Goldicot Culls The Week - V

by Goldicot

Tue, 11 Feb 2025

Read in 6 minutes

Thus ends the beginning

weekly

And so through the door we are fully passed. Janus, the two-faced god, represents both beginnings and transitions, which I find a useful way to think about resolutions; to make them habitual they must be an endless succession of re-beginnings, in order to produce a transition in the actual pattern. January, of course, is not an actual beginning, except calendrically, just the endless procession continuing unabated. Nonetheless, it is the start of a new pattern, perhaps yet unrecognized, but the thread begins, indeed has now begun, to form, only fully glorious in hindsight and memory, yet you can still bask in its light as it dawns.

I resolved to write more this year, and I’ve done that. I also tentatively toyed with using the last two years’ practice of high volume listening for some potential record-setting. It remains to be seen if 2025 will be my year for that, but January 2025 is in the bag – my personal best for albums listened in a single month is now a whopping 625, and covered every single album added to the Vortex in that month. Five greens and thirty-seven sixes is roughly a ten percent return on investment, not to mention the invaluable and incommunicable knowledge gathered from the trenches. Even the 245 below-average albums offer something; I don’t know exactly what, but I hesitate to call it wasted time – though I can’t defend what it has cost me in opportunity. I could beat this record – I missed a minimum of two days almost entirely, easy +40 in there – but I’m pretty happy with things like average length (I didn’t add it up, and #slamuary tanks it, but there’s some big boys in there too) and diversity (it’s all metal and whatever y’all added), and broadly speaking, I have no complaints. It’s not a sustainable pace, but if it were I would be glad to sustain it.

Speaking of #slamuary, that was a bust, wasn’t it? Aside from aforementioned culls Spume and Visceral Explosion (and Fleshbore, which is not slam but does contain slams), only Theurgy crawled above the mean, and they did it in two different ways: the four-way split Sheol on New Standard Elite and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it demo from Ebullience. Beyond that I struggle to find anything intelligible, much less intelligent, to say about any of it. Nothing truly depraved, nothing truly ironic, nothing truly awful (not a single 2 in the batch, let alone a 1!) When it comes down to it, the release I find most memorable was a mere thirty seconds in length - HyurGun - Agglutination. Ostensibly some time of goregrind, this thing is some kind of avant-garde tech demo slam with a conga line as a vocalist. Your guess is as good as mine, but it may be the only #slamuary (or #misslamuary) that had me guessing at all.

Aside from the memetic pain olympics, January was a competent month, with a sizable contingent of worthwhile releases. Right at the finish line some heavyweights entered the comp, most notably Selvans, All That Remains, and Pentagram, and a beefy newcomer, welcoming Willowtip to 2025 with Relics of Humanity. There was also, unfortunately, a new Night Flight Orchestra album. All said and done, this was a great month, a lot to like and even more to think on and about; a start good enough that it could all be downhill from here, yet I remain optimistic – somebody has to.

One of the few good recent innovations of genre nomenclature is “cavernous”, striking a balance between huge, vast sounds and a monolithic heaviness, distinct from sludge, death-doom and post-metal in its total oppressive darkness, containing naught but hollow reverberation and sheer emptiness. It’s rare to find an evocation so specific to a sound that isn’t defined by infinitely regressive nuance, which is good because Sacred Noose has no nuance. Nothing but pitch black caves and howling echoes, cudgel bludgeons bouncing and impacting wall-to-wall, the listener dashed against monolithic and unmoving sonic stone. A cave-system itself isn’t new territory, but there are few attempts as comprehensively pitiless as Vanishing Spires, an album for the pit.

This is everything wrong with slam. This is an itemization of crimes against music in the wider brutal death metal community, from the frequent widespread rampant abuse of sampled “memes” and pugilistic displays of deliberate self-retardation; to the new era offenses of the modern youth degenerate, production of music concocted of multiple drug-ridden genres, most commonly slam, laced with hip hop beats and gangsta rap, and in some cases going so far as to use country music – these damning accusations represent many of the most common offenses against decency and originality in the scene today. And somehow despite its conviction as the bottom-barrel scrapings of puerile nonsense dumpster-divers, it’s… actually good. Worm Alert is a middle finger pointing in every direction at once, defying every expectation and landing tricks that have never been succeeded before, while just as boorish and moronic as all the attempts before were – only difference is when Worm Alert does it, it whips ass. It cannot be expressed how far from good all of these ideas are, and yet, they work – the turd has been polished, the pig has flown, Call of Duty meme hillbilly slamhop has been achieved, and it is good.

Maniacally hostile barrages of vitriolic fury and sheer tumult arrive on berzerk frenzied gale, a sonic uproar of malevolent static, noise meant to hurt. The faster something is, the slower it becomes, a paradox best understood through pain, the more excruciating it is, the more every single brief moment feels like an eternity, a stretching of agony until it is all all-encompassing. Revenge is an exemplar of this concept, where blistering and bewildering speed dilates into inexorable slow punishment, wrenching grinding hurting. The torture gives you time to appreciate the finer details of sadistic devices, like the cascading avalanche fills tumbling incessantly down, the feverish shrieks devolving into pure electronic distortion, the malignant hate coalescing from the delirium inside you, the whirlwind reaping you.

GOLDICOT RECALLS THE WEEK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9NiaNzpxuI

Many of us live in endless pursuit of those magical artifacts of singular uniqueness, the ones that are their only portals to another world, an experience you can’t get anywhere else. This is the opposite: a confluence of so many different influences and pasts, brimming with sonic history and ancestral memory, so much so that it feels very much like those one-of-a-kind wonders, not of untold originality, but of deep and versed lore and wisdom, like an ancient scroll with maps and diagrams by which to study the alien antecedents. The discipline here is a familiar alchemy, the blackened gradient between seedy nightlife metal and wandering poet post-punk, and in this mix by Axis of Desire the lines melt away entirely, creating a pure concoction, as if all the inspirations here were from just one source, realized to full potential in haunting ceremony of urban neon guitar solos, baritone cemetery lullabies, windswept rasping and re-animated dancing, songs of joyous ruins and grim delight.