 |
Gnaw Their Tongues, aka Mories, the Dutch one man band who scares people with his sonic mayhem since 2006, releases his 8th full length album Abyss of Longing Throats. … and this is not exactly happy music either.
It is seven tracks and about 43 minutes of industrial black metal… well, basically, but there are very many other musical styles and elements involved and they are absolutely masterfully deployed.
 |
| Photo by Justin Snow. |
There’s an omnipresent backdrop of dissonant noisy, droney sounds that gets permeated, covered and complemented by a raw black metal frenzy, industrial electronic sounds and noise, orchestral, classical parts, spoken word samples, doom and drone sounds.
The vocals sometimes sound like black metal shrieks and screams, or chant-like chorals and sometimes modified, distorted growls like they are creeping through a veil of lysergic dreams. They seem to wander like ghosts, both haunted and haunting, through the dense inextricable soundscape, seeking some escape or salvation from a menacing force that gets increasingly terrifying.
In dark, doomy, ethereal and psychotic atmospheres of utter blackness and bleakness they express their pain and fear, fury, despair and sorrow.
From the start everything gets increasingly disconnected, chaotic, desolate and insane until in the end finally all things fall apart.
Throughout the album there’s not one moment of relaxation or contemplation, even in the few parts where shreds of melodies are involved. The melodies don’t alternate with the harsh and dissonant parts, they are added to them which makes the whole thing climb even higher on the scale of eerieness and disturbance.
Everything cumulates and intertwines into a seemingly chaotic, painful, violent outburst of insanity - seemingly, because it is nonrandom, it’s carefully planned, with targeted movements and it's brilliantly executed,
This chaos is one of the most “symphonious” cacophonies I ever listened to. It’s a complicated, multilayered and interwoven soundscape, an opus of sound with an extraordinary compelling power and intensity.