Beats and yelling: Endless Dismal Moan

Lord of Nightmare
Out 25^th July on Hessian Firm (originally released in 2006)

Endless Dismal Moan, the brainchild of one Chaos 9, who sadly took their own life in 2008, was an enigmatic Japanese black metal entity that typified or even perfected the dark, urbanist turn the genre took in the early 21^st Century. Hessian Firm’s decision to reissue their first album, “Lord of Nightmare”, is an interesting choice. It embodies many traditional traits of European black metal, particularly emphasising gothic horror and the heightened state of awareness that comes through viewing reality through this lens. But it combines this archaic orientation with features common to early 2000s black metal such as an encroaching industrialism, a jagged, spiteful brand of nihilism, and a deliberately illogical flow to the music calling to mind Black Funeral at their most reckless.

What this project had over contemporary releases, for instance the formative material put out by the artists featured in the “One Man Metal” documentary (Xasthur, Leviathan, Striborg), was a simple efficiency. Delivering a visceral gut punch of violent horror directly into the listener’s psyche. The music is much less passive, more deliberate and insistent than its Anglosphere counterparts. A combination of awkward dissonance, aching repetition, eerie synth and choral lines, and relentless, pounding industrialism brings to life a world of horror and anomie far more realised and total than the early 21^st Century wave of depressive/ambient black metal. Ambience, it should be noted, does not necessarily imply a lack of activity, and Endless Dismal Moan appear alive to that fact, as vital percussive violence and angular chord sequences wrap themselves around the minimalist narrative evolution, rhythmically paced out with the stilted inevitable gait of the undead.

The almost comical directness of the programmed drums offsets neatly with the ethereal keyboard lines, creating a work that vaults wildly between disjointed statements of self-bisection and rampantly monomaniacal streams of sonic energy that embed themselves into the subconscious.

Sitting alongside this is an interesting demonstration of symphonic metal from an alternative universe. Keyboards are foregrounded to the extent that they flow into the guitar lines as equals both within the mix and in terms of musical significance. The raw material of symphonic black metal’s latent medievalism is here repurposed into an abstract, surreal beast of bleak modernism. 

Reviewing this material nearly twenty years on from its original release is somewhat bittersweet. On the surface “Lord of Nightmare” is very typical of mid-2000s black metal. A genre attempting to overcome its past by developing a new aesthetic language, one contiguous with the same technical and textural material as the previous decade. A project explicitly borne out here through a contemporary, urbanist horror. The uncanny, the gothic, the wild invading domestic mundanity.

But unlike much comparable material, Endless Dismal Moan do not stop once this simple juxtaposition is achieved. They retain the ambition, the world building and experiential totality that made second wave black metal so thrilling and unique, here replayed in new contexts and forms. This was something sorely lacking in the more high profile champions of the third wave as it evolved throughout the 2000s and beyond.