Terra Tenebrosa - The Reverses [2016]

There is something distinctly unnerving about Terra Tenebrosa even as you glance at their various cover arts. Slanting, oblique figures in masks that look like they were stolen from a hellish carnival around the whereabouts of Chernobyl, set against a grainy, black-and-white bucolic landscape as though something out of a modern indie horror movie. But even the cover of their albums - among which their third, The Reverses, I find the most visually frightening - does not begin to encompass the integument of the aural and parasitic trance which these Swedish obscures have no offer, a kind of digestible, if not lacking experimentation, configuration of grating, otherworldly senses which seems to liaise between highly industrialized, bogged down venture, and a more cohesive palette of instrumentation akin to Deathspell Omega, Samael, Neurosis at their most unhinged, Blut Aus Nord, Red Harvest, and the Dutch hopefuls Dodecahedron. While most of the time I'm accustomed to slab the label 'unusual' or 'strange' onto bands, the classification does not help much here. In fact, the only way to rectify the crawling insanity of such a band as Terra Teneborsa should require a deep dissection of the band's style and music.

How exactly to go about this? The Swedes are frightening, theatrical, capricious and dissonant. Predictability is completely out of question, with the band employing such a rich mixture of dense, broiling industrial guitars, cavernous murmurs intermingling with chants, and the production value is simply off the chain, pummeling and bombastic, it's oddly yet titillatingly loud which gives the parasitical quality of the riffs a great deal of punch and energy. Truly, production is at the helm of the sheer momentum of this music. Had the band opted for a grainier, lo-fi production the aural experience, while no less unnerving, might have come off as underwhelming and appropriately downsized, but the magnitude of sound here enhances the claustrophobia and atmosphere, much like the Swiss Samael, especially after their 1996 masterpiece, Passage, only instead of the cosmic, ethereal aura they manifest so endearingly, the Swedes meticulously fabricate the auditory equivalent of a industrial nightmare doll-house, with charred pieces of plastic and piled masses of doll's heads lying about. Ambient sounds textures and multitudes of creeping voices fill in the almost mindless discomfiture they strew in between tracks or passages, and these as freakish and harrowing as a lengthy shot from a Tarkovsky or Kubric opus, dragging in the listener for several minutes with terrible anticipation until a load of jagged, heavyweight riffs are unburdened.

This is very noticeable with the final, overarching megalith, ''Fire Dances'', some 16 minutes long, which not only has a terrific set of crushing, grooving riffs but a totally immersive center section with long, drudging currents of sound and discord enveloping the listener with minutes at an end. But besides the band's obvious stylistic merit in cultivating such shadowy, implosive chaos, I was surprised at how many of these songs which I felt like coming back to, even with actually memorable riffs and sections I could pick out across the board. ''Ghost at the End of the Rope'' is like a titular, cadaverous Leviathan track, with one guitar chugging out huge rhythms and the other plodding at a terse, repetitive melody; the band's mastery at experimental black metal is apparent from the unusual timing and signatures, the explosive drums and the few, narrow moments of pureblood Scandinavian dynamics which they employ, making for a delicious kind of escape for the bedraggled black metal outlaw. ''The End is Mine to Ride'', with its more traditional structural approach and mid-paced gait, is also very good. Intensity is never a problem for Terra Tenebrosa when they are so apt at picking paces and tempos apart, diverging and converging into varying structures and patterns, which they equally reveal on ''Exuvia'', a forlorn industrial metal piece utilizes a single riff for its entirety, building upon the soundscape around it. Granted, there is some repetition with the riffs but overall the sound sustains itself and the album never yields to musical equanimity, which means I was rarely disinterested throughout. The Swedes have not quite deracinated black metal as others, like, say, Arcturus or Sigh, have. Instead, black metal remains an element of the recipe which in itself is, beyond just 'unusual', mortifying and creepy as fuck. Tribal and nightmare-inducing, this is the kind of album you definitely don't want to give a spin at 2-3 in the morning, not in the least if you're living in a wooden cabin, with the closest scrap of civilization being a petrol station located 20 km away. You've been warned.


Highlights:
Where Shadows Have Teeth
Ghost at the End of the Rope
Fire Dances

Rating: 80%

Autokrator - Autokrator [2015]

Drone and death. Two things which would have seemed irreversibly oblique had you told me about it 20 years ago, when death metal had just gleaned its initial flourish, but here we are, at the edge of the world, listening to a French band with an album capable of satisfying followers of both genres, at least in theory. Autokrator. Oh, the autonomy. We've all had our fair share bands only too incapable of governing their own creativity and resulting in veritable travesties of musical produce, and a smaller percentage of bands which can skillfully exploit their unabashed titles and work out miracle albums, across the heavy metal spectrum. Autokrator doesn't quite belong to either camp. Simply put: there's a place, deep within the reaches of an industrial complex shrouded with clouds and gloom, perpetually fixated in production and yielding the same output with pretty much every return, coagulated in its moody ambient obsession. That's where you'll likely encounter ''Autokrator''.

