another generous review—this time for some atmospheric black metal band from Siberia

Melodies—buoyant and boreal, layered and lofty—ring out on this diverse black metal album

ULTAR’s latest album, At the Gates of Dusk, often stays near the moonlit path worn by the second-wave black metal pioneers. Songs like “Midnight Walk and Reminiscences of Necromancy” and “My Rope” feature the genre conventions—blast beats and rasping gauged-eye screams. Rhythms on these songs trend toward the furious and unyielding while the drums, not the guitars, dazzle.

But ULTAR plays atmospheric black metal that leans at times toward post-metal and even shoegaze. This album, which features higher production value than the pioneer and modern purist recordings, features more accessible melodies even while retaining a lot of the older back metal stylings. The melodies—buoyant and boreal, layered and lofty—ring out in their simplicity within the harrowed arrangement’s peduncular hallucinosis.

Some of the most obvious post-metal/shoegaze sounds arrive with the slower-paced “Antiques”—a trotting Elk of a song, its antlered head dipping as it climbs the rise of red hills. The guitars are fuzzed and jangle more than they vomit distortion. Likewise, “Rats in the Walls” opens with a delicate construction of guitar harmonics, reverb, and fuzz. Then comes the distortion and the screaming, the splashing cymbals, and then the onslaught alongside a simple melody. This is perhaps the album’s most dramatic song; although the promotional materials claim the album is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, during this song I think of Mary Shelley and picture the monster Frankenstein crashing through the Arctic in a stolen dog sled, his creator, Victor, closing in as the ice begins to crack.

ULTAR is a five-piece band from Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. At the Gates of Dusk, released November 20, 2022, follows the albums PANTHEON MMXIX (2019) and Kadath (2016). The band has opened for Behemoth, Cradle of Filth, Myrkur, Suffocation, Vltimas, Hate, Wiegedood, Alcest, Swallow the Sun, Harakiri for the Sky, and The Ocean.

a review of a heavy metal band from The Netherlands

Heavy, melodic post-metal—the music of mechanical advantage

On The Burden, Throwing Bricks compose leaden post-metal grooves. Opener “Bricks of Grace” introduces the album’s thick sound—a sound that looms across hemispheres. The vocal goes at a full roar, and higher-end guitars layer on top. Then, at 4 minutes, the distortion drops and a reverb-laden guitar strums a few chords. The band often creates dynamics in songs by shifting into these atmospheric, quieter parts. A bass guitar enters and creates a flow, lending some substance to this little indulgence, followed by lighter drumming, then a pillow-muffled roar. Then at 6:10, everything kicks back in at full volume.

The songs “Clearly Awake” and “Hall of Mirrors” hammer out a bit of a sharper-edged sound than the album-opening song and fold more melody into the heaviness. Similarly, “Doubt,” after a few perfunctory strums on a reverb-darkened guitar, blasts into the washing surge of melodic heaviness.

This 5-piece band from Utrecht, The Netherlands, aim for an epic sound rather than a dazzling show of guitar and vocal histrionics and rhythmic acrobatics. The fuller, more melodic chords on the album seem introspective even while the sound expands out always in volume. The sound engineering and recording might be the album’s main feature; it was recorded and produced at Much Luv Studios by Tim de Gieter and mastered at The Atomic Garden by Jack Shirley.

The Burden is the band’s second full-length and was released October 28th on Tartarus Records. Some bands that have been mentioned as reference points for Throwing Bricks include MØL, Oathbreaker, Amenra, Ultha, and Fall of Efrafa. But on The Burden, Throwing Bricks reminds me of Envy but with more chugging guitar parts—loud parts smeared with sludge-oil filled with the metal shavings of heavy machinery.

something about “Working,” a book by Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel (1912–2008) was an American historian, broadcaster, and writer; in 1974, he published Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, a nonfiction book that—true to its title—catalogs many, many people of various walks of life talking about their work. During his lifetime, Terkel produced a few works based on his wonderings about the lives of the strangers you pass every day.

This is probably an okay or even fine book, but I grew annoyed by the too-on-the-nose “regular guy” voices. It was like, “I’m what you call a [job title]. Our system isn’t perfect. But we make do. The other day, we were cranking the [name of something]. I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe this. What are we doing over here?’ Then I get $50, which made me feel great! So that’s the deal.” Five hundred pages of this.

Note: For reasons I do not understand and have not bothered to look into, I associate Terkel with Chicago baseball.

 

a review of a noise rock/mathcore band

Lower Automation’s newest album, Strobe Light Shadow Play, is an experimental, dissonant mishmash of noise rock, hardcore, and mathcore. The music has such a sense of motion, of nervous energy, sounds can seem like randomness overtaking the system. The band tests and tries things, and the noise is barely contained—but it is not chaos. “It’s the most experimental and noisiest release we’ve ever put out, but also probably the most melodic,” the band says.

Among my favorite songs is “Information Entrepreneurs and Their Lipsynching Choirs,” which opens with a piercing, shaky, manic vocal. At 15 seconds, the buzzy bass buzzes into a punchy dance beat while the distorted echo- and reverb-tweaked guitar bounces off the walls. Drums fritter and snap out.

“Acolytic” opens with little discordant riff that features a subtle lift at the end of each series of strokes. The bass rumbles and yawns, and the drums motion frantically and then pause and punctuate a desperately prayerful vocal. The energy grows, but then, at 1:25, the band pulls back into a bad-attitude bass riff, the drum marking time more evenly while the guitar still noisily sparks off around the room. The album captures some very good moments, and this song is a great example.

Another exciting moment is the what-the-hell-is this? opening to “End Scene”–a fast-picking classical guitar with softer emotive singing. This gives way to noisy, raw hardcore—the guitar is nuts. At 1 minute, cello strings sift from behind bass-drum hits before the song dives back into the fray.

The songs are short, hovering around 2 minutes each, and sound a little like The Locust with bits of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Botch, and At the Drive-in. Strobe Light Shadow Play will be released November 22nd via Zegema Beach Records. Lower Automation, a trio from Chicago, has two previous releases—an EP titled Maps from 2016 and a self-titled full-length from 2021.