 Disembowelment Australia’s Disembowelment make painfully slow ambient doom/death metal with occasional and unpredictable blasts of grinding speed. The music strives for a certain atmospheric affect through songs of epic continuance that disregard traditional compositional coherence, utilizing monotonic guitars towards trance-inducing moods, and hanging notes seemingly suspended over churning rhythms. Serenity dances with dark and angry energy here. The dense riffs of standard death and doom metal fashion, and equally common rhythmic themes are uniquely employed in the extension of passages for mood manipulation, free of fixations on familiar transitions. Tranquil, slow, clean guitar notes fall over unexpected blastbeat drumming, wonderfully portraying the intense yearning of life through conditional suffering. Existential agony in the struggle towards enlightenment defines the philosophy of this music. The despair encountered in the unacceptable awakening of life threatens internal hollowness, yet when one comes to terms with this awareness, and embraces the emptiness of life, tranquility is close at hand. "Your Prophetic Throne Of Ivory" achieves the most efficacious presentation of this worldview, its use of distant chants and meditative themes during the introduction and final moments is suggestive of dreaming of spiritual nirvana. The torment and frustration essential to the journey take shape in ferocious death metal attack in-between these exquisite passages, displaying through the song’s entirety a recognition of the symmetry of existence. "As my eyes slowly descend,
the dust transcends into my frail structure Vocals are mostly nondescript death growls and anguished screams that function primarily as emotional effect. The absence of deep growls as main vocal approach would serve to enhance the desired impact of particular passages. These vocals work best when used sparingly. Most of the screams are successful in the expression of torment, both in quality and timing of delivery. Chanting is used to strong effect in slower sections, especially during contemplative moments in the aforementioned "Your Prophetic Throne Of Ivory", as well as the disc’s final two tracks, "The Spirits Of The Tall Hills" and "Cerulean Transience Of All My Imagined Shores" These last two songs are deeper explorations of unembodied darkness, moving towards more ethereal elements and abstract structures, concluding the disc in resplendency the manner of which further appropriates the album’s title. Transcendence Into The Peripheral strikes a balance between all phases of emotion and natural forces. A few songs, such as the hauntingly placid and disenchanting "Nightside Of Eden", emphasize a specific emotional state through its entirety, as a more concentrated observation of the given mood. The music is somber, yet its solution is anything but depressing. Life is justified by death. Rather than crumble under the weight of hopelessness that troubles the mind following this realization, life can be embraced for the journey that it is, complete with the suffering that is essential to it, with death seen not as a horrifying evil but as deliverance from the burden of life into the nothingness from which life emerged. "Ambience from the dark
evolves from beyond the divine nightshade Disembowelment are often given credit as the first true doom/death band. While this is not exactly the case, they can perhaps lay claim to being the first band to explore mystical and transcendental themes in a doom/death context to this extent. Most of the doom/death bands of the time were primarily focused on sorrowful expressions, prophetic doom, or suicidal despair, and while Disembowelment are not alien to these themes, they are used as an inspiration to something beyond rather than a surrender to fatalism. Emotional/mental/spiritual suffering is a necessary stepping stone on the path to enlightenment/tranquility for Disembowelment, not the single and ultimate condition of life. Rather than drowning in an ocean of sorrow, Disembowelment seek to transcend that sorrow by applying a proper perspective acquired from appropriately comprehending the nature of existence. 3/4/07 Tracklisting: 1. The Tree Of Life And Death Disembowelment Discography Mourning September
demo (1990)
|