Lurker of Chalice Lurker of Chalice (Southern Lord)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I’ve gotten better at describing that sort of record, but I still have a hard time anticipating where the next one’s coming from. In retrospect I should’ve expected it from Wrest, a one-man black-metal juggernaut from San Francisco who’s been recording as Leviathan since the late 90s. Wrest clearly has a more fertile and restless imagination than most of his peers. Under the name Lurker of Chalice he’s put out a couple cassette-only releases that show off his (relatively) lighter, more intimate side, and his first full-length under that moniker sold out almost immediately when it came out on Total Holocaust earlier this year. Southern Lord rereleased the CD in August, and this month it announced the release of a vinyl-only version with an extra track. Southern Lord’s sold out of the CD; the vinyl sold out in preorders. (Locally, at press time Metal Haven had CDs in stock and Reckless had the vinyl.)
The ringing guitar tone in the surging, stormy parts of “Piercing Where They Might” has more than a whiff of early Bauhaus about it, which means a certain bloody-minded archness isn’t far behind. Gurgly baby-demon noises? Wind chimes? Echo-laden spoken-word interludes laid over plains of dreamy synths? Oh Wrest, you rake! On “Granite” he merges a cliched morass of kick drum with some incongruous goth rock and makes even that work, sounding a bit like Fields of the Nephilim.
