This month’s Best Metal on Bandcamp includes crust-infused melodic black metal, ecclesiastical classic doom, self-proclaimed “bimboviolence,” and more.
Dödsrit
Nocturnal Will
Vinyl LP
There’s a natural—if not necessarily obvious—affinity between the immediacy of crust punk and the grandeur of melodic, atmospheric black metal. In the January edition of this column, I highlighted Svdestada from Spain, whose pendulum swings a little further toward crust. Sweden’s Dödsrit offer a somewhat purer black metal alternative—not that they sound much like the genre’s nihilistic ideal. Nocturnal Will is a towering monument to black metal splendor, its four non-interlude tracks all swelling beyond the eight-minute mark and delivering soul-stirring melody in spades. (Lamp of Murmuur’s M. also lends a dazzling guitar solo to “Nocturnal Fire,” his finest since the crystalline Submission and Slavery highlight “Deformed Erotic Visage.”) Dödsrit’s punk roots aren’t as close to the surface as on past outings, but even the grandest songs on Nocturnal Will are vividly and viscerally rendered. They thrum with crust’s emotional urgency, never losing sight of that thrust amid the mists of blackened atmosphere. Dödsrit’s default mode on Nocturnal Will is intensity, never inertia.
BRAT
Social Grace
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
The New Orleans band BRAT like to refer to their genre as either “bimboviolence” or “Barbiecore.” They play snippets of pop hits between songs during their live sets, and their merch is mostly hot pink. BRAT’s Lisa Frank aesthetics run interference for the music itself, which is a mean, swampy amalgamation of grindcore, powerviolence, and death metal. (They do cover Heart’s “Barracuda” live, but they give it a menacing makeover.) On Social Grace, the band’s first full-length, they rip through 10 punishing songs in 21 minutes, scraping the history of metal and hardcore for nasty sounds and even nastier attitude. Vocalist Liz Selfish, fronting her first-ever band, has a scabrous, staccato bark that helps anchor the album as it chaotically veers from riff to riff. Her fearsome delivery makes those impressive high kicks she executes onstage feel less cheerleader, more Chun-Li.
Ecclesia
Ecclesia Militans
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Doom metal and Christian imagery have gone hand in hand since Tony Iommi donned his first crucifix back in 1970. Candlemass’s Messiah Marcolin and Solitude Aeturnus’s Robert Lowe followed suit in the ’80s and ’90s by wearing monastic vestments onstage. The robed, masked Frenchmen in Ecclesia honor that lineage by taking their priestliness a few steps further—I recently saw a Christian metal subreddit talking about Ecclesia Militans, even though I’m pretty sure a Christian band wouldn’t write a tongue-in-cheek song about the righteousness of witch trials. Ecclesia’s ecclesiastical shtick is indeed a shtick, then, but it does help orient their classic, melodic doom sound within a rich tradition. Sabbath, especially the Ronnie James Dio and Tony Martin eras, looms large over Ecclesia Militans; as does Candlemass. What Ecclesia understand that a lot of classic doom fetishists don’t is that you need variety in texture and tempo to really make this style sing. “Ereptor Verae Fidei” sees vocalist Arnhwald Rattenfänger unleashing an entire verse in a stately death growl as church organ and Gregorian choir roil beneath. A few tunes, like the stunning “If She Floats,” push the speed nearly into power metal territory. Ecclesia may worship at familiar altars, but thankfully, they’ve bothered to write new prayers.
Volcandra
The Way of Ancients
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Listening to The Way of Ancients, the sophomore album by Louisville’s Volcandra, feels a little like cruising through a boozy all-day marathon of ’80s sword-and-sorcery flicks. The band’s anthemic take on extreme metal draws from a bunch of different sounds—melodeath, thrash, black metal—all harnessed in service of subgenre-agnostic, Crom-worshiping glory. Like the directors of classic schlock like The Beastmaster (1982) and Deathstalker (1983), Volcandra know their milieu and execute the hell out of it. This is playlist metal, the kind of shit you can crank up in the car or at a barbecue without any stripe of metalhead complaining. At its best, The Way of Ancients splits the difference between the black-thrashing debauchery of Chance Garnette-era Skeletonwitch and the epic melodicism of classic Amon Amarth. Volcandra aren’t necessarily reinventing anything here, but they play with a fire that can’t be denied.
