Nønsun- Good Old Evil

Lviv, Ukraine’s Nønsun plays a style of doom metal mixed liberally with drone, sludge and modern post-metal. As the years have progressed, the meanings of these aforementioned genres have come to denote an assortment of things, and, seemingly in answer to that fact, this band, on points throughout its 48-minute Good Old Evil “demo,” manages to cover most of them.

“Jesus’ Age,” after a beginning blast of noise and feedback, lumbers into a doom metal plod that’s anchored by vocalist Goatooth’s full-throated roar. Droning noise rushes back over the song, like the ocean reclaiming the coast, but after roughly a minute guitars, drums and vocals re-enter the song with a devastating, YOB-style heaviness, complete with bluesy stoner metal soloing that is undeniably indebted to that band's sound. The push-pull between drone and metal continues, with long stretches of both commingling beside one another. Out of the final stretch of metal, the drums and guitars begin to pick up speed for a bashing, almost punk section that collapses into molasses-drenched doom and feedback.

In addition to the expected heaviness and passages of enveloping noise and feedback, some surprising bits of melody find their way onto the album. Moments like the second half of "Rain Have Mercy," with its elegiac-sounding riffs and soloing and spoke-sung vocals, reveal  how far-reaching Nønsun’s sound is within its chosen genres. Though less representative than “Jesus’ Age” of what Nønsun does most, “Rain Have Mercy” might be the best track to introduce the average listener to exactly what the band can do. Though I love how huge and angry the former is, there's a transfixing emotional nuance to the latter that draws me to it individually, even if I don't have the time for a listen to all 48 minutes of the demo.

Nønsun’s strengths, as mentioned above, are in the way it fits together the extreme influences that encompass its style. It follows, then, that Good Old Evil’s weakest point is the nearly 7-minute rolling drone that is “Message of Nihil Carried by the Waves of the Big Bang,” which contains little-to-no genre mixing and only the barest changes in tone or mood. As with other drone and noise compositions on extreme punk and metal records, the emotional flatness of “Message” belies the peaks to which these genres can be carried by veteran practitioners.

After the droning of “Message,” closing track “Forgotten is What Never Was” makes a slow transition back into doom metal, beginning with noise and piano and working up to an ancestral stomp, out of which only occasionally bubbles growls or chanted vocals. Little more than a mesmerizing exercise, the 11 minutes of “Forgotten is What Never Was” feel longer than the 18 of “Jesus’ Age,’ and while its slow, atmospheric progression makes it a stronger piece of music than the drone work that precedes it, it joins that work in being part of the weaker second half of what is otherwise an excellent first release.

Overall, this is a band with a ton of promise. The impressive amalgam of extreme genres (on both the metal and noise sides of that spectrum) represented on the first half of the release, if reigned in with a slightly tighter compositional leash and carried over the final two tracks, would have made the word "demo" completely unnecessary here and elevated the band from "awesome, can't wait to hear how they improve next time" to a plain old "that's awesome."

Stream Good Old Evil below and/or download it for free from Nønsun's Bandcamp. [Note: The band sent me a download of the album.]

Temporal Shift: Natural Snow Buildings- Ghost Folks

Warning: Neither this record nor this review contain blastbeats or any references to blastbeats. Those with bpm-related allergies should be advised to keep blastbeat-rich products close at hand while listening to this record or reading this review.

What is it about the end of the world that so fascinates us? Is it some innate sense of fatalism that our past few generations have been programmed with? Is it instead the sense of freedom from responsibility that the end of everything brings with it? Or even a simple sense of self-importance that makes us feel like the logical conclusion to humanity as we know it?

Maybe it's instead, as Sun Ra put it and Brutal Truth so emphatically agreed, “after the end of the world” that's the true focus of our fascination with the Apocalypse. Rather than waiting for the end of everything, we're waiting to be the golden ticket-holders left over when the rest of everything gets tossed in the Great Garbage Disposal of the Cosmos.

Whatever the case may be, that survival beyond the end is the focus of this collection of songs. Bookended by two songs about the post-nuke fallout, “Nuclear Winter (Dispatches)” and “Nuclear Winter,” rather than talk about the circumstances of its happening, the guts of this album instead focus on what goes on after the big one.

