The Contagion in Nine Steps

Insofar as music is concerned, 2015 stands in my mind as one of the very best years we’ve had in this new millennium; certainly the best of the decade when I account for all the life-changers and modern classics clustered within it. Of those, Lychgate’s An Antidote for the Glass Pill was one of those which hit the hardest. Based on that, you could ride the coattails of inference and assume (correctly) that I thought Lychgate’s second album was pretty god damned special.

Avant-garde metal usually sounds like a colourful toybox of kitchen sink accessories mashed together by musicians with more technique than taste. There’s always a self-contained elation in hearing a band that comes through on the promise of pushing boundaries. Between the maelstrom church organ (leading the band) and the eerily tone-perfect guitars, Lychgate’s was a sound dredged out from some uncanny valley. Ghostly, arrogant, cerebral, and completely unique. It was a deal made grander by the unmistakable presence of one Greg Chandler, who long since established himself in Esoteric as one of the few vocalists in metal to vindicate the art of growling with range and expression par virtuoso.

Around the time An Antidote for the Glass Pill was released to the public, I predicted that it would go down as some kind of underground classic. Alas, this was not meant to be, not least of all considering the sum of people I’ve heard profess variations of “I can’t get into it, Conor-- why don’t we put something else on instead?” Sure thing, let’s go ahead and listen to that spooky Watain record and pray to Hanna-Barbera their wild hunt isn’t foiled by some meddling kids.

I won’t make the same mistake with The Contagion in Nine Steps. Lychgate have released another fantastic body of material that comes impressively close to the awe of An Antidote for the Glass Pill without relying on the same tricks. Still, I’m not so naive now to think this one will do much better than the mixed-bag reception of its predecessor. Lychgate remain-- and likely always shall be-- challenging, unique, and reeking with demented genius.

Lychgate are once again different-sounding than before, this time with rebalanced emphasis on theatricality and the apocalyptic undertones of the last record. Most significantly, the church organ no longer plays magistrate in Lychgate’s sound, having coiled back to a more conventional support role. Gone too are the alien clocktower guitars, replaced in turn with something similar but less garish. The black metal-imbued frantic pacing of Antidote has been followed up here by a self-assured momentum I half-assume drew some influence from Esoteric. Similar in a sense to the doom-shifting evolution manifested by The Ruins of Beverast, it’s hard to say for sure where the foundations in one genre ended and the other began. It’s up for debate how far tags like that could really go to pin the sound here when there’s such a blurred divide between disciplines.

If that second album was apocalyptic fanfare from a stark cathedral, Contagion serves the same dish in an opera house instead. Theatricality was part of the band’s framework before, but it’s been such a core part of my impression this time around that I can almost imagine the stage direction. The emotional dynamics can be downright wild, careening between clawing malevolence and hysteric Romanticism several times within certain tracks. The expressive range owes itself to the album’s regard for strong song structures. Predictably dense atmosphere aside, I was first taken aback by how vocal-oriented these arrangements are. Greg Chandler’s growls have the sort of resonance you could naturally imagine filling up the rafters in some grimly inverted opera, interspersed with deep booming vocals, haunted whispers, moderate tenor cleans and, most strikingly, bombastic earpiercer falsettos typically reserved for prog and power metal.

The diversity of vocalists comes together very nicely. Alexandros Antoniou of Macabre Omen (coincidentally the culprit behind another reason I remember 2015 so well) grounds the atmosphere with something recognizably human. The soaring wails of guest Chris Hawkins are, perhaps ironically, the ballsiest move Lychgate makes here. I think it works brilliantly as a counterpoint. Then again, maybe I can just count myself uncommonly suited for this album as the stale adult continuation of a 15 year old who once fumbled at a record store between buying the Rhapsody of Fire album in his one hand or the one by Gorguts in the other, and fortunately had the good sense to go broke and come home with both.

An Antidote for the Glass Pill was too one-of-a-kind to suffer the ease of a direct comparison. I suppose The Contagion in Nine Steps makes this part easier in that I could ask you to imagine what Lychgate’s funeral doom cousin project would sound like were they possessed by the playful mania of Arcturus. Weirdly in some ways I think this album is bounds closer to the average palate of the types of people who felt strongly averse to Lychgate’s eccentricism; the glaring quirks have been shaved down enough for me to initially speculate if it had in small part influenced (read: discouraged) by the murmurs from the gallery. Then again, those same underground metalheads that called the organs “pretentious” would be none too pleased for the operatic power metal wails this time around. So scratch one theory if I first supposed Lychgate were softening down at all.

The Contagion in Nine Steps is challenging in precisely the sort of way I hope to hear from the avant-garde keep; precisely the sort of experience I’ve stopped realistically expecting from a metal record. This really is as jarring and uncompromised as the one before it, and while your mileage may vary too much to give a recommendation whole-hearted, those with the ears to hear the brilliance will have something special to behold at the end of time.