#Signal Rex

[drondskaath]

Svart | Relentless Downfall | 2024

Italian Symphonic Black Metal

Artwork by Sözo Tozö

[dustedmagazine]

Mons Veneris — Ascent into Draconian Abyss (Signal Rex)

Lock up the communion wine and cover those tender orifices (earholes included), Mons Veneris is back. If you are as delighted by that news as this reviewer, maybe seek help. But also seek out this record and play it, at excessive volumes. Doing so won’t make you a better person, or a happier or a healthier one. Repeated exposure to Ascent into Draconian Abyss will likely garner opposing results: worse, more miserable, more disturbed. But we should note that those words also describe the general condition of the earthball and most of its inhabitants. Somehow the music of Mons Veneris — black metal that manages to be traditionalist and utterly singular at the same time, no small feat — keeps creeping in from the margins, and along that trajectory it ascends closer to the light of day, which is increasingly difficult to distinguish from Nietzsche’s infamous abyss.

So it’s apt that Ascent into Draconian Abyss seems to stare back, with unabating truculence and bizarre intensity. The Portuguese band doesn’t ease you in: the opening, title track is a 20-plus minute experience, modulating from strangely primal chanting in its first 50 seconds; through long expanses of elemental, more-and-less recognizable black metal riffage (though still afflicted with some of that primal, mournful chanting and moaning); into angular eddies and even slightly more conventional song forms, which threaten to resolve into black’n’roll (to be sure, Mons Veneris has a strong taste for obscenity, but let’s not get carried away). Mostly though, “Ascent into Draconian Abyss” seems to dramatize that very thing — a hard climb, an endurance contest with dread, which ends up dropping you into a psychologically fraught void.

When you finally clear those 20-odd minutes — and are extricating yourself from that void — “Whisperers of the Plague” seems to restate the first track’s main riff and rhythmic structure. It’s dispiriting; do we have to do this all over again? But the band is just messing with us. The riff eventually mutates and the following 16 minutes get progressively stranger. There are the musical equivalent of mechanical failures, spates of more demented chanting and the band even permits itself a sort of guitar solo (which is as alarmingly ugly as you might suspect it would be).

But it’s in the final song, “Chant to the Unknown,” that things get really weird. After the foregoing 38 minutes, the song’s dalliances with hummable melody and conventional aesthetics are disorienting, even transgressive. Because it’s Mons Veneris, those dalliances are counteracted by echoing, off-kilter pulsations of guitar, which add dizziness to the disorientation. Even standing on dry land, you’ll feel a little seasick. Just as you achieve better footing, the music falls away, and washes of electronic noise, a fogbank of sound, drift in and envelope you. You get lost all over again, and you start looking for signs of that aforementioned ascent. Good luck: the fog is pretty thick. And what’s that smell? Sulphur? Is this stuff mist or smoke? We both know the answer to that. It’s a Mons Veneris record: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here….”

Jonathan Shaw

[columnistfromtheabyss]

Review: Izrod – Sarejevski Odisej (Signal Rex)

My review of Izrod's outstanding debut, Sarejevski Odisej, written for Heavy Music HQ:

Over the past decade, and a little more, Bosnia and Herzegovina has been one of the black metal hotspots in the Balkans and southeast Europe. From Sarajevo, Izrod are also part of this region’s colossal black metal wave. Their debut album, Sarajevski Odisej, is a grand spectacle of the decadence and collapse of a world that is sinking day by day into depression and degenerate darkness.

Sarajevski Odisej, which translates to “Odysseus of Sarajevo,” not only narrates the fatigues and sufferings of the war left on the body of the capital, but also portrays global decadence, absurdity, and the reflections of distressed human who clings to every rope for survival. It’s a dark, wrathful and nihilistic musical odyssey that pours the two worlds of Polish and Swedish black metal into one goblet and produces a poisonous potion. Sarajevski Odisej is one of the thought-provoking and finest black metal albums of the year.

Rating: 4/5

[rexwrendraws]

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Prices vary depending on the complexity of the request— minimum is USD $30 for lineart single character bust! Find the full base price list HERE (all prices in USD)!

