As the cold breath of fall creeps down our necks, and the lantern light from carved gourds glints and flickers around us like the leering gaze of mischievous sprites, you may find it appropriate to invoke a spirit to guide your journey into the depths of winter.
Halloween is the time of year when we acknowledge such transitions—from harvest time into the slumber of the wintertide, from days that dawn for the toil of the wakeful and living, to long evenings of heavy twilight reserved for the return of the dead. To observe the crossing of such a threshold, rituals are required, and there is no better rite to pay tribute to the Earth, and those who now reside within its keep, than the recitation of songs. And do New Orlean’s Mehenet ever have a songbook for such an occasion!
Mehenet have performed a highly visceral form of black metal from their earliest releases on through to their most recent album for Gilead Media, Ng’ambu. Their debut album, 2018’s Dii Inferi, sought deeper and more powerful connections to the spirit world through what they described as “satanic terrorism” realized through the practice of Thelmenistic philosophy.
Conversely, Ng’ambu takes as its chalice of inspiration the Afro-Brazillian nature worship of Quimbanda, invoking the spirits of that tradition in both an act of communion and one of solicitation—bidding them to visit chaos and fire upon the modern world. Despite the band’s seeming, and at times, even gracious, overtures to a shared human connection through land and common ancestry, at its core, Ng’ambu is an act of refined, spiritual antagonism.
Case in point, the ecstatic violence of closer “The Mystery of Nations,” which has the somatic energy of having been swept up and nearly drowned in a choppy current of blood and otherworldly angst, and was (allegedly) inspired by the experience of drinking out of a Confederate soldier’s skull in a ceremony calculated to turn the source of their enemy’s strength against them.
Needless to say, Ng’ambu is a weird album—both in the contemporary parlance and also in the older meaning, as in something that owes its origins to witchcraft. The song as incantation is never more apparent than on the eerie lash of the vampiric melodies and guiltlessly vengeful clean singing exhibited on the latter half of “In the Garden of Suicide,” but the absolutely physical nature of the grooves on “Dona Sete,” along with the way that the frantic riffs feel like they are clawing at the ground, in an exhaustive binge and attempt to breach the Earth’s mantle in order to unleash vomitous scourge of vengeance and all-consuming magma, leaves little doubt about the band’s intentions elsewhere.
Not every spirit you call upon needs to be of the rueful variety. Maybe you need some companionship to ward off the cold, or you have some desire or want of the heart that needs to be fulfilled. But if by chance you feel threatened by an intolerant and wicked world, you may just find the emissary of blight you need in folds of Ng’ambu—a charm of retribution that contains a fury that has been steeping in the soil beneath your feet for centuries.
You can buy and stream Ng’ambu below via Bandcamp:
Ng’ambu is out via Gilead Media.