Now, as much as the term 'drone/death' feels slightly alien to me, there's no denying that the Frenchmen are following a similar path to the Americans Aevangelist with their brand of irrevocable, tumultuous black/death shaking the very foundations of your cortex, or the calculated, Deathspell Omega-esque dissimilitude of Imperial Triumphant; but even so my resemblances wouldn't be entirely exact since there's a very industrial foundation to found here, not so slick or street-like as Ministry or Godflesh, but a more carefully plotted, systematic rendering of bulky, impenetrable chords redolent of Portal or Impetuous Ritual. Certainly the 'drone' is there, because Autokrator flesh out their riffs in some of the most mundane fashions I've recently heard, with dronish chord upon chord flung with unobtrusive reverb and patterned segments; yet I could also complain that between these gigantic hulks they propagate and the darkly atmosphere present, the Frenchmen aren't particularly interested in spicing their material up with detailed melodies or intricate high-end fret melodies the way their countrymen Deathspell Omega would have evoked excesses of nightmare and agony. Fuzzed out and implicitly linear, ''Autokrator'' is only slightly shy of becoming a dark marital industrial project - think In Slaughter Natives or Kreuzweg Ost - especially on the final track ''Optimus Princeps'', and as inclined the Frenchmen may be to spooning off your brain with these buzzed exhortations of sound and rhythm, I've found that none of the songs here cling to head, which isn't too surprising, but moreover, they lose their hypnotic and cranial power a little too quickly - in fact I found myself scrambling for ways to keep myself occupied by the third track.

Every track is nearly a duplicate of the other, with little or no nuance offered in between, therefore I find it silly to point out specific highlights on this record.While records of this kind are definitely difficult pills to swallow, after a acclimatization of the ears they should be taken in entire packages for the maximum, potent effect, yet ''Autokrator'' feels like a drug which loses its initial gloss of hypnosis shortly after the first injection, like a cheap, painful high. The drums here can be annoying for some. Personally I didn't have a problem with them since the sharp, industrialized snares provide with a few splotches of white in a a gossamer otherwise completely embroidered in darkness, but beyond that the cymbals were weak and the dynamics department therefore surprisingly meager. Some props go to the few ambient effects which somehow made it into an album almost completely filled with simplistic, gloomy synthesizers and hard-boiled riffcraft, giving the listener a few rare moments of breath and exploring more atmosphere than the instruments could ever hope to. As much as I sometimes enjoyed the aural and industrial punch of the rhythms from time to time, there's never enough variation to make the album worth reveling in. The majestic darkness of Deathspell Omega or Aevangelist is simply not there. The vocals, the musical equivalent of coughing out wet coals out of your asshole, are there, but even that hellish diarrhea feels unsatisfactory.

This is a record which strangely enough ticks all the boxes except for intricacy as far as this industrial black/death metal niche goes, but most of those ticks are, well... half-ticks. Unnerving, cyclical displeasure runs throughout. While one half of me wonders if this was the album those engineers and worker stormtroopers were jamming out to be while Death Star was being constructed in the midst of a spatial vacuum, the other half thinks it's probably a good idea to lay off this record, especially when there are so many other monstrous alternatives lying aground, although ''Autokrator'' still isn't terrible by any means.

Highlights:
The Tenth Persecution
Imperial Whore

Rating: 52%

Ketha - #​!​%​16​.​7 (Ep) [2015]

I've not ventured as far deep into this Ep as to understand the meaning behind its affably ungrammatical title, or the artistic nihilism behind the geometric anomaly of the cover art, a full-fledged banner of abstruse, almost kaleidoscopic triangles painted chrome-metal black, but judging by the nightmarish and unique penumbra offered by the music itself, I imagine there is some sort of vague, even philosophical statement about the conceptual preferences of these unfrazed Poles which have come to produce the second most inventive metal experience I've heard thus far in 2015 (first place goes to Solefald's latest). Certainly when you thought you couldn't devote another second to anything Meshuggah-related, these Poles come to seize the day with music more irrationally addictive than the title itself, a masterful performance straddling the straits of death, progressive, avatgarde, jazz, groove and 'math' metal for a price that's cheaper than a pack of cigarettes (€2, yo!) and a run-time that'll be over before you've even had your third fag.

Grooves. With a capital fucking 'G'. Ketha's got 'em, and they're not afraid to use the methodical precision of surgical math metal impetus is certainly immensely riveting, as they're played with spectacular staccato grooves during some of the more percussive moments of the Ep, something of a progressive metal fixation, or just on a more atmospheric basis when they're hoovering above the vocals. Songs like ''Multiverse'' or ''K-boom'' explode with such incendiary tempo patterns and hooking chords and mutes that they make comparisons to Meshuggah at once irresistible and equally difficult because the momentum here is something far more avantgarde in nature. The slugfest of rhythm guitars and bedecked with spiraling, dizzying segments of queer melody and effect-laden lead guitars, but there is an even more compelling feast of sounds and atmospherics manifested through the saxophones which blare vociferously throughout the Ep. The command of the sax over the groundwork is just huge; there is more to them than just arbitrary appearances like on a lot records as they display clear pungency for the majority of the disk, providing some of the best jazzy dissonance you'll hear anytime.

