Départe - Failure, Subside

As soon as the album started I knew this was going to be a good one. There were a couple of surprises, but the introduction doesn’t lie about where this record is going.

As an avid fan of catastrophic black metal such as Plebeian Grandstand (which have a very similar feeling at some moments), the opening was a welcome apocalypse of guitar noise to my ears. As soon as the vocals hit, I instantly saw a dying, tortured man dressed in rags. The cymbal work caught my ear, and the man behind the kit knows what he’s doing. More about him later.

Clean vocals come into play after a couple of minutes, and took me by surprise. I was hoping they wouldn’t be there – I often find they’re out of place – but by the middle of my first listen I was converted. They’re not eerie at all, it’s more of a melancholic hopelessness, which works with the way the album’s written. It’s worth noting the singer’s range is also quite decent, managing to hit those rare lower octaves.

While the songs themselves have dynamics, one could reduce them to “just” being crescendos. However, it’s the way the album itself is written that is more interesting. It almost feels like narrative composition, during which hope is lost and mourned for, anger follows and a challenger finally ends it all. The album takes place in a desolate forest with a reverberating mist suffocating every sound, and the listener is completely lost and terrified from start to end.

None of this takes away from the individual songs themselves – the dissonance is constant and beautiful in its own way. As the album progresses, there seem to be more and more layers of guitar, which end up enveloping you like an icy blanket.

On a tangential note, the album cover’s style is reminiscent of Celeste – artistic black & white shots without text, even though they are missing the characteristic girl’s face.

Giuseppe Fitzsimmons

Comments

Sulphurous - Dolorous Death Knell

Sulphurous – Dolorous Death Knell December 2018 – Dark Descent Records 90s revival and cavernous death metal started gaining popularity about two years ago, with bands such as Phrenelith and Pissgrave being propelled into quasi-mainstream success thanks to a couple of public figures introducing their audiences to an otherwise relatively underground facet of death metal. Dark Descent Records have certainly capitalized on said revival, signing giants of the genre like Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice, and previously Chthe’ilist (and Mitochondrion to a certain degree). As with any other cavernous death metal record, the production is the first thing you’ll notice – it’s all suffocated, as if the amps were draped in thick curtains. Few effects and no triggers are applied to the drums, giving the whole package a very live/practice room aspect. Despite the apparent muddiness of Dolorous Death Knell, everything’s quite audible – even the lower registers somehow retain

Kataplexia – The Rise of the Unknown

Kataplexia – The Rise of the Unknown January 2019 – Rotten Music Kataplexia is Finland's best Indonesian brutal death metal band. You read that right, Indonesian is now a valid qualifier for brutal death metal. For those unaware, I explored and wrote about the Southeast Asian brutal death metal scene two years ago, discovering a gigantic scene with an uncharacteristic public acceptance. One of the members of Jasad began a side-project, Kaluman, which is the definition of high-quality Southeast Asian brutal death metal. A couple seconds into Kataplexia's latest, I expected to see Rottervore or Extreme Souls as their label, as every element pointed towards Indonesian origins – the tone, production, vocals, riffs and even album art all felt like Ferli Suferli (Jasad, Kaluman) was behind the project, yet Helsinki is listed as their base of operations. Admittedly, there's only so much one can actually say about the music without endless comparisons. A modern

Uboa, the interview

UG You’ve gone over the “Jouissance” title in the past. Would you mind going over Coma Wall? It’s got quite grave and final undertones. First, Coma Wall has no totalised meaning for me, but death of the author could suggest otherwise. But there are themes. The Coma Wall, also known as the CfA2 Great Wall, is a galactic filament - thread-like structures composed millions of galaxies - of and one of the largest structures in the observable universe. It’s 750 million ly high x 200 million ly in width x 16 million ly in thickness. There are few structures bigger than it before you get to the “End of Greatness”, where the universe no longer is seen in discernible structures (filaments and voids, which combined look awfully organic, almost like clusters of interconnected neurones) and you get undifferentiated noise, like static on a TV or white noise. Basically, in cosmology, there seems to be an upper limit to how big things get before the universe seems to become pure undifferentia

Undergrind Metal

Search This Blog