#morgion

Thorr's Hammer: Dommedagsnatt EP (1998)

It's one thing to name your death/doom band Thorr's Hammer and sing/croak lyrics in Norwegian, but quite another when a 17-year-old Norwegian exchange student is doing it after bumping into a pair of depressed stoners in Seattle, Washington.

So goes the tale of Dommedagsnatt (Norwegian for "Doomsday Night"), which paired Runhild Gammelsaeter (the aforementioned Norwegian waif, a.k.a. Ozma) with future Sunn O))) and Southern Lord label masterminds Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley.

Recorded in 1995 and released in '98 as SUNN01, the three-track Dommedagsnatt EP was the product of a brief, six-week "career" during which Thorr's Hammer (augmented by bassist James Hale and drummer Jamie Sykes) performed all of two shows.

But they had the presence of mind to visit a nearby studio long enough to record three examples of their crawling, crushing, mythologically-inspired death/doom, topped by Runhild's haunting wails and unbelievable, inhuman roars.

Seriously, you may have to watch some vintage live footage for yourself to fully accept this incongruous reality as fact.

First cut "Norge" is basically an ode to Norway, extolling its frozen nights and midnight sun, virgin forests and deep mines, its sailors and adventurers, while "Troll" pits legendary beasts against the Viking gods (including Thor, of course) in an epic battle over Midgard.

And the title track recounts the Norse apocalypse itself -- Ragnarok -- and draws yet again from ancient texts to describe that final battle between gods and giants, as mankind helplessly awaits to learn who will be their masters after this immutable "doomsday night".

Southern Lord's first CD pressings added a live bonus cut entitled "Mellom Galgene," which translates to English as "Between the Gallows," and places Anderson and O'Malley's colossal, corrosive guitar tones somewhere between Electric Wizard and their most successful subsequent endeavor, drone lords Sunn O))).

These bands' names alone should stoke raging fires in the souls of extreme metal enthusiasts (and strike fear in poseurs' 'nads), and indicate the overwhelming power and enduring cult surrounding Thorr's Hammer and their small but seminal musical canon.

It ain't for everyone, but ... Happy Halloween!

p.s. -- Today, when she isn't being called into very sporadic tour duty with Thorr's Hammer, Runhild works in the field of biology, in which she holds a Ph.D. in cell physiology.

p.p.s. -- Some of these words were edited from my All-Music Guide Thorr's Hammer biography and Dommedagsnatt review.

I hope I find you well on whatever day you’re reading this post. It’s time once again to my Jukebox Writing Prompt.

For those of my new followers, I will go over the history of the challenge here. I look through my library and pick out titles that look like they would make a good story. Each playlist is as close to eighty minutes as possible. This is because CD-R’s could only hold up to eighty minutes and I used to put together burned CD’s with songs in an order which told a story. I shuffle the playlist until it seems like a good order and then put them here as a challenge for other writers to do.

Here are the rules for the challenge. Then write a flash fiction or short story while working the title of each song in the order they are on the list. Everything aside from the song titles is completely up to you to create. It is not important whether or not you know the songs, but if you like metal then you should check them out. That is to say that the message of the song is not used in any of the story, only the title.

For this specific challenge, I’m only using songs that I have not yet shared on my music sharing group @greatnewmusicgnm . The order that I have them here is not important because I did not randomize this list. So the matter of which song title goes where is entirely up to you.

“Alleys of Negation” - Crescent Moon

“The One Inside” - Shining

“Synaptic Plasticity” - Blotted Science

“The Talisman” - Act of Defiance

“My Champion” - VUUR

“Fake My Own Death” - Sum 41

“Crooked Red Line” - Ihsahn

“The Necromancer” - Dream Theater

“Invalid Prodigy” - Morgion

“Voidspawn” - Chthe’ilist

“The Fool” - Fleshgod Apocalypse

“Cemetery Gates” - Between the Buried and Me

“The Will of the Ancient Call” - Crypt Sermon

As always, I would love to read anything that gets written as a result of this prompt.

Isis: Oceanic (2002)

It's clear vinyl clearance week on VinylSpinning, and today's subject is this black and gold splatter see-through wax reissue of the massively influential sophomore long-player from post-metal architects Isis ...

Their first, Celestial, had generated lots of underground buzz, but it was Oceanic that put these Boston residents on the global map (no pun on its title intended) with what turned out to be the most emulated post-metal blueprint of the '00s.

Of course, we weren't even calling it post-metal yet, since most of us head-bangers weren't cool enough to own Sigur Rós and Mogwai albums back in the late '90s (I'd almost gone there, but other records beckoned) when the post-rock terminology was being coined.

But many of us were intimately familiar with the era's closest metallic equivalent -- Neurosis, Godflesh, Mindrot, etc. -- and ready for more when Isis burst onto the scene -- even if we tended to call that stuff "progressive hardcore," at the time, not "post-metal."

