Beats and yelling: Sodality

Benediction, Part II
Out 5^th December on NoEvDia

The second instalment of the Benediction series sees this Polish entity expand on their torturous, laboured brand of black metal ritualism, pitching a mood somewhere between depressive black metal and second wave Norwegian trademarks. Mayhem stands as an obvious influence through clever manipulation of ringing, open strings to eek every last drop of ambient affectation from relatively simple chord progressions. This casts a droning static across each track in a manner similar to noise rock, where riffs are treated as mere vectors for the conveyance of abrasive waves of sound, challenging the listener like trials of endurance.

Production is notably open. Linear, fluid guitar lines dominate the mix with a tone one part muscle, two parts frigid atmosphere. Simple, stilted drums are pitched relatively low in the mix, switching from loose blast-beats to slow, funereal marches such that it perfectly matches the atmospheric currents of the music without ever interrupting its meditative flow. The unmistakable voice of “Mark of the Devil” completes the picture with his trademark vocal theatre. Again mirroring Attila, he weaves his way between guttural, semi operatic barrages alongside spoken word narration and throat driven animalistic experimentation. That, and a host of choral backings that crop up incrementally throughout the album solidify the theme of religious exaltation and throttling anxiety.

Sodality make for an interesting study in the function of pacing and flow in black metal. As an artist that doesn’t work through riffs in the strictest sense, nor thematic builds to moments of revelation, they may present as a frustrating prospect for some listeners. But as one accustoms themselves to their style, it’s clear that this fits into a long tradition of explicitly theatrical black metal. Not in a basic aesthetic sense, but at the material level in terms of how the music moves and breathes between ideas in ways utterly distinct from the more fluid and frankly musical way typical examples of the genre operate.

Both the vocals and the flow the guitars oscillate between impatient fragmentation and near monomaniacal exploration of a single idea. Periods of almost random switches in tempo, theme, and mood are segmented by extended passages of noise driven ambient, mirroring the rhythm of the human psyche in a state of stress as it switches from unfocused panic to fugue like rumination. In this sense the experience of ‘Benediction, Part II’ could hardly be called pleasant, even for ears accustomed to the extremities of underground metal. Its upsetting of expectation occurs too frequently and dramatically to make it anything other than testing. But within the process, if one is able to flip their state of mind, there is much of interest to mine from both this and the first instalment in this series.