MMXXI: The Mollusk's 2021 Extreme Metal Advent Calendar

[The Mollusk]

DECEMBER 16th

SPECTRAL LORE - Ετερόφωτος

As the years go by and I gradually mature (lol, I'm 35 next year) I find myself drifting away from the trappings of a lot of traditional black metal. Much as I love the trailblazing evil battle cries and the near-ambience of the music's relentless lo-fi riffing, the artists behind it with their fascist leanings, homophobia, murder convictions and church burnings are just a bit too edgelordy for a liberal snowflake like me to keep defending. The pinch of salt ends up looking more like a shovel. Can't I just listen to music made by nice people instead?

In steps Greek musician Ayloss, AKA Spectral Lore, a compassionate-minded antifascist and one-man band whose ambition is to help steer black metal away from its unfortunate roots of bigoted nationalist warmongering (which sadly continue to stagnate its fanbase nearly three decades later) and towards confronting the actual horrors which plague humanity. In his own words: "It's OK to make escapist art, but if you want to be edgy in a meaningful way, include the real world and real problems in your stories".

"Ετερόφωτος" itself is a triumph of forward-thinking black metal. Its arrangements are baffling and complex, as menacing riffs are whipped up in chaotic maelstroms of bizarre time signatures and reprieved by darkly ponderous prog. There are several occasions where this album sounds like Tool at their most-naval-gazing, and even speaking as someone who can't stand that side of Tool any more, this stuff sounds fantastic. Perhaps the most confounding choice of all however comes in the form of the closing track, 19 minutes of sombre, brooding ambient drones. This is an epic and challenging album for sure – and I'd be willing to accept if anyone were to criticise it being over-long, but the myriad rewards within are well worth the investment.

THE SORCERER ABOVE THE CLOUDS

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DECEMBER 17th

CARCASS - TORN ARTERIES

More than three decades into their career, everyone's favourite death metal pioneers are back with this, their 7th studio album, 8 years after their 2013 comeback record "Surgical Steel" which still holds firm as one of the finest ever British extreme metal exports. Carcass at this point in time certainly don't seem intent on reinventing the wheel – nor should they ever feel the need to – but what they've managed to do here is knock out another hour of pristine and rollicking good songs, which is all any fan of the band could ever wish for now.

It's not just an admirable feat that a band with a tenure as lengthy and influential as this could come back with something merely very good. It's far beyond that. "Torn Arteries" is full to bursting with tight, pristine, majestic, cool and rip-roaring death metal grooves and holds on tight to a core ethic the band has maintained for many years now: the sound of musicians having fun. There's an anthemic hand claps on "In God We Trust" and "The Devil Rides Out" ends with a fucking bar chime, neither of which sound out of place at all. If that's not the sound of a heavy metal band sounding ridiculously sure of themselves, I don't know what is. This record is an immense joy to listen to, with a seemingly effortless swagger and sense of purpose that has me grinning from ear to ear, and it only further cements Carcass as one of the greatest metal bands we'll ever see in our lifetimes.

KELLY'S MEAT EMPORIUM

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[The Mollusk]

DECEMBER 18th

LLNN - UNMAKER

This band piqued my interest with their 2018 album "Deads" but this new album is something else entirely. The production values and use of ambient sound and distortion – not as an overriding feature but as a natural aid to the colossal weight of the music – is thoroughly impressive.

Unmaker, for the most part, is blackened sludge metal that sounds like one long hardcore beatdown section. The anguished screamed vocals are searing white-hot and truly horrifying. This album is ridiculously brutal but it has such an atmosphere and sense of space to it. I'm reminded of bands like Old Man Gloom and Harvey Milk in their use of noise and distortion to sonically push otherwise run-of-the-mill sludge metal standards further into the sonic crust of the earth without compromising it or becoming lo-fi. What's especially great is that structurally it's quite a simplistic record, but it's so artfully crafted that it's gripping from start to finish. An unstoppable force of nature.

DESECRATOR (ft. MATT McGACHY of CRYPTOPSY)

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[The Mollusk]

DECEMBER 19th

YAUTJA - THE LURCH

Feeling like a sludgier spiritual successor to Mastodon's "Remission" (their only true brilliant album, I'm willing to die on this hill, come and fight me) the aptly-titled "The Lurch" is a great ambling beast of an album, all bared teeth and slobber, its enormous paws trampling foes into the mud below. The menacing repetitious chug of the guitars – not too dissimilar to that of noise rock veterans Unsane – is elevated to nosebleed-inducing intensity by Tyler Coburn's thunderous rolling drum work which is stupendous throughout.

