Review: Aktor-Paranoia (2015, High Roller Records)

This is a psychedelic hard rock album with catchy choruses, precise, crunchy riffs, and keyboards that sound like they're coming from inside your head. The sound is clear and the songs are airtight structures, not spaced-out dins. Vocals tunefully recite a stream of surreal images that make enough sense to give the impression of a story. That's all a prospective customer needs to know, but I'm still struggling to define exactly what makes Aktor so unique.

"He took familiar music and systematically played the wrong notes," I've heard said about Thelonious Monk. That statement also works as a description of Aktor's method. For example, the verse riff in "Gone Again" begins as a predictable "Holy Diver" offshoot. While the beat stays consistent, the power chords spell out an unusual melody: basically the first half of the major scale with the fourth note sharped to introduce "the Devil's note." You rarely hear this in popular music, let alone traditional hard rock/metal.

Aktor colors in hard rock templates with unexpected juxtapositions of melody. Without breaking form, the emotions portrayed can instantly shift from creeping dread to melancholy to sunny euphoria. Or to put it another way, every path through Paranoia's nightmare garden is familiar underfoot, but the sights, sounds, and smells are bewildering.

Chris Black seems uniquely qualified to give Aktor a coherent voice. He has a long track record of writing about multiple personality disorders, but whether we're talking Dawnbringer, Superchrist, or High Spirits, each project sticks to its discrete identity and narrow set of themes. Writing for Paranoia's amorphous variety of moods must have been a challenge. It's easy to imagine that songs like "Stop Fooling Around" and "Where Is Home" address frustration with locating the music's true center.

Many of the lyrics are vaguely familiar from Chris' other songs: isolation, extreme fatigue, messiah complexes, the endless highway passed down from Motorhead's "Keep Us on the Road," the creative process itself. I confess to being slightly disappointed, considering that some early Dawnbringer imagery matches Aktor's music every bit for sheer craziness. But ultimately, it's much more valuable that "heavy metal's last singer/songwriter" has forged a balance between the meaning of words and their sound as music. Considering the larger category of experimental psychedelic metal, with all its Mike Patton impressions and Neurosis-style aggro poetry slams, it is probably Chris' sensible approach that even makes Aktor a good idea. Experimental or not, their album is fun and highly addictive, worth interrupting AC/DC for several back-to-back listens on an all-night powerdrive.

Review: Helrunar-Niederkunfft (2015, Prophecy Productions)

I'd never heard this band before, but the "pagan" tag had me expecting something with folk instruments and sappy melodies. My mistake. Other than bouts of eerie chanting and the odd cinematic effect, Niederkunfft is pure evil metal with a thick dungeon vibe. Swedish DM tones and solid double bass drumming overlap with delay-soaked lead and clean guitar melodies, mostly at a walking pace, but often slowing to doom and occasionally bursting out in thrash. Verses and choruses being somewhat interchangeable, the album focuses on layers of texture and long sequences of slowburn riffs. Vocals are low and gross, yet enunciated. It all reminds me of classic Bethlehem but more sinister than suicidal, heavy enough to stand alongside today's more deathly varieties of black metal.

While most of the material is in German, I get the feeling that Niederkunfft tells a story of historical witch hunts, tortures, and executions. The pre-album single, "Devils, Devils Everywhere," certainly conveys that idea, partly through cheesy movie samples. The lyrics are in English and the words are quite striking, really fucking nasty actually, with a certain highbrow, sardonic tone that makes me wonder if they come from a historical text. I'm impressed, but also slightly put off by the overbearing vibe. If I have one general criticism of this album, it's that certain passages are vocally crowded. That said, the singing is great, pretty much a master class in dramatic phlegm usage. I guess if you've got that voice, flaunt it.

I don't think it's too far off the mark to call this album a more conventional counterpart to Ruins of Beverast's Blood Vaults. Both albums translate unsettling historical concepts into ultra-dense atmospheric hybrids of black, death, and doom metal. Blood Vaults is the more intense listen, but I love Niederkunfft for its sprawl of awesome riffs and drowned, mournful solos. As you know, not everyone can arrange a great riff salad, but let me just say that I was legitimately stunned into headbanging when this band busted out their fucked up version of the "Angel of Death" breakdown riff midway through a Gorgoroth-style floor crawl. This is obsessively well-crafted metal, cut with just enough eerie chanting, tolling bells, and burning sounds to give you a view of a larger mental space.

Available now. Check it out!

Review: Infernal War-Axiom (2015, Agonia Records)

This is one of the few relentless blastbeat albums I've encountered that's really going to leave a mark. Most bands going for polished hyper-speed leave me feeling a little detached, whether they lean black or death. Infernal War play about as fast as humanly possible most of the time, but they also make room for ugly mid-paced rock and vintage thrash breakdowns. At any speed though, the riffs are seriously catchy. They tend to be simple and Marduk-ish, but with little pauses and hooks that make them rhythmically exciting on the same gut level as classic Slayer. The spirit of real metal seems to move within the bulk of frenetic distortion, the drums don't sound too terribly fake, and the guitar solos are surprisingly polished. 

That about sums up why I find this album so addictive, but it would be remiss not to mention the vocals. Compared to the studied demon-impressions of someone like Mortuus, vocalist Herr Warcrimer often just sounds like an angry yelling guy. His humanity adds blood to the machine, and in contrast to all the blackmetal smartypantses indecipherably growling their postgrad thesis research,  it's kind of nice that he's not always yelling very esoteric things. "No paradise is coming, you better get it straight!" Plus he swears a lot. It's weird to think of a "kill everyone" type band as personable, but Herr Warcrimer's real person-esque stylings really put me on Infernal War's side. When he growls, "nothing to prove" at the beginning of  "Transfigure," the band touches on the same badass vibe that The Crown had during their brief moment of glory. Same rockin' justified arrogance, more explicitly hateful context, where, "the famine that makes a mother eat her own child," reigns. I genuinely feel that progress has been made.

North American release date: April 21, 2015

Forced March to the Brink of the Non-Mediocre

Recently I've been receiving lots of seriously good albums as promos, effectively guilt-tripping me into writing about music again. So I've started this blog, knowing full well that there's already a pretty good band out there called Barrow Wight. It's just that I've had this name in mind already for quite a while. Years ago I decided that a metal zine called Barrow Wight would be the ideal vehicle for the perfect Ferrous Oxide interview. I may yet conduct that interview with myself, right after I record my imaginary cover of Biohazard covering Immortal's "Withstand the Fall of Time."

For now, I'm simply astounded that it's even possible for albums reflecting such high standards of craftsmanship/artistry/dedication to be overlooked in the teeming metal seas. So I'm gonna do the responsible adult thing, and tell you about some stuff that fucking rules.