Abyssal - A Beacon in the Husk

By Steven Leslie. The best music takes you somewhere. Whether it’s a windswept fjord on a pitch black winter night, a glorious battle for the future of the human race deep within the heart of space, or even deep within yourself as you come face to face with personal

By Steven Leslie.

Artwork by Elijah Tamu.

The best music takes you somewhere. Whether it’s a windswept fjord on a pitch black winter night, a glorious battle for the future of the human race deep within the heart of space, or even deep within yourself as you come face to face with personal traumas that drove you to a life filled with depression and anxiety – great music takes you there and provides the backdrop for your imagination and emotions to run wild. For me personally, no matter what mood I am in, I can throw on a personal favorite and immediately be transported not just to another place, but a completely different emotional state. Sadly, as much as I love the genre, blackened death metal often provides the journey, but lacks the emotional resonance that I crave in music. Enter black/death/doom/ambient UK crew Abyssal with their fourth album in as many years to flip my expectations for the genre on its head and set a new benchmark for emotional impact in this dark artform.

If you are unfamiliar with the band and are wondering what to expect, the band name should clue you in – this is a trip to the heart of darkness, an endless descent into the void. Building upon a base of cavernous, chaotic blackened death metal (similar to Aussie nutcases like Impetuous Ritual or Portal) and injecting elements of funeral doom and dark ambient, Abyssal propels the genre forward with a unique and compelling sound. Album opener ‘Dialogue’ sets the tone for the next hour, opening with a few seconds of ominous ambience before sending the listener careening into a maelstrom of vicious blasts and crushing, trem-picked madness, from which a dissonant and unsettling riff rises to the fore, all against a backdrop of colossal, inhumanely deep funeral doom styled bellows. While the core components will be familiar to most listeners versed in extreme music, the way in which Abyssal commands them and weaves them together is both methodical and compelling. Throughout the track--hell the whole album--there is an unsettling feeling as your mind and emotions are taken over by some diabolical, omnipotent force.

The minds behind Abyssal have harnessed the void itself and used it to create a sonic black hole that drives the listener on an inescapable journey that scars the listener’s mind, in the best way possible. While it’s possible to break down the album track by track, I would be doing the band a disservice, as this is one cohesive piece and should be experienced as such. Heard individually, tracks can be enjoyable, but heard in the context and flow of the album, their true impact reveal themselves. While this makes for a demanding and emotionally draining experience, each subsequent exposure reveals new secrets and insights into the artist's vision, making repeat listens not just compelling, but essential.

I also have to note the excellent pacing and production choices the band have made. While it is very easy for this type of music to become monotonous due to the sheer relentlessness of sound, Abyssal wisely integrates dark ambient and doom into more traditional blast fests to create a constantly shifting landscape of sound. There is a real flow to this monster that keeps the listener engaged without ever allowing their mind to drift away from the journey. The production provides just enough space in the blasting sections to make Abyssal’s colossal riffs stand out and differentiate themselves from movement to movement and song to song. While A Beacon in the Husk is by no means an easy listen, it offers boundless rewards to those willing to give themselves over to the void.

Haunter - Sacramental Death Qualia

By Bryan Camphire. Over the last five years of releasing music, Haunter has always been visceral and confrontational. But none of their previous records hit as heavily as Sacramental Death Qualia. The opening seconds are antithetical to an ambient intro

By Bryan Camphire.

Artwork by Elijah Tamu.

Over the last five years of releasing music, Haunter has always been visceral and confrontational. But none of their previous records hit as heavily as Sacramental Death Qualia. The opening seconds are antithetical to an ambient intro. Press play and you are bludgeoned with the full force of Haunter right out of the gate. Immediately the listener is thrown straight into the deep end. The effect is intoxicating. Chasers come later. Let it be known from the start that this music is high test.

The vocals are so deep, the guitars low slung, the rhythm section pummeling full force; at first listen it is not easy to get a foothold on this music. The meter is shifting and the harmonies are dense. On Sacramental Death Qualia genre distinctions are obliterated. Elements from all corners of extreme metal are to be found: brutal death cries, majestic blackened subcurrents, technical prowess on ample display, melodies thick enough to make you choke. To be clear, it is not genre bending for its own end that gives this band its strength. Their power lies in their heaving mountainous arrangements.

More than other extreme music artists, Haunter's heady admixture of styles delivers an attack that is as confounding as it is memorable. Every song in this set packs the power to send you into next week and hand you your hat. Still more remarkable, however, is the fact that the album contains plenty of breathing room. Quiet passages and clean melodies abound, providing dynamics that only deepen the darkness of the record as a whole. The mid-marker of the set, "Abdication", track three of five, is a highlight. Here the guitars are entirely clean, there are acoustic passages, trippy sci-fi glissandos, melancholic arco elements, and acrobatic bass work on display. While a lesser act might provide ambient noise as a palate cleanser, Haunter show that they have sophisticated melodic ideas to burn. I can scarcely recall any other extreme metal record that has included an entirely clean melodic track that managed to more than hold its own amidst a set full of barn burners.

