Goldicot Culls The Week - VI

40 days, 40 nights / Broken people go without

Six weeks in. I’ve completed my first goal: get some writing done whatsoever. Time to look ahead to another goal: that writing should be good. After all, the artists behind the art might be reading these. And what would they think, if instead of insightful commentary and discussion of the contents, it was mere faff and babble about their geographic residence, or lists of bands that bear some vague resemblance, or entirely unfounded observations about genres, et cetera ad infinitum? Well, instead of writing a manifesto of art criticism replete with rules and self-imposed bans, I’ll simply write what I would want to read, and leave the rest up to providence. Hark! It’s death metal week!

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• 3

• Omnicidal Instinct
• Catharsis in Blight
• P2
• February 7

The method to this madness is prosaic dispassion, a kind of dry brutality and rigid heaviness, not at all machine-like, but with precision machinery approves of. This type of brutal death metal sounds like the eye travelling across pages of meticulously detailed violent desolation, overwhelming in scale and minutiae alike. It doesn’t rhyme and it isn’t harmonious, instead it is a slowly unfurling sentence, a music convinced of its own inevitability. Omnicidal Instinct bears maturity, or perhaps cynicism deep enough to appear like wisdom, but the only tradition here is death.

• 2

• Continuum of Xul
• Voratore
• Independant
• February 9

Behind the riff, another riff. This is death metal of an eternal chain of twisted link and rusted hook in endless relentless succession, leading ever downward, pulling ever deeper. It’s technical in execution, yet the design is pure onslaught, a combination of strokes and blows that pummels everything and spares nothing. Many aspire to such a goal as this, but few are so genuinely breathless in domination of the auditory senses. As every moment breathes its last another replaces it, just as vicious, over and over, every moment a new fresh hell.

• 1

• Phrenelith
• Ashen Womb
• Dark Descent
• February 7

Doom is an emotion. The mind knows it is the end, and the resignation brings only dread, embracing the inexorable end, like hope once towards the light, the mind now crawls toward death. Phrenelith scores this final journey, the dead man’s march, the extinction smog unfolding, the decomposers thriving. There are dismal melodies, like funeral threnodies, in almost every moment on Ashen Womb, alway amidst vast crumbling heaviness, perhaps songs of respect for the end, music played in deference to defeat, dignity in the shadow of the coming nothingness.