Golem – Eternity: The Weeping Horizons
This album has developed a small following over the years but from the ridiculous cover artwork to the irrelevant intro and outro from ‘Le Sacre Du Printemps‘, it’s difficult to understand why. The actual music is no greater indicator, although there are flashes of potential in the songwriting, which echoes more of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok than it does Stravinsky. From pulsing but uniform rhythmic basis emerges melodies of varying complexities like Ceremony’s ‘Tyranny From Above‘, although it’s being punched out by the same AI that must have been responsible for the computerised approximation of Death Metal called ‘Dreams of the Carrion Kind‘ by Disincarnate. As with James Murphy‘s band, Golem have a generic sense of logic behind each riff progression, where the contextual dynamics of mood and tempo totally nullify the sense that there’s any idea behind the compositions, at least any worth listening out for. Add to this sterile formulation some really uninspiring rhythmic filler and you have a largely disappointing album.
Profanity – Slaughtering Thoughts
If you’re one of those deranged masochists who listens to Death Metal for the audial desecration of the senses that it can inflict, no matter how much you end up panicking to turn down the volume before your brain finally explodes, then Profanity might be one of the more tastefully executed methods of phrenocide. ‘Slaughtering Thoughts’ follows from the structuralism and down-tuned aesthetic of Morpheus Descends ‘Ritual of Infinity‘, but add to this the intensity of percussion and spiralling riff-work of Sinister and you have an album that steps out of the adipocere of decomposition and into the chaos of a sonic vortex. Like trapping a tornado inside a test-tube, this album captures the tumult of the mind in a world of illusions, based on the fragmentary nature of perception, creating a whirlpool of thoughts that veil the impersonal reality beyond. Sporadic outbursts of unexplainable lead guitars heighten the mental frustration, but with a kind of resolute beauty in trying to break free, creating patterns that would resemble the cracked and bleeding glass of its experimental, symbolic container, before being swept up in the almost ambient madness. All this brutality and not much groove nor a single breakdown in sight, this is the right music to attack your brain with and tear down all its worthless, mortal thoughts.
Filed under: Death Metal Music Reviews — Tags: Brutal Death Metal, Death Metal, German Death Metal, Modernism — ObscuraHessian @ April 8, 2010 13:52 — Comments (0)
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