ALBUM REVIEW: ...ni degu fazentz escumergamënt e mesorga... – Escumergamënt
Charles Darwin once proposed that all species of life descended over time from common ancestors, adapting to the adversity of the world around us, evolving as we traverse the cycle of life. Much like Darwinism, so too has language and music. The former has spiralled into historical ambivalence as the world hungers for accessibility in a technological translatory world whilst the latter mutates microscopically like a newly-discovered strain of a supervirus. The evolution and devolution of language and of music is where the symphonic black metal blaze of underground Swedish supergroup ESCUMERGAMËNT interweaves itself. Their debut deliverance, ...ni degu fazentz escumergamënt e mesorga..., derives itself from the endangered medieval language of Occitan, picking out it’s phrase from a perusal of the holy bible. Forgoing the evolution of latin-based romantic languages into the modern musings we know now; the Swedes swing their sweeping symphonic black metal through a labyrinth of riddles and clues, leaving room for you to lose yourself in their studious world.
Whereas devolution aids their funeral dirges, ESCUMERGAMËNT falls prey to the fatalities of sepia-toned nostalgia, drifting off into a sea that splits their soundscapes into two distinguishable camps. The bulk of their black metal blaze bleeds out the black-and-white corse paint-coated blood of mid-nineties second-wave black metal, bulldozing down the suspension of disbelief in order to trap themselves within the genre’s tropes: think blast-beats that beatdown the barriers to your soul and tremolo-plucked guitars that give themselves to guttural screams and lo-fi production. For the minority of their musical musings, they burn a torch bright for black metal’s mutations, shape-shifting through sonic solar systems of symphonic black metal, blackgaze and black-and-roll.
When ESCUMERGAMËNT hit the sweet spots on ...ni degu fazentz escumergamënt e mesorga..., they swim in their sweeping soundscapes effortlessly, pulling together a musical palette that puts themselves in the sights of scene-leading generals like BEHEMOTH and CRADLE OF FILTH. To Envy The Corpses is a six-minute serenade of melodic and symphonic black metal, as black-and-roll riffs dance around like decibels in your eardrums as lo-fi screams echo out cavernously in your mind before exploding across the astral plane in a glittering shower of keys and blast beats that blind you like the sight of light in the dark. Elsewhere on the album’s monolithic centrepiece Antediluvium, symphonic keys chime rhythmically like lightning striking down their black-and-roll thunder, lo-fi screams once again scrambling the sound system of your brain, before melody oozes out through isolated riffs rolled out in the left channel of your eardrums, later breaking off into atmospheric interludes where synths sputter along ike ripples in the fabric of the track’s waves tripping into KRAFTWERK-esque kraut-rock before demons swarm a blast-beat riddled sky.
To Envy The Corpses and Antediluvium are undeniably diamonds in the rough, majestic and meteoric moments that are few and far between throughout the six tracks that make ...ni degu fazentz escumergamënt e mesorga. There’s far too much time spent frollicking through the fields of memory lane, ploughing through rough-and-ready carbon-cut copies of second-wave black metal. Opener Of Old Night And Winter wanders off into well-trodden territory, feeling far too much like a long-forgotten B-side for EMPEROR’s genre-defining In The Nightside Eclipse, whilst I Sang Of Murder can only be described as the sounds of a small child discovering the glockenspeil during DIMMU BORGIR’s rehearsal sessions. Closing duo The Grievous Miracle and Black Ash And Ruin are laborious slogs through swampy swathes of funeral-pyre BM, drifting into dingey, dirgey, and downright dark territories without any of the impact it’s earlier tracks hit home with.
ESCUMERGAMËNT show such promise for the evolution of black metal in the modern world, if only they could harness that energy across all of their output rather than roll it out in the reserves just waiting for natural selection to pick and choose its path for them.
Rating: 5/10
...ni degu fazentz escumergamënt e mesorga... is set for release March 26th via Avantgarde Music.