Ygolonac - Strange Aeons

Apologies for the unexplained absence for the preceding fortnight, gentle ones, but rest assured that posting will resume with gusto upon the arrival of the new year.  In the meantime, share with me this horrid lump of coal that I found in my inbox.  Another mad one man metal band in the mode of Brown Jenkins or Aarni, this Ygolonac seems fixated on the fictional grimoires of the Mythos, from what can be deciphered from the song titles and the band name.  Ygolonac is the lord of the perverse and sadistic, the only Old One outside of insidious Nyarlathotep capable of taking human form, and notorious for the ravenous mouths screaming for blood from his palms and groin, traditionally cast in the role of curating the library of suppressed tomes which tend to drive mundane minds into madness.  Ramsey Campbell's brutal and bitterly funny "Cold Print" is perhaps the finest Lovecraftian story produced in the seventies, and while the retro vibe of this nasty debut is probably meant to transcend time and space, I can sense a little disco cokestache under all the noise, maybe just slowed down 800x.

Down at the Bookstore

Rudimentary Peni - Cacophony

Well, we arrive at the 500th post and so I give you Rudimentary Peni's aptly titled Cacophony.  Notable as not only one of the most vital and well known works of Lovecraftian music but also as one of the most insane, terrifying things ever committed to wax, it is largely responsible for my fascination with the Mythos and therefore for the existence of this Swamp.  A sharp departure from the band's bleak anarcho-punk sound and long held to be an account of Peni frontman Nick Blinko losing his mind, these songs seem like random fragments stitched together and pasted to a padded wall inside a cell.  

There a hints of punk and hardcore, shimmering instrumental exploration, drinking songs, collages of mad noise, multi-tracked gibbering, morbid story-songs, threatening doggerel, and references to (and jokes about) nearly every facet of Lovecraft's work.  Much of this is driven by Blinko's horrific vocals, which range from cheeseball operatics to metallic growls, from snotty punk taunting to inhuman gurgling, often simultaneously.  Famously, one interlude is composed of a choir of clacking, gnashing teeth; another is a melange of wheezes and death rattles.  It's hard to believe it all came from one man.  The album is overstuffed, impenetrable, and baroque, in sharp contrast with the minimalist path the band followed afterwards - it's as if all the horrid knowledge in the universe flooded out from between Blinko's jaws.  

Dead Death Dead Death Dead Death 

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Deicide - Legion

Another crucial piece of your narrator's youth - Deicide's Legion is a classic or crazy, evil death metal merging cartoon Satanism, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and a level of heaviness heretofore unheard.  The track "Dead but Dreaming" is an important piece on the map of Lovecraftian metal, one of the best known and earliest.   Legion clocks in at just under thirty minutes, but packs more brutality and nihilism into that short time than a dozen albums by lesser bands.  It's easy to forget in light of later shenanigans, but at one time Deicide was the evilest, hardest band in the world. 

Revocate the Agitator

Antonius Rex - Zora

While we're on the weird outer rims of heavy metal, let's stop over in darkest Italy, home to many truly bizarre bands of all sub-genres.  Antonius Rex, the brainchild of Jacula leader Antonio Bartoccetti and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Doris Norton.  Of their many simultaneous projects, this is the darkest and most explicitly occult, enough so that they were dropped by their label and forced to self-release it in limited quantities some years later.  Mixing the baroque organ fugues and jazzy psych of Jacula with a cinematic adventurousness influenced by Goblin and Morricone, with the pair's sometimes distracting vocals and breathless narration kept to a minimum.  This version is a recent reissue containing the extended track listing of later versions but with the original, suppressed cover art intact.  One can hear influences on occult rock modern bands, especially Blood Ceremony, but nobody has the freeform batshit wildness of this monster.

Morte al Potere

Cryongenic - Celephaïs

Here's a bit of pompous, low-budget symphonic black metal from Germany's Cryogenic, paying homage to the Lovecraft story of a doomed city locked in a vicious cycle of death and rebirth for all eternity.  Defined by cheap synths, phony choral vocals, rubbery drums, and a sort of cardboard epicness that makes me think these guys are probably LARPers in their spare time, Celephaïs has a certain charm that makes up for its lack of atmosphere or audible guitar.  For fans of Bal Sagoth or Septic Flesh, especially the kind that likes to make armor out of soda pop boxes and duct tape.

Ignis Occultus Im...

The Nameless Dread

 

Well, the gateway to Mediafire seems to be closed temporarily, so I must improvise tonight's entertainment.  I thought this timely with the passing of Bil Keane, creator of the widely loathed Family Circus.  Though numerous parodies of his maudlin creation existed, often with his blessing, only the now-defunct Nameless Dread was actively suppressed, presumably after touching some dark nerve in Keane's soul.  Fortunately I have many of them preserved in my private archive and now I shall pass them along to you, dear ones.  Presumably normal transmissions will resume tomorrow. 

