False - Portent

Thumbing my nose at the True Believers

If Bell Witch can be held responsible for anything at all, it's introducing the metal world to Mariusz Lewandowski, apparently the only human being in the galaxy capable of accurately emulating Zdzislaw Beksinski's iconic art style.  Since painting the stunning cover of the aforementioned Mirror Reaper, this nearly sixty year old painter has suddenly found himself one of the most in-demand artists in the entire metal sphere, and one of the bands that won the Lewandowski Lottery this year was Minnesota's False, a band finding itself scrutinized fairly hard by those in the know.  This midwestern sextet seems almost lab grown in how they hit every single nerve when it comes to soaking up alternative press adoration as the token "metal band we'll allow ourselves to like".  Gorgeous cover art, female vocalist, pristine production quality, easy to absorb and understand music, inspiration from modern styles of metal, signed to Gilead (home of Smart Person BM heavyweights like Yellow Eyes, Mizmor, Falls of Rauros, and Krallice (and previously Fantano mainstays like Imperial Triumphant and Thou)), they blacked out the Internet Metal Journalist bingo card before a note was even heard.  I can absolutely understand the skepticism from the underground when a band hits a meteoric rise like False did when every single element seems like the closest thing to an industry plant that metal can muster.

However, sometimes the Hipster Hype Train gets it right.  Maybe, just maybe, it was purely by accident/coincidence that False has all of those aesthetic bits that made them media darlings so quickly (though it may be worth noting that they've existed for nearly ten years without a lineup change before finally hitting it big with their sophomore release here), because none of that shit should even matter in the first place, and allowing it to cloud your judgment of the album obscures some fantastic songwriting.

I'd be lying if I said Portent was something radically new or unique, but I'd also be lying if I said this was a shamelessly derivative copypasta.  It's pretty close to impossible to listen to any random snippet of this album and not be reminded of Emperor's full lengths from the 90s, but their personal twist on it is that they're paradoxically hypermaximalist while taking heaps of influence from drawn out minimalist atmoblack of the Cascadian variety.  It's no secret that I love overly busy maximalism, I am one of the last dudes still loving obnoxious tech death after all, and I think putting such an idea into the context of extremely lengthy and atmospheric black metal creates a sound that should be a total disaster but somehow works marvelously.  For example, synths are featured on the album, but they're never "prominent" in the sense that they're carrying the melody.  They're settled back playing simple chords to accent the atmosphere, unlike the Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk style of hammering you over the head with doodly melodies.  The guitar instead takes the lead when it comes to these things, and they restrain themselves only insofar as they aren't playing shredding Yngwie Malmsteen arpeggios, because they're doing everything else they can to be the star of the show here.  Occasional bursts of major key triumph pepper the landscape laid out on Portent, and they never let these moments go by without drawing attention to them.  Take a look at the 3:37 mark in "A Victual for Our Dead Selves".  That right there is an abrupt shift in mood from slow, agonizing death into a bombastic victory fanfare, and it's done without a reliance on tooting keys at all.  It's just pure, unadulterated, fist pumping metal slicing through the darkness.

Almost all of the buzz surrounding the album, positive and negative, has done well to describe the music accurately, with the only real difference being the qualitative assessment thereof.  If you don't like the idea of especially busy atmoblack, then False was never going to appeal to you to begin with, and that's fine.  For me though, this is superb.  Imagine Wolves in the Throne Room or Altar of Plagues except the drums almost never slowing down and the melodies less floating in the upper spaces and more being shot out of a bazooka.  Portent is forceful in its expressiveness, very much taking background elements and exploding them into the foreground.  My only real complaints are ultimately pretty nitpicky, those being that the vocals aren't nearly as impressive as the rest of the band and "The Serpent Sting, the Smell of Goat" is 100% just two separate songs smashed together, complete with fifteen seconds of silence between the two halves.  It's such an oddly pointless thing to do and I wonder if somebody insisted that every song needed to be over ten minutes or else the album wasn't getting released.  Pure speculation, but whoever had that idea is a doofus.

So the hype train took a stop in Minnesota and picked up False, but I'm happily hanging onto the caboose like a filthy transient, pumping my fist and hooting the whole way.  Portent just hammers you over the head with riff after riff after melody after riff and I adore it.  Maybe it's overbearing for those who can't stop huffing the fumes of burning ravens and slashing their wrists with their bullet belts, but for those of you who, like me, wished atmoblack as a scene would stop pumping out so much drawn out mediocrity and finally let something fucking happen for a change, Portent is a godsend.


RATING: 94%

White Ward - Love Exchange Failure

One must imagine Sisyphus dying

It's impossible to talk about post-black metal nowadays without referencing Deafheaven it seems.  Like it or not, Sunbather was an absolute game changer in modern metal history, bucking the established aesthetics of the genre in a way that was bold and definitive.  It opened the door for legions of hipsters and music snobs to appreciate metal music stripped of all the kitsch and laid itself emotionally bare in such a way that it made traditional metalheads violently uncomfortable.  A lot of old school types didn't like it, and that's fine, it wasn't for them.  I liked it a lot, but I feel like I respect it more than I actually like it.  It was a watershed moment that inverted so many metal tropes that to this day people question its black metal credentials despite the abundance of blast beats and hypnotic tremolo riffs underneath screeching vocals.  The musical elements were all there, but the added shoegaze and major key carefree nostalgia of the whole thing was just so different that I think a lot of people didn't really know what to do with it, myself included.

