Avant-garde metal acts land at Berkeley's Cornerstone
BERKELEY -- One of the most forward-thinking metal bills currently touring the U.S. comes to the Cornerstone in Berkeley Friday when daring black metal meets gospel band Zeal and Ardor is joined by Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Sylvaine and NYC experimentalists Imperial Triumphant.
Led by Swiss-American guitarist/singer Manuel Gagneux, the experimental group builds its unusual sound on the collision of black metal with traditional gospel and blues. Raised by an African-American mother and a Swiss father who were both musicians, Gagneux initially listened to more extreme sounds including grindcore, techincal and death metal as a youth, but got his start making indie pop in the band Hellelujah before moving to New York City and founding the chamber pop project Birdmask.
He would start Zeal and Ardor as a musical exercise after suggestions on a 4chan discussion board led him to try and combine black metal with early blues and spirituals. Gagneux would later say the resulting sounds were intended to answer the question, "What if Black American slaves embraced Satan instead of Jesus?" After releasing a number of one-man recordings online, the musician recorded the group's acclaimed eponymous 2016 debut.
The success of that album led him to recruit a full band including multiple back-up singers to replicate the group's gospel-choir sound when recording the follow-up effort, Stranger Fruit. That album earned another round of high praise two years later as Gagneux and company became a popular live attraction with prominent appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands and Psycho Las Vegas in the U.S. The band also released an in-concert document in 2019, Live in London, which perfectly captured their intense stage show.
While the pandemic would keep the group off the road, in 2020 Gagneux released some of his most political songs yet with the Wake the Nation EP, a recording that was in direct response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and the unrest that erupted across the country in response.
The band's self-titled third album came out earlier this year and continued to expand Zeal and Ardor's musical palette with elements of hip hop and electronica, shoegaze and industrial added to Gagneux's black-metal gospel template. The band returns to the Bay Area to headline Berkeley's Cornerstone Friday night to close out their headlining tour with a pair of equally bold support acts before performing at Aftershock 2022 in Sacramento Saturday. Norwegian black metal multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Sylvaine (aka Kathrine Shepard) has established herself as a leading figure on the Scandinavian scene with her mix of classically influenced arrangements, choral vocals, crushing guitar riffs and shoegaze drones. The diverse and frequently epic-length tunes heard on her third album Atoms Aligned Coming Undone made her the first female artist to be nominated for a Norwegian Grammy in the metal category. Her latest deeply personal effort Nova nods to the progressive-metal complexity of Opeth and the hypnotic sounds of Bay Area indie-metal mavericks Deafheaven.
Opening New York avant-metal outfit Imperial Triumphant was started by guitarist/vocalist Zachary Ilya Ezrin nearly two decades ago. A collision of experimental noise, avant-garde jazz, modern classical and progressive black metal, the masked and robed group also features monstrously talented drummer Kenny Grohowski (John Zorn, Secret Chiefs 3, Titans to Tachyons) and bassist/keyboardist Steve Blanco, but is usually augmented by numerous guest vocalists and musicians on studio recordings. The band employed a full horn section on its third album Vile Luxury in 2018, a release that helped establish the group as part of the leading edge of New York City's experimental metal movement and scored them a deal with Century Media. The band has been on a creative tear ever since, issuing a live recording and two new studio albums since the pandemic, including Alphaville in 2020 and last year's dizzying Spirit of Ecstasy which featured guest spots from guitarists Alex Skolnick (Testament) and Trey Spruance (Mr. Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3) and -- shockingly -- smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G.
Zeal & Ardor with Sylvaine and Imperial Triumphant
Friday, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. $22-$24
Cornerstone Berkeley