Scumdogs

RIP Flattus Maximus

Shub-Niggurath Please

Vader - Out of the Deep
Morbus Chron - Red Hook Horror
Necromandus - Nightjar
Arkham Witch - Dagon's Bell
Briton Rites - A Meeting in the Woods
Orchid - Eyes Behind the Wall
Noctum - The Seance
The Wounded Kings - Return of the Sorcerer
Innsmouth - The She-Goat Quandary
Portal - Omnipotent Crawling Chaos
Abgott - Book 3-The Eye of Yog-Sothoth
Vasaeleth - Wrathful Deities
Necronomicon - Dreaming of the Old Ones
Thergothon - The Twilight Fade

Happy Halloween

Stoned

In keeping with the spirit of the season, let's all listen to Acid Witch's superior second LP, Stoned.  This album was easily one of my favorites last year, and still gets frequent rotation in the Swamp, especially this week.  Acid Witch explores the sort of death/doom purveyed by Coffins and Hooded Menace, but in contrast to the dark and cryptic vibe of those bands they explode with technicolor gore, like a Suspiria-inspired marker set by Lisa Frank found in the cheap costume aisle of your local grocery store, the kind that get you high as hell.  With festive seasonal gusto in the lyrics and a warm layer of horror-movie organ to fend off the foul weather, and several trippy digressions into cinematic abstraction belying the knuckle-dragging facade, Stoned glows like a pillar of green flame rising from a distant pile of corpses.

Thundering Hooves

Downer Rock Genocide

Here's another comp of British proto-metal, vaguely themed around an end of the world scenario.  I picked it up because I recognized a couple of bands on it: Necromandus, whose Lovecraftian "Nightjar"  is a staple on these sorts of compilations, and Bram Stoker, the spooky organ-heavy psych band responsible for the classic "Born to Be Free."  There's lots of other tasty bands here, like Red Dirt, purveyors of noisy blues-thud with a vocalist who sounds like a talking dog, and the cosmic weirdness of the Flying Hat Band.  This the perfect soundtrack for a cold grey day of whiskey drinking and teeth gnashing.

Long Live Man Dead

Arkham Witch - On Crom's Mountain

At last, a new release from Arkham Witch!  I'm breaking my own no-new-releases rule once again here due to my excitement over this album.  Straddling the line between the old-school Lovecraftian doom of Simon Iff's other project Lamp of Thoth and the NWOBHM-informed approach of like-minded bands such as Christian Mistress, On Crom's Mountain isn't deep or particularly dark heavy metal.   Instead, it's a fairly upbeat, joyous drunken celebration of crusty rock n' roll, ragged and righteous.  Of course, there's the requisite Lovecraft/Howard lyrical leanings, along with some witch and viking-related material, and some more cryptic sentiments.  It's still gestating in my ears, as I've only listened to it a scant handful of times, but even now I must go crack another beer and loosen up the old neck muscles - It's tough to headbang and type at the same time.

Through Arkham madness, and lunacy

In gibbous frenzy - we are free!

Vader - The Beast

Poland's unkillable death metal O.G.s  Vader put out a tough-as-nails album this year, Welcome to the Morbid Riech, which I highly recommend.  This record, from 2004, finds the band in a more eldritch mood than usual, with a pronounced Lovecraftian bent to the lyrics and an obsession with the black abyss of the sea.  The music, of course, pretty much just sounds like Vader always does: thrashy first-wave death metal with Piotr Paweł Wiwczarek's hoarse throaty bellows booming over the top.  You can't go wrong with a Vader record, unless you're an asshole.

I Shall Prevail

Eibon - Entering Darkness

Eibon, not to be confused with the Phil Anselmo/Fenriz band, is a French doom act named after Clark Ashton Smith's Book of Eibon, a tome of great and terrible power.  Fittingly, the music they play is hypnotic and repulsive, a black tar pit full of bones.  Sludgy vocals alternate with frenzied, barely audible sounds of panic and madness, as if the narrator was slowly losing his mind.  The occasional blast beat/tremolo part crops up from time to time, but only to heighten the weighty slowness of the rest of the album.   A must have, one of my favorite releases of last year.

