Why? ‘Projections’ is an intensely surreal, disturbing ritual that I still do not have any great understanding of. This debut full-length from Peruvian occult black metal act Arcada is at the top of my ‘pile of shame’ this year after having missed its late March release date for a review and keeping it on the back burner far too long. A hidden gem for folks who stop just short of “weird for the sake of weird”. I’m a sucker for an album that rides the fence between complete genre fuck nightmare and tuneful, introspective high art. As a solo project this is ambitious in terms of skill though much of the charm ‘Gamma’ possesses lies in the smaller details of the compositions, the swinging motifs that line up with surrealistic folkish jogs and the playful keyboard melodies developed atop these rhythms. The extremity of the experience lies in the amount of strange detail they’ve infused into what is essentially a jazzed prog rock album delivered via the modern experimental extreme metal perspective and achieved with humble production values. Opener “Astralanum” grinds out a bit tuneless to start, a sweeping rhythmic event in some sense but uneventfully lain, glitched.
Consider ‘Gamma’ a spooky black metal take on Finnish symphonic prog rock, at least in spirit. Definitely check this band out of you’re big on the more aggressive Helheim records, Vried, and ‘The Olden Domain’.įolks who are attuned to psychedelic black metal, avant-garde metal, and willing to swing between folkish Thy Catafalque-esque creep jazz and Oranssi Pazuzu‘s freak bops will find the third Wyrmwoods album challenging and perhaps even more rewarding for it.
If anything these songs are surprisingly ambitious with divergent rhythms and bold non-traditional tonality, heralded drummer Dirk Verbeuren ( Scarve, Megadeth) is a real asset for this adventurous style. Once you’ve chilled out “Þrá” stomps in with a bit of triumphant Enslaved action and these guys can handle it. Honestly this record won’t seem like much to start, it just needs to work up its groove and you’ll have to settle into the soft n’ crispy guitar tone a bit. That might sound horrendous to some just for the sake of the “post-black” tag but in this case I’m using it as shorthand for death metal influenced progressive black metal something truly “post-” and not post-metal influenced. Having now sat with it quite a bit I can appreciate the progression between ‘Nætur’ (2018) and this follow-up, which picks up similar lyrical themes and aesthetics while modulating the unique texture of their melodic and considerably modern take black metal to align a bit more with post-black sensibilities. Meanwhile, on lengthier tracks like "At the Mountains of Madness" and "Brains on the Tarmac," they often include long stretches of humming organ or synth, atop which float guitar notes like glowing orbs drifting aimless in the distance, summoning up an atmosphere not unlike something Poe might include as a protagonist saunters up on horseback to the decrepit aging manor of some old family line.This’ll be the second time an album from Icelandic black metal act Vetur has landed in my ‘to do’ pile a few months beyond its release date so, I’d not ignored ‘Vist’ but set it aside for several months. For instance, in "Cauliflower Growth," Bedsore breaks their own mid-paced pummel to descend into a viscous and cavernous organ-assisted death-doom dirge before erupting back into a vintage Leprosy-era Death groove which eventually breaks into a potent blast beat section. They play with a wide dynamic arc, making their mellower and more psychedelic or proggy atmospheric passages feel more integrated than the typical pattern of a tacked on intro or outro meant to imply a kind of cerebral nature to otherwise bludgeoning death metal.
The band has an approach to the progressive wing of death metal that doesn't rely upon virtuosity or profound technicality but instead on arrangements, pacing, and atmosphere.
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