My commission slots are rolling, but I'll only work on max 3 at the same time, so be sure to check the most recent commission status post on my blog to make sure there are slots open before reaching out!

💥 ALL INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND HERE— Please read through the entire page (all general rules, agreement, payment info, etc) before reaching out to me! If you have any questions, feel free to DM me!

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If you don't want to commission me but want to support me, please consider dropping me a tip on my Ko-fi! And consider reblogging this post! Thank you!

[womenofswzine]

⭐ Meet our contributors! ⭐ Introducing @rackcty as one of our rebel page artists!

[celadons-penultimate]

' BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS ', except Jace Fox is the Batman in question, Cassandra Cain is Batgirl instead of Orphan & the team is closer to working together like equals, rather than one guy being the leader.

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[deinobi]

Hello,👋

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[im-no-jedi]

the Feelings™ these images give me... 😩

bonus, I never realized they looked at each other before running off 🥺

[spark-circuit]

HAPPY HALLOWEEN ULTRAKILL ENJOYERS, NEW REX VANCANDY COVER DROPPED 🎉

[dustedmagazine]

Mons Veneris —  Excesses of Perpetual Gloom (Signal Rex)

The band just can’t help itself. Even when Mons Veneris wants to make some more or less conventional black metal, the players’ inherent madness wins out, and the resulting music is uncomfortably weird, demonic in ways that other Satanic bands that seem to really mean it can only envy —  if envy is the right word. This reviewer wonders what sorts of psychological disorder are required to make music so convincingly unhinged. Perpetual Gloom? More like excesses of permanent psychosis.

Those points noted, for those who like this sort of noise, Mons Veneris is reliably terrific (in the old-school sense of that term), and this new EPdelivers. The pace of its three tracks skews from undulating blasts to mid-tempo shambles, none of it particularly precise but always compelling in its dips and eddies and instances of near collapse. Unlike the band’s last two proper records, Inversados d’Um Abismo de Podridao and the mostly improvised Misterios Satanicos Disformes Infernales (split LPs and shorter records emanate from the band with discomfiting regularity —  these dudes are prolific in direct proportion to the intensity of their disturbance), Excesses of Perpetual Gloom features a standard array of black metal instrumentation and embraces the traditional concept of the tremolo riff. Like the figure on the record sleeve, who rolls in some paroxysm of booze-and-rawk induced frenzy, the songs engage the genre’s archetypes and essential forms.

But it’s still a Mons Veneris record, and the ghastly growls are matched by arch falsetto shrieks, the shuffle in the rhythm of “The Faceless Horror’s Mirror” is punctuated by demented, sing-song guitar notes. That song, the EP’s best, builds to a frothing crescendo about three minutes in, followed by an atmospheric section with an organ that sounds like it was recorded in some remote Iberian grotto. Most black metal bands would cut back in with big guitars and blasts, seeking conventional catharsis. Mons Veneris lets the organ move into a dominant position, still submerged in mordant echo. It assumes an increasingly mournful resonance, repeating a simple melody with monomaniacal insistence. After a long time, it fades. It’s creepy, and effective, and unexpected. We shouldn’t be surprised. It’s a Mons Veneris song.

Jonathan Shaw

[wipbigbang]

WIP BIG BANG SIGN-UPS ARE LIVE!

The 2024 round of WIP Big Bang is now open for sign-ups! Any fandom is welcome, as long as the fic is 500 completed so far and will be at least 7,500 words upon its finishing. Signing up is easy: just fill out the form linked below after you read the FAQ and take a look at the schedule.

[digirainebow]

"oh, and i'll see you at christmas. i pop out a little early."

[ghostsessioned]

my troubles are all over, & i am at home.

[celadons-penultimate]

@ DC Comics: BLACK LIGHTNING AND THE OUTSIDERS (creative team- my dreams! 😭):

-Black Lightning

-Dr. Lynn Stewart

-Thunder & Lightning

-Rain

-Grace Choi

-Signal / Duke Thomas

-TC / Baron

-Issa Williams

-Brandon Marshall

-Painkiller / Khalil Payne

-Metamorpho

-Katana

-The Creeper

[nefarious-616-necromancer]