Some music sounds like the soundtrack to ghosts in a platonic way, passive and focused on the vaporous lightness of spectral placidity. Not this. This is like that distant aesthetic of atmospheric lightness all of a sudden turns dense, thick; nearly carnal; like the soul-grabbing rush of a nightmare, like hands tangibly grabbing onto the listener, somewhere - around their wrist, or conscience - firmly...rising from the deep cryptic recesses of the subconscious. There's an almost regrettable truth to the horror described in these meandering tales, projecting a powerful urgency at the forefront that one might've wanted to avoid. The terror is there; it's relentless; and it draws the listener into the abyss it's reminding us all, does in fact exist. It won't let go. The first track introduces the affliction right into our hearts, plunging us in the vivid dead of night, but then the consistently hellish intensity of this endeavor pushes the torment further down. Trapped inside this phantasm, an avatar of life's vertiginous gravity, it dawns on us there's no escape.
The textures become grimmer, more punishingly macabre, to not say moribund. Outright demonic growls have appeared now. Have we traveled so far into this god-forsaken maelstrom, we're now hearing the devil himself - speaking in tongues, gurgling with a resentment infinitely vicious, pouring out this loathing magma that's steaming with misery - or is this not... hatred itself ? Other voices, distressed cries, reverberant chants of an eerie depravity, are speaking to us too. What are they saying ? For whatever alien language they're using, it's clear what they're communicating: something is wrong. Something is wrong with the world. Something is wrong with us, and something is wrong... with you, for merely grasping but even a fraction of the lucid dread expressed.
There's a feeling this music has a sentient control of its own, like it wasn't written by someone who's deliberately planned out its articulation. It feels spontaneous, as if breathed into existence, seeping through dormant imagination and found its way here. Unbeknownst to its very creators, those being merely a vessel conducting the pain. Like those Lovecraftian fiends have somehow transgressed the natural borders between real and fantasy, imposing themselves from beyond into perceptible truth, with all the chilling despair that restlessly follows in their lugubrious wake. And it is restless. Not one moment of respite grants the listener a glimpse at daylight, and the prevailing anguish that completely fills their thoughts and the air they breathe, recalls them always. Always.
A form of torture to be sure in that it forces the individual to stare right at the bare reality of suffering, and suffering as a constitutive acting force in life; awarding no relief, no sympathy. No warmth. It never invites, and not a creature in the universe could find a monad of hospitality there. The descending guitar discordance is no less than descending into the underground. The wailing noise is noise blurring our conscience, corrupting it with confusion as depicted by the resonating dissonance - resonating in our entrails, in our innermost interior.