Beats and yelling: Tenebro

Una Lama D’Argento
Out 12^th December on Time to Kill Records

Bracing, fluid death metal achieves a sense of power through ambient riffing that weaponizes repetition as a tool of malevolence. The album is defined by a wall of guitar noise that monolithically frames the parameters through which riffs can work, limiting them to basic, dry melodic streams elevated to a place of dark grace via intelligent composition. Simple yet urgent drums are therefore relegated to following the contours of the guitar, reaffirming their pacing and flow via modest framing devices.

The production is geared towards achieving an enveloping, dark atmosphere as if to emphasise that, despite the raw materials lifted from death metal, this is a dark ambient album in disguise. The layered guitar lines dominate the mix, achieving a panorama of gothic grandeur built from a hybrid of the genre’s punk roots alongside the more regal melodic aspirations of mid 90s death metal. This in term rhymes with the dreamlike atmosphere of the Giallo films it draws from. Drums switch from linear blast-beats to fast paced d-beats, creating a sense of vertigo within the listener, an unsettling dizziness beds in as each weighty track floats ponderously by. Guttural vocals undergird this sense of alien threat, adding a degree of monstrosity and abrasion to what is otherwise a relatively soft mix despite the raw power on display.

In this sense the music is more universalist than the slasher themes and cover art imply. A statement of horror, power, and the dreamlike half reality invoked by the human psyche at its most desperate. Despite the transparent mechanics behind the riffcraft, they achieve a state of surrealism through repetition, undulating deviations, and subtle but striking contrasts between traditionally dark gothic horror and the more primitivist nihilism implied by chromatic and atonal play.

It’s here that Tenebro can even get away with pacing out certain passages with a rockist cadence and predictability. In context they work as an almost satirical commentary on otherwise knowable, domestic tropes of radio friendly music, here twisted out of form and placed within a new setting that injects them a sense of mocking sadism. From here we see the black metal influence at its starkest, as the material moves with a sense of gravitas and weighty significance far greater than what’s implied by the otherwise rudimentary material. The power of atmosphere, arrangement, and a clear sense of balance affords Tenebro far more mileage from even the most germinal idea, restating the virtues of minimalist death metal in defiance of the genre’s increasingly unwieldy statements of maximalism.