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Kill the lights. Cover the windows. Light a candle. Skáphe have delivered another harrowing seance. In "VII", the release’s single twenty-two minute song, the band maintains their reputation as one of the strangest acts active in extreme metal. Forging metal of dissonance and dismay along the lines of today’s weirdest and most twisted acts. If one were dubbing this track onto cassette, a work that would compliment it nicely for a B side would be The Marrow Veil EP by Howls of Ebb. The guitar playing is wildly original and pointedly chaotic. More notes seem to be bent than not, which sends the music headlong into oblivion. The entire song feels very deliberately off kilter. The drums sound like they are being played backwards during the faster sections, as though they have eclipsed time and space and are operating in some kind of shadow dimension. It gives the listener the feeling of being re-introduced to reality through a distorted perspective after having sustained a serious head injury. In fact, it has been said that this music was inspired by experiences taking psilocybin mushrooms. Once upon a time, I ingested mushrooms that were much too strong for my constitution. I ended up in the fetal position on a dingy cot in a filthy overcrowded hovel. I distinctly remember the overwhelming inconsolable fear that my sanity was lost, never to return. Time was condensed into diamond-like densities. Lifetimes - even aeons - seemed to pass in the span of an hour. Reality was a tightrope I had fallen from, careening downwards, flailing towards a bottomless abyss. With so much stoner metal populating the rank and file of heavy metal music, it is refreshing to encounter metal that is hallucinatory. Impressions of being on the edge of madness come to mind when listening to this outstanding work.
