Chthe’ilist to release Le dernier crépuscule

chtheilist
You don’t get a great deal of straight up Demilich worship, but Chthe’ilist got some buzz a few years ago for having some clear similarities in their aesthetics and writing style. This presumably continues on the band’s upcoming full length debut – Le Dernier Crépuscule will come out in January 2016. Several record labels have claimed the rights to various formats, but Profound Lore is responsible for the CD pressing and digital releases, so that’s probably who you should go unless you’re a major collector. Profound Lore has already released a preview track from this album – “Voidspawn” bears some surface similarities to the works of Demilich, but otherwise sounds a bit smoothed out and obviously streamlined to meet the requirements of a larger audience.

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Upcoming tours: Voivod

Promotional picture of Voivod by Valerie Gagne from their official site
Two tours of note today. First, and presumably better, is Voivod’s impending US tour. The band is currently traveling through Europe with Napalm Death and Obituary as part of Deathcrusher 2015. This February, they will join Vektor and Eight Bells for what is mostly a tour of the eastern USA, with some later dates in the Midwest. If an interview from February 2015 is to be believed, an album (and one that may be more overtly progressive rock oriented than usual for the band) is coming some time next year; the splits with At the Gates and Napalm Death that it mentions appear to have released without issues. The tour dates follow:

2/06 – Providence, RI – Fete Ballroom
2/07 – New York, NY – Gramercy Theatre
2/08 – Philadelphia, PA – Kung Fu Neck Tie
2/09 – Morgantown, WV – Mainstage
2/10 – Pittsburgh, PA – Altar Bar
2/11 – Asbury Park, NJ – Stone Pony
2/12 – Lancaster, PA – Chameleon Club
2/13 – Washington, DC – Black Cat
2/14 – Richmond, VA – Strange Matter
2/16 – Raleigh, NC – Kings
2/18 – Charlotte, NC – Neighborhood Theatre
2/19 – Sanford, FL – West End Trading Co.
2/20 – Ybor City, FL – The Orpheum
2/21 – Atlanta, GA – Masquerade
2/22 – Knoxville, TN – The Concourse
2/24 – Chicago, IL – The Abbey Pub
2/25 – Cudahy, WI – The Metal Grill
2/26 – St Paul, MN – The Amsterdam
2/27 – Omaha, NE – Waiting Room
2/28 – St. Louis, MO – Firebird
3/03 – Ferndale, MI – The Loving Touch

I could theoretically make it to the Rhode Island show, and I am certainly interested in doing so, but we’ll have to see how things shape up in the next few months.

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Bureviy – Concealed Beyond the Space (2015)

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Hailing from Ukraine, Bureviy (Буревій = Hurricane) play a modern take on black metal which makes use of old school sub-styles by keeping them relatively uncontaminated but subsumed under the band’s personal voice. In Concealed Beyond the Space we find the folk-oriented black metal with rock sensibilities of Nokturnal Mortum, the swaying of long melodies of Drudkh, and a collection of strumming, tremolo picking and metal riffing that meld as diverse raw material for a black metal language descended and definitely compatible with but ultimately different from the more uniform black metal of old.

 

This approach is somewhat of a signature among Eastern European and Québécois black metal bands. The phenomenon is interesting when found in albums that manage to channel this almost faceless style into beautiful and meaningful expression. It demands a stricter attention to musical coherence in composition as the link between musical ideas will not be found in stylistic uniformity. Bureviy even makes use of acoustic guitars to decorate or fill passages that at first may feel like misplaced filler. A closer and paradoxically more comprehensive look also shows these passages are in line with the sections they connect and are not gimmicky interludes but articulations, points of exhalation.

 

A single spin of this will pass unnoticed. It is like a dense temperate forest, you need to get close and see the trees, the rocks and the streams. It takes more time and familiarity with the album to experience what it is trying to transmit. Ancient Slavic nature-worship and the mystic contemplation in tune with the proud mountains, the warm hillsides and the powerful rivers is channeled through Concealed Beyond the Space.

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