Serpentine Halo

It took me quite a bit of time to track down the soundtrack to this mythical Metalywood blockbuster. How could I have known that it was entirely composed by an abstract metal entity named Zillah from Scotland? Finally armed with the name, I embarked on a journey to find the Holy Grail of all soundtracks, and logically my quest led me to the band’s full-length debut “Morta in Crucem” (2002). It wasn’t the music I was looking for, but it was a pretty decent mathematical modern deathy metal slab reminiscent of early Meshuggah with shouty death metal vocals. The Swedes’ bleak sterile landscapes have already begun to influence the scene so this effort wasn’t quite the last vogue’s outcry.

Three EP’s released subsequently passed through my ears containing similar piles of stylish mechanical “noise” the guys gradually elaborating the approach. Then I stumbled upon the sophomore opus “Substitute for a Catastrophe” (2006) from where half of the soundtrack was taken; the band have made a major step forward with this highly stylized modern death metal saga which combined Gorguts’ “From Wisdom to Hate”, Ulcerate’s “The Destroyers of All”, and Wormed’s “Planisphaerium” into a captivating dissonant whole the spices provided from Voivod’s mid-90’s period.

Then the band dropped from sight... for whole nine years. The world has forgotten about Zillah by the time their third instalment came out, the album reviewed here. The guys by all means had some catching up to do with all the aforementioned acts, including with Meshuggah themselves who have finally woken up from their djenty industrial stupor with the excellent “obZen” (2008). I was thoroughly delighted to discover the remainder of said soundtrack here with the opening “Therefore I Am”, a turbulent whirlpool of super-technical dispassionate riffage which is strangely dynamic the whole time regardless of its amorphous, mechanical nature; distorted blast-beats tear the aether sounding seductively surreal on the bleak background. “Something Done Cannot Be Undone” has an alluring quiet beginning which grows into creepy robotic riffage before the fast-paced cannonade resumes with supreme technical “excursions” ala Martyr later making this cut a masterpiece of multi-layered, thought-out metal. “Made Flesh and Bone” is the centrepiece of the robots’ rebellion, also title-wise, a dramatic intricate chugger with sparse faster-paced escapades which reach a fever pitch in the second half to the headbangers’ delight.

“Karras” is the last relatively short track, splitting the album into two, before the songs’ length increases with a more elaborate song-writing immediately served on “Not All of Me Shall Die”, a beautiful surreal brutalizer with a very busy, constantly shifting rhythm-section still finding time for a few appetizing melodic digressions. “Man Son of Swine” begins as an industrial doomy ballad, but “the idyll” can’t possibly last very long although the doomy motif persists later, and takes over the spastic sterile aggression. “One Thousand Stones Thrown Pt.1” brings about the dissonance and completely captures the listener’s imagination regardless of its pensive, meditative character; it will certainly not be all serenity and peace all the way till the end, and before long the band unleash some outlandish math-like mosh which retains the dissonant flavour even on the scattered blast-beating sections; return to serenity in the second half with a nice piano tune putting the robots to sleep. “He Knows All”, and “he’s” also the closer; that’s why “he” vanquishes the robots’ rebellion seducing them first with mesmerizing dissonant balladisms before some of the most unearthly, bizarre speedy accelerations “break” the robots into pieces; those who survived the first “massacre” will be inadvertently extinguished by the jarring cosmic panoramas finishing the whole album with a pessimistic “Obscura”-sque twist.

The classic death metal fandom would hardly spend more than 10-min with this mathematical cavalcade which eclipses most of the modern practitioners who are trying to create similar spacey, surreal machine-like vistas at present, and for the most part end up with something a bit more than cacophonous artificial noise. At this stage Zillah have no intentions on leaving the death metal arena, and their odes to the robots unmistakably belong to the death metal community. That same community has endured all kinds of cosmetic alterations in the past few years, and has become numb to any modifications however adventurous they may be. The detached futuristic “hallucinations” of three lads from Edinburgh would hardly shatter the genre’s foundations, but by all means would be an invaluable stronghold against another potential “robotic rebellion”.