Endless Serpent Column

Perry and Gerrard continued to experiment and improve with The Serpent's Egg, as much a leap forward as Spleen and Ideal was some years previously. As with that album, The Serpent's Egg was heralded by an astounding first track, "The Host of Seraphim."

Dead Can Dance - The Serpent's Egg (1988)
1st German Pressing 1988
EAC AccurateRip | FLAC, IMG+CUE, LOG | 199,2 MB | Complete Scans (300 dpi) | 23,1 MB
Modern Classical, Gothic, Ethnic Fusion, Ambient | Label: 4.A.D./Rough Trade | Catalog Number: RTD CD 92 | Time: 36:10 | RAR | RS.com

Perry and Gerrard continued to experiment and improve with The Serpent's Egg, as much a leap forward as Spleen and Ideal was some years previously. As with that album, The Serpent's Egg was heralded by an astounding first track, "The Host of Seraphim." Its use in films some years later was no surprise in the slightest – one can imagine the potential range of epic images the song could call up – but on its own it's so jaw-droppingly good that almost the only reaction is sheer awe. Beginning with a soft organ drone and buried, echoed percussion, Gerrard then takes flight with a seemingly wordless invocation of power and worship – her vocal control and multi-octave range, especially towards the end, has to be heard to be believed. Nothing else achieves such heights, but everything gets pretty darn close, a deserved testament to the band's conceptual reach and abilities. Slow plainsong chants such as "Orbis De Ignis" mix with the harpischord and overlaid vocals of "The Writing on My Father's Hand" and the slow build and sweep of "In the Kingdom of the Blind the One-Eyed Are Kings." Two of Perry's finest vocal moments occur here. The first, "Severance," is a slow, organ/keyboard led number that showcases his rich, warm vocals exquisitely – it's no wonder that Bauhaus chose to cover it some years later on its reunion tour. "Ullyses," the album's closing track, makes for a fine ending as much as "The Host of Seraphim" did an opening, Perry's delivery almost like a reading from a holy book, the arrangement of strings and percussion rhythmic, addictive and lovely. AMG

Melodic death metal with female voice from Finland

The fifth full-length album from Portland, OR-based black-ish metal band Agalloch, The Serpent & The Sphere, opens with a 10-and-a-half-minute track called “Birth And Death Of The Pillars Of Creation,” and it is a mindfuck. The song spends some three and a half minutes laboriously building from near-total silence, and upon finally hitting its groove, it proceeds for the next seven goddamn minutes at like 56BPM — a rhythm you might describe as “adagio” or “deliberate” or “glacial.” Frontman John Haughm’s lead vocals are mostly whispered, his rhythm guitar track is entirely acoustic; there’s some portentous plainsong chanting, and at numerous points, components of the already spare instrumentation peel away, leaving only one or two pieces in play, as if the song is buckling under its own enormous weight. It reminds me a lot of the elegant and deeply depressive funeral doom made by Australia’s Mournful Congregation (or Agalloch’s Profound Lore labelmates Loss, from Nashville), although it doesn’t attempt to wring quite the same powerful drama from those sonic elements. It’s not a difficult song, exactly — it’s rather refined and beautiful-sounding, in fact — but on first blush, as an opening track and inaugural statement, it makes no fucking sense.

Coffin Birth, the new death metal band featuring Hour of Penance guitarist Giulio Moschini, bassist Marco Mastrobuono and drummer Davide Billia, Fleshgod Apocalypse guitarist Francesco Paoli and Beheaded vocalist Frank Calleja, will release their debut album The Serpent Insignia on November 30. The album is some serious HM-2 death metal, though maybe a touch less Swedish than you're used to and a lot more in the vein of the bands whose members comprise Coffin Birth.

At the heart of 'Serpent Power,' the second full length from Celestial Trax (born Joni Judén), lives an organic entity; its sounds roll over the listener like an unknown weather pattern. The intoxicating textures and strange dimensions are designed to cultivate the imagination away from screens: it is music for the journey inward, an ode to stillness. It models itself after the unpredictable yet harmonious sequencing of the natural world. Stepping away from the exhausting, hyper-saturated cyber-dystopia we've been thrust into, 'Serpent Power' envisions a world where technologies aren't aimed at our brains and our souls in order paralyze and control us. Instead, they’ve been modeled after nature in order to elevate us…