Spiritual Warfare & the Greasy Shadows - Ad Hoc - VINYL LP

One of the things that struck Oberst as he and the band went through twenty-plus years of music is that he may in fact have been writing the same song this whole time. Not sonically, of course, but conceptually. This last wave contains, in Noise Floor, early Bright Eyes songs so raw Oberst never even released them back in the day, as well as, in Cassadaga and The People's Key, the band's most polished and sophisticated albums. When Bright Eyes toured Cassadega they performed an epic 7 sold-out nights at NYC's Town Hall. What's more grown-up rockstar than that? And yet...InchThematically those early songs are not that different than the songs I make now,Inch Oberst says, shaking his head. InchThere's something affirming and disheartening about it. It's like, have I really changed or grown? But maybe it's just that I knew what I wanted to write about from the beginning.Inch

Spectral Voice's Sparagmos unfolds as a momentous second full-length offering under the banner of Dark Descent Records, marking the culmination of a period devoted to katabatic immersion into the material. The title itself, alluding to the Dionysian rite of being torn limb from limb, sets the stage for a profound exploration of life, death, and the untamed essence within.InchThe content of the album oscillates between lamentation and exaltation. An immersive, morbid atmosphere of funereality longs for the liberation of death and mourns the agony of life. Coupled with moments of frenetic madness, grandeur, terror and ecstasy, the point we are trying to get to is the moment in which-through sacrifice-atavistic wildness is unleashed, and the ultimate exaltation of life through death is realized,Inch reflects drummer /vocalist E. Wendler. Influences drawn from the esoteric realms of death, black, doom metal, dark ambient, and arcane literature converge to shape Spectral Voice's most realized manifestation. Featuring the sonic prowess of M. Kolontyrsky (guitar), P. Riedl (guitar), and J. Barrett (bass)-also of Blood Incantation fame-alongside the drummer / vocalist E. Wendler, Spectral Voice weave a sonic tapestry with a level of excellence that surpasses even their own formidable standards. Sparagmos unquestionably stands as a definitive death metal highlight of 2024.

Following 2019's acclaimed self-titled debut album, Metal Preyers take the left hand path into a gloomy backwater filled with haunted creatures and fraught with peril. InchShadow SwampsInch again finds London-based Jesse Hackett handling the music and Chicago's Mariano Chavez fashioning the album's visual identity, which this time includes a short film and book for a fully immersive experience. InchShadow SwampsInch is the soundtrack to a pitch-black fairy tale about a father and daughter as they journey through a swamp avoiding gremlins, red swines and crater creatures. Musically, it pivots between the clattering Czech new wave experimentation of InchValerie and her Week of WondersInch composer Luboš Fišer, or the magical, eccentric lounge of Birmingham's Broadcast, and the grinding industrial grot of Italian pioneer Maurizio Bianchi. This time around, Hackett has roped in production assists from his six year-old-daughter wonder Nyasha hackett who used phone memos to record herself singing - veteran Metal Preyers collaborator Lord Tusk, and Manchester-based painter, DJ and producer Richard Harris, aka Sockethead. The crew inks an unsettling, richly textured sonic landscape, with claws of rhythmic smoke curling around chiming otherworldly xylophone, disembodied fiddle drones echoing over screwed 'n chopped beatbox dirt and half-heard magical vocals buried under clouds of white noise.