November had a pretty solid assortment of quality releases, both covered by us truly and unnoticed by the ascendant elite. Luckily, the intellectuals and high-IQ-having filtration team successfully dug out sparkly gems from the gross mesh of the Filter this month. Whether you agree with or support these choices depends on your innate ability to understand music and its intricate nuance. Obviously, we exist on a higher plane than mere mortals, so I for one would be utterly unsurprised to find that the general public might be unable to grasp the moderate genius behind the selections before you. That said, we’ll risk alienating the plebeians by exposing these cherished excavations to the world, because they deserve attention and we worked our brains off to locate them.
TheKenWord’s X-Mas Extravaganzas
Anomalie – Tranceformation
Sion – Sion
Carcharodon’s Final Festive Flourish
Rinuwat – Dua Naga
I am always interested in metal that brings in elements of traditional music from its place of origin. Even though I very rarely have any sense of how authentic or otherwise it may be, I like metal musicians that try to push boundaries and incorporate different sounds and influences. Which brings us to Australian trio Rinuwat. The name translates as something like “to liberate oneself from a curse” and their debut album, Dua Naga, expertly conveys the tense horror of going through an exorcism. Incorporating a range of Southeast Asian instruments—ceng-ceng, jublag, suling, gongs and tuk—alongside funereally-paced blackened doom, sludgy noise, and mesmerizing percussion Dua Naga is not an easy listen. The vocals are a mix of harsh, gravelly, ritualistic chants (“Sewu”), wailing, shrieking rasps (“Taring Emas”) and ethereal cleans (“Laknat Bumi”). The whole combines to create a haunting, beautifully terrifying package that has been skilfully crafted and will reward those with the patience to give it time to fully unfold.
Dear Hollow’s Decked Hall ov Holly
Dakhma – Blessings of Amurdad
Zoroastrian Death Metal, they call themselves. After the solid but unspectacular debut Hamkar Atonement, Swiss collective Dakhma returns for another trek through forlorn deserts laced with mystical and occult intrigue. More riff-focused than they have ever been, with muscular riffs providing the backbone of the album, highlights like “The Gaze of Ahura (The King)” and “Oath of Purity (Amahraspand)” lumber and blast with moments of fury and contemplation, with husky vocals moving fluidly among them, highlighted by an overlay of ghostly melodies. What Dakhma does right, compared to Hamkar Atonement, is inject a palpable sense of mystery into their sound, as if exploring the subterranean ruins of an ancient civilization rather than simply listening to a collection of blackened death tracks. While featuring hints of the folk dimension of acts like Aeternam or Orphaned Land it ensures the musty cavernousness of Nile’s In Their Darkened Shrines remains intact. Offering an exploratory mystique with ominously meandering brutality, Blessings of Amurdad is escapism at its finest.
Felagund’s Festive Conferral: A Thrashmas Miracle
Mental Devastation – The Delusional Mystery of the Self (Part 1)
Steel Druhm’s Season’s Beatings and Boozy Sugar Plums ov Iron
Djiin – Meandering Soul
French psychedelic stoner act, Djiin released their third full-length in November, and it’s a weird and wonderful slab of witchy wonkiness. Meandering Soul prominently features the talents of vocalist and electric harpist, Chloé Panhaleux, who makes the material sound both seductive and threatening in equal measure. On dark, dreamy cuts like the intense “Black Circus,” this balance between charm and unease is the central feature, as Chloé weaves enticing vocal melodies to lure you down the rabbit hole where the knives are. Riffs twist from hazy to crushing, sometimes verging on Sun O))) territory and the electric harp adds a whole other level of hectic strum and clang. On “The Void” soothing, languid 60s hippie rock slowly morphs into suspiciously cult-like chanting before erupting into something like suicidal depressive black metal as Chloé unleashed a series of screams that are quite horrific and jarring. It’s a weird trip, as this is the whole album.
Hollow – Tower
