Veritas Diaboli Manet in Aeternum: Chaining the Katechon

Originally "Chaining the Katechon" was part of a split vinyl album with S.V.E.S.T. but was made a separate EP for the disc version which is available in North America through Southern Lord. A mighty pairing the split vinyl album would have been if you know S.V.E.S.T. as well as DSO with DSO's intense and complex music complementing and contrasting well against the other band's whirlwind BM psychedelia.

The 22-track plays like a mini-album of several pieces. The intro goes straight for your jugular and holds tight: it's brutal, it's intense, raw and aggressive with blazing guitars and incredible nuclear-powered drumming. Suddenly it all shrinks back into a long-ish, loping piece of laidback doom and if that weren't enough, the music melts away into an almost acoustic passage dominated by howling nauseous guitar.

Around the 7th minute we have an interesting scrapey loop of snare drum lording it over the rest of the music; this is actually an important part of the track as it repeats much later on.

Blasting black metal comes back with redoubled fury but again and again it moves aside to introduce quite warped passages of music where guitars can bounce off or slide up and down pixillated drumming sequences that may owe a debt to jazz improv. There's even a section around the 13th minute or thereabouts where the music drops into a dance-worthy groove if such a thing can be possible with DSO!

Onwards the music continues and while it alternates punches of black metal blast fury with loping passages of doom, melodic post-rock flights of fancy and spurts of off-tune, off-beat experimentation, we may glance at the lyrics which show a preoccupation with metaphysics and a universe dominated by an indifferent and much less powerful God than religion has forced us to expect. Life and Death turn out to be two sides of the one prison from which we cannot escape.

At about the 18th minute, the scooping rhythm we met much earlier barges in again, leading us through a gale of trumpeting guitar drone into an extended coda of doomy metal highlighted by deep, clean-toned vocals. The coda ends very decisively on one note.

Overall this is an impressive opus of consistent and sustained black metal anger and intensity combining trad BM blasts with unexpected moments of melodic post-rock, introspective loping cowboy doom and jazz-inspired experimentation. The vocals are the weakest part of the track, not varying as much as the music does, but they're not much more than a textural element in the music anyway. DSO should be credited with maintaining such a consistent level of intensity, tightness and intricacy in a very long track.