And without Sunbather, I wager there'd be no Love Exchange Failure, so for that I have to thank Deafheaven eternally.  White Ward's sophomore album is the exact kind of thing I'd always wanted to experience but never knew I wanted to.  I decided a while ago that metal culture fucking sucks and I would've abandoned all of you dorks years ago if I didn't love the music so much, so an album like Love Exchange Failure hits me in a cockle so deeply embedded in a shriveled black stalactite that was once my heart.  Classics be damned, tradition be buggered, if this is the future of the genre I love, I am all aboard.

All you really need to know is that I find a clear parallel between this and Deafheaven's breakout album, and the album cover paints a picture so vivid that I felt like I knew this album on a personal level before I had even heard it.  Metal isn't a very "urban" genre, and I mean that in the sense that it's usually thematically centered around nature, fantasy, the occult, escapism, war, violent death, just generally things you won't find underneath well lit skyscrapers, ya know?  Love Exchange Failure is black metal presented at its most romantic without losing sight of the negativity that the genre dwells in so deeply.  Cities are a confounding thing to me.  By definition you have more people than you could ever count all living and coexisting in one space, interconnected by the greatest feats of modern engineering and architecture that the brightest minds of their eras could conjure, they are very clearly connected.  And yet, they're the loneliest places in the world.  Being isolated in a cabin hundreds of miles from civilization lets you be at one with yourself or with nature, but the white noise of a metropolis completely blocks you from such a spiritual experience.  You are surrounded by people, hundreds of thousands of them, millions even, and yet not a single person knows or cares about one another.  There is something gorgeously ironic about such an open air prison, surrounded by life and yet completely lost within yourself.  The sights around you are beautiful, and yet it's a concrete labyrinth of lights hazily illuminating nothing but decay and misery all around you.  So full, so lonely.  It's breathtaking, it's serene, it's the worst place in the world.

The dark splendor of urban isolation is on full display here musically, with long stretches of unobtrusive piano and smooth saxophone creating backdrops for lonely walks in the small hours of the morning, punctuated by loud, violent cries of agony.  The lion's share of material here is unabashedly metal, but that bitterly ironic twinkling sweetness never truly dissipates.  Even during the blasting and screeching, the quiet melodies of the piano and sax never stop.  The saxophone can probably be argued to be nothing more than a gimmick to help the band stand out, the same criticism Rivers of Nihil got last year with Where Owls Know My Name, but hell even if it is a gimmick it stands out in a wonderful way.  I don't think I realized how much I loved the sound of a saxophone until I heard White Ward, but now that I've heard it in a metal context where it doesn't clash so sharply, I want it to be as standard as a guitar.  I don't think it adds a new dimension as much as it fills a space I didn't realize was empty.  Atmoblack is a melodic genre, no doubt, but the melodies are always subtle and more implied than outright stated, flittering in the background, but the addition of the sax here gives those drawn out melodies a more active counterpoint, cutting through the cliche'd bullshit and grabbing you by the ear, pulling your face towards a dead homeless woman and demanding you weep for the tragedy of somebody dying for and with nothing when surrounded by opulence.  It sings defiant songs of agony and despair in a space of cold, unfeeling misery. 

I do my best to adhere to the Death of the Author theory, and that is because the beauty of art is that it can be interpreted more than understood.  I've read the lyrics here, most of them seem to be about a person trying to find meaning in a miserable world via murder, with some allusions to existential thought and I think some vague idea of using the violent nature of mankind to sow something natural in a place where nothing is, and while that's also great, it's not what I get out of Love Exchange Failure.  Instead, I feel what I described earlier.  Isolation, loneliness, the bitter smirk on the face of a lonely man surrounded by thousands of equally lonely people who will never even think about one another.  This sounds like the last moments of a man coming to terms with the fact that he lives in a cruel irony.  You are going to die here, and that's okay.  Death can be beautiful.  The cycle of life never stops, and though you're surrounded by so many people in a lively place, nothing here is truly alive, and the ultimate defiance of The Combine is to live anyway, and you're going to be denied even that.  Nobody can shoulder the crushing weight of conscious existence forever, and your time has simply come.  Look around you.  You see everything.  You feel nothing. 

I've barely described the music here, but I don't think that's really the point White Ward was going for.  This is all about mood and atmosphere over riffs.  It's atmospheric black metal with a saxophone, what more do you really need to know?  I could paint a much better picture of what the album feels like by saying it sounds like nostalgia for a time that hasn't happened yet than I can by telling you that it's noir-y and sad black metal.  The real genius of Love Exchange Failure is in the intangibles, and I hope I've made that clear.


