Cruciamentum: Obsidian Refractions
Out 24th November on Profound Lore Records
Fortune favours the patient. Next to many of their peers suffering from what can only be described as release incontinence, Cruciamentum’s slow eight year rise from the ashes following the collapse of the lineup behind ‘Charnel Passages’ has paid dividends. Stylistically one of death metal’s few continuity candidates, their refreshing contemporary nihilism remains deeply entrenched in the threads of history. Paying lip service to the chasmic death/doom so popular amongst a certain stripe of old schoolist, they enrich these populist calling cards with a sophisticated and dynamic riff vocabulary, raising the question as to why aesthetically comparable artists are somehow unable to achieve this historically baseline requirement for quality death metal.
Six lengthy yet tight tracks dripping with both atmosphere and clear development of theme, ‘Obsidian Refractions’ scratches an itch for death metal that builds on the Incantation formula as opposed to simply recapitulating their achievements. Transferences of energy from malevolent doom, to undulating percussive mechanisations posing as Suffocation on Valium, to relentless marches of swelling sonic power lifted straight from the book of Bolt Thrower on a particularly gothic day, all give these tracks energy, variance, and intent. The epic ten minute closer ‘Drowned’ works in hints of jazz fluidity via guitar drone and loose drum fills, before collapsing into a final threnodic dirge.
It’s this intersection of an almost fragile melancholia with a fanatical reverence for brute power that fuels the engine of this album. The framework may hang on a clear (and contemporary) aesthetic package of overbearingly grim death/doom, but Cruciamentum mark themselves out by leveraging these presentational facets into effective ornamentation as opposed to using them as a crutch to disguise a lack of substance. Bursts of speed blend into funereal doom passages, crushing atonality prepares the ground for soaring melodic content, rich interchanges of complexity collide against blunt simplicity, but through it all is a clear development of theme and purpose, one that carries itself throughout the length of these sizeable pieces. Said themes are at times so distinct as to be almost lyrical in their ability to comment on the blunt chaos of link phrases made up of standard blasting chromaticism.
It took its time in arriving, but Cruciamentum have reaffirmed their standing as one of the few holdouts left for sophisticates of death metal. They use the same grammar as bargain basement OSDM, but ultimately speak an entirely different language. Across these pieces a diverse, multifaceted sound world unfolds, capable of expressing senseless aggression alongside surprisingly meditative melodic threads.
Demoncy: Black Star Gnosis
Out 1st December on Dark Descent Records
2023 has seen the confident return of what could rather clunkily be referred to as “pre-post US black metal” artists. Back when the US was still mocking of anyone conversant in the genre. Seen as a way to do death metal for the musically incapable. Whether because of or in spite of this hostile environment, the crop of USBM artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 90s were cut from a different cloth to their European colleagues. Darker, more claustrophobic, more explicitly occultist, they operated on an obscurantist metric that somehow straddled traditional metal calling cards and outright avant-garde music, completely bypassing the high melodicism of the Nordic or Mediterranean styles.
Demoncy’s discography stands as one of the most emblematic – if patchy – examples of this. It’s been over a decade since their seminal ‘Enthroned is the Night’. But the venom has not departed in the interval. A singular darkness, defined by monotonous tremolo picked guitar lines and mid-paced blast-beats, with scant minimalist dark ambience deployed as subtle backdrops to this otherwise monomaniacal artistic vision. But stripping metal back to its most basic rudiments forces a different form of experimental imagination to the surface, a focused, ruminant vision of darkness standing in contrast to the unanchored free-for-alls we normally associated with the word “experimental”.
By limiting the textural scope and atmospheric reach of the music, Demoncy force the mind into a focus rarely seen in modern black metal. When we speak of artists such as Beherit or Ildjarn completely destroying the musical terrain they saw before them, in the expectation that this would free the next wave of artists to build anew on this soil, Demoncy is an approximation of the form I imagine this constructive project to take.
The landscape is every bit as minimal and restrictive. No technical flourishes, rich orchestration, or flowing ambient emptiness. This is still highly riff based black metal functioning as a stream of consciousness. But Demoncy are highly methodical in their approach to constructing interchanges of riffs with enough content and depth to carry a theme forward for the length of an entire piece. This is essentially what we are seeing here. The basic rudiments of melody are manipulated and conjoined in the most creative yet (intellectually) accessible way possible. All is couched within a dark occultist aesthetic intent, with traditional minor key threads almost spilling out of the music in uncontrollable bursts of energy, straightforward in its evil intent.
This music can be digested in pure form as the simple yet elegant language of melodic construction. But it is just as suited as a backdrop to ritualism, a means of achieving altered psychological states through the loose divergences of repetition and development. Demoncy’s work carried black metal through its most barren period in the 2000s and early 2010s. Where once this artist was a reliable workhorse of the genre, in today’s landscape, and with much the same formula, they appear as defiant revolutionaries. The ability to communicate such obvious yet simple creative energy in starkly traditional packaging is something worthy of our continued admiration.
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