#spectral lore

[theartofmetal]

403. III - Spectral Lore (Atmospheric Black Metal/Ambient, 2014)

Art by Benjamin A. Vierling

[sound-bombing]

Spectral Lore - III (I, Voidhanger, 2014) Genre: Atmospheric Black Metal, Dark Folk, Space Ambient, Artwork: Benjamin Vierling Bandcamp

[dustedmagazine]

Jonathan Shaw's Year in Review: Another year of pissed-off music (and some that’s somehow not so pissed), for the freaks, and the lovers, and the ghosts

2023 threatened for some months to be a marginally less awful mess than the several years before it, but then came autumn, and the Cop28 Conference turned into a massive lobbying event for the fossil fuels industry; and Geert Wilders pulled off his dismaying political success in the Netherlands; and the paranoid style in American politics was further entrenched (witness MTG’s juice as a figure of national political import and Mike Johnson holding the House gavel); and Gaza was reduced to blood-soaked rubble; and there is the ever-increasing, mind-flaying certainty that yes, 2024 will be dominated in the States by a presidential race between two completely unacceptable choices: a frail Boomer largely coasting on the fact that he is not his principal rival for the office, and that principal rival, whose absurdity increases in direct proportion to the hazard of his petulant, narcissistic rage.

No wonder much of the music on this list is so steeped in fury, contempt and sorrow for the continuing idiocy and grinding horror of the human condition. Some of that music is memorably grim, or ferocious, or both. See the records below by Gravesend, Lucifixion and Spirit Possession, all of which cut viscerally violent paths through your senses. Eardrums are subjected to scorched-earth treatment. I dig it.

But those aren’t the only feeling tones available on records I listened to a lot this year (still the dominant metric for how records get on this list: How often did I play them?). On “Bananas,” a great song from Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, Will Oldham’s gentle strumming and the song’s duet of hushed vocals dramatize lovemaking, to achingly gorgeous effect. On “Quiet World,” the best track on Home Front’s excellent Games of Power, the band commits to the sad-boy, New Romantic postpunk that some of their other songs flirt with a good deal less certainly. And while no one would ever wish to accuse the Sleaford Mods of anything other than sardonic smarts, “The Rhythms of Class” may be as close to pop music as the band has ever gotten, and it’s a terrific tune.

So maybe that’s why Gel’s Only Constant got so much play in my world this year: it’s “hardcore for fucking freaks,” as the band likes to insist, and it rips. But that’s not its only tone. The songs are also affirming, like the hand on your back at the edge of the pit that doesn’t shove but seeks to steady you on your pins. You can hear plenty of anger in the songs, but it’s not the sort that sends you out to score coke or oxy (more likely it'll mostly be fentanyl—careful out there, kids) or prompts you to set fire to random objects in the public square. It’s music to dance to, along with the other freaks, and to gather and sing in support of something you believe in. And thank goodness there is still great punk rock that wants us to feel that.

So Only Constant is presented below, first, as the album I am most grateful for this year, and all the other records are alphabetical by artist.

Gel—Only Constant (Convulse Records)

What’s better than those first 50 seconds of “Honed Blade”? To my ears, this year, nothing.

BIG|BRAVE—nature morte (Thrill Jockey)

Noisy, beautiful and idiosyncratic songs of love, desperation and death. The band finds new ways to create shapes with sound, and tunes out of those shapes.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (Drag City)

Simultaneously spare and lush, poetical and direct, wooden and fleshed. It’s the best record he’s made in some years.

Gravesend—Gowanus Death Stomp (20 Buck Spin)

Like a dip in the Gowanus Canal, this record is cold, corrosive and really, really bad for you. Not all of Brooklyn is for hipsters.

Home Front—Games of Power (La Vida Es un Mus)

Synth-rich postpunk meets the macho multi-voiced choruses of Oi! and the unthinkable happens: the songs are really, really good.

Lucifixion—Trisect Joys of Pierced Hearts (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Icy, satanic black metal that’ll strip you down to the bones, and it’ll grin while doing so. Weirdly, you may grin, too.

Retirement—Buyer’s Remorse (Iron Lung Records)

Overly adventurous consumers might have some buyer’s remorse if this record slips impulsively into their carts on a Bandcamp Friday, but smart punks sure won’t. Fast, nasty, hammering, anti-capitalist hardcore.

Sleaford Mods—UK Grim (Rough Trade)

More songs slagging Idles, Brexit, Tories and Labour, but as ever, the Mods make it all sound fresh. Angry, exhausted and jaded, but still fresh. Neat trick. Good record.

Spectral Lore—11 Days (I, Voidhanger)

Originally released as a straight-to-digital charity fundraiser, 11 Days has been packaged as a CD by I, Voidhanger and put back into circulation. Unusually political for Spectral Lore, the record sonically represents the journey thousands of migrants have taken across the Mediterranean, only to face the current racism and ethno-nationalisms proliferating through Europe. It’s harrowing stuff.

Spirit Possession—…Of the Sign (Profound Lore)

Utterly nutty, memorably antic, acid-drenched black metal. Like a bad trip, but you’ll be sort of disappointed when it ends.

