Style: experimental, black metal, Halloween, instrumental
Label: Death Incarnate
Year: 2012
Home: Colorado
Members: Stefan Klein ~ all instruments
Can you name an album wrapped around the theme of Halloween? There's plenty of Christmas themed albums & even a few bands doing that theme ... but Halloween? I'm not talking about Smashing Pumpkins or Alice Cooper who use frightening imagery often equated with Halloween. I'm talking about the Halloween equivalent of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I can only think of one band/album in Dee Snider's Van Helsing's Curse. That was until Unhallowed Eve landed in my e-mail this month, an instrumental moody album that may not be singing about ghosts & goblins but is the sound you blast out the window when trick-or-treaters wander by. Dethcentrik is known for cacophonic absolutely barren mind-numbing black metal of guitars & screaming vocals & droning keyboards. Some call it industrial. Others call it noise. But, this is a new direction for Dethcentrik, far different from anything previously released by great leaps. Dethcentrik, originally a band but now a one-man outing, must have spent the last year in a cave with new musical influences. Early Dethcentrik was assaulting to the ears, even more so compared to this new release. They also were straight black metal with all the thorny heavily distorted guitars thrashing about in a maddening almost unlistenable at times rush. That's all been replaced by droning keyboard lines, though even that's been kept to a minimum here & instead replaced by naturally occurring sounds distorted beyond recognition into a moody hypnotic mesh that's more akin to a movie soundtrack, particularly being instrumental with no lyrics to distract from the visual. This album goes for the pleasure of sounds themselves & how they become something new on an organic level when twisted & turned & particularly stretched well beyond their natural length & near breaking point. "As The Birds Consume They Flesh Featuring Some Crows" is keyboards deep in the mix churning out droning wind like tones while squawking crows, in real time, form the main textural movement of the song, with occasional computer blips popping up. While "Must You leave So Soon" is just a weird wave of static, I believe, distorted beyond recognition into three minutes. Then there's "The Devil's Breath" following a similar path with a recording of wind distorted into nearly eleven minutes. That's another key here - length. There is no boundaries to time. Earlier Dethcentrik pushed the limits of listenability for many, once even accused by a critic for the excessive use of distortion. Now excessiveness has now been taken in a new direction. Personally, I find this much more exciting. & without a doubt I see the musical change the most exciting thing to discover. I love the sense of musical development into new territories, for both the listener & composer. I also like musicians that take risks. That's what music is essentially all about. & Dethcentrik pushes it with great braveness, such as with the 20 minute "The Sawmill" that is the sound of saws sawing away against an unrecognizable background of crunching drones. Perhaps the background is actually the saws given a computer make-over? That's what I believe makes up "The Possessed Music Box" which is heavily distorted tones against other tones. I believed they're all the same tones but thrown together to see what they'll spawn or how they'll push & pull each other. Strangeness at its best.
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