Reports from the Underground: Albums We Missed in 2020

Descend – The Deviant (Sweden)
Style: Prog Metal/Death Metal (mixed vocals)
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Review by: Sebastian

There are many bands that try and take up the style that Opeth established in the progressive metal scene, but very few bands could match the caliber of their songwriting abilities. I could say with confidence that Descend in their 2020 album The Deviant has passed that threshold from merely taking up the sound of a legend to becoming one themselves. Hey, maybe we’ve all just been sleeping on them for a while. They already have 3 full-length albums. Or maybe it’s something about just this album that is especially insane. It personally amazes me that this band can go about their business being so unrecognized despite the sheer quality of their work.

What you will find in this album is no less than exceptional progressive death metal. It feels as though they are sticking very true to the Opeth formula, but at the same time, it is apparent that Descend had studied the elements that more recent bands in this scene used with great success, and compiled them all into a new album that boldly introduces us into the next decade of great prog death to come. Aesthetically, this album has many similarities to different artists that one could name, but it has the most parallels with an album like Still Life from 1999, except it incorporates the epic nature of melodeath and delivers it through a more modern lens.  

The album gives off vibes that are entirely sinister, as well as times where it can sound absolutely elegant. The general goal of these bands is to create an auditory juxtaposition between the aggressive, brutal, and technical aspects of death metal with basically whatever kind of beautiful, creative, and progressive sound they can muster up. And when it’s pulled off correctly, we get some of the most balanced albums in all of prog.

There are riffs as addictive as heroin packed into every song on this album. Its guitar work in general is stellar. But that is not to say any of the other instrumentalists were slacking. The writing and performing of the drumming, bass guitar, and vocals all do well to synergize with each other. They all have their moments where they shine as individuals as well as when they are in harmony with one another.  

However, when one hears the bass of Descend and Opeth back-to-back, the difference is clear. The bass is not as distinct as it should be, and hence it can get a little lost in sections of chaos. The bass in metal music is always important, though often underappreciated. It’s the instrument that creates the foundation of the rhythm, and gives weight to the overall sound of a metal piece. In a future album, I would want to hear the bass a little bit more. This is a minor nitpick more than anything though as it does have its place in the album, as well as moments where it is able to shine, often in The Deviant’s more tranquil moments and moments where a smooth transition is needed.

Comparing Descend to a metal giant like Opeth has its ups and downs. This is of course because it creates a higher expectation from newcomers like this, but also that it shows that they are in contention with some of the best. And even though Opeth sounds better produced most of the time, I would say Descend actually has their Swedish heroes beat on other aspects of their music. For instance, their sound has moments of very strong and successful sound choices that Opeth has never attempted. The female guest vocalist on the song “The Purest One” has a great voice, and performs a nice contrast to the gutturals we’ve been presented with for the first section of the album. I could not find her name credited through researching this band, but she did an amazing job. One could also say that Descend didn’t need to place a sick saxophone interlude on the track “Wallow”, but its unexpected appearance was greatly appreciated (much akin to Rivers of Nihil on their latest album).

All in all, I have very little material to complain about on this album. It is honestly in contention for the best progressive death metal album of the year (alongside The Reticent). There are no bad songs on The Deviant, and it always provides a greatly enjoyable listen. For anyone who enjoys Opeth, this album is an absolute must. It truly feels as though Descend is the reincarnation of their classic style that has been long dead since Heritage in 2011. If so, they are starting from scratch but with a new and interesting path ahead of them.

Recommended tracks: Lily, Wallow, they are literally all good tbh
Recommended for fans of: Opeth, In Mourning, Edge of Sanity
Final verdict: 9/10

Mora Prokaza – By Chance (Belarus)
Style: Blackened Trap (harsh vocals)
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Review by: Josh

Yes, you’re reading that genre tag right. All things considered, we should’ve expected this. Trap metal’s been a thing for a while, so it’s only natural that a band would do it in reverse, going from metal to trap. Still though, this is just something else…

Okay, so how does this work? I’d call it more black metal with trap influences for the most part, but even then it’s difficult to classify. Every track is a new combination of elements picked from the two genres. You’ve got songs like “Be There”, which are pretty straightforward black metal songs, albeit with unusual vocal rhythms for the genre. On the other hand, there are songs like “Check It”, which are a lot closer to the hip-hop side of things, featuring vocals rapped and chanted through a black metal shriek. In the middle, there are tracks like “I See It This Way”, which mesh black metal and trap to the point where neither are recognizable. It’s a truly strange listen.

Quality-wise, this album is at its best when it leans closer to the black metal side of things. “Blacker Than Black”, my personal favorite song on the album features a black metal instrumental rapped and sung over by a triplicate of voices: a whisper, a shriek, and some horrifically tortured-sounding clean vocals. The cleans in particular sound fantastic, and the bits sung in them are my favorite vocal moments on the album. The shriek-rapping works here too, though mainly through the aggression of the delivery. With shrieks, lots of the consonantal nuance and rhyme schemes that make rap work all but disappear, and without increased energy to compensate, the rapping tends to fall flat. This is what happens on tracks like “Sorry Man”, where the vocals come across as more airy, and we’re left with the all-so-common triplet flow over middling black metal instrumentals.

