Earth Penetration

The latest album from Hail Conjurer offers an interestingly brief blend of entropic, repetitive black metal, loosely strung together via Black Sabbathian rhythms seemingly designed for informal and unstructured jams normally considered out of place in a setting such as this. Tonally the music is kept squarely in the realm of harsh yet mournful hooks, delivered almost deliberately out of tune as a means of enhancing the abrasion. This is supplemented by keyboards played through distortion effects which both elevates the already alienating timbral character of the music whilst extending the stylistic offering into nightmarish psychedelia.

This interesting blend of harsh, slow, ruminating black metal with musical flourishes that harken back to a 70s jam setting marks ‘Earth Penetration’ out as a curiosity within modern black metal. Drums flow from loose, almost bluesy grooves to stilting, stop-start patterns played at depressed tempos, bringing some of these tracks to the borders of doom metal. Generous and foregrounded crash cymbals and deep, throbbing toms make for a combination more fitting for various forms of stoner doom than of typical black metal.

The guitar tone is ghoulishly thin, working through simple repeated sequences almost to the point of being unbearable. Unlike the usual wash of tremolo strummed riffs blazing by in galloping glory, the slower tempos on this release and the frustrated pacing makes each hook a laboured ordeal to work through. This is supplemented by an oppressively loud bass guitar, thundering away with punk like aggression, doing its level best to fill out the mid-range of the mix into the bargain. Vocals explore a range of tortured howls, monstrous in their theatricality, touching on a range of pitches and emotive intensity throughout the course of this album.

As ‘Earth Penetration’ progresses the experimental elements become ever more explicit. The psychedelia quickly gives way to borderline noise segments, and fascinatingly spontaneous meanderings of droning melodies, off centre drumming, and unpredictable emotive intent. The pieces seem to flirt with total devolution into unstructured noise rock before pulling themselves back into a recognisably black metal melodic structure, before diving straight back into aggressively drab horror aesthetics, pivoting on a push and pull between the eerie and the threatening.

Hail Conjurer have succeeded in genre alchemy as a trojan horse, blending styles and techniques without making this the centrepiece of the music itself. ‘Earth Penetration’ is an undeniably weird album from whichever angle one approaches it, but it is thus and so in a totally natural and uncontrived manner. The eccentricities of its many stylistic leanings work in conjunction with each other to create this bizarre, unpredictable, and eminently novel experience.

Originally published at Hate Meditations