drone / ambient / doom

2500 kilometers apart from one another and still able to create an intriguing collaboration album. Without the internet, this album might have been never been made which would really be a shame. So, hurray for the internet and now let's dive in the massive cesspool of drones, soundscapes and noise that this stunning album actually is.

​[ B O L T ] is a drone doom trio from Germany while Biblo lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. There she creates deep ambient soundscapes. The artwork consists of pictures shot and arranged by Ole-Kristian Heyer.

The four tracks on this album vary quite a lot from each other, depending on who was involved in the recording process. Track one is a dark, droning anthem, created by ​[ B O L T ]. On the second track, Biblo cooperates, which turns the music into an amalgamation of noises, soundscapes, drones and strange rhythmic elements. Quite often this collaboration crosses the borders between ambient music and noise, which is pretty damn awesome.

Biblo takes care of track three on her own. It's an almost danceable track, driving on deep percussion and an hypnotic repetitiveness. The last track is another collaboration. Again driving on rhythmic percussion, this one turns from a trip hop ambient tune into a heavy droning doom metal track. For that, it's my favorite on this collaboration, which doesn't mean I don't like the other tracks. On the very contrary. This is an excellent collaboration, one I absolutely recommend.


​Serge

dreampop / ambient / shoegaze

Sometimes an album sounds like someone wrote it and invited some musicians to record and perform the thing. Sometimes an album sounds like a group project where everyone seemed to be involved in the entire writing process. Sometimes an album sounds like an impromptu blast of creative chemistry, dressed in sweet but melancholic pop songs. This one by American dreampop combo Carta is the latter. Initially a two-man bedroom project, Carta grew around an evolving cast of musicians, trading instruments and vocal duties. This is their fourth album. It sounds sad, melancholic and introvert, even though it's quite varied.

The album opens with 'Arthur And Linda', a slow, gloomy pop song that immediately sets the tone for the whole thing. Slowdive comes to mind. The Cure too. Joy Division maybe. But also Tycho and even Massive Attack. So yes, I think we're in for a varied ride along a number of sad songs. 'It's Always As It Always Is' somehow reminds me of Dead Can Dance while 'The Last King of Rome' feels like it could have been written by Archive.

By now, we're four songs into the album and it's definitely growing on me. But there's more. 'Ettore and Adele' sounds like the love child of Trentemöller and Cocteau Twins. It's one of my favorites on this album, a slowly lingering ambient pop song with dreamy vocals. Then, there are a few minimal beauties, like the folky 'Tarentella', followed by a slow trip hop tune in 'The Manuscript'.

In all, this is a remarkable album, one I will definitely recommend to all dreampop and shoegaze fans. It's sad, it's loaded with melancholy but it's also varied and it will will pleasantly surprise you numerous of times. So check it out while I add the songs to my day-to-day playlist. I will be listening to these tunes for a long time from now on.


​Serge

doom / gothic metal

Yesterday, I was at a friend's house, drinking Irish coffee and talking about music. The subject was differences in quality between classic albums and modern day attempts. Every musical genre has its classic, must-have albums, released years or decades ago. My friend claimed that modern day albums rarely, if ever, reach the overall quality of those old favorites. I respectfully disagreed, mostly because I know that people define their opinion on "classic, genre defining albums" around their 16th year. Everything that comes after that, is usually new stuff, not to be adored as much as the so-called pioneers. It's just how our brain works.

In my opinion, there are loads of classic albums out there. The old bands just forgot to write and record them, which leaves that possibility open to other ones.  Of course, as a music reviewer I have actually encountered several of them. I think I have uttered the phrase "if this album was recorded in (insert year), this album might by now be a classic in the genre" many times before and I am going to have to use it again.

Polish gothic doom act Medebor takes us right back to the nineties. Founded in 1997, these guys obviously know their classics. Paradise Lost, Type O Negative, Tiamat, Moonspell, My Dying Bride, Anathema, November's Doom, Amorphis.... I too have heard them all, I've seen them all live and I recognize their influences in this epic album. In short: 'Dark Eternal' can easily stand right next to your favorite melodic doom albums.

The album opens with a strange, spoken word intro which lasts for a while before the guitars eventually kick in. But when they do, they immediately place themselves among the aforementioned giants in this genre. Melodic doom metal with both grunts and clean vocals, while the guitars and drums create a dark but immersive atmosphere. It's pretty much everything we loved so much back in the days.