RATING: 95%

Forlet Sires - Holy

Nothing else can stop Meteor

Honestly I feel like the main reason Forlet Sires hasn't caught on the same way Tchornobog has in recent years is purely because they lack Markov's innate ability to relentlessly promote, because this Swiss quartet is playing more or less the exact same idea with a very similar level of quality and yet seems to be pretty widely unknown, and that's a shame.

Holy isn't my usual jam, but there's a lot here to like regardless.  It's a bit of a double edged sword with its succinct length, being only 40 minutes long (which is a perfect sweet spot for metal in general but this particular type of stretched out atmoblack/doomdeath usually lends itself well to a more expansive experience) so it never wears out its welcome and it always feels like it's not much of an investment to give it a relisten, but there are surprisingly few standout sections despite the consistently high level of quality, so each relisten is breezy and simple but leaves little distinct impact beyond "the whole thing is pretty good".  And even then, that's not a bad thing at all, it means the entire experience is consistent and well done, but it does make it hard to write about and articulate why it resonates with me so much.

I think what it is is that there's a very boomy, bassy feel attached to these songs which would typically be presented in a much more thin and atmospheric way, similar to one of the things I like so much about Tchornobog.  That's not to say that atmosphere is diminished as a tradeoff for riffs and heaviness, merely that the ethereal spaciness of the songs work extremely well in tandem with the tumbling percussion and morbid tremolo riffs.  The vocals help as well, never screeching and instead sequestering themselves to a low growl, adding in more of that gruesome morbidity that keeps the songs from floating away.  There's a lot of give and take, with the two longer tracks indulging in the  post rock influence intrinsic to all bands of this style and the two shorter ones spending more time being crushing and doomy, but the two influences play off of each other very well and spend most of the runtime working in perfect harmony.

There's very little to dislike about Holy, it twists and turns through inspiring soundscapes and the crushing inevitability of death.  Like how Chrono Trigger feels like the most epic RPG of all time but actually only takes like 12 hours to complete, it's both expansive and truncated and crams a lot of ideas into a short amount of time.  If there's any problem here, it's really just that it flies by so quickly and leaves surprisingly few lasting melodies and sections in its wake.  I've found myself returning to it multiple times over the last week or so though, so clearly it's doing something right.  Count me as impressed.


RATING: 89%

Golden Ashes - Gold are the Ashes of the Restorer

I really like this band name okay?

My first thought upon hearing Golden Ashes was "I feel like this is trying to be Summoning but actually black metal."  My second thought was "No actually this just sounds like fuzz trying to gain sentience."  My third thought was "This has to be a one man project, no way several people signed off on this lazy piece of shit."  My fourth thought was "Huh actually I can't stop listening to this even though it's objectively super fucking basic."  My fifth thought was "Oh shit wait this is the guy behind Gnaw Their Tongues."

Now, I'm not familiar with Gnaw Their Tongues really, at least not beyond the incredibly basic knowledge of knowing that the name is super cool and that the dude behind the project (Mories, going by his real name here, Maurice De Jong) tends to focus on experimental noise in a black metal context.  Golden Ashes here is a bit more straightforwardly black metal, but it retains both the "experimental" and the "noise" by simply being mega lo-fi and distantly atmospheric.  There are synths that carry the melody throughout each song, but they really just play one chord for a whole note each measure and change up two or three times each section while the drums tick away meaninglessly and the guitars occupy some completely inconsequential space in the background as featureless distortion. 

That's really all there is to say when it comes to the music itself.  It's very basic, almost offensively so, just ultra-green lo-fi atmoblack with no real outside-the-box thinking behind that.  But despite that, I'm actually kind of enraptured by it.  Every song sounds more or less completely the same, they're all just blasting at the same tempo with quiet BM vocals and random buzzing guitar lines with prominent synths in the foreground that don't play anything beyond one or two notes at a time, but it's just constructed and presented in a way that I can't help but find endearing.  "Drifting Slowly Through the Portal of Sorrow Towards the Void of Death" stands as the only song (to my memory at least, I could be wrong because though I do like this album, it kinda lacks staying power) that stays purely ambient the whole time, and as such it's pretty clearly the best one simply because the soundscape isn't cluttered with shoehorned-in metalisms.  What this sounds like to me is if somebody had Summoning described to them poorly and then tried to emulate it, like an ESL speaker who can write with perfect English grammar but misspells every third word.  Like, it's got the basic aesthetic idea of Summoning down perfectly but something got lost in translation and ol' Maurice here thought they were still a metal band and tried to just kinda cram black metal tropes in along with the epic atmosphere. 

Regardless, it's well done despite how brain dead simple it is.  I think that speaks to how good of a songwriter De Jong is, because he took basically three basic building blocks and crafted eight entrancing songs out of them.  I said this lacks in staying power somewhat and that's certainly true, but I mean that mostly in the sense that I don't catch myself humming these melodies outside of actually listening to it, but I can't deny the magnetism that's drawn me back to Gold are the Ashes of the Restorer more than a few times over the last few weeks.  There's something here that I can't quite articulate, but it's something that I definitely really enjoy.


RATING: 79%