Path to Oblivion

Deceased - Supernatural Addiction

Alas, wee ones,  I must away forthwith for a day or two!  Focus your minds together on this, my favorite album by Virginia's unkillable death/thrash misanthropes, Deceased.  Supernatural Addiction is perhaps my favorite among their peerless discography (although one can't go wrong with any of their various albums).  Loosely themed around various notably works of short horror, from the glorious "The Doll With the Hideous Spirit" from Richard Matheson's famous "Prey," and its bloodthirsty Zuni Fetish Doll, to "Dark Chilling Heartbeat" based on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."  Each song is a gem on its own, but taken as a whole they add up to a Tales From The Crypt-style anthology of horrid tales of revenge an comeuppance. 

The music?  Ah, yes.  This isn't the most brutal Deceased record by a long shot, but the ambitious texture and range are breathtaking, unfolding from the crusher opening of "The Premontion" into a complex mix of not only death and thrash but hints of psych, punk, doom, and weirder territories.  Even the longest songs are perpetually forward-moving and fat-free, anchored by the excellent and instantly recognizable vocals of drummer King Fowley.  Deceased is one of those bands like Slough Feg or Primordial, seemingly content to stake out their own plot of metal soil and crank out album after album of quality music, impervious to trends and inertia.

Will we ever open our minds to greet a world beyond?

Briton Rites - For Mircala

 

Greetings, dearies!  I have once again returned to the Swamp, and am back among you.  Today I have for you one of the great unheard doom albums of the last year, the debut album from Georgia's hirsute Briton Rites. Effortlessly evoking the dark history of doom metal without sounding artificially retro or atavistic, For Mircala is a loose concept album centered around vampirism and Lovecraftian dimensional bleedthrough.  I have a particular weakness for metal bands with literate and diverse sources, and these chaps certainly deliver on that front: the title cut is based on a pre-Dracula vampire novel; "The Right Hand of Doom" is grounded in a Robert E. Howard short story starring his demon-hunting Puritan, Solomon Kane; several other are grounded in Hammer Horror flicks and pulpy supernatural melodrama.  Musically, it owes a heavy debt to the doomier side of NWOBHM, like Witchfinder General of Pagan Altar, with killer vocals from Phil Swanson (of such Swamp favorites as Hour of 13, Seamount, and Atlantean Kodex) and guitars by Howie Bentley of legendary Georgia metal band Cauldron Born.  More importantly, every song is memorable, catchy, and tough - no pretty stuff here, just doom and blood and haze.

The doom evoked by the words he spoke, as the hand began to crawl

Abgott - Artefacts of Madness

Proving the old adage about the weirdest of metal coming out of Italy, Abgott's complex, mathy black metal is thoroughly constructed and precise.  There's hints of that Meshugga-derived irregular chug, Enslaved's epic sweep, and the sheer nuttiness of early Voivod, combined with a Lovecraftian lyrical bent.  For all the clinicism of the playing, there's still a nasty heft here, a mad whirl of rage usually absent from today's technical death metal scene.  Abgott are no theoreticians or hipster music school dropouts - this is the real deal, and it is scary.

Diabolical Surgery

Diamond Plate - Mountains of Madness

Today I bring you a short-but-sweet Ep from Chicago's teenage thrash savants Diamond Plate. Free of the irony and jokiness that characterize most modern thrash, this savage little record is pure headbanging havoc. Startlingly the average age of the members on this recording was fifteen, and they're better and more sincere than bands twice their age. Good stuff - I recommend the new album as well.
Maelstrom

The Grotesquery - Tales of the Coffin Born

Featuring Kam Lee of Death and Massacre on vocals, Swedish-death-metal-by-way-of-Florida band The Grotesquery released their solitary full length in 2009, and boy is it a doozy. This is old-fashioned gristly death metal with sharp teeth and zero interest in crossover appeal. Also featuring members of Lovecraftian bands Crypticus and Ribspreader.
That Thing Which Lurks In Shadows

Celephaïs

This is another new release made available as a free download by the artist, German one-man metal act Celephaïs. Combining the atmospherics and drone of black metal acts like Fen or Altar of Plagues with the cinematic sweep of, say, Fall of Efrafa, this instrumental album is pleasantly entrancing and meditative for the most part, but punctuated with bursts of dissonant blasting and menace.

Solace

Cenotaph - The Lurking Fear on Desecrated Ground

There are at least a dozen bands named Cenotaph - this one is the Italian death metal band who eventually wised up and changed their moniker to Necrosphere, which is only marginally better. Anyway, this brief demo contains three songs and the seemingly obligatory intro noodling, in just under twelve minutes. This is 1991, so death metal is still in its embryonic stage as a thrash metal offshoot, and this tape accordingly reflects that. Keening high-pitched thrash shouting alternates with death growl, tempos remain at full gallop throughout, and no song is longer than four and a half minutes. Still, we get some excellent Lovecraftian themes and atmosphere and a raw, bullshit-free bite-size lump of madness.
Perpetual Wars on Cerebral Shores