Thecodontion / Ceremented

Hands up who likes their metal without guitars? This split brings together Arizona’s Ceremented and Italy’s Thecodontion, two artists capable of demonstrating the enormous versality of instruments historically side-lined within metal, but ones that have recently been taking up more room centre stage as people gradually tire of distorted guitar dominance. Here this intermediary is completely stripped out, and we, untroubled by walls of distorted noise, are able to reach for the very core of metal’s essence: the riff.

Coming off the heals of their hugely acclaimed debut album ‘Supercontinent’ released in 2020, Thecodontion largely dispense with the furious deathgrind element of their sound to focus on the eerie, ethereal aspects of their style. Whilst on their LP this asserted itself as a form of progressive sludge metal, here the addition of a full time a keyboardist drags their bass driven template into full on progressive metal territory. Echoes of Pestilence and Cynic ride atop what is still an undeniably abrasive bedrock.

Grizzly, distorted bass is still the foundation of this sound. As are drums that articulate the blast-beat as a kind of jazz shuffle, with emergent fills acting as accents as opposed to signallers of a coming transition. Bass leads ride atop these waves of primal aggression, offering idiosyncratic harmonic material, juxtaposing their softer textures with the rough edges at the music’s core. Equally the vocals retain the gravelly, distorted bark of death metal (aside from ‘La Torre’, a cover of Italian singer /songwriter Franco Battiato).

Keyboards fill out the textural offering of the music. Where ‘Supercontinent’ was marked out by the unsettling emptiness at the core of the sound, a positive absence felt by the listener expectantly awaiting the centre of the mix to be filled by distorted guitars, this EP by contrast leaves no such speculative gap. All is eerie, spacey, unnerving, but also oddly compelling. The keyboards for the most part flesh out the sound with spacey, mystical texture of synth lines following the cues of the bass. Emergent melodic licks extend the already rather complex musical meanderings of Thecodontion.

Ceremented take the more obviously direct route, with three tracks of dirge ridden death metal, pivoting on a primal percussive attack, along with a “lead” and “rhythm” bass guitar line. They offer a nightmarish, industrialist take on Autopsy, via droning, downbeat riffs and off kilter playful rhythms that revel in their nihilism.

The production is oddly mechanical, with an overtly clicky bass drum, a tinny snare worthy of the power violence at the philosophical core of the music, and mechanistic bass tones. Guttural vocals complete the picture, offering the audial equivalent of industrial noise static to flesh out the scant textural picture.

The tracks themselves are a kind of half-formed descanting on the nature of finality, futility, a sparse, plodding, lackadaisical tour of twisted and simplistic death metal. The structure of these tracks is so loose, informal, entropic, that they appear to collapse before our ears. Post hardcore and sludge sit as peripheral influences here, guiding the music in its loose approach to compositional structure that pivots on exercises in competing intensities, degrees of activity, and layers of sonic illogicism.

Originally published at Hate Meditations