This month’s Best Metal on Bandcamp includes the long-awaited return of a vocal chimera, the final album by a cult Japanese band, bilingual trad metal from Los Angeles, and much more.
Julie Christmas
Ridiculous and Full of Blood
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP, T-Shirt/Shirt
“I’ve not yet begun to defile myself.” Julie Christmas sings that line about a minute into Ridiculous and Full of Blood, her first solo album in 14 years. She quickly sets about making up for lost time. Christmas was the powerhouse voice of the 2000s avant-metal bands Made Out of Babies and Battle of Mice, but she’s maintained a more methodical pace since their dissolution. Ridiculous and Full of Blood breaks a silence she’s held since her 2016 Cult of Luna collab Mariner, and it’s a roaring reminder of what she’s capable of. Her voice, still shocking in its sheer elasticity, is the beating heart of the record. Christmas has always been able to careen through multiple vocal modes—whispered, screamed, spoken—in the span of a line, but her control has never been better.
Consider how she seems to teeter on the edge of madness on the sludgy “The Ash” before finding her way to a hypnotic, repeated melody in its final minute. Or “Silver Dollars,” which lets a passage of wordless breathwork give way to a series of strangled cries, only for Christmas to reemerge with some of the most technically demanding singing she delivers on the entire record. Even the more aggressive, straightforward songs, like the nü-ish “Thin Skin” and “Blast,” are animated by Christmas’s unexpected vocal choices. (Her backing band, which includes Cult of Luna’s Johannes Persson and Candiria’s John LaMacchia, mirrors her varied vocal approach, never sticking to one genre for long.) The lyrics on Ridiculous and Full of Blood blur character study, allegory, and autobiography, and there’ll be plenty of time to unpack all the metaphors. For now, the simple but striking refrain of the post-metal stunner “The Lighthouse” jumps out: “She’ll mow you down like a hurricane/ And you’ll never see her again.” Here’s hoping only the first part is true. The world still needs Julie Christmas.
Sabbat
Sabbaticult
After 40 years and 10 full-lengths—plus countless comps, splits, and live albums—Japan’s original “blacking metal” band is reportedly done making new music. The ripping Sabbaticult will be the final entry in one of extreme metal’s most idiosyncratic discographies, and it’s oozing with the charm that made Sabbat an object of cultish obsession these past four decades. There’s plenty of Venom-inspired proto-thrash riffage on display, and frontman Gezol is still singing roughly one syllable per verse in his gasping falsetto. There’s a song called “Oh, My Baby 666,” which somehow wasn’t already a Sabbat song. Gezol and cofounder/drummer Zerugelion remain in thrall to the primordial first wave of black metal, an influence they hitch to a NWOBHM gallop on songs like “Black Metal Tornado” and “Witches’ Mountain.” They sound equally comfortable on Sabbaticult’s bugged-out, labyrinthine closing track, “Kanashibari the Dwelling.” Crucially, nothing on this record could be the work of anyone but Sabbat. Crank it loud and pay your respects to some all-time greats of Japanese metal.
Intranced
Muerte y Metal
Vinyl LP, T-Shirt/Shirt, Vinyl, 2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
I’ve never been in a convertible. I drive a Subaru, and the last time I was in L.A., I rented a Mitsubishi SUV. But sometimes, a metal album comes along that makes me feel like I’m cruising down Sepulveda with the T-top down. Muerte y Metal, the debut album by L.A. classicists Intranced, is one of those albums. Its songs are so colorful, so vibrant, so imbued with the spirit of an endless summer night that I want to throw my head back and let the ocean breeze toss my hair. (It’s usually at this point that I remember I live in Ohio.) Frontman James-Paul Luna cut his teeth in bands like White Wizzard and Holy Grail, but Intranced feels more thoroughly suffused with his sensibility. He’s an old-school hard rock singer, and there’s a scuzzy ’70s glamour to his work here. Traversing a multi-octave range in Spanish and English, Luna is the anchor of Muerte y Metal. He’s equaled by Fili Bibiano, a stuck-out-of-time guitar hero who retains a strong melodic center in even his shreddiest passages. You can play a little spot-the-influence here: “Passionate Pretender” is a direct nod to Judas Priest’s “Dissident Aggressor,” and the Scorpions reference in Intranced’s name frequently bobs to the surface. Yet Muerte y Metal, partly because of its bilingual approach, makes a unique cocktail out of its familiar ingredients. I’m gonna roll down the windows on my Impreza and rock the fuck out.