Per Wiberg
The Serpent’s Here
Vinyl LP, Other Apparel
The Swedish musician Per Wiberg boasts a long and varied discography, from his decades of work with proto-metal revivalists Spiritual Beggars to his stint in Opeth and his guest spots with everyone from Candlemass to Carcass. Since 2019, he’s been amassing an excellent solo catalog, too. The Serpent’s Here is his third and most accomplished release under his own name. The album finds Wiberg, who handles the keyboards, guitars, and vocals, in an exploratory mood. The stomping riff-rock of the title track gives way to a wild jazz breakdown where a guitar solo might ordinarily sit, while “He Just Disappeared” is built around woozy free improvisation and spoken word. The result of all that experimentation is a prog album that doesn’t just nod to prog’s legacy but tries genuinely new things in its name. Robert Fripp would be proud.
MIDNIGHT
Hellish Expectations
Vinyl LP
In the first eight years of MIDNIGHT, sole member Athenar didn’t release a single album, opting instead for a string of demos, splits, and comp contributions. 2011’s Satanic Royalty changed all that, and Midnight transformed itself into a reliable purveyor of all-killer, no-filler full-lengths. Hellish Expectations feels like a throwback to those pre-LP days. The album clocks in at a tidy 25 minutes, with only one song clearing the three-minute mark. It’s also a little looser and a little more punk rock than Athenar’s past few outings, with a few more dashes of Discharge in his signature Motörheadian elixir. Hellish Expectations doesn’t make any radical changes to the MIDNIGHT formula, but it manages the notable feat of streamlining a sound that didn’t seem like it could get any leaner or meaner.
Skeletal Remains
Fragments of the Ageless
There’s something machinelike about Skeletal Remains’s approach to death metal. It’s not that it’s cold, not exactly. But the California quartet plays with such ruthless, bulldozing efficiency that listening to Fragments of the Ageless frequently feels like being caught in the treads of a tank. You don’t blame a tank for being an unfeeling engine of death; that’s what it was built for. To the band’s credit, there are plenty of touches of humanity at the album’s edges. Fragments is the fifth Skeletal Remains full-length in a dozen years, and over that time, they’ve developed into elite practitioners of the metal guitar solo. Without exception, Chris Monroy and Mike De La O’s leads on the album are thoughtfully constructed and rigorously executed. The solos are a crucial counterpoint to the merciless slaughter inflicted by the churning riffs and lockstep rhythm section. This is death metal as death machine, but it’s a death machine that can kill with finesse.
Celestial Sword
Nocturnal Divinity
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
You could be forgiven for bypassing yet another album tagged as “raw vampyric black metal/dungeon synth.” That’s a crowded scene, and most of it isn’t worth the J-card the track list is printed on. Celestial Sword rises to the top of the heap, though, and they do it by sheer force of will. The sound of Nocturnal Divinity is familiar—blown-out vocals, scraping guitars, pronounced tape hiss, haunted-house synths. (Shout out to M. from Lamp of Murmuur, who makes a second appearance in this column as the album’s mixing and mastering engineer.) The songs are just more interesting, more diverse in texture, and frankly, much better than most of what the raw BM scene has to offer. On tracks like “Waves of Deafening Soliloquy” and “Scarlet Moon Enchantment I & II”—featuring killer guest spots from Drugoth and Zofie Siege, respectively—Celestial Sword makes the connection between lo-fi black metal and atmospheric synth music feel exciting all over again.
