Beats and yelling: Petrale

The World Down There
Out 2^nd November, self-released

Croatia’s Petrale return for another skirmish of suffocating, eerie, dissonant black metal. This latter descriptor is liable to evoke images of cold, clinical, sterile music replete with jagged edges, tempo change incontinence, and aspirations toward headier subject matter. None of which is completely absent from the world of Petrale, but ‘The World Down There’ (and indeed Petrale’s entire catalogue) revamps (or maybe regresses) the aesthetic formula with a pre-Norwegian warmth, expressed through an organic mix and bouncier rhythms harkening back to Celtic Frost, Tormentor, or Master’s Hammer. But more importantly, Petrale cast a shadow of traditional melody over the pursuit of pure dissonance, one nevertheless following modes not often seen in an extreme metal context.

The nuts and bolts of the album are strikingly sparse. No keys, a warm but clear guitar tone, organic drums, and a single, mid-range distorted voice. Reverb is positioned as a background actor in stark contrast to its defining role within much modern metal. One can hear it in the rests and pauses most strikingly, as a brief after shock of a closing beat, its influence important but peripheral. Such austerity foregrounds the mechanations of the guitar itself as the chief driver not only of momentum but of contrasting textures. Dramatic shifts in pitch and strumming technique exercise enormous power over the contouring of each piece, fleshing out new passages and dispensing with old.

In part as compensation for this presentational minimalism, the pieces themselves, at the level of fundamental musical activity, are strikingly busy. Petrale found their music on an uncanny rhythmic bounce, immediately calling to mind Celtic Frost for its oddly playful momentum. The shadow of rockist phrasing can be discerned beneath the complexity, planting in the mind of the listener a stark contrast to the musical content layered atop this foundation. The juxtapositions only compound on one another from there, with bizarre, clashing chord sequences taking up the mantle on each piece, dictating the direction and flow of the music itself in defiance of its domesticated material setting.

Echoes of turn of the Century Darkthrone sit beneath abstract, anomic vignettes (one hesitates to call them riffs at this point). Highly familiar melodic content lifted from a broad range of metallic settings – epic doom, traditional black metal, heavy metal, and even hardcore by way of Die Kreuzen – are introduced only to be broken apart in violent and dramatic fashion. Brief reprieves in the form of clean breaks or orthodox cadential phrasing offer a fig leaf of comfort to the listener. But the overwhelming impact is one of abrasion, alienation, and disorientation.

‘The World Down There’ forges a passage between older forms of black metal – via the cold despair of peak Fenriz depression era Darkthrone – with a very contemporary notion of what abstract or avant-garde metal should look like. In doing so it goes some way to redeeming the more off-putting elements of both. This is not a homogenous mess of dissonance, illogical rhythmic flow, and harsh textures. But it’s also far from a retroist love letter to pre-1992 black metal. Far from easy listening or reaffirming our expectations, this is an album that presents many challenges. But counter intuitively, it offers the many and diverse branches – and generations – of extreme metal’s fanbase a route into styles and approaches they may have previously avoided. All without losing its unique identity beneath such an eclectic project.