The strength of sin

Deathspell Omega
Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice
(Norma Evangelium Diaboli, 2004)

Black metal isn't dead, it just moved. For instance, the French have a storied history with the style, although aside from the work of Stefen Kozak (Eikenskaden, Mystic Forest, etc.), I admit to being fairly ignorant about it. The famed kvltsters of Les Légions Noires assaulted the underground in the early '90s, but I am fairly certain that the only people who knew about that movement when it was active were a part of it. Some of those dudes were "racialist" types, some of them weren't, and I don't care enough to find out which is which so I can spend a gazillion dollars buying old cassettes on eBay. Which brings me to France's Deathspell Omega, who have done split releases with various shady ultra-underground legends and whose vocalist, Mikko Aspa, has put out some shady groups on his label. There is nothing in Deathspell Omega's lyrics or image that has anything to do with ethnicity, so in the libertine spirit of True Unholy Black Metal, I will consider all of that to be moot. Besides, this record, which I recently acquired, is one of the best pieces of progressive black metal I've heard since Leviathan's Tentacles of Whorror. Lyrically, these guys are all about the Horned One, and they're pretty serious about it, although their more philosophical take on anti-Christianity is undermined by catchy couplets such as "Organic procreation, mind-intromission, there comes the salvation/Pubescent vaginas obstructed with the redeemer's holy essence." Eewww-uh!

SMRC thrives on mesmerizing repetition, as all good black and doom metal does, yet it's a diverse and immersive listen. After the requisite sacrilegious intro, the second track, "Sola Fide I," is where things take off, beginning as an angular waltz and building to a crescendo of eerily clattering production tricks, including a countermelody buried in the mix around the three-and-a-half minute mark that sounds like underwater church bells programmed by a madman. You don't notice it immediately, but it's very unsettling when you do. By "Second Prayer," the pace has slowed to a trudge, its interlude of feedback and tribal drumming interrupted by a return to the main theme, Hasjari's guitar mirrored by either a viola or keyboard. Here we see Deathspell Omega's real coup, their skill at building tension through ambience which is more musical and active than most, as also heard in the Cult of Luna-ish sludge of "Third Prayer." The more "black metal" songs such as "Hétoïmasia" or "Jubilate Deo (O Be Joyful in the Lord)" bleed baleful, tremolo-picked minor key guitar melodies, yet are cataclysmic and droning and warped like old Enslaved. It all comes together in the twelve-minute bonanza "Carnal Malefactor," which takes an extended Gregorian chant break at its midpoint that makes the inevitable blast of blackened bile all the more devastating. Fast, slow, it doesn't matter - the entire record is drenched in the same shoegazer fuzz, leaving the listener sealed in a dank cave with Aspa's reverbed rasp cackling at your feeble hope of escape. I can think of no more appropriate a musical approximation of the month of March as the closing instrumental, "Malign Paradigm," and its inexorable lumber toward a swirling psychedelic miasma, a sharp hiss of white noise and then, finally, silence.