Leading up to this record's release, I have had the pleasure of seeing Haunter perfect this set of music in live performance here in their home state of Texas a handful of times. They truly get better all the time. That this music with all its complexity and drastic dynamics can be delivered in a live setting is no small feat. A Haunter show is a testament to the living breathing extreme urgency that this music contains. Don't sleep.

Lingua Ignota - Caligula

Way back in 2011, Tori Amos threw out a random comment in an interview about the power of emotion in music: “I'll stand next to the hardest fucking heavy metal band on any stage in the world and take them down, alone, by myself.” As I remember it, there was a

By Justin C.


Way back in 2011, Tori Amos threw out a random comment in an interview about the power of emotion in music: “I'll stand next to the hardest fucking heavy metal band on any stage in the world and take them down, alone, by myself.” As I remember it, there was a short burst of garment rending and name calling from the dumber side of the internet metal community, completely missing her point and falsely equating “power” with “volume.” There are a lot of metal bands Amos probably isn’t familiar with (see, for example, Immortal Bird) that do deliver the kind of emotional experience Amos was referencing. But the fact remains that Tori is and always has been metal in spirit, and for emotional power, she easily outshines basic-bro metal bands.

This memory resurfaced when I first heard Lingua Ignota’s debut full-length, Caligula. Kristin Hayter is the creative force behind the project, and although she and Amos don’t share a lot of sonic similarities, they do share some experiences. Both Amos and Hayter have played with or have ties to the heavy music scene (Trent Reznor and Maynard James Keenan in Amos’s case vs. The Body and Full of Hell in Hayter’s), both have “complicated” relationships with Christianity, and both have classical music training, piano and voice, respectively. But while Amos has often mixed her emotional power with a bit of sweetness in presentation, Hayter’s music is the ragged edge of an exploding star.

That’s not to say there isn’t beauty in Hayter’s work. Album opener “FAITHFUL SERVANT FRIEND OF CHRIST” finds Hayter’s voice riding on a beautiful string arrangement. You might mistake it for a legitimate hymn if it were not for the dark timbres and the final lyrics, “Bend before unending night.” The fact that she invokes Satan to stand beside her in the next song is another hint that we haven’t stumbled onto Profound Lore’s first gospel record.

Picking genre tags is even less helpful than usual here. The accompaniment to Hayter’s singing is often minimal, with piano or keys punctuated by an occasional industrial or noise flourish. But Hayter’s work is first and foremost defined by her virtuosic voice, ranging from the choral to the operatic and all the way up to black metal-esque screams. “FAITHFUL SERVANT” has a stunning choral arrangement of layers of Hayter’s voice in a striking-but-clean vocal style, but the very next track, “DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR,” finds her diving into the lower depths of her impressive range, pleading, “How can you doubt me now?” The song eventually erupts into Hayter’s barely contained shrieks, and the dripping venom she adds to the line, “Every vein of every leaf is slaked with poison” is delivered with such nuance and delicately applied timbre that it’s difficult to imagine anyone singing the word “slake” in a way that’s more viscerally evocative of the word’s literal meaning.*

There are too many amazing moments to detail here, although I’m tempted to do it. The album is a tour-de-force performance pitting Hayter’s substantial chops against soul-shattering emotions barely restrained. I’ll confess: I wanted to write this review much earlier, to coincide with the release of the album, but I just couldn’t do it. Part of that was because the usual b.s. and work stress, but part of it was that the music demands an investment that can be difficult to give. That is in no way a critique--great art should challenge us, or maybe more than that, great art should sit us down in a chair in a room and scream in our faces until we acknowledge it, and Caligula does that. Hayter has been relatively open about her history of a domestic abuse survivor, and although she describes her music as a way of talking about those experiences allegorically, there’s very little to shield the listener from that power, and as someone who’s had some run ins with abuse in my own adult life, I initially shrunk back.

But much like Hayter had to write this music, I felt I had to write this review. I’m going heavy on the astronomical analogies, but this album is a meteor strike to your soul, and if it doesn’t produce a reaction in you, then you might be dead inside. If your takeaway from another site’s blurb is, “Oh, singer-songwriter with electronic/industrial touches, a pretty voice, and occasional metal shrieks,” your expectations going into this are going to be shattered like the breaking glass in “SORROW! SORROW! SORROW!” (even after many, many listens, the sound still startles me every time. That’s where this music is going to take you.) I know I’ve paraphrased this Iggy Pop quote about Coltrane dozens of times, but this is music that can be difficult to get close to, and it’s not going to be for everyone. And that’s fine. But for those who can engage with this work, I think you’ll find yourself changed to a degree you wouldn’t have expected. I am.

*It’s at 1:07 in the track. Go listen now. Do it. I’ll be here when you get back.