The more experimental moments on this album are sadly not executed very well. “I See It This Way”, the album’s longest track by a substantial margin, piqued my interest going in, but I came out unsatisfied. It’s constructed of massively varying bits and pieces: ominous guitars, breakbeats, bouncy piano sections, record scratching, vocoded vocals, and power chords. Mora Prokaza, though, fail at uniting these elements into a coherent whole, despite the quality of some of the individual elements. Many of the tracks suffer from this issue; they have interesting parts, but the quality of the songwriting brings them down. After the novelty wears off, we’re not left with the most coherent or engaging album.

Despite this, I’d still absolutely recommend giving it a listen, especially if you’re into both hip-hop and metal. The scream-rapping on “Check It” had me dumbfounded when I first pressed play, and some sections on “I’m Not Yours” sound like if Playboi Carti grew up in Norway during the church burnings. “Blacker Than Black” overall features a legitimately great vocal performance, too. Sure, this is a gimmicky release, but it’s fun as hell the first few spins.

Recommended tracks: I’m Not Yours, Check It, Blacker Than Black
Recommended for fans of: City Morgue
Final verdict: 5/10

Bagdadski Vor – Колхида (Russia)
Style: Mathcore/Shoegaze (harsh/shouty/melodically harsh vocals)
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | VKontakte | RYM page
Review by: Dylan

This is an album which I found thanks to a dear friend of mine. Knowing my Russia obsession™, he immediately sent it to me without much of a description. With its cover being very vibrant and colorful, it made me think that whatever this was gonna be, it was surely not going to be a very dark album. And dark it was not, because Bagdadski Vor have put out one of the warmest, coziest mathgaze albums that I know of.

The band does not explore further than their general formula; which is major key-guitars, playful time signatures, a non-stop frantic style of drumming, and vocals that are not growled but certainly not sung either. They’ve got this raspy, shouty feel to them which isn’t quite a metalcore scream either, but rather what feels like an intensely sung melody. It’s language barrier only helps make things better for me, due to how well the language works percussively within the musical landscape. 

The mixture between all of these genres like mathcore, emo, and shoegaze form an atmosphere that’s incredible and very unique. The melodies are insanely well crafted, its intensity is perfectly balanced within the cozy, happy riffs the guitars create. It’s a recipe that doesn’t take an insane amount of risks, but at it’s short length of 25 minutes considered unnecessary, having a very well packed punch that is endlessly replayable. 

Колхида is simply put, gorgeous. Even those afraid of the language barrier are bound to be enamored by the musicianship shown in this album, and I’d be surprised if anyone didn’t find at least something to love in this tight EP.

Recommended tracks: Крысолов, Колхида
Recommended for fans of: Totorro, Save us From the Archon, Deafheaven,
Final verdict: 9.4/10

Wyrmwoods – Gamma (Finland)
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal (harsh vocals)
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Review by: Callum

Look at that album artwork. Take a good look. It gets more atrocious and amazing the more I stare at it. It’s what I imagine Bob Ross on a particularly disturbing trip would conjure up. Coincidentally, this is just how I feel about the music, it’s gross and horrifying and I love it. I dismissed this album back in October as I’m sure several of my fellow subway reviewers may have. Through an initial scrub through the tracks, Gamma sounded like some off-kilter demonic circus. I threw it in the ‘weird for the sake of being weird’ pile, considered the production substandard, and moved swiftly on. Looking back, however, something about that artwork just grabbed me and I felt the need to revisit Gamma and decipher the absurdity I remembered hearing, and to my great fortune. Never in life did I think I’d award such a high rating and vote of recommendation to an avant garde black metal album (words that I may have wrinkled my nose at not so long ago). It’s ok to think this record is a disgusting mess, but with some determination you may develop an appreciation for it like I have.

Wyrmwoods, a one-man outfit out of Finland, fully commits to the bizarre alien aesthetic as the core of the album is black metal fused with strange wavy guitar tones and the liberal use of synths resembling a calliope (the circus pipe organ thing, I had to look that one up). The synths are what make the album. They paint the sometimes ugly, sometimes pretty, but always odd soundscape. They remind me of something between Summoning, who I hear as an influence on Gamma, and dungeon synth from some old-school metroidvania game. I assume video game music is a large influence given the nod in the album notes to David Whittaker, a prolific video game music composer in the 80s/90s. The lyrics, delivered through a combination of guttural, other-worldly growls and Issahn-like shrieks, are just as mad. My Finnish isn’t great but I’m fairly sure they aren’t sung in Nuurag-Vaarn’s native language, nor is ‘Cebes, grieve / Heartee noth thes / Pierceng ang rows, Venemies of snakes?’ any kind of English I know.