I'm not sure which my favorite songs on this album are. I absolutely love the opener 'Forest Of Deranged' and the lingering doomer 'Never To Be Forgotten' but pretty much all the song carry the same quality, the same atmosphere and the same doom metal delight. In all, I can only recommend this beast to all you doomers out there, especially the ones who are nostalgic for that nineties era. Medebor will not disappoint you, that's a fact.


Serge

gothic / doom / metal / darkwave

A beautiful album with nine tracks, The Sad Wonder Of The Sun is best described as a dense, profound and renitent poetic quest for exceedingly perfect and pure melodies, constantly flirting with the light winds of an everlasting spring, flowing through a mosaic of surreal elevated majesty. The colorful and bright  harmonious waves of Ecnephias, brilliantly mixing a very peculiar kind of soft gothic rock with a brave, intoxicating and marvelously melancholic, but smoothly melodic type of dark wave, inebriates the listener with an amazingly singular style of music, that infuses into an obscure realm of dreaming divinities the preordained sense of an oblique grandiosity, that engraves in their music the uniqueness of a symphony destined to shape in the world a more sensible and gentle perpetual twilight of comprehension and lucidity. 

With a marvelously peculiar style that draws the strength of its inspirations from the sensible fugacity of an everlasting horizon of stone, Ecnephias merges a remarkable perception of profoundly poetic gothic aspirations with a more melancholic and melodic form of dark rock. The final result is a smooth, incisive, intense, dense and vigorously alternative sensible somber rock, that greatly uses gratifyingly delicate and expressively sensible harmonies to indulge their sonorous ambitions into a higher axis of literal rapture and commotion. Unfortunately, despite the ardently ascendant and formidable artistic sagacity of their music, Ecnephias sometimes gets too close to pop music and synthpop. Of course, not to the point of compromising the beauty of their art; nevertheless, some passages seem too overtly “happy”, indulging in what almost appears to be cabaret music.    

Evidently, I completely understand the diversity, the uniqueness, the audacity and the experimentalism of their style – something which gets specially obvious in the fifth track –; Ecnephias is not just another band, let alone be qualified as an ordinary rock group. They are a melodic art act, and no ordinary label literally applies to them. This is something you really have to understand before listening to them. With Ecnephias, there is no ordinary music. Not at all. Labeling or categorizing them is not just extremely difficult: it’s impossible. 

If there is a band capable of changing the entire scenario of the underground scene nowadays, and provoke a really consistent artistic, stylistic and sonorous evolution, this band is Ecnephias. Although I can’t really categorize The Sad Wonder Of The Sun as a masterpiece, there are songs on this album – like Povo De Santo and Nouvelle Orleans – that will literally blow your mind away. Fantastic symphonies of marvelously exponential beauty, if you like avant-garde metal, experimental music, or something completely out of the ordinary, you have to listen to this album. It is totally different from everything you’ve heard before. Be sure about that!   
  

Wagner

post rock

Mammock is the most recent album by Russian post rock group Ruins!Ruins!. A very extensive record, more than one hour long, it has nine tracks: Serene, Hurricane, Distress, Grab, Arch, Kurta, Szorstki, Collumns and Polynya. With soft and poetic tendencies, a colorful flavor that gives to its modular nodes the surreal peculiarities of harmoniously playful idiosyncrasies, this record is the increasingly velvet transfiguration of an everlasting afternoon perpetually frozen in the surface of the universe. With smooth melodies, and a predominantly transcendental atmosphere that gives to its notes the lenient exaggeration of a formidable delusion, Mammock is an astonishingly formidable album, curiously unique. With wonderfully texturized melodies, converging to a lancinating path of primordial intonations, the excruciatingly intense harmonies filtrate the dilacerations of an existence that floats invisible through the sound, in a sagacious journey of sentimental completeness and vicissitude.         

With a genuine perception of priorities, preordained by a mature sense of principles, the melodies conduct the rhythms to a point of immoderation, where everything is highlighted according to the nature of a higher level of musical saturation. With a sonorous intricacy that subtlety disperses the whispers of its amalgamated dissonances, the striking result will be the curious profusion of a marvelous atmosphere of wonderful cosmogonies, where the musical rapture concedes to the axis of its inherent strength the colossal predisposition of a symptomatic ascendancy. 

