Beats and yelling: Diabolus, Mecum Semperterne!

Diabolus, Mecum Semperterne!
Out 20^th February on Terratur Possessions

Dark, fluid, minimalist black metal creates a sense of grandeur by bolstering the near constant tremolo riffing with keyboard accompaniment. That, and the thick reverb covering the mix gives the music a degree of inertia, forcing it into rather simplistic themes that gain greater currency from the smallest shift in pitch or emphasis. At the textural level therefore, this feels like a work of maximalism, but when studying the actual melodies and riffs it is a work of the strictest austerity.

Layer upon layer of guitar noise dominates the mix, behaving more like a section of an orchestra than an individual instrument. Much like modern melodic black metal in the vein of The Kryptik or Tempestarii, the music is not constructed through riffs but in waves of energy, each one containing a number of micro refrains and proto melodies in their wake. Pocketed within each cycle is a whole host of activity, but at the macro level it’s a relatively simple sequence of events, ordered in obvious, deliberate, yet significant passages that allow the listener to navigate the album.

The choice of keyboard patches is interesting here. Rather than flush the mix with an array of synth string tones to undergird the wash of guitars, the dominant instrument is the organ. This injects a friction into this otherwise smooth surface. A teasing throughline lifted from classical horror aesthetics, here repurposed as a sparse textural flourish which serves the purpose of tightening up the mix, anchoring the homogenous chord sequences with a semblance of clarity. Deadpan clean vocals supplement the low distorted howls with defeatist, proto-Gregorian chants in a manner akin to Germany’s CNTMPT.

In this setting drums need only commit themselves to the barest rhythmic foundation. Tying themselves to simple, mid-paced blast-beats for the majority of the album’s runtime. Flying out to a ride cymbal to open out a particular passage, and bringing it back to the hi-hat to emphasis moments of heightened tension.   

It’s a coalescence of threads lifted from the minimalist tradition within black metal, combined with a more active current within the genre post 2000s, leveraging its textural excesses without being overly indulgent toward them. The wall of sound is vast and totalising, but any activity at the molecular level is kept modest, restrained, functional for the sake of allowing the music to take up space and fill out the speakers with streams of gloomy, downbeat sonic energy.