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| Painting by Caue Piloto |
Jupiterian, from São Paulo/Brazil offer their second full-length album Terraforming. This is fourty minutes and six songs of Doom/Sludge laced with Black Metal and a pinch of noisy industrial sounds.
The term "terraforming" instantly evokes images and sceneries of Sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories/movies. I understand the album as a story about a terraforming process, a dangerous venture, a feat with a huge emotional and physical impact. There's fear, exertion and pain, but also triumph and hope. In a mix of tribal rhythms, percussive sounds, chimes and chants, but noisy, bleak industrial sounds as well Jupiterien create a weird setting where ritualistic invocations of unearthly powers seem to blend with an alchemistic and technical process.
These elements, juxtaposed and almost contradicting are characteristic for the album and create a kind of omnipresent uneasiness that gets perfect amplification by the earth shaking massiveness of the walls of sound with hypnotic rhythms, heavy, abrasive riffs, powerful, roaring, savage vocals and dissonant melodies. This uneasiness is constantly growing from song to song.
While the opener “Matriarch” is a perfect intro to the atmosphere, the following song “Unearthly Glow” gives more hints to the disturbing chaos to come. The melodies here are of an overwhelming melancholic beauty, and a ridiculously catchiness. Woven into raw, distorted sludgy riffs their emotional impact is immense and both build a fragile balance and exciting tension, Black Metal infiltrations and industrial noise elements disrupt the balance and everything topples and slips shortly into chaos, and “Forefathers” enhances the sense of industrial bleakness.
On the title track "Terraforming" chaos reigns anyway. A huge droney background is infused by eerie ambient noises. The song feels unhinged and structureless. It cummulates to an apex of chaos and unsettling horror. All seems twisted, warped, bent and distorted and the atmosphere gets filled with a sense of torment and pain. The song obviously marks a point of transition, the actual process of reshaping, shifting, ... the "terraforming". Here the involvement of Mories from Gnaw Their Tongues is prominent and he enriches the album with his own flavor of eeriness.
The heaviness of the two remaining songs is even more depressing than ever before on the album. The clean quiet sounds in the beginning of “Us and Them” seem to offer some peace and calmness, as if the painful process had a cleansing effect, but droning, pummeling, driving drums and black metal fury destroy all hope for peace and the song builds up in a powerful climactic structure and unrelenting triumph. The final song “Sol” solidifies this triumph with its majestic melodies and rhythms.
Terraforming is extremely heavy from start to finish. The atmosphere is so dense and the sound so massive that there should be not a bit of space left for any motion, or even something dynamic or progressing, but miraculously Jupiterien manage to infuse all the heavy with a whole lot of dynamics and beautiful melodies that bring quite a variety of different nuances and moods to charge the atmosphere. There's an overall sense of a lurking danger and impending doom, an uncanny eeriness and darkness and a deep melancholy - a shamanic brew that reaches for your soul right away and slowly grows into a hypnotic spell.
The Track "Us and Them" is featured on The Wicked Lady Show 153