Since the album is too long, though, it can be quiet annoying, although this fact doesn’t diminishes its artistic greatness in any way, whatsoever. With a formidable sense of originality, applied in a respectful degree to masterful technical abilities that amplifies its creative scope, Mammock is a very good album, that not only honors the post rock genre, but expands the vicinities, patterns and structures of its musical range.

A great album that certainly diffuses and rearranges the musical probabilities of the genre, as well as having a beauty of its own, Mammock is a true celestial triumph, despite its share of excessively uniform and monotonous passages. Nevertheless, it’s quite an artistic achievement!             

Wagner

ambient / post rock

Between darkness and light is the latest album from Blak, a Spanish instrumental post rock group. Released on July 28, the album has five tracks: In the absence of light – Eigengrau, Impression of an even deeper darkness – Illusion, Temples drawn by the blind – Revelation, Black drips in the sky – Overwhelming and Colors awake – Perception. A little heavier than most groups of the genre, the proficient technical degree of the band gets close to perfection. In a well-centered axis of astoundingly manufactured melodic thunderstorms, they manage to gravitate towards a superb sonorous perception of an absolute density, displaying a formidable level of harmonious intonations, that seems to evoke fragmentary dreams from another dimension.    

With a voluble energy that salutes the melodies reshaping them with sincere, but tender strength, there is a subtle ferocity hidden in the lines that inherently exhibits the profoundly detailed and powerful molecules upon which the music was written. Composed with the lancinating force of an anguish that has recently woke up, each and every note is masterly dosed with the prominent discipline of a barbarous musical veracity, easy to perceive at the sharp intensity of its profound and relentlessly organic melodies. Song after song, note after note, Between darkness and light reveals itself to be a formidable album, certainly one of the best ever released in the history of the genre. 

With the fantastic contrast between dense, vaporized, heavier harmonies and more lucid, easy-minded, serene rhythmic dissonant tonalities – maybe their way to express the darkness and the light referred to in the title, I suppose (and given the fact that, in each track, the listener has, in this marvelous sonorous journey,  the feeling of a soft, but gradual ascension, transmitting a sentiment that seems to be related to the title of each respective song) –, this record really has it all: from the ethereal desolate soundscapes of the melancholic vicinities of the universe to the greatest waves of a synchronic rapture, the creativity of this band has whimsically and beautifully delineated the sound of an amazing state of the art work, so refined and poetically diffuse, but at the same time expressively down to earth, that their genuine craft is yet to be challenged by any contemporary band.     
 
Fantastic from the very beginning to the end, Between darkness and light rearranges deep harmonies – as well as common themes to the genre – into twisted and more consistent patterns. Nevertheless, despite their groundbreaking originality, post rock enthusiasts will feel deeply familiarized with their sound. They are really on the right path to be a shining star of the underground scene.     

Wagner

electronic / ambient

A very smooth ambient album, a little more than one hour long, Only With Myself has nine nameless tracks, only listed in alphabetical order, from A to I. Although a typical ambient music album – very skilled and modest – the melodies are moderately interesting: in an uncompromised atmosphere of lower inhibitions, incredibly discreet deep toned harmonies floats through a labyrinth of disparaging intensity, smoothed by the wings of an organic, but profoundly vast serenity.   

Though remarkable, there is nothing on Only With Myself that you haven’t heard in another albums of the genre before. Nevertheless, there is such a vigorous and pulsating formidable linearity in the music, whose subtle minimalist arrangements and tendencies gives a special charm to the style of the artist. With patience, a profound taste for density, and a detailed intricacy pervasively crafted on simplicity, there is an astonishing musical conjuncture lying beneath the graceful structure of this album. So you have to listen to it attentively, to really decipher the most ingenious prospects hidden beneath its artistic singularities. 

Nevertheless, I should point it out the fact that the album would be quite boring for uninitiated listeners. People who really are not into the genre will literally die from monotony, possibly. Only With Myself concerns exclusively people who really love minimalist ambient music; otherwise, there is not a single chance for audiences who qualify this type of music as tedious to really appreciate it.

While Only With Myself can’t be properly categorized as a great album, there is indeed a formidable level of lucidity and originality brilliantly inserted into its craft. Highly recommended to higher level enthusiasts of ambient music, this record is a striking and pungent ambient piece, that really has a charm, an intensity and a vicissitude of its own. It’s virtually impossible to deny the peculiar flavor of this album, and its subtle genuine nuances, gracefully inserted into the genre with a sensible imponderability.     