There's more than a whiff of hardcore punk influence here too; a surly, discordant sense of angst and restlessness that stirs up a nervous tension and spikes the aggressive charge of the record. Even at its slowest point, the 7-minute heavyweight "Undesirables" anxiously claws at the same four walls of despair as Black Flag's "Nothing Left Inside".

Hostility is everywhere in heavy music, but it's rare to come across something as ceaselessly brash, arresting and confrontational as "The Lurch". I've not had my hackles flared up like this in a while. Essential listening.

THE SPECTACLE

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[The Mollusk]

FIIIIVE GOLD FUCKIN RIIIIINGS

DECEMBER 20th

LABOR INTVS - SUNKEN CRUCIBLE

From the opening track of this album – which drifts gloomily from warped-cassette dungeon synth to atmospheric doom with an extended pitstop at a blackened wall of hissing guitar and a voice that sounds like the cave of wonders from Disney's Aladdin – I knew I was gonna love it, and boy was I right.

Aside from their Finnish origin and that this is a self-released DIY project, seemingly little else is known about this band or their debut album. Beyond that, all we're left to go by is this hour of music shrouded within its enigmatic cover art, but that's certainly enough for me.

"Sunken Crucible" is a psychedelic pilgrimage of avant-black/death metal and cavernous tomb-crawling doom. Labor Intvs stalks round corners, hurtles down corridors, flings open doors and gazes wide-eyed at all manner of blinding lights, smoky apparitions and otherworldly terrors with a brazen, dreamlike nerve. Moments of sparse, introspective dread plummet from cliff tops into hellish maelstroms. Chainsaw-in-the-guts guitars pull back to hang over plunging chasms of despair.

From ponderous melancholy to spellbinding breakneck riffs and all the odd touches of alto sax, tortured screaming and tape hiss atmospherics in between, "Sunken Crucible" is a remarkable and phantasmagorical journey – reminding me strongly of the first time I heard Amon Düül II's masterpiece "Yeti" – and one of the most evocative and bold experimental metal releases you'll hear this year.

LABVRINTH

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[The Mollusk]

DECEMBER 21st

FULL OF HELL - GARDEN OF BURNING APPARITIONS

Without a doubt one of my favourite extreme metal bands of recent years, Full of Hell are back with another aurally stimulating release that packs more nightmarish visions into its 20 minute runtime than many other bands can manage in an entire career. To call this record a breakneck ride, one might simply imagine short songs which jackknife from one section to the next with alarming precision, and you wouldn't be far off in that summation. They're not a million miles away from The Locust in terms of style, and yet although I adore The Locust, it's undeniable that Full of Hell are the next logical step in this particular vein of experimental metal/grindcore, and undoubtedly at the very top of their game in 2021.

What the band brings to the table on this new album is a platter of shimmering and immaculate delicacies, each as uniquely brutal and horrifying as the next. The saxophone on "Asphyxiant Blessing" and "Urchin Thrones" is a flailing scorched alien howl, piercing through shuddering walls of brutal death metal. "Reeking Tunnels" finds the band in relatively safer waters with angular barbed noise rock instrumentation reminiscent of The Jesus Lizard, whereas "Derelict Satellite" is the most unapologetically caustic slab of punishing noise they've produced to date.

It's a testament to their prowess that they can create something so relentlessly and cohesively nasty as this whilst ensuring it's a total delight to indulge, since veteran producer Seth Manchester's attention to detail here is outstanding. A gourmet tasting menu of ungodly pleasures, writhing, squirming, corroding, erupting and screeching around your ears. Something as short and sweet as this is worth waiting two years for, especially if you're as eager to give it a second consecutive spin as I am, just to marvel at the fucking glory of the thing.

ASPHYXIANT BLESSING

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[The Mollusk]

DECEMBER 22nd

AD NAUSEAM - IMPERATIVE IMPERCEPTIBLE IMPULSE

Okay, so before you listen to this, head to the Bandcamp page and read the bio for it. Try to resist the urge to scoff as the smug pretentiousness smirks out of the screen at you. Allow yourself to be convinced that the artistic content within could never be justified by a piece of writing so self-aggrandising and pompous... and then prepare to be proven wrong.

It would be unwise at this juncture to say Ad Nauseam have rewritten the rule book for technical death metal here, but what I'm positive of is that they're a band at the mental and physical peak of their abilities, world class athletes who wisely shunned the steroids and stuck to the rigorous diet and exercise regime. They're setting world records as their peers look on in their dust and wish they'd trained harder.