Plus, I'd already picked up Seminar II by Aaron Turner's side project, Old Man Gloom, so Oceanic wasn't the sort of epiphany that had me jumping out of the bath like Archimedes shouting "eureka!," but I was immediately drawn to their newly refined musical vision.

This entailed taming some of Celestial's raw distortion through compression (beating the sludge and hardcore out of it, if you will), while offsetting their deliberate, droning, hypnotic, crushing riff tectonics with horn-like power chord blasts (see "From Sinking") and clean melodies, both subtle and sublime, capped by occasional vocals from Maria Christopher on epics like "The Beginning and the End," "Carry," and "Weight."

A couple of instrumental interludes ("Maritime," "-," and yes, that's just a dash) reinforce the album's focus on atmospherics, and yet for all their calculated world-building, Isis could still head-bang with convincing savagery on personal favorites like "False Light" and "Hym."

The long-term upshot of all this was that, where most heavy metal bands take listeners on a jarring, high-speed roller coaster ride, Isis subjected them to an arduous but ultimately rewarding marathon, as movements wax and wane in intensity, before strenuously reaching their resolutions.

Oh, and between Turner's oft-unintelligible roars and my chronic impatience for lyrics, I must admit that I never gave much thought to this concept album's storyline -- something to with incest and suicide, oh boy! -- and in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't.

But I do think Oceanic's music stands up very well to retroactive scrutiny, both as a spellbinding and immersive musical journey in its own right, and arguably as the standard by which all post-metal albums have since been judged.

Symptom: Caverns of Katabasis (2014)

If an extreme metal band's (black metal or otherwise) TRVE CVLT status is measured by how mysterious and obscure they manage to be, then Portland, Oregon's Symptom passed that credibility test with honors (they even had the requisite illegible logo) ... until it nullified their career prospects, anyway.

Ooops!

Formed in 2010 by one man wrecking crew J.T. Gilmore (vocals, guitar, bass, drums), Sympton self-released a pair of EPs in 2011 before signing with Mexico's Cráneo Negro Records and reissuing the tandem as '12's Beneath the Ossuary collection.

Next on the agenda, Symptom's first long-player, Opulent Atrocity (what a great title!), arrived in 2013 and today's subject, Caverns of Katabasis (an ancient Greek term for a voyage into the Underworld), followed a full decade ago, in '14.

Yet this copy must have sat, unwanted and forlorn, on a record store shelf ever since, because a few months ago it was tossed into a Discogs order I had placed -- free of charge -- by a retailer who, I can only surmise, made a business decision to free shelf space for more lucrative vinyl.

But the thing is: Symptom ain't half-bad; in fact, they're at least half-good, which is another way of saying they're competent without achieving anything truly original or transcendent with their familiar-sounding mix of death, doom, and other metallic forms.

"Risen from Shadow" is the token, atmospheric, instrumental intro, after which surprisingly frequent blast-beats often push "Marrow Spires" and "Omen of Crypts" into the black metal realm, before returning to their primary domain in slothful quasi-funeral doom dirges.

At their best, ensuing numbers like "Saturine" and "L'appel du Vide" (which translates to "Call of the Void" -- neat-o!) contrast the sort of detuned, leviathan riffs I can never get enough of with woeful guitar melodies or a lonesome, despairing piano ... lovely stuff.

But don't ask me about the unintelligibly howled lyrics ... I just can't be arsed to absorb their no doubt cryptic accounts of arcane lore.

And while I did look up the meaning of "Pnakotic" (Lovecraft, naturally), the song may as well -- indeed, would be better off, if you ask me -- recounting the exploits of Cthulhu (what it did on its summer vacation, etc.) as sharing a delicious panna cotta recipe.

All jesting aside, though, I've heard much worse albums of this ilk over the years from far more successful bands than Symptom, so I'll probably hang onto it for some time, in spite of the project's lacking personality or backstory.

About which, as I posited in my opening statement, maybe Symptom mastermind Gilmore was a little TOO successful at being UN-successful, but that hasn't stopped him from contributing his talents to other bands like Eosphoros, Ghoulgotha, and Void Manifest in recent years.

dISEMBOWELMENT: Transcendence into the Peripheral (1993)

Normally, my grammatical O.C.D. forces me to restore missing apostrophes to song titles and to refuse vanity band names that defy the natural order of upper- and lower-case letters (especially the dreaded ALL-CAPS), but I have to give metallic extremists dISEMBOWELMENT a pass.

Still deservedly revered in underground circles for their pioneering fusion of doom, death metal, and death-grind, these residents of Melbourne, Australia were active for less than five years starting in 1989, and, as far as I know, never even performed live before disbanding.

But dISEMBOWELMENT, which, in its longest-lasting line-up consisted of Renato Gallina (vocals, guitar), Jason Kells (lead guitar), Matthew Skarajew (bass), and Paul Mazziotta (drums) nevertheless excreted (sorry!) an influential and enduring body of work in that short span.

This consisted of two demos in 1990’s Mourning September and ‘91’s Deep Sensory Procession into Aural Fate, one EP, ‘92’s Dusk, that earned them a deal with Relapse Records, and one, absolutely essential full-length in today’s subject, ‘93’s Transcendence into the Peripheral.

