RSS Feed


DODENBEZWEERDER
Vrees de toorn van de wezens verscholen achter majestueuze vleugels

Iron Bonehead Productions (2020)
Rating: 8/10

Right, I’m not going to repeat the album title here or bother with track titles, hence their length and my poor translating, but if you like trauma-inducing, soul-sucking extreme metal then you need this six track platter in your sorry life.

This piece of unsettling noise is the first full-length outing from this Netherlands duo that has been in form for just a year. The result is this hideous creation that at times really does dredge the psyche of all nightmares and projects them on the wall like hideous shadows that engulf.

This is remote yet punishing, alien yet consuming; a consistently black, howling mist of ravaging and raping elements that claw, rake and drain. It aches, moans and bellows a cold breath to leave immense patches of black mould on your lungs.

What we have here is unnatural “metal”; raw, primitive, cavernous, clanking and above all a draining and drawn out horror soundtrack that doesn’t really fit into a category, although I’m sure some will say it’s a black metal of sorts with deathly and doomier layers.

Such is the gnawing aching provided by such a vast landscape, I’m only permitted to review the album then cast it into a vat of acid in the hope the manifestations it has created will not follow me forevermore. I’m not even sure it’s worth speaking anymore!?

Dodenbezweerder have created a harrowing, harsh soundscape that would sit nicely alongside the horrible Miscarriage opus Imminent Horror (2019). However, this one is like being in a blizzard of nails; there’s no speed, no sharpness, just a slow motion grating industrialised barrage of dystopian evil straight from David Lynch’s surreal scrotum.

Drums just exist as shimmering, clanging rust buckets that create grey walls of squalid blackness, while other instruments don’t deserve to be called names such as “guitar”. Instead, we get horrifying storms of hail, a blast furnace of echoing, abysmal grief, and enough racket and harrowing unravelling to last a lifetime.

Is this composition really only 37-minutes long? It feels like an eternity; the sort of avant-garde cacophony that might have emerged in the early 90s when I was spending too much time listening to Scorn and God. However, with this “thing” we rarely get a beat or a structure, the only respite being an ambient shift into further bleakness at, say, the 15-minute mark.

It’s never an easy listen; a squawking vocal yelp may exist within that blanket of heavy grey snow, the drones may or may not be from this planet, but then we’re back beneath that cascading terror of hissing drums and drawn out blackened sheets of ice, slowly raining down to numb and leave one as utterly and pathetically distraught.

Is it some form of black metal I ask myself? I dunno… who cares… six tracks, all plied with sadistic pleasure and sure to mangle to headphones and coat the ears in ash. Thank the good lord above when this one finishes, but then ask yourself if such a deity exists then how on earth could such a dismal drone be created?

Neil Arnold

<< Back to Album & EP Reviews



Related Posts via Categories
Share