Mass Grave Aesthetics

A very powerful piece that deservedly stands alone as an EP; very few listeners will be able to stand any more from DSO after this song. Unusually perhaps it begins as a sinister crackle of noise that explodes into a frantic and furious scrabble-guitar blast. The solid guitars-n-drums battery throws out odd flashes of lead guitar and washes of steel-toned ambient noise paint the background. A steady rhythm continues before an utter collapse about the 5th minute and we're in a void from which electronic ambient chaos of jagged-edge swirls and keening high-pitched squeals spread out and release the band.

Wriggly guitar chord riffs, clashing cymbals, solid drumming and deranged background synth ambience that rises to hysterical levels of panicky emotion provide solid backing for spiky lead guitar tune loops and spitting vocals. Sometimes the music pauses to allow listeners a brief glimpse again into the void where the electronic noise universe rages unceasingly; at times in other parts of the track, this universe threatens to engulf the musicians completely and they can barely be heard. The music is affected by the chaos: the singing is more desperate and extends to screaming, and guitars are more dense, more squiggly as if struggling to escape suffocation. About the 15th minute, everything suddenly pauses and changes into something more intense and melodramatic: winds blow, the vocals are wailing and begging for release, synths are squealing and bleak, bleached-sounding guitars are buffeted this way and that. Everything disappears into a delirious hell.

This is an incredibly intense work that takes listeners to highs and lows in black metal art. You wonder if DSO have anything left to offer after this. They'd be superhuman if they do!

Just as intense are the lyrics which are based on poems by 19th century French anarchist poet / essayist / opium junkie Laurent Tailhade whose utterance:

"What matter the victims, provided the gesture is beautiful?
What matters the death of vague human beings,
If thereby the individual affirms himself?"

provides the springboard for DSO to explore the possibility that individuality and self-affirmation may be possible only through violence even if that violence claims lives. While DSO are certainly not endorsing leading the life of a serial killer, their exploration may have a point: certain ideologies, religions, even modes of governance and governments themselves depend on the sacrifice of lives (through ceaseless factory work perhaps, brainwashing through media propaganda maybe, or just outright killing by driving people off lands desired for corporate activities) and care nothing for the value of those human beings mown down in the process.

In "Mass Grave Aesthetics", DSO take a stand against the oppression of religion or ideology by portraying it as a crazed being that takes believers into chaos. Elsewhere in the song, there is also a point made that violence is sometimes necessary as it can reveal the truth about one's oppression; only then can one resist that oppression.

Incidentally the statement made by Tailhade after a bomb attack on the Chamber of Deputies in 1893 was to haunt him as in 1895, he lost an eye in a bomb attack on a restaurant. Not exactly une belle gesture for him!