ALBUM REVIEW: Resilience & Despair – Qaalm
Debut albums are always intriguing things. A chance for a new set of up-and-comers to show their hunger and musical prowess; hoping to leave their mark on subgenres that are often decades old. But every now and then you get a debut record from a group of established names that have come together to combine their embarrassment of musical riches into something brand new. Enter QAALM.
Comprising members of extreme metallers ACT OF DEFIANCE, punky black metallers HARASSOR and sludge’s SEVEN SISTERS OF SLEEP, QAALM rises from the ashes of those bands and smashes it all together into a masterful slab of glacial, creeping, monolithic doom.
Across four tracks and a sprawling 70 minutes, QAALM dives headlong into the mire of depression and adverse aspects of humanity. With such dark lyrical themes, it should come as no surprise that musically Resilience & Despair carries an unbelievable heft. Lurching from chunky riffs plucked from the seven circles of Hell, to cacophonous passages of sonic apocalypse, this is a staggeringly heavy, oft-claustrophobic experience. There are moments of relative levity; the band occasionally opts for the scenic sonic route via atmospheric soundscapes and ethereal clean vocals (see the midpoint of Reflections Doubt and select pockets of Cosmic Descent), but it’s all a detour to that ultimate destination of caving your head in.
There are no fleeting moments to be found of Resilience & Despair – the shortest track clocks in at just under 15 minutes. Rather, this is an album that looms over you and continues to stomp you into the dust; a relentless assault that seeks to deconstruct the listener on an atomic level. There is a phenomenal span of six minutes on Existence Asunder where everything slows and slows and slows some more, to the point where it seems unfathomable they could slow further without just stopping. But this enduring marathon of tight crunching guitars and thunderous drums stands out as one of the most impressive metal moments put to record so far this year. The ability to gradually slow the audio equivalent of a flaming 18-wheeler but to keep everything as tight and devastating as this is truly something to behold.
Alas, this insistence on making things last as long as possible is where the door is opened to nit-picking levels of scrutiny. The second half of Existence Asunder features a riff that, compared to the maximum intensity of the rest of the record, feels like it’s lacking something. It does form the bed of a face-melting guitar solo, and ultimately builds to a mammoth conclusion that shakes the listener to their very core, but there is a window where it stands alone just a fraction too long.
On the whole though, Resilience & Despair does a fantastic job of taking the key points from each member’s sonic tapestries and weaving them together into a new career-defining piece of work. As debut records go, QAALM has knocked this one out of the park. More to the point, they’ve smashed the park apart completely and launched it into the stratosphere. The future is bleak and broody – just the way we like it.
Rating: 9/10
Resilience & Despair is set for release on April 15th via Hypaethral Records.
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