Tongues - Hreilia (2017)

I listen to and enjoy droves of metal records each years, across a wide spread of the subgenres, but few and far between are those that can even for a few minutes deliver me some sort of a genuine creep factor. The full-length debut of Denmark's Tongues is one such case, a highly atmospheric black metal experience which effectively weaves in elements of doom and death metal to create an experience which alternates between haunting, paranoid and frenzied. While there are a lot of bands experimenting with hybrids of these stylistic niches, Hreilia succeeds where so many others falter or plane out because these gentlemen are masters of scripting simplistic but hypnotic guitars and bass grooves that bore down through your temples into your memory box.

I could tell you that I picked up fragments of Canadian alienists Antediluvian or Mitochondrion here, or perhaps scraps of the dissonant French masters Blut Aus Nord and Deathspell Omega, and all of that would be true; but the psychedelic submission and trauma of Finland's Oranssi Pazuzu is perhaps the closest equivalent, though Tongues don't rely strictly on such exotic walls of atonal sheen in terms of songwriting. Hreilia is intelligently set up by the slow, evil, subliminal grooving of the track "Perennial Waves", behind which you can make out all manner of scaling and falling ambiance that gives the impression you're in the wake of some midnight atrocity, the victims' remains cooling around you, bathing in the lunar rays, much like the cover. The album can grow much more savage, with faster blasted parts that rely on busier progressions of chords, but it's generally the rule that the material remains slower or mid-pace, extremely bewitching and atmospheric, and they play around more with the riffing structures and bass lines that actually matter, while using a guttural lead vocal as a constant that helps rein in and bind the material to a sense of bleak oppression.

Synthesizers are used tastefully throughout, whether in some of the shorter instrumental pieces or to accent the metal components with heightened, fell grace. They also use a saranji, an incredibly atmospheric Eastern stringed instrument which by itself can create all manner of depth and drama, and it balances off against the harsher sections of the albums smoothly. The mix is a fraction oblique, sacrificing polish for a more dingy and alien feel that better serves the blend of instruments, but this all works really well as a package alongside the crude, creepy colors of the artwork and the arcane symmetry of the band's logo, or the imagery of cosmic/weird horror and dread which permeates the lyrics. One of the strongest and most sinister new voices I've heard on both the Danish scene and the I, Voidhanger roster in some time, Hreilia is a record which is not immediately impenetrable, but still picks up accumulative value the more you listen through it, with its spooky and subduing licks that massage and violate your mind in equal measure. Euthanasia for happiness.

Verdict: Epic Win [9/10] (seraphs become larvae)

https://www.facebook.com/tungerne

Tongues - Thelésis Ignis EP (2014)

Unwilling to conceal themselves completely under one genre or the other, Denmark's Tongues straddle the border between the death and black metal genres, the former coming through largely in the growled vocals, the latter via the blasted drumming element and spurts of rollicking, warlike chords whipped up into a frenzy I imagined to be redolent of the mid 90s fervor of a number of their European forebears, whether as 'A-list' as Mayhem or lesser revolutionary like Belgium's Enthroned. What separates this duo from the usual grist for the mill, however, is the very organic tone which they've applied to their guitars, as well as the atmospheric and wildly unpredictable liberties taken within their compositions. Obeying the rules here, shattering them elsewhere, Thelésis Ignis is, if not a masterpiece, then at least a lesson in see-sawing between expectations and experimentation.

It's not so avant-garde as to slap you in the face, but Tongues likes to fuck around with both purely ambient passages and those created by dropping out the steady thrum of metallic percussion to let a few guitars drudge on in desolate oblivion, or to implement all these strange, atonal zipping guitars and dissonant chords which don't always seem to align themselves so closely with the firmer rhythm guitar riffs found elsewhere in the tracks. Not to mention how the vocals bounce back and forth between the aforementioned guttural, lots of layered howls, trad black metal rasps and then some really gruesome exhibitions of excess as early as the first tune "Void Meditation", a 10-minute piece through which most of the ideas I've already mentioned are cycled, but was also ironically the one I enjoyed the least here. "The Will of Fire" has more a more compelling, irreverent structure where the riffs are a lot more interesting, the vocals meshed into these patterns where they howl above the fray like someone having left a window open at night in a hillside asylum when the wind picked up. "Last Grip of the Hand of Guilt" pursues a more disjointed, doom-laden pace with these huge backing guitars that fuzz out at the top of their frequencies...

And the closer, "Bloodline of the Blind" is this yawning, apocryphal ambient piece with droning, deep vocal incantations and a wonderfully wrought palette of backing sounds, steady drips and tones that seem as if I'm listening to them in some extradimensional cathedral. That deep gut-felt vocal does grow monotonous, but that was actually hands down my favorite part of the album, to the point that I almost wished they'd distributed more of this ambient bliss throughout the longer metal cuts. But either way, Thelésis Ignis is far more interesting than your usual cut & paste Scandinavian black/death, with a resonant, fulfilling but unnerving production to it which doesn't necessarily obscure it's more subtle touches, but gives you plenty to think about on multiple listens. The riffs were a little mixed in quality, some compelling and some blander and less rewarding, but I mentioned the two bands in the first paragraph for a good reason: if you enjoyed the weirder deviation the former explored on records like Ordo ad Chao/Esoteric Warfare, or the more recent, atmospheric iteration of the long-standing Belgian fiends, or maybe even some of the stranger output of the last decade's Swedish black metal orthodoxy, then these are Tongues worth wagging.

Verdict: Win [7.25/10]

https://tongues1.bandcamp.com/