When it was released, 30 years ago, the album’s epic compositions helped lay the foundation for what would later become known as ‘funeral doom’ with their hypnotic, glacial tempos and sudden bursts of double kick-drum speed, titanic riffs and ethereal melodies, unintelligible Cookie Monster vocals and oppressive atmospherics that lent a symphonic quality, even without the aid of synthesizers.

And, just like the album title says, the group was all about pushing musical boundaries, since ‘transcendence’ is defined as “the quality or state of extending the limits of ordinary experience,” while ‘peripheral’ “relates to the external boundary or surface of a body.”

In layman’s terms, or at least my chosen terms in another review, theirs was “a sound built to vibrate and loosen the viscera of its hapless victims with razor sharp riffs and subterranean tones.”

Sure enough, noteworthy emissions like “The Tree of Life and Death,” “Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory,” and “Excoriate,” trafficked in surprisingly cerebral lyrics, well worth reading, even as the surrounding, mercilessly grim and suffocating music appeared determined to destroy the listener’s body!

“A Burial at Ornans” and “The Spirit of the Tall Hills,” while less distinctive, are both heavy beyond belief, and yet the anomalous gothic interlude, “Nightside of Eden,” features guest vocals from a pseudonymous young lady credited simply as I’da.

Finally, comes the album’s -- and maybe the band’s -- signature cut, “Cerulean Transience of All My Imagined Shores,” which had already appeared in an earlier guise on the previous year’s Dusk EP, and here gained extra heft from the double bass of Paul’s brother Tony Mazziotta, though nothing else is known about these two collaborators.

Come to think of it, little more was ever heard from band principals Gallina, Kells, Skarajew, and Paul Mazziotta, who all but vanished from historical record, except for brief associations with lesser known bands like Inverloch, Feralian, Wurms, and an ambient folk project called Trial of the Bow. 

What is known for certain is that dISEMBOWELMENT cast a very tall shadow, beyond their premature demise, and every funeral doom band that followed owes something to Transcendence into the Peripheral, whether they know it or not.

p.s. -- Some of these words hail from my All-Music Guide biography of dISEMBOWELMENT and a Loudwire article I can no longer locate online. 

Fudge Tunnel: Hate Songs in E Minor (1991)

Care for a little fudge with your sludge?

Fudge Tunnel were around for six or seven years and issued three full-length LPs, along with a handful of singles and EPs, but I’m of the opinion that 1991’s Hate Songs in E Minor is the only truly essential document of their existence.

While they were perfectly respectable efforts, both ‘93’s Creep Diets and ‘94’s The Complicated Futility of Ignorance sounded and looked like too many other, heavy-handed alternative bands, and their "improved” production couldn’t compare with the iconoclastic crudity that made Hate Songs sui generis.

Or, I could be overthinking things, as usual, but hear me out ...

According to my decades-old All-Music Guide Fudge Tunnel bio (and it better be correct, ‘cos I sure as shit don’t remember anymore), 18-year-old Alex Newport (vocals/guitar) formed the band with Dave Riley (bass) and Adrian Parkin (drums) after moving to Nottingham, England, in 1989. 

That same year’s Sex Mammoth EP was already buzzing among the metal press when it was named ‘Single of the Week’ by the NME and indie cred followed -- along with 1990’s Sweet Sounds of Excess EP, a support slot with industrial metal pioneers Godflesh, and a deal with Earache Records.

Cue Hate Songs in E Minor, whose cover boasted a poorly-cropped, out-of-focus, black-and-white concert photo that made Charles Peterson’s similarly lo-fi grunge photography look positively polished, and whose songs out-sludged and out-feedbacked pretty much everyone playing in 1991 except maybe the Melvins.

Personal favorites like the surprisingly swinging “Hate Song,” hard-charging “Bed Crumbs,” slow-grinding “Spanish Fly,” and stop-starting “Boston Baby” shared a singular and uncompromising vision: one that forged metallic power and punk rock attitude out of muddy guitar noise, thumping bass and drums, and Newport’s primal howls.

Like grindcore at quarter-speed, if you will.

But I was less impressed by the trio’s ironic deconstruction of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” and Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever,” which felt a little too clever for their own good back then, and sound twice as gimmicky and unnecessary over 30 years later.

However, it was precisely this sardonic bent that briefly convinced those indie press kingmakers to champion Fudge Tunnel, in spite of their evident metallic connections (their fans, their record label, etc.), only to turn on them as soon as they’d exhausted their fuel for hot copy ... it’s the cycle of hype.

So, credit to Fudge Tunnel for refusing to provide grist for the media mill any longer than they absolutely had to and knocking it on the head after those two follow-up full-lengths I mentioned earlier, neither of one of which managed to conjure up new “hate songs” on par with this debut’s, anyway. 

p.s. -- The quote found on the A-side label apparently comes from a series of controversial books called How to Kill, written by a former special ops marine named John Minnery -- scary!