Albums of 7/12/24

The most interesting albums of the week!

Seth are a French melodic black metal band, releasing their seventh full length La France Des Maudits on Season of Mist. Their last release, 2021’s La Morsure du Christ was a solid record that I haven’t returned to often in the three years since. Seth‘s style sounds old, which makes since given the band’s age. But the throwback style gives this music a familiar base rather making the songs on La France Des Maudits sound outdated. This isn’t second-wave worship and it isn’t atmospheric. The bite of bands like Sargeist is missing, replaced with forlorn introspection and a greater focus on melody.

La France Des Maudits works because of well Seth blends their melodies into the larger song structures. The melodies themselves are great, but black metal bands that know how to write a riff lurk around every shadowy corner of your local crepe shop. Seth blend their great melodies into one another, adding vocal chants or a violin on top to give extra emphasis when needed.

A moment about three minutes into the second track shows how Seth works around melodies. At the 2:20 mark, the drums switch to a slower beat and the vocal chanting comes forward in the mix, only for the drums to come back into the swing with a more energetic beat. The band grooves here for about 30 seconds, with the vocals and guitar riffs chugging away. Then all of this drops out, leaving just the guitar to play a transitional phrase while the vocals shout. The drums come in with a more furious beat, the melody switches to something more frantic, and the bass speeds up its foundational line. Seth heighten the energy, but only for a bit before transitioning back to a more sparse passage. The emotions and angst never let up, but the band transitions between methods of expressing this angst with frictionless speed while maintaining their core style.

Thirteen Goats are a younger Canadian thrash/death band. Capricorn Rising is their second full-length, released on Exitus Strategem Records. Aesthetically, everything this band does is a turn-off for me, from their song naming conventions to their album cover. But their music gets the blood pumping. Sounding something like Archspire mixed with Blackening-era Machine Head, the tracks on Capricorn Rising are direct and violent. The guitar solo near the end of the opening track sums up the musical approach here: It’s on the simpler side, not virtuosic, and not particularly impressive, but it’s played with enough snarl and edge to decapitate a king.

The riffs are straight-forward, there are moments throughout the record where the vocals, strings, and drums all come together to pound sixteenth notes in unison until your ears bleed, and the band seems allergic to syncopation or interesting rhythms. But they play with enough pizzazz to make this caveman approach work. There are definitely weak moments that mire the album, but after I’m done listening my impression of this release is pure muscle. Good gym music.

Bipolarities is a split from two of the quirkier bands making death metal currently, brought to us by Transcending Obscurity Records. Diskord play a bass-first style of proggy death metal featuring jazz influences and songs on the shorter side. ATVM are a more Blood Incantation-type of death metal band with more of a riff focus and a more exploratory song structure. Both bands released some fantastic music earlier in the decade, and neither let the listener down in this split.

Diskord open things up with four tracks containing plenty of space. Their trademark bass-led song styles are still present, but this doesn’t mean the rest of the groups are slouches. While their less riff-focused approach to songwriting may turn off some listeners, previous fans of the band will find more to love here. ATVM similarly continue where they left off on 2021’s Famine, Putrid, and Fucking Endless. Their music has a harder edge and more guitar work than Diskord, and both bands have plenty of weird moments in their songs. On this split, Diskord and ATVM end up complimenting each other perfectly. This is the best release of the week.

Damnation’s Sight is the debut full length from Australian blackened thrash metal band Mages Terror, released on Invictus Productions. It features one of the guys from Portal on guitars, but that’s a sonic red herring. Mages Terror sounds like a group that listened to a bunch of Aura Noir and Nifelheim decided to play with (somewhat) newer production values and songwriting techniques while maintaining that old school sloppy hatred that made those bands so much fun to listen to.

Mages Terror play with a guitar-focused style. Riffs are as much tone as they are notes, and everything is drenched in so much reverb the beat can recede to irrelevance at times. The music is straightforward, teeth-bared, no-nonsense fun. The songwriting sounds choppy at times, but mostly fits the aesthetic of a band like this. For fans of low-frills, rough-on-the-edges music that sounds perfect when played from a cassette on shitty speakers in a dark smoky room, Mages Terror will be a blessing.