Ouroboros Lust

Hail Conjurer continue their journey into surrealist black metal doom with the latest outing ‘Ouroboros Lust’. Fuzz prevails, with a wash of background static, eerie drones, and minimal synth tones infusing the album with an opaque haze. Many of the riffs are identifiably black metal, albeit played through a guitar tone that appears to be in a perpetual state of collapse. The experience of Hail Conjurer remains one of live action entropy. It is as if we are watching the corpse of black metal decay before our eyes. Any solidity, detail, nuance, and clarity are gradually melting away, leaving nothing but a viscous mulch of material, with no way to distinguish features once thought to be clear and distinct.

This adds an extra layer of grief to tracks like ‘Two Stars’, which ends on an almost bright note with a simple guitar solo set to a mid-paced blast-beat and a hint of a major key. Yet all the usual weapons of black metal’s peripheral triumphalism fall to dust under the weight of decay’s inevitability. Simple, demo quality drums clatter their way through these pieces, at times barely able to hold the simplest of patterns together, at others desperately trying to marshal the guitars into an entity capable of holding its form.

The guitar tone itself adopts a bass heavy, overly distorted poise, one more fitting of primitive doom than frigid black metal. But there is intentionality behind this, as the faster passages fail to hold their form, the guitar only provokes this deconstruction further as the inertia of noise and feedback overpowers any traditional musical development at the level of the riff. A near constant fog of background noise – often of unknown origin – frames the metallic instruments with a cloud of uncertainty, mournful yet utterly alien. A punk-like vocal bark completes the picture, refusing to engage in any overt display of despair in favour of defiant outbursts of focused rage.

‘Ouroboros Lust’ is therefore a fascinating rumination on the deconstruction of music itself. But unlike the many attempts to achieve this process over the decades, here it takes place from within the citadel of institutionalised music theory itself. Thus creating the opportunity for us to witness music’s self-annihilation. Or rather, music’s self-dismantling. This is still recognisable as a work that contains rhythm, harmony, melody, phrasing. But all or contorted into various states of decay to the point that they appear to bleed into one another. We remain trapped in the moment where rot has set in, a return to yesterday’s certainties is no longer possible, but the full force of decomposition is yet to take place.

Originally published at Hate Meditations