Daydream

A very new post-BM / blackgaze project, Misertus is led by Tomas who is based in Manchester, home to a famous and varied rock and pop music scene stretching back to the 1960s. With a style blending the cold bleakness and dark isolation of BM with moments of hope and beauty, akin to finding diamonds in the deepest parts of a long-used and exhausted coal mine, maybe Misertus has found a formula that will help put Manchester back on the music map and regain that reputation for diverse, dark and passionate music established by bands like Joy Division and the Smiths years ago. Regarding passion, along with energy, Misertus seems possessed of bucket-loads: in 2019 alone, this act released three (!!!) full-length albums in the space of five months. Whoa there! I'm having trouble trying to keep up with this guy shooting out releases like a factory assembly line! I think I will just start with the debut work "Daydream".

The front cover artwork of a grim, even slightly sinister landscape under a dreamy pink-purple sky hints at the contradictions inherent in the music and its moods and atmosphere which work together very well. In the midst of darkness and despair, when everything seems completely hopeless, unexpected brightness can appear, even if very small and fleeting. Unusually perhaps for a debut album in its genre, "Daydream" starts full bore with machine-gun blast beats, noisy fuzz guitar showers, a definite bass groove, screeching ragged BM vocals and above all a trance-like atmosphere courtesy of occasional darkly jangling guitars: this underlines Misertus's approach for the rest of the album. Already themes of aggression and melancholy, harsh corrosive BM guitar noise and bewitching dream guitar tones, the bleakness of reality and an alternative world that exists in a parallel world which could enter ours if we knew what power we hold (but are prevented from doing so by The Powers That Be) are present in this song. This confrontation of opposed polar opposites continues into "Red Ghosts" with heightened intensity almost to the point where everything threatens to topple into madness.

We keep going with the mixture of despair, alienation and isolation on the one hand and on the other the glimmer of hope, perhaps at the expense of distinct musical motifs and riffs, in succeeding songs. While levels of energy, aggression and layered density of music are high, and the execution is spot-on, given that Tomas plays all instruments, at the same time the relentless pace can be wearying for listeners and sudden drops into dreamier, more flowing melodic passages which get kicked aside by blasts of full-on jackhammer BM tremolo showers become annoying when the novelty value wears off after one too many such bouts. The album starts to improve with "Duskwinds" which piles on atmospheric synth-generated drone wash over a barrage of melodic lead guitar, brooding bass and noisy metallic tremolo stutter in a track that almost sounds positively eastern European martial folk BM with its epic background bass steeliness. Dreamy dark jangly strumminess, driven at maximum speed, marks out "Fragility" as a major track with sparkling guitar riffs and a brief moment of meditative quiet as its assets. "Further" shows Misertus at its most epic and monumental with elements of prog rock in the keyboard noodling over the layers of guitar and percussion.

There is a progression from the early aggressive and bleak tracks to the later, more musically and emotionally complex songs which are brighter and (in the last couple of tracks) even celebratory and triumphal. As a result the better songs on the album are in its second half, featuring as they do more varied music, moods and atmospheres, and probably a better balance of post-BM, blackgaze and other elements from outside these genres as well. There is a danger that with the songs in this part of the album, the music is so densely layered and packed with sound and emotion that it could actually lose listeners; maybe spells of quiet synth tone-wash ambience between tracks would have been welcome in diffusing some of the tension and excess energy that have built up with each song. While at this stage of its development Misertus can handle very majestic music, it has to take care not to fall into overblown bombast which the music could so easily do.

For a debut work, "Daydream" is a very confident and self-assured album with a definite style and sound - it has the energy of an act determined to make its mark. Misertus is a band definitely worth watching in the future.