Gwarth II

Thoren… every time I recall these lads I always think of Thorin, the hero dwarf from “Lord of the Rings”, or rather from “Bilbo Baggins…”. Well, the truth isn’t very far from it as “thoren” actually means “fenced”, “protected” in Sindarin… yep, you haven’t studied this language at the university across the street; you haven’t cause this is a fictional language created by J.R.R. Tolkien. With thousands of metal acts borrowing names and phrases from the Tolkien books, this moniker doesn’t exactly evoke notions of originality.

We’ll stay on the Tolkien connection some more as what this formation cooked on the self-titled EP wasn’t far from the work of some Count Grishnackh aka Burzum, namely “Filosofem”. The three Americans recorded a small all-instrumental version of Burzum’s magnum opus, dark cavernous, miasmic dungeon music which hypnotic quasi-doom base instantly mortified any attempts at a faster play. Two years later, on the debut “Brennenburg”, things were radically different; the band switched to nervy spastic mathcore mixed with the bouncy polyrhythmic conundrums of mid-period Meshuggah. All-instrumental again. Then came the first part of the album reviewed here, “Gwarth I”, which saw the guys moving towards the tech-death fraternity with a constantly jumpy unpredictable sound, hectic highly eventful shredding that still had its pacifying quiet moments. Needless to add, it was all-instrumental stuff; again.

Judging by the name of the opus here, one should expect a faithful follow-up to the complex mathematical death metallisms of the preceding saga… and yes, those expectations are met every bit of the way, the lads tossing the listener all over the place with the impossibly restless jarring, hectic title-track, a symphony of highly-stylized chaos which leads a string of aural insanity after it, the latter reflected in either short spastic bolts (“Naeg”) or in more sprawling, more meticulously-assembled sterile puzzles (“Thaw Gur”). Strangely enough, it’s the brief super-technical cuts like “Vex” and “Egladhrim” that contain the more exciting material regardless of their breezy nature as there’s simply not enough time for the plot to be lost having in mind the very swiftly-changing times and tempos. There’s nothing wrong with the longer compositions, mind you; it’s just that there’s some chugga-chugga tendency (“Suith”) on those when the guys take a break from the profuse dazzling riff-downpour, also with a couple of short lyrical etudes (“Lithui”, “Firen”). However, when they retain their twisted genius for the entire duration of said numbers, they literally hit the very top like on the supreme surreal excursion “Raun Raeg”, a free-flow wonder of weird overlapping rhythms and eccentric melodies with never an artificial moment, not to mention the absolutely ravishing abrupt short speedy nuance.

Yeah, all-instrumental tech-death can seldom be served in such a fabulous manner; this is more feverishly-executed than the Spanish Continuo Renacer’s repertoire, and more aggressive than the musings of the Canadians Electro Quarterstaff. It’s less than half an hour, the entire saga, it passes you by like an encompassing tornado, one that you will choose to revisit almost instantly in order to savour all the gimmicks within. It all has the feel of a semi-improvised, not very premeditated jam session, but one done by experts, by musical adepts who are very confident in their skills, and who know that even in their more relaxed dishevelled state, they can still produce compelling musical riddles.

Ha, it’s good that I thought of the word “tornado”; cause this so aptly describes this outfit’s approach… in fact, I think that from now on any musical tornado, of this or any other kind, should be labelled “thorenado”.