Houle
Ciel Cendre et Misère Noire
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP, Sweater/Hoodie, T-Shirt/Shirt, Button/Pin/Patch,
In case you couldn’t tell from Maéna Paillet’s J.M.W. Turner-meets-Mariusz Lewandowski artwork for Ciel Cendre et Misère Noire, the French black metal band Houle is aesthetically fixated on the ocean. A “houle” is a sea swell, and there is indeed an undercurrent of churning drums and roiling riffs lurking within a typical Houle song, threatening to swallow the band like a cresting wave. They always find their way to daylight, whether that’s in the form of an aching, melodic passage of lead guitar or a particularly expressive run of screams from frontwoman Adèle Adsa. Ciel Cendre et Misère Noire is Houle’s first full-length, and already, they’re masters and commanders of a formidable sound.
Crypt Sermon
The Stygian Rose
Cassette, Vinyl LP, T-Shirt/Shirt, Compact Disc (CD)
When Crypt Sermon were “just” an epic doom act worshiping at the altars of Candlemass and Dio-era Black Sabbath, they were already one of the best bands in the U.S. metal scene. Out of the Garden was my favorite album of 2015, and its more ambitious follow-up, The Ruins of Fading Light, landed inside my top 10 four years later. Now they’re back with The Stygian Rose, which builds on their true doom foundation while obliterating its guardrails. There’s room here for the lush ballad “Scrying Orb,” the stomping, radio-ready “Thunder (Perfect Mind),” and the snaking, 11-minute title track. Obsequiae’s Tanner Anderson, who contributed hurdy-gurdy to The Ruins of Fading Light, is now on board as Crypt Sermon’s full-time keyboardist. Whether he’s laying down atmospheric carpeting or taking over a lead melody, his presence consistently helps push the band to daring new places. (Geoff Nicholls’s work on the Tony Martin-era Sabbath records looms as a probable influence.) The Stygian Rose is a big evolutionary step for a band who didn’t necessarily need one. We’re lucky they took it anyway.
Horseburner
Voice of Storms
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
If this were 2006, Horseburner’s Voice of Storms would likely land them on magazine covers proclaiming them metal’s next big thing. The West Virginia band’s fourth album—and first in five years—finds them perfecting their signature blend of burly hard rock, dexterous prog, and sludgy doom. Take the best bits of Baroness’s Red Album, Mastodon’s Remission, and High on Fire’s Blessed Black Wings, throw them in a blender with some acoustic guitars and Allman Brothers harmonies, and you’ll get something like Voice of Storms. The metal scene has largely moved on from its attempted mainstreaming of this vintage of prog-sludge, but Horseburner’s towering yet soulful songs make it seem like a project worth resurrecting.
Alcest
Les Chants de l’Aurore
Since arriving with a near-perfect trinity of releases—2005’s Le Secret, 2007’s Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde, and 2009’s Écailles de Lune—Alcest’s output has been frustratingly uneven. The French band who essentially invented modern blackgaze lost the plot on the dream pop detour Shelter, the anime-inspired Kodama, and the attempted return to form Spiritual Instinct. Yet all those albums apparently taught bandleader Neige something useful, as Les Chants de l’Aurore feels like a career-spanning collage. There’s an epic heft to songs like “L’Envol” and “Améthyste” that’s been missing from the past few Alcest releases, but Neige (quite effectively) delivers them with the delicate touch of his sunniest work. It’s a long way from the paradigm-shifting perfection of Souvenirs, but Les Chants de l’Aurore provides a good opportunity for lapsed fans to tap back in.
Ulcerate
Cutting the Throat of God
Sweater/Hoodie, T-Shirt/Shirt, 2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Over a series of harrowing, airless albums, New Zealand’s Ulcerate have become synonymous with the sub-subgenre known as dissonant death metal. That umbrella is big enough to house the free jazz-inspired explorations of Portal, the whirring tech-death of Ad Nauseam, and the erudite savagery of Pyrrhon, but Ulcerate’s take on the sound is most indebted to late-era Gorguts. Like those Canadian greats, Ulcerate’s songs communicate a sense of place. You have to spelunk down into cavernous depths to appreciate a song like “To Flow Through Ashen Hearts” or “To See Death Just Once”—two highlights from the band’s latest LP, Cutting the Throat of God. Once you’re there, and your eyes adjust to the light, you’re treated to fully realized worlds of unintuitive compositional choices, dense polyrhythms, and alien bursts of noise. That Ulcerate manage to nurture an emotional core within even their most experimental excursions is a testament to their mastery of the genre they’ve made their home.
