Hypertension Records has started a very special project called The Abyss Stares Back, a series of 5 splits lp’s, each featuring exclusive tracks on one side by artists like Nihill, Primitive Man and Scott Kelly, and on the other side Belgian powerhouses like Amenra, Drums Are For Parades, Hessian, Mathieu Vandekerckhove (Amenra, Syndrome), Vvovnds and Alkerdeel…now, CVLT Nation have been given the unreal honor of streaming #1, featuring AMENRA & VVOVNDS. All I can say is that this record will transport your being to other realms of reality, where ethereal emotions turn into soaring dragons flying through black clouds. Both bands bring their A game and will make you want this vinyl so you can blast it for all the rest of your days! Now press play below and allow yourself to hold on to your sonic future!…Much respect due to Hypertension Records, AMENRA & VVOVNDS…
“The flat lands, my hometown, skin,” is how lauded photographer Willy Vanderperre described
the feelings evoked by Amenra’s music, after working with the Belgian quintet for the
mindblowing video of ‘A Mon Âme’. It’s a statement that aptly demonstrates the several
dimensions on which the band’s profoundly affecting songs move – on one hand, vast and
dauntingly sparse like a West Flanders landscape, on the other hand intimate and deeply organic
like flakes from frontman Colin H Van Eeckhout’s own skin as he scratches and wounds himself
during Amenra’s harrowing live performances. Amenra is one of the few bands that I treat with
absolute reverence. Even after decades of listening to hours of music daily, every new release or
live event by this band holds the same kind of exhilirating anticipation as it did when I first laid
down a needle on a round, black piece of vinyl. They touch upon something primal, something
real and timeless, like a different beast that is unleashed every time they play a note. The songs
on this release focus on the quieter, more atmospherically sinister side of the band’s sound, but
they hit as hard as any shrieking, electrically-charged moment. Dive in. (José Carlos Santos)
It starts with the name itself. VVOVNDS. Wounds, but not really. Like wounds seen through a
smudgy lens, or maybe inflicted by the shards of that broken smudgy lens. And the caps, why? Is
it screaming? Like, all the time? Nothing is obvious because nothing stays for long enough to
become obvious. Urgency, violence, the speed of dirt, “swallowing nails // spitting riffs”, as
VVOVNDS themselves put it, or dreaming really fast, as Bill Murray would.
That’s the only way to describe the punk of VVOVNDS, with broken shards of descriptions, scraps
of half-formed ideas, quick words before it’s all gone. Like their name, they leave things simple,
their boots firmly planted in the roots of the hardcore punk genre, but nevertheless taking it to its
(il)logical extreme point, adding powerviolence and blackened sludgy sonic hatred to form a
particularly harsh cocktail. Names get lost and become meaningless among the chaos, but bass
player KJM does stand out for his crucial role in the origins of Amenra, acting as the decisive link
betwen the two bands in this release, which features five doses of pure razor-sharp hatred,
mastered and mixed by Will Killingsworth, to counterpoint Amenra’s sombre, contemplative side.
(José Carlos Santos)
