Goldicot Culls The Week - III

Triplet feel

The honeymoon is over. January regresses from green to the mean. Yet the year remains strong, with almost half (12 of 28) of my above-average rates arriving in this week (albeit one of those will feature in Culls IV.) Aside from an unusual amount of thrash metal, from Sarcator, Axetasy, Hazzerd, and Cyanide Grenade, there was really no mainstream movement to speak of, yet nonetheless pleasant surprises abound the next strata down, with worthwhile contenders from Hammerheart, Personal, Sentient Ruin, Lifeless Chasm, and Scarlet, in the forms of Hesperia, Onirophagus, Necrotech, Synaptic, and Dragonknight respectively. Even Necrodeath, throwing in the towel after this album, was a pretty decent listen. And although I can’t in good conscience recommend it fully on account of being the most American thing France has ever done, somehow Frenchly dumpster-diving bottom-barrel US traits, Goatlord Corp. (no relation) is an undeniably good time.

3 - Hierarchies - Hierarchies

Alexander the Great once told Diogenes, “had I not been Alexander the Great, I should have liked to been Diogenes.” Had I not been myself, I should have liked to be Jared Moran, and swap myriad listen counts for myriad album releases and projects completed. Think of a number. If you came in below 120, your imagination is smaller than Moran’s musical pedigree, and that’s just going by the number of bands Metal Archives says he’s been in. On Hierarchies, Moran finds a new way to up the ante, with a meta-supergroup of not just Moran, but frequent collaborator Nicholas Turner, by themselves multiple groups, most notably Acausal Intrusion, and also Anthony Wheeler, all three together also making up Dwelling Below. A Venn diagram of all Moran projects and his collaborators would make great album art all on its own. In Hierarchies, Moran’s instantly recognizable fluidic drumming and droughted rasp are upgraded by technical death-doom in a virtuosic display of dissonant non sequitur and rigorous challenge. And for the hat trick – it all sounds so natural, so effortless, operating on fever dream logic, unmoored from memory and causality, and as bewilderingly beautiful as it is frighteningly hideous.

2 - Spume - Xenomold Geomorphologies

There is an artistry to everything. Even slam, long since raced to and through the bottom of puerile negativity, in the hands of a visionary can form works evoking emotions unique to itself. It requires entertaining monolithic stupidity, without accepting it, to wield the heaviest and bluntest riffs with grace. Spume got the juice. Thick bubbling viscosity explodes into savagery and coalesces back again with staggering force in total brutality; you know you’ll get hit again but you never know when, from where. It’s not all in the head – listen to just how hard these instruments are being played. The pick is pushed down through the guitar and your skull, the drums are beaten through the floor, the gutturals wrenched from physical abyss. In 1965 nobody could believe how hard The Sonics played. In 2025 you won’t believe Spume.

1 - Häxkapell - Om jordens blod och ungravens grepp

Black metal and folk music, closely intertwined, sometimes are inseparable from each other, fully both, with distinction. Folk music, less of a category than an attribute of music borne of rich tradition and deep relationships, and black metal, a clear category known to be deeper than that, together form something at once old and venerated and new and awesome. Häxkapell makes exactly this respected revelation come alive. Gorgeous sweeping black metal conjures the storm, in a single moment spanning horizon and right in your face, and when it breaks, instead of relief comes dark and troubled folk, songs of deep respect for the terrible. These two halves are inseparable, and the exchange between is a sight to behold, booming baritone over the boundless black – easily some of the best clean vocals one’ll hear this year. I know nothing of northern Sweden, yet Om jordens blod och ungravens grepp makes it feel familiar, music from another place, both new (“Metamorfos” is a frolicking black metal combination of rolling waves and sharp jagged strokes) and old (“Hem” is a majestic nocturne of haunting acoustic guitar and deepest tone),  a window to another world.