Perfumed Saturnine Angels - Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind (2023)

I know Garry Brents as Gonemage, the music project that combines black metal with chiptune and it's as crazy as it sounds. The project conceived as a duo, now, after Brandon Nurick's passing, continues as Brents solo project with the debut album called Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind as a homage to Nurick's name.

While this time Brents doesn't use the electronica samples and, overall, sounds more "serious" for the metal music fans, his work still surprised me a lot. There is something in the quality of the sound (and particularly his vocals) that makes me feel like I've got hit in the head with the audio wave. It's loud and it's overwhelming in the best possible way. But the compositions are far from being homogeneous walls of noise: they are experimentally diverse with mathrock-like pace changes going from slow guitar-only passages to fast and angry, energy-fueled madness as rapidly as you can imagine. 

And I have to mention that: the cover art is at the god-tier level.

Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind costs whatever you want to pay.

Gonemage - Handheld Demise (2022)

Gonemage - Mystical Extraction (2021)

Check: Trash Judgement

Country: Texas, US

Genre: math black metal

Label: Zegema Beach Records

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Skyglow - Skyglow (2022)

The four-piece band from Germany, Skyglow, made their debut four years ago with a very promising self-titled debut EP. Finally, the time has come for the second release and they decided to go with... another EP called Skyglow, that's something I haven't seen before!

Also their music is shaped in a similar way: it's clear that the band know what they want to play and what emotions to evoke in the audience. The very much OG post-rock guitar-based melodic passages meet here with heavier, hard-rock-like guitar avalanches of sound. And so the listener enjoys a well-written and energetic composition only to get eventually lost within the realm of darker, more massive audio figures. Those changes of pace and atmosphere are what drives this music and what generates my excitement, especially in the pinnacle moments like the mathrock-like sections in Targ or the broken finish of Jaguar Floppy, very much in the 65daysofstatic style. The post-rock from the Germans is many things and combines a lot of sub-genres resulting in a work from the highest level of energetic entertainment.

Skyglow costs 6 EUR.

Skyglow - Skyglow (2018)

Check: Targ 

Country: Germany

Genre: mathrock post-rock

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Carmen Sea - HISS (2021)

Carmen Sea are from Paris and last autumn debuted with an album called HISS. Their rapid and surprising post-rock is bound to impress many fans of the genre, yours truly included. 

The EP begins with a chaotic and extremely energetic sounds of Frames that suggest a lot of mathrock influences. However, what clearly is the first thing one notices, is the involvement of violin sounds - not ones that are supposed to generate mystical or depressive atmosphere but ones that are pure energy and fun, folk-style. And when they lead the heavy guitars in experimental compositions, it's beyond impressive. Especially that there's also a good quantity of electronic effects involved (almost dub step-like in some places) - the chaos that's generated this way brings energy and strength to dance and/or destroy things around. It's even more surprising when in the album's finishing track, the long Glow in Space, the violin gets suddenly very artsy, almost as if taken from The Irrepressibles' works, only to get back to the band's signature madness after a while. I love it.

HISS costs 7 EUR.

Check: Frames 

Country: France

Genre: violin-led mathrock

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SEIMS - FOUR (2021)

Simeon Bartholomew is the conceptual leader of the Australian experimental post-rockers from SEIMS. The band bought me two years ago with their shorter album 3.1 and now they show their fourth, particularly crazy album. 

Although the release is advertised as mathrock drawing a lot from the music of 65daysofstatic and such, the first thing one notices about the band's music is the use of neoclassical instruments (violins and cellos). It's pretty special as they don't serve as only romantic ornaments, the whole compositions are based on them; there's little to none heavy guitar walls of noise; in this aspect, the Australians make extremely artsy and jazzy music. Of course the mathrock references are not a mistake here; those delicate instruments create a real madness here: the paces change, the melodies are subjective, the next part of a composition is anyone's guess. And this is all created by music that in many places feels practically orchestral (the louder parts of Stranded. Isolated. for instance) and less frequently, surprisingly guitar-heavy (Biting Tongues and The Mountain's Scream).

The album was mixed and mastered by people from the very top of the Australian post-rock society and it can be felt in the music's quality. The album is said to include their most "engaging and hypnotic material" to date and it surely feels the most experimental, one the artists had a lot of fun when making. And judging by their modus operandi, I can bet money on that the next album will be titled V.

FOUR  costs 10 AUD.

SEIMS - 3.1 (2019)

Check: Biting Tongues

Country: Australia

Genre: artsy mathrock

Label: Art As Catharsis

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Colision - Lost Ghosts, Vol. 1 (2021)

Two years after showing an extremely interesting debut album HEALING IS NOT LINEAR, the French band Colision (watch for the spelling) are back with a new EP that includes some quality noisy guitar sounds and dreamy loudness of the best kind. Let's try Lost Ghosts, Vol. 1.

The EP is so short it could as well be a single or perhaps a part of something bigger, like the title suggests. It features music kept in similar vibes as the previous album - psychedelically diverse approach to noisy genres like shoegaze, noise rock, etc. The guitar sounds are extremely heavy, ready to crush the audience at any time but also have these smooth vibes that characterize more shoegaze-only artists like 93millionmilesfromthesun for instance. Also the dispersed, hidden and very ethereal vocals point in this direction. However, the compositions have something wild about them. The pace changes all the time as do the ideas what a particular track is about. It's not the chaos of mathrock but definitely some influences there, especially that there are also more furious, metal-like vocals in the backgrounds, adding up to the eclectic ethereality of the compositions. 

Lost Ghosts, Vol. 1 costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: swim while it rains 

Country: France

Genre: mathrock shoegaze

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