Astraal Constellations of the Majickal Zodiac

Esoctrilihum sit at the apex of third/fourth wave black metal conceptualised as a playground for individuals with a rather generous assessment of their own significance within extreme experimental music. They self-identify as mavericks and outliers, and to some extent they are. Only the most wilfully blind would deny the imagination and craft stretched behind the output of Esoctrilihum, The Ruins of Beverast, Spectral Lore, Blut Aus Nord, Urfaust et al. All boast a clear and distinct vision of how their work should be perceived, and all have a demonstrative ability to communicate at least a precis of this vision. But all got perhaps a little too caught up in their own mythos and perceived calling in life, to the point that delusion replaces craft, and their inflated perception of themselves as outliers and visionaries leads to an excess of surplus content creaking under the weight of overcooked conceptual delirium.

This point extends beyond the sheer volume of material these artists have released, (Esoctrilihum are on album ten in seven years, averaging well over an hour a pop between them) or the convoluted thematic universe cluttering their work. These features certainly function as bright florescent warning signs that a poison lurks beneath the packaging even before one hits play.

But Esoctrilihum’s overestimation of their own significance is more apparent for the fact that they always appear on the point of unleashing a grandiose statement of cinematic, experimental extreme metal, but are never quite able to cohere the mental image of their music into a holistic, tight, focused artistic vision with deeper resonance for an audience. To be vulgar, we are forever on the point of orgasm, only to never arrive at a satisfactory completion.

Esoctrilihum are perhaps the worst offenders in this regard. Having crafted a compelling, angular take on dark, understated symphonic black metal that borrows heavily from the drama of blackened doom and the technical prowess of regal death metal a-la Septic Flesh, their work since the turn of the decade reads more like a set of hastily scribbled post-it notes after a prolonged fever dream. A dream that perhaps held internal logic at the moment of experience, but the logic quickly dissolves upon contact with reality, leaving only disconnected images, and concepts that look compelling on the surface, but melt into incoherence upon closer inspection.

‘Astraal Constellations of the Majickal Zodiac’, as a three part album centred around some tediously overcooked space adventure from the mind of Asthaghul, is both a continuation of this artisanal degeneracy and a vast expansion of it. It’s worth noting two facts about this album, both of which can be concurrently true.

1. This is a finely crafted, well executed piece of broadly symphonic atmospheric black/death metal.
2. This is an endless tome of confused vignettes clusters, unfinished riff sequences, and contextless ephemera.

How is this so? Each track boasts at least one compelling melody (often more), an engaging riff, or idiosyncratic theme. But surrounding these attention grabbing moments is a surfeit of inexplicable compositional choices we could charitably describe as “ill fitting”, to the point that the experience of listening to ‘Astraal Constellations of the Majickal Zodiac’ is akin to skipping through a playlist covering five decades of metal music on shuffle. From surplus thrash chugging, to hastily inserted tech-death, to tonally jarring hints of folk metal.

This is not experimentation, this is an artist in dire need of an editor and arranger. Someone to comb through every idea sprung from the deranged mind of Asthaghul and ruthlessly chop away the fat. Then for someone else to organise the remaining material into a serviceable sonic representation of whatever tedious cosmic fantasy narrative Asthaghul insists on inflicting us with.

The problem with Esoctrilihum’s music is Asthaghul himself. A taut, quality album of eccentric extreme metal of – perhaps modest – experimental import sits somewhere beneath the obfuscated mulch of ‘Astraal Constellations of the Majickal Zodiac’. Like David within the marble (or maybe not something quite so epoch defining), we await, yet again, for the emergence of an artistic vision worthy of the name, we await our moment of orgasmic climax. And the main obstacle to Esoctrilihum ever realising this moment is Esoctrilihum itself (and this point extends to many of the other modern bastions of orchestral, experimental extreme metal).

Originally published at Hate Meditations