Black Metal History Month - Delirant : "Thoughteater"

 

This band from Spain plays a dark and dissonant style of creepy black metal. The second song finds them turning to a more frantic vision of chaos. There are blast beats executed in an almost jazzy cadence, like a train being operated by a clown going off the rails. They bring things back into a more conventional halftime groove and a song takes shape. Other melodies unfold amid this. It's a gamble this project seems to be willing to take, but are the creative dice going to roll their way for the course of an entire album when they walk the fine line between noise and experimentation within the six minutes of this song. 

The songs pour from one another with the third song feeling like a slower movement of the previous venture. This more deliberate shift works better from the perspective of songwriting. The vocals croak and gurgle with little form or function. Their desperate gasps are just a layer of madness to bumble under the guitars. The fourth song at best descends into the conventions of black metal, sometimes even thrashing a little. The spewed vocals seem more useless the closer to playing actual metal they get. There is a two-minute interlude before they throw themselves headfirst into the swirl of blast-beat oblivion. This shifts into a more straightforward punk beat, while the guitar remains wacky. Three and a half minutes in the bottom falls out and they leave you in a formless void. The drums lock back in and then it begins to become an actual song, though the vocals contribute very little to this cause. The drummer is actually the MVP  of this band, as they work hard to keep things moving in a direction that is not just mindless excess. 

The last song is the first moment that carries a more depressive feel, aside from the fact the vocals this entire time are trauma vomiting into the mic at every moment.  I like the creepy moments that form, the black metal parts that are actually black metal and not just swathes of noise cascading against your ears are fairly colored by numbers. I will give this album a 7 as they do make some impressive creepy passages when they allow things to flow into more of a throb and I appreciate their willingness to experiment it is a shame songs pay the price when they do not conform to any semblance of what sounds like a song. It is little surprise that Sentient Ruin released this. 

pst85