Special shout-out to Mitski for “My Love Mine All Mine,” a great song that is, as a friend pointed out to me, both pop and the real thing—in spite of which the broader culture has embraced it. And also this:

They’re both gone now, but we still have their songs, and memories of them like this one. O’Connor’s weird, inbent charisma is hugely effective here, and she is so, so lovely. But it’s MacGowan’s song, and while he wrote it a bit earlier (when he and Cait O’Riordan were both still in the Pogues; she sings on the excellent version of the tune that made it onto Sid and Nancy’s soundtrack), it’s bittersweet that the last great song he ever recorded and released was a love song. A song in which the power of love is registered by the extent to which one is “haunted” by its “ghost,” and hence also by its death—that’s MacGowan to the core, and we’ll never get another songwriter like him.

Down with fascism, smash all nationalisms, turn the music up.

Jonathan Shaw

[nofatclips]

Sol Ouroboros by Spectral Lore from the the split album Sol (with Mare Cognitum)

[portrait-of-the-jaded-dawn]

While there are still a bunch of 2023 releases I haven't checked out yet, here are my top 30 or so of the year thus far. Not sure why the Smoulder art isn't downloading.

[drondskaath]

Auriferous Flame | Ardor For Black Mastery | 6th October, 2023

Greek Black Metal

Artwork by Gilded Panoply

From Ayloss of Spectral Lore, Mystras fame...

[metalchris]

The best albums of 2025 (so far)

Well it’s 2025 now and I’m very behind on my 2024 best albums stuff so I thought I’d get a jump start on my best albums of 2025. This isn’t some lame list of my most anticipated albums of 2025, no this beefy list the best albums that are already released in 2025 as of January 1st. If you’re looking for fresh new tunes to ring in 2025 I got you! Beatrix – Deathsent Ceremony High energy blackened…

[maquina-semiotica]

“ Sol Medius”, Spectral Lore

[echoes-from-the-woods]

Auriferous Flame - The Insurrectionists And The Caretakers (2024)

Artwork by Gilded Panoply

[lesdeuxmuses]

Mare Cognitum + Spectral Lore - Sol (Fallen Empire, 2018)

[auralatrocityabyss]

Ardor For Black Mastery

Auriferous Flame

Blasting Greek black metal at it's finest from Ayloss of Spectral Lore. This album is a full assault channeling the best of the classic Greek sound, yet remains firmly new and fresh. Everything from the cacophonous vocals, full-throttle drums, and excellent riffs creates a no-holds-barred listening experience, which is further improved by the stylistic flourishes of the occasional underlying synths and choral elements.

The album can be purchased from Bandcamp and True Cult Records.

[dustedmagazine]

Spectral Lore — 11 Days (I, Voidhanger)

Greek black metal project Spectral Lore originally released 11 Days straight to its Bandcamp as a fundraiser for organizations supporting refugees arriving in the EU’s Mediterranean countries, many of those migrants on the run from poverty and bloodshed in places like Syria, Libya and Sudan. I, Voidhanger, with which Spectral Lore has released a few terrific records, has given 11 Days a more visible digital release, and physical versions are also available. We should all be grateful. Even if you don’t particularly care about the charity angle (you should, but your politics are your own to grapple with), it’s a strong black metal record, well worth listening to closely.

Exactly how to classify the record’s form is a bit of an issue. In keeping with his long-standing practice with Spectral Lore, musician and sole member of the project Ayloss is calling 11 Days an EP. The record doesn’t crack the 60-minute mark, which Ayloss determines as the necessary length for a Spectral Lore LP. Seems a bit of a hair-splitting measure — almost nowhere else does a release of over 44 minutes count as an EP. And there is an additional layer of complexity to the terminological constraint Ayloss applies, given the record’s keen interest in the issue of temporality. The title 11 Days refers to the most significant, nightmarish experience at stake in the record’s narrative — the long time a fictive boatload of migrants spends afloat in the sea, under baking sun, short supplied, exhausted, full of dread but even more terrified at the prospect of a return to home shores that bristle with danger and moan in misery.

That’s unusually political for Spectral Lore, a project that tends toward abstruse philosophical abstraction and astronomical scale (hence those long, long LPs). It’s also the case that Ayloss is stretching and inhabiting the “atmospheric” in atmospheric black metal with real emphasis. The EP alternates more straightforward black metal with dark ambient compositions, charged with mournful, tense synth tones. The combination is effectively volatile, even though the shortest track on 11 Days cracks the nine-minute mark. You get long washes of sound, and even longer barrages of blasts and ear-scorching riffage.

That’s not a new aesthetic strategy or combination in atmospheric black metal, but Ayloss’s use of it has an urgency, and a purpose. His anger and disgust are palpable; check out the snarls and howls of “Adro Onzi,” and its truculent, percussive force. You ride its waves of sound for longer than seems possible, or sustainable. Eventually that ebbs. “Tremor/Kalunga Line” envelopes you in its dimensional hum. It’s hard to say how the record imagines the conclusion to its narrative, and that closing ambient song’s glittering synths provide ambiguous signals. That may be the intent, for certain it’s effective. Rarely have noises that seem superficially pretty opened to more ominous possibilities.

Jonathan Shaw

[intistone]

bro is convicted of stealing from like 5 oddly specific dudes. insane

[hedgeartzone]

@intistone Come get your cookie, they're gonna be late for tea with the Desolate Realm.

Drawing cookies is way more fun than I thought.

Also what started this all

This gif caused so much chaos