Doomscapes

You can tell just looking at the cover of "Doomscapes" (which isn't really that doomy, by the way) that it's going to either suck out loud or blow your mind. Luckily, at least for me, it's all the latter and none of the former.

Where do these guys come from? Norway? What is in the water over there? Norway's status as the go-to country for classic second wave black metal seems to have freed up its scant handful of death metal bands to do whatever the unholy fuck they feel like. For example, the early death metal days of Darkthrone - try asking for albums that sound like "Soulside Journey" and see what you get (answer: some death metal albums with keyboards that don't sound much like "Soulside Journey").

And Diskord is definitely weirder. Who are their models? Seven or eight listens into this album, I still can't quite put my finger on it. I hear all kinds of peculiar, not-that-influential bands in the mix: the truly avant strangeness of Gorguts; the techy death/thrash of Martyr; the upside-down riffing of Demilich; the weird sonic signature of The Chasm, maybe; the dry sound and grind influence and avant garde bizarreness of Disharmonic Orchestra... I'm running out of points of reference. More than anything, Diskord sound like themselves. They have a tremendously self-assured style, perhaps as a result of existing for six or seven years before they put this album out. Or perhaps it just comes from some inner consistency of vision and creative voice that can't be conjured from nowhere or imitated - you simply have it, or you don't. Diskord have it in spades.

The sound of "Doomscapes" contributes much to that "can't place it" feeling. The guitar tone is peculiar, like a couple of bees duking it out with a guy who has a chronic rattling cough. The vocals are also dry and raspy, so you get an unusual sonic effect from the whole thing. It's certainly not atmospheric in any conventional sense, but neither is it clean enough to be "clinical." The oddball, dominating bass lines take it to another place as well; it's rare to encounter an album where you'll spend so much time hoping the bass comes up for a solo or key melody soon. The drums are maybe the least remarkable part of the band, but still are doing things that could only work in this particular context. Diskord definitely sound like a unit; I'd be hard-pressed to remove any of their members and identify a suitable replacement. It might explain my difficulty if I said that it seemed like any random member of Primus might be better suited to play in this band than, say, a member of Incantation or Nile or Suffocation or whoever else.

Bottom line - if you like the weird outer limits of extreme metal, you need this CD. And you'll probably end up like me, desperately hoping they do another one. "Doomscapes," maybe - I would have called it "Mindscapes," which ain't exactly original, but does conjure some idea of how much this release engages my brain every time I put it on.