Guitar effects are certainly high in supply, with anything from the convulsive wah-wahs of ''Airdag'' to the fading, algebraic lead riff of the 36 second track ''3C 273'', but pianos, electronic influences, sheer industrialized punishment, saxes, rowdy radio voice-overs and trumpets are exerted at such rates of variety and unabashed playfulness that the Ep reaches Mr. Bungle levels of eccentricity, or CSSABA levels of tension, and that's no easy feat. The tracks are ridiculously short, the longest one being some two and a half minutes and the others ranging typically below the 1-minute mark, and they flow into each other like a meticulously adjoined potpourri of musical freakishness. And yet what a well-rounded offering it is... vocalist Maciej Janas appears occasionally, and harnesses the power of both deep death metal growls and some more distinguished, individual inflections that disperse themselves across the record at his will. And if you're asking about the drums; they're equally impressive, with enough fills and tenacity as any high-brow jazz performance.

12 tracks, each unique, and it's only fucking fault that it's too damn short. And like all other beautiful things, ''#​!​%​16​.​7'' ends up biting its tail much too prematurely. Forget any other musical reservation you've made in recent times and purchase this, since your planned purchases are likely to be dross anyway. Tension. Trauma. Unprecedented, wallowing Lovecraftian evil in the form of the architectural aberrations witnessed by Arctic explorers in At The Mountains of Madness. Ketha don't care if you like Meshuggah or not, and they care less about your lighthearted opinions. There is evil abound; our only reconciliation is to fight evil with evil.

Highlights:
K-boom
Multiverse
The Sounderiad
Crink Crank


Rating: 88%

Spektr - Cypher [2013]

As much as I love groups like Bastard Sapling, who can instantly rumble into nostalgic, atmospheric haze, groups that seem as if they were bred from acts such as Blut Aus Nord, or Deathspell Omega have a special, assorted appeal to me. France's Spektr is no outsider to the aesthetics of Reverence, CCSABA and the like; in fact, they have over a decade of professionalism behind them along with two more albums at their belts, making them one of the more preferable acts in the recent surge of industrialized ambient black metal manifestations, and certainly one of the more inventive ones too, forming a strident, dissonant balance between your standard drowning black metal tremolo waves and Godflesh, all the while bringing forth a wealth of ambient sound tracks that literally form about half the album. You can already guess what sort of disturbances you're to encounter on your 45 minute journey, a nightmarish apocalypse of discordance pulsing against your ears, lost in a pitch-black gorge.

Alright, I'll admit, despite incorporating such a mass of influences from acknowledged connoisseurs of discordant mourn and turbulence, Spektr are hardly at their tumultuous paramount. The ambient passages and samples that excessively adorn the record are certainly amazing exhibitions of modern macabre, but the riffs themselves are mostly bathed in chock loads of reverb, chorus flange, tape echo and phaser, which lead down to the same dissonant pathway, and they don't particularly feel inaccessible, and actually quite entertaining considering their basis is a simple Norwegian inflection from the mid 90's. The lack of vocals also provide with a mysterious, ominous overtone here, and to be fair all the instruments are an equally important part of the gear-system, and the record itself should be regarded as a gestalt, too, not simultaneous clash of subterranean clangor. While I enjoyed the majority of the ebbing tremolo barrages, the haunting feel of the guitars which sometime took trudging, droning heights in pace and the band's tendency of spontaneity, inserting samples and riffs completely at random and thus creating an aerial complex of capriciousness, I can't deny that the band did an excellent job in building up a dozen of blood-curdling ambient samples.

Only, the number of samples butting into the actual material actually cut off a lot of the real action taking place. Sure, going by their book, moments of such harrowing drudge is only common, but I felt the Frenchman were spending too much time building up for climaxes for the riffs when they should have spent some more time engrossing the substance and not the decoration. The title track, despite being the longest remains my favorite, so filled with captivation that the band at some point gave into straightforward, semi-industrial black/thrash attacks, and there were even  moments when samples and riffs coexisted, leading to the ultimate, obfuscated assembly that I believe that band tried so hard to achieve throughout. I think I might have heard a few gaseous gnarls along the way, though they could have been just pieces of the samples, but still, the band could have accomplished even more if they stuffed in a few dreary growls here and there. ''Cypher'' still remains a prehensile album, a homage to modern Blut Aus Nord, CCSABA and Godflesh, and certainly a very strong album in its own rights. You won't be entirely engrossed, I can assure you that, but more than a couple of spins won't prove to be very healthy for your sanity, either.

Highlights:
Teratology 
Cypher
Antimatter

Rating: 84%