In terms of musical style, Natural Snow Buildings (a French duo made up musicians Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte) craft an ever-shifting amalgam of acoustic drone, folk and post-rock grandeur well-suited to their subject matter. Previewing one or two tracks is by no means a proper introduction to the group (even one or two albums really doesn't do justice to the full scope of their talents,) since they cycle through minimal, tone-based droning, slow, string-heavy post-rock and eerie, vocal-augmented folk throughout the course of an album, all the while keeping, for the most part, a respectably even pace.

After the short noise/drone opening “Nuclear Winter” (which always sounds to me like it's going to lead into a Pig Destroyer album rather than one filled with post-rock and folk) come a pair of tracks, “If I Can Find My Way Through the Darkness...” and “...I Came Down Here,” which set the blueprint for the album's post-rock-leaning tracks with slow, orchestral instrumentals that echo and chime, moving ever forward like the protagonists in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

What are by far my favorite tracks are the two vocaled folk tracks, “Sun” and “Guns & Rifles.” Don't make the mistake of assuming that these two are my favorites simply because they've got vocals; rather, they're my favorites because they've got damned excellent vocals. The first of the two, “Sun,” is a dark, eerie acoustic guitar track that's kept lovingly bare-bones, showcasing the humanity inherent in fret noise and the emotion-rich vocals of Ameziane. The fact that the arrangement doesn't move beyond letting the second guitar chime in atmospherically lets the lyrics hit that much harder, making sure that a line like “This fucking sun keeps staring at me” leaves you shivering. “Guns & Rifles,” on the other hand, takes longer to build, opening with strings and only revealing itself as a folk tune halfway through. This allows the band to further show their range, proving that they're more than a band that can just play several disparate styles of music. Because of its slower build, “Guns & Rifles” is a fuller song, with piano, strings and guitar all stacked onto the track before the unstable, heavy-hearted vocals make their appearance. When Ameziane says, “I remember many colors, many tortures,” we can't help but believe him, because we've been hearing it in his voice the whole time.

Similar to the album by the Body that I reviewed last month, Ghost Folks has no shortage of sampled-based tracks. “With A Stolen Red Lipstick Bible On Her Side” sports a lengthy piece presumably taken from an interview in which an old woman details her childhood wagon trip across America, complete with stories of encounters with Native American warriors and the murder of a farmer and his daughter. One track, “The Haunted Falls (Let Us Now Praise Harry Powell),” is entirely built from samples, and its 1:26 run time seems to be built entirely from gospel singing from The Night of the Hunter (Harry Powell being the sinister preacher who is the central character of that film, and who inexplicably announces himself, constantly, by singing gospel tunes.) Another sample, plopped near the beginning of “...I Came Down Here,” finds its speaker shift between detailing all of the things she'd change in the world (“I'd take every single hungry person and feed 'em, I'd take every single rich person and take away their money”) to discussing her own mortality (“After Kent State, I realized I could put on a cheerleader's sweater and an 'I Love America' pin and if he could even shoot, if he could even aim it wouldn't do me any good.”) These other voices lend humanity to the proceedings, peopling our post-apocalyptic world with more than the usual dust and echoes of post-rock and drone territory.

The one track on the album that I can't help but label a glaring misstep is the one simply titled “...” Barely classifiable as music except for the fact that it's bookended by tracks that are indeed music and it can't be seen to serve any other purpose, the average experience while listening to this track will be 3:21 spent trying to decide what's going on (and if you illegally downloaded the album, that time will be spent trying to figure out if the version you grabbed was somehow corrupted.) The only audible sounds seem to be recorded through the wall of another room, or on a hill in a brisk wind, and the only explanation for the track's inclusion on an album would seem to be either that the band was pressed for time in finding an eleventh track or that the recording itself had such a special significance to the band that they felt the need to include it despite the fact that it's barely listenable and that you'll probably think the album has stopped entirely if you're not listening through headphones.

This is by no means a perfect album, and it may frustrate those without the patience to sit through a 65-minute drone/folk/post-rock survival course, but it offers such a unique experience, as well as one that I keep coming back to, that I highly suggest an examination of the full range of its charms before you deem it not your cup of rare, scavenged Tetley tea bags.