The artwork is inscrutable; the production yawns like a bottomless well; the guitars warp and stretch; the album title is Greek and the closing song title Latin: you know it, you love it — Abyssal plays Very Serious Metal exclusively.
Unlike too many of its Very Serious peers, however, Abyssal backs up its tar-black aesthetic with tremendous riffs, unexpected ambient and atmospheric passages, and a canny sense of naturalistic songwriting. Where a band like Ulcerate has recently tended to be too transparent in pulling the listener again and again to one side solely for the trick of dropping that seasick twist and yanking her back to the other side, Abyssal’s songs breathe more openly. They still know their way around tension and release, however, as the glorious melodic climax of “The Cornucopian” proves. Though all the instrumentation clatters and bleats and hammers as one would expect from this sort of blackened, lurching death metal, the drumming is inventive and thoughtful throughout, as on the jazz-leaning, gently tripping accents in the first few minutes of “Chrysalis.”
At its best, then, the album is jaw-dropping, but it still gets in its own way. The chant-and-drone intro of “A Casual Landscape,” for example, is effectively spooky, but kills any momentum by dragging on for three minutes. “Telomeric Erosion” moves from soft, suspended riffs punctuated by staccato gut-checks to a wistful furrow, but it wears itself out by leaning a little too far back on the beat. More broadly, Abyssal’s vocals are such a hoarse, whispered abstraction that they are nearly a non-entity.
Even with these flaws taken into account, it’s hard to imagine that there will be a better album in this style released this year. This is primarily because Abyssal has mastered the art of building seamlessly to a huge crescendo or breaking point but then, rather than puttering out, somehow building atop that crescendo to ratchet the intensity even higher. The best example of this is the album MVP “Veil of Transcendence,” which whips and thuds along its merry way before bowing out to introduce a severely unsettling piano motif which sounds a little like a demonic calliope. Where so many a lesser band would leave it at that and exeunt on that note of quiet horror, Abyssal doubles down and then some by reentering the fray with a renewed, full band death-vigor. Through the rest of the song, then, that damnable children’s carnival melody is there, playing neither in sync with nor at a clear offset from the metal, but at an oscillating angle, as if the song is running – fitfully and sometimes unsucessfully – away from its own ghost.
Though it takes its time getting there, when the closing track really hits its stride, it makes good on the rest of the album’s promise. When the spidery guitar lead syncs up with the bass about halfway through, it is a thing of deep beauty. In fact, by the time the song reaches its end, it has managed to recast the listener’s sense of the journey involved to get there. The closing minutes are so refreshingly nimble that it’s easy to overlook how otherwise jarring it should be to hear a syncopated house rhythm against a swift post-punk bass line in a Very Serious Death Metal Album. But that, it turns out, is Abyssal’s true magic: elevating sounds that in other hands have become overplayed by privileging feel over form, tactile emotion over trite erudition, truth over template.
As it was and shall be.