“Astralanum” opens with dissonant chords and that unique wavey guitar tone along with spacey, distant sounding drums. Soon the creepy fairground synths chime in along with – literally – indecipherable growls and disgusting high shrieks somewhere between a retch and a gasp for breath. These components reminded me of why I dismissed the album in the first place as, at first listen, they are off putting. However, this is a black metal album for the most part and retains the core attributes of tremolo picking, and plentiful double bass and blast beats. The drumming is excellent and keeps things fresh during longer verses with distinct fills here and there and some interesting open hi-hat bars. “Karamoon” continues with more traditional black metal and interesting staccato shrieks preluding a softer, dream-like finger-picked sequence that adds those strangely beautiful alien textures of gushing pink rivers and parasitic baby trees presented on the cover. The album is structured well with a wodge of four strong, unique tracks at the beginning topped off by the short “Koraktor”. In under two minutes it dances between the absurd, chaotic, and creepy; a fairly concise sampler of everything Gamma has to offer. “Antigone” is then a well placed 80s horror movie interlude before one final descent into the madness of “Solanus”. This is another traditional sounding black metal track with a healthy dose of the bizarre before allowing some time to digest with the final ambient track “Nix”.

My enjoyment of this album took me totally by surprise. For those with a taste for the strange, or looking for black metal with a fresh, psychedelic or progressive sound, this is really something special.

Recommended tracks: Astralanum, Karamoon, Subterrane
Recommended for fans of: Oranssi Pazuzu, Pyrrhon, Maudlin of the Well
Final verdict: 9.5/10

Le Grand Sbam – Furvent (France)
Style: Avant-Garde/Zeuhl (this has vocals)
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | RYM page
Review by: Chris

The ever-strange ever-interesting Le Grand Sbam are back with Furvent, their new hour long Zeuhl/Art Rock endeavor. Truthfully, I’m not much of a Zeuhl or its relatives listener – I tend to stick with Klezmer or those branches more than the French stylings of Magma and the like. That said, I do really like this album…I think. It can be a bit hard to say. I’ve listened to Furvent a good many times now and it really takes on a different flavor depending on what I’m doing or how I’m listening. Walking my dog to this album felt like I was in a strange twilight zone esque show or old half live-action half animated film. Making dinner to this album I found myself getting less lost in it and more contemplative of it. 

Furvent consist of 4 parts really: The first track “La Trace”, an 18 minute long thesis essentially on how to make a zeuhl composition, “Nephèsh”, a shorter much more vocal and piano focused track, “Yi Yen”, a very long suite which goes a lot of places, and “Choon Choon”, a song which for most of it feels like a zeuhl infused mambo or tango. While “La Trace” is presented a bit like the magnum opus of the album, I personally found the Ya Yen suite to be the real meat of the album, with it holding a lot of the more fun experiments as well as the real groove holding moments that pulled me into the record. “Nephèsh” in contrast felt like a bit of an afterthought to me in hindsight, while “Choon Choon” was a fun cherry on top of the album that was great fun. It’s really hard or impossible to really give a track-by-track thought process or experience description of the album with how much it twists or turns, so I’m really not going to even try.

Instrumentation wise, this has a lot of what you would expect from the genre description, though it does lack real guitar work in any way (not to the album’s detriment). The piano work throughout is great, ranging from nice mambo dance lines, to rough low note accents (almost like a Tigran Hamasyan album!) to light flutters and stutters. The drums and percussion bring shades of the latest Behold…the Archtopus record, with the main reliance being on percussive accent instruments than necessarily a true drum set styling. The percussion elements really help hold together the stuttering feel of the album while still holding it together enough to not make you feel like you are completely falling apart. Additionally, the vibraphone and similar idiophone work is great when it pokes its head out. Similarly, the Moog and synth work is also great, especially when the Rhodes and FM style synths really get chances to poke out from everything else and set the tone. There are more than a few drone style interludes and builds on the album as well which are well put together.

As the vocal description may indicate, there is a lot going on in that category. There is normal singing for sure, but there is also chanting, Chinese style opera singing, scatting, talking, lip fluttering…I mean any sound a mouth can make is on this record and usually 4-5 different voices are taking part in it at any given time. It’s definitely strange to get used to if you are not accustomed to this style of vocal use in music, but it is nothing if not always entertaining and engaging. I can’t comment on lyrics or meaning or anything because none of it is in a language I speak, but it sounds emotive enough to me.

In all, if you haven’t dove into Zeuhl music before this will without question be a strange ride at first, but is definitely worth a listen for how fun and put together it honestly is. It is well composed to the point that it thankfully can rocket past the detractions some people make about music like this being “haha random” and easy to do. Are there surprises and questions of why something was done? Sure. But honestly I don’t think of a lot of moments that felt like there wasn’t actually some thought behind how to get to or from that part. I’m not a super Zeuhl man but, maybe this will change that a bit for me. Good stuff.

Recommended tracks: La Trace, Yi Yen  – Li (Le Feu), Choon Choon
Recommended for fans of: Frank Zappa, Magma, Behold…the Archtopus
Final verdict: 7.5/10