Wagner

stoner rock / sludge

Magnetic Fields of Radiant Light is the latest release from American stoner rock group Mammoth Salmon, from Portland, Oregon. Thirty nine minutes long, the album has five tracks: Apotheosis, Mortals, Maelstrom of Discontent, Black Moon Ritual and the title track, Magnetic Fields of Radiant Light. An interesting album, despite a fine range of qualities, the work basically revolves throughout the traditional traits of the genre: a gratifyingly intense lower pace, profound rhythmic dissonances, sometimes dense, corrosive harmonies, and mortifyingly wild guitar lines, that easily erects fortifying walls of sound around its perpetually static musical devices, ready to acidly dispose traces of good behavior without any fear.  

With a profound psychedelic vibe, Magnetic Fields of Radiant Light is an interesting album. Despite the fact that the band closely follows all traditional aspects of the genre, there is an intriguing amount of genuine audacity subtlety inserted into the harmonies, that rapidly deviates from the common ground predictability inherent to this type of music. Nevertheless, the record would be solely – and more exclusively, I think – appreciated by veteran enthusiasts of the genre, since it will certainly sound astoundingly monotonous to an uninitiated audience.

The technical aspects are obviously marvelous. The guitar lines exhibits a tenure of hazardous strength and consistency that brilliantly shapes their melodies and the vigorous expansion of their dilated harmonies. Although the songs in some passages sounds excessively uniform at times, this is a quality inherent to the genre, that explores the inextricably quiet, patient and pragmatic dissonances of slow intonations, while retracting and dispersing at the same time a voluble and convertibly flexible sonorous ordeal, throughout a sordid configuration of vastly irregular universes, made of graceful impositions of imponderability.    

While I haven’t found Magnetic Fields of Radiant Light to be a masterpiece, there is no doubt the record is a remarkable representative of the genre. Despite the lack of authenticity, it’s impossible not to recognize that they really understood what stoner rock is all about, and amazingly replicate this feeling throughout their music!  


Wagner

stoner rock / sludge

Moon of the Wolf is the debut album of an eponymous American sludge/ stoner rock group, whose style denotes a distinctively progressive musical experimentalism, hailing from Salem, Oregon. Almost thirty eight minutes long, the album has seven tracks: Blue Eyes, Stretch, With Prowess, Fear the Fire, Huntsman, Capture and Realize. With a more radical approach, and a very singular style, Moon of the Wolf – the band as well as the album –, shows an intense and serious musical work, highlighted in the dilapidation of a singular comprehension of stoner rock, exceedingly different from contemporary bands, although without any distance or estrangement from the usual characteristics applied to the genre.    

With some influences clearly derived of hard rock, punk rock, as well as a little bit of hardcore, Moon of the Wolf has a very distinct, perfunctory and amazing style, that goes direct to the point. With a sensational sonorous alignment that shows exactly what they are, and what they came for, Moon of the Wolf brings on the epicenter of its dense and categorical musical proposal a more brute form of artistry, shaped by formidable sonorous arrangements, that rescues in the axis of its amazingly dilapidated rhythmical tonalities the purity of the old traditional rock’n’roll, combined, infused and perfectly amalgamated with a fresh contemporary understanding of its most hard, but whimsical, bastard musical correlations.

Although the record is distant from being considered a masterpiece, it has a plenty of rejuvenating and original qualities. Impossible not to like or to be immediately captivated by it, Moon of the Wolf is saturated by the most pervasively dense and infuriating aspects of aggressive rock’n’roll, although its melancholic, pragmatic and depressed side is severely highlighted at the peripheral quest of its musical tangential zones.            

If Moon of the Wolf can’t be considered a remarkable album, at least it is a gratifying, exceptional and vigorous musical experience. It is certainly worthwhile of each and every minute of its genuine, graceful and audacious musicality. Enthusiasts of a more experimental and original heavier noise rock will instantly feel delighted by this superb work.     


Wagner

When I started these Brieviews series over a year ago, the initial idea is to empty my inbox by writing shorter reviews for EP's, reissues, singles and a few full length albums. Back then, I was talking about 900 unread emails. That amount has tripled since then and we're already at part 25. That's a lot of short reviews if you ask me. Anyway, here are some more Brieviews for your reading and listening enjoyment. 

dark ambient

heavy metal

black metal / thrash metal

post rock

drone / dark ambient

bandcamp

stoner rock / hard rock

gothic metal / symphonic metal

black metal

Larval Productions

post punk / gothic rock

grindcore

Serge