This is dissonant avant-garde metal at its absolute finest. The long and winding labyrinthian compositions are imposing, at times intimidating in their complexity, but always compelling and executed with such fantastic precision it's often baffling. The quieter ambient and neo-classical sections not only give the songs (and the listener) room to breathe but they also work brilliantly against the harsh and overbearing heaviness, the sort of peaks and troughs you'd expect from the classical composers which strongly influenced the band in writing this album.

IMPERATIVE IMPERCEPTIBLE IMPULSE

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[The Mollusk]

DECEMBER 23rd

WORM - FOREVERGLADE

Crawling from the thick black mire and cloaked in funeral fog, on their latest offering Worm creates a suffocating atmosphere that pulls you in with a pungent humidity, no doubt inspired in part by the swamps of their Florida homeland. Every song is its own misery-laden trudge through a different dank realm whilst still holding together as one hideous whole, alarmingly splendorous despite its relentlessly bleak outlook.

"Foreverglade" doesn't merely flirt with the dramatic escapism of heavy metal, but then it also doesn't lay it on so thick that the music ever becomes cheap or trashy – pompous symphonic goth rock this absolutely ain't. What makes this album particularly outstanding is Worm's ability to relish in its nocturne influences to maximum effect but still sound genuinely maudlin and funereal. Where most death/doom is simply slow yet brutal, "Foreverglade" is often surprisingly pensive and even beautiful, a perfect marriage of the genres that picks its blastbeat battles wisely and knows when to keep it simple. The guitar solos are finessed and sophisticated, and the synths create a genuine atmosphere of pervading gloom throughout.

Of all the excellent stuff I've heard this year, this is the one my mind has come idly wandering back to the most. In the split second of wondering what to listen to on my daily commutes, "Foreverglade" and its oozing chaotic William Burroughs fever trip cover art spring to mind almost instantly. It's clung itself to my flesh and worked into my pores, a fetid stink I can't wash off. A masterfully executed and damn near faultless piece of work.

EMPIRE OF THE NECROMANCERS

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DECEMBER 24th

KRALLICE - DEMONIC WEALTH

Devised and created remotely during 2020's lockdown periods, with all drums and vocals recorded on a phone (and the vocals allegedly, hilariously recorded "in a car near a swamp"), "Demonic Wealth" is Krallice's most expansive and confounding album to date.

The ingredients of black metal are here – the squalling distorted guitars, the chaotic rattling drums, the frost bitten vocals – but these elements have been fragmented through a lens of disconcerting new age/kosmiche synths to create a uniquely unsettling surrealist atmosphere. The double kick drums are filtered back to a distant rumble and the well-trodden unyielding roar of trad black metal is reduced to a howling, weird abyss of dark introspection.

That's not to say it won't still rip your head off, though; tracks like "Mass for the Strangled" and "Disgust Patterns" go in hard and nasty, but the widening expanse of their song forms on this album adds another layer of abstraction and bewilderment which is fascinating. The percussion is totally off the wall, which is especially impressive considering the songwriting for every track was initiated by drummer Lev Weinstein.

As always, you can hear the band members' other projects in their sound (they've been in Gorguts, Behold the Arctopus and Orthrelm, to name a few) but their combined wealth of technical prowess avoids becoming bloated and instead refines and evolves with laser-guided focus across each release. It's commendable enough that a band can string together a great album without ever being in the same room together, but creating something as innovative and genuinely unique as "Demonic Wealth" under those conditions is phenomenal.

Black metal, of all the metal subgenres, is the one with such a problematic legacy that it deserves to be pushed out in as many weird and wonderful directions as possible in order to prove its merit and piss off online fanatics who spout bigoted "KVLT" nonsense and keep voting up Burzum's "Filosofem" as the greatest the genre has to offer. For my money, no one's pushing that envelope quite as hard as Krallice. Long may they reign.

DEMONIC WEALTH (FULL ALBUM STREAM)

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Thanks all for taking the time to read and check this stuff out. Happy Christmas CaB!

[Noodle Lizard]

I'm still working my way through this list, little by little, but a big thank you to Mr. Mollusk there! Some great stuff materalising, many by acts I'd never heard of, and I've already recommended some to others. Should be a pinned thread, really!

Thank you!

[The Mollusk]

Aw thank you man, you're so welcome!! 💖