Precipice

An odd concoction greets the ear on Galicia’s debut album ‘Precipice’. Hailing from California, this outfit whip up a strangely hypnotic interplay between the informal violence of war metal and the melancholic melodic aspirations of Nordic black metal, employing elements of death and blackened thrash as mediators supervising this tense exchange of ideas. It’s as if the music is attempting to overcome its own drive to chaos by wresting more formal structures from the ground itself.

Aesthetically ‘Precipice’ is a lo-fi album, with a mix lifted straight from the rehearsal room that only goes to enhance the primitivist aspects of this release. Riffs and their percussive accompaniments are packed tightly together, as the music lurches between tempo and key with ease. The production is clear enough to allow the listener some visibility on the intricate interplay between drums and guitar. But whilst justice is done to the performances, Galicia proudly position themselves at the dirty, primal end of underground extreme metal. Vocals are a cavalcade of monstrous black metal rasps, guttural death growls that would sit quite happily on a goregrind album, and banshee wails adding a degree of high fantasy drama to supplement the violence.

Compensation for the rough mix goes further than mere vocal ornamentation however. The guitar work is replete with a unique melodic character, reaching back to the very early days of melodic extreme metal in the ‘The Red in the Sky is Ours’ or even mid-90s Absu. Narratively, the riffs take on a conversational attitude to one another.

Tracks typically open with an atonal rumble of primal war metal, upon which is placed meandering melodic material situated somewhere between the mournful, the heroic, and the cathartic. But rather than the riff resolving itself in order to be repeated in a predictable sequence before new material is introduced, they taper off as unfinished melodic fragments. The cadence left hanging, the next riff will follow directly from the last initially building from the same starting point, only to drive the music in an entirely different direction; like witnessing an exchange between two participants in a debate, both bouncing off the other’s ideas, yet both not entirely in control of the direction and pace of the subject matter.

In this sense Galicia are an ultra compressed version of their label mates Into Oblivion, who adopt a similarly unpredictable, tangential attitude to the melodic character of their riffs. The music seems to be constantly fighting itself for direction, meaning, structure, but as the music compounds on itself a gradual forward motion can be discerned from the superficially chaotic miasma of ideas that is thrown at the listener. A densely packed slab of information that cloaks its own complexities behind the veneer of disorder, only revealing its internal logics via intimate and persistent study.

Originally published at Hate Meditations