with a revamped line-up, and the result so far is this remarkable EP. It’s quite short, adding up to about ten minutes of music, but those ten minutes are absolutely packed to the brim with vibrant ideas, big riffs, impossibly catchy melodies and complex rhythms. Heavy, dynamic and unpredictable, seriously bursting with a pile of ideas that many full-length albums would kill to have. And you know what? Over three decades later, you can still call this “futuristic thrash”. They don’t sound exactly the same as old Transilience, but they still sound like they’re so far outside the box they’re not even in the same room as the box. They still sound like they’re playing the music of the future. So maybe this time we will know better and pay them proper attention.
03.
Lunar Chamber
’Shambhallic Vibrations’
(20 Buck Spin)
At almost half an hour in length, this is almost a cheat on the EP list (we had several shorter full-lengths on the main list), but hey, this would have made it on to the big list too if they had called it an album, so it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s the very first release for Lunar Chamber, a trio comprised of people with a certain pedigree in the extreme prog scene already (members of bands such as Tómarúm, Proliferation, The Ritual Aura or VoidCeremony, among others), so it’s not such a surprise that they roar out of the gates all fully formed and awesome-sounding like this, but you still have to admire the rather unique twist these guys were able to apply to brutal, cavernous death metal. Rife with delirious twists, chants, synths, impossible solos and a dazzling mastery of their instruments, the cool thing about Lunar Chamber is that all this technicality (believe me, I too instinctively recoil a bit whenever the word “progressive” is used before death or black metal) never becomes masturbatory, it’s never a show off of how many notes they can play per second. Everything serves the songs, which do become dense, complex psychedelic mazes you’ll have to navigate through, but they all have a way out, they all have a point. I’m sure we’ll get an 80-minute brain-destroying proper full-length out of these people soon, and I for one can’t wait for it.
02.
Forever Autumn
’Crowned In Skulls’
(Self-released)
Ever since Aaron Stainthorpe recommended Forever Autumn on the TDM podcast episode where he was the guest, I’ve been a huge fan and follower, and it was a pleasure to see sole member Autumn Ni Dubhghaill display the amount of maturity she does with this extraordinary EP, a perfect follow-up to an already excellent other EP she had released in 2021, ‘Hail, The Forest Dark‘. Each release typically differs from the last over the course of her discography, but you can generally interpret Forever Autumn as a unique take on harrowing acoustic doom folk, with a latent black metal sensibility but never really following any genre pitfalls. The profound connection to nature and the refreshing lack of any obvious leading influence make the music sound pure, untouched by conventions or rules, free and willing to go wherever it needs to go. As Autumn told us when we interviewed her for a Band Of The Week feature, “Forever Autumn can be anything it is called to be.” So far, among many other things, it’s been consistently amazing.
01.
Ghost Heartbeats
’A Companion To Nekyia’
(Union Finale)
It seems appropriate that the #02 EP on the list features music so deeply connected to nature and to the musician’s surroundings, as our EP of the year is all about those connections too. First things first - Ghost Heartbeats is really Menace Ruine, or rather Geneviève Beaulieu, and this EP was born out of a necessity to ease the vocal fatigue she was feeling during the recording of ‘Nekyia’, the latest (and absolutely extraordinary) Menace Ruine album. It’s not exactly Menace Ruine, as the approach and sound are indeed different, but very clearly comes from the same time and space and belongs in the same creative process. It comes from a few drum sessions Geneviève used to play outdoors, which she started to record at one point. Apparently, this communion with nature - they delightfully describe it like this: “she brought her handy recorder and captured a few drum sessions with the birds, bees, insects and critters of all sorts to eventually craft a few little songs with them” - helped greatly in easing the aforementioned vocal fatigue she was feeling in the ‘Nekyia’ sessions, and so, after those, she returned to those recordings and filled in a few blanks, but with the expected care and sensitivity to leave them close to their initial spirit. “(…) very mindful to preserve the trance inducing and ritualistic qualities at work in the original sessions, and on the condition that there would be no human voice and no words other than the narrative titles,” as it is described on the band’s text in their Bandcamp.
The end result works indeed perfectly as a companion piece to the more full-bodied experience that was ‘Nekyia’ - in a sense, it’s as if this EP strips everything down to the bare essencial, exposing the beating heart of this music and connecting it more closely than ever with its true origin. The way it reaches your heart may be different, perhaps more subtle, but the same sense of fragile, wounded beauty is still there, the same evocative feel, the same transcendence, all make their way to you anyhow. It sort of puts its bigger sister record in a different, even more perfect kind of light, but it also stands alone as a simply gorgeous, quietly addictive piece of music in itself. And hey, it gave us a wonderful excuse to have a beautiful conversation with Geneviève (thank you!), about ‘Ghost Heartbeats’, yes, but also ‘Nekyia’, life, the universe. migratory patterns of birds and everything else.
(part of this text was taken and adapted from the Menace Ruine Band Of The Week feature published in April - click here for an in depth interview with Geneviève about this release and more)