fore, perfect in its role. If you look closely, the German word Sprache (language or speech) is written across a closed eyelid. Is this abstruse symbolism? Is it vapid provocation? Who cares? This guy here 
on the cover is already calling me an asshole for asking the question. Humanism is as short (just over 29 minutes) as it is unsettling (very). I hate the cover art, but it’s a productive hate. For very little reason at all, I keep thinking about the title of the My Dying Bride song “The Thrash of Naked Limbs,” except that Malconfort’s music is more like the twitch of mannequin parts. That cover art – also courtesy of vocalist Nuun – is aggressively unpleasant and uncomfortable, and there
rally like bugs crawling on your skin. About the only time the album gets conventionally “pretty” is around 3:10 or so into “Stain (Fantasy),” but even that clean guitar line lasts only a few bars before splashy drums and nervy backing guitar push it out of view. Speaking of, Humanism answers the unasked question, “What if Massive Attack’s Mezzanine was played by Deathspell Omega circa Drought?” or maybe “What if BAND interpreted Radiohead’s King of Limbs as the soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis?” The bass work in particular gives Malconfort a flavor that should tickle the nostrils of followers of Bill Laswell or Mick Harris’s Scorn. “Cruelty (Elation)” drops out completely after 2ish minutes, only to come back in with close-mic’d guitar and drums and feel quite lite
means anything to you. The devoutly peculiar racket contained within Humanism, however, is so confounding and enticing that the quest for antecedence soon fizzles. These songs live in a perpetual monochrome strangeness. Humanism is the debut album from a new trio out of the UK, Malconfort. The album’s press materials mention that members of the band also play in bands called Sea Mosquito and Amaltheia, so God bless you if that
cymbals often drop into slow-motion breakbeat patterns that goad the strings from band member Fas into twistier sheets of sound. On “Carnivore (God),” for example, Kopczak leads with spacious beats while Fas spools out lazy, dejected fragments of guitar melody. This song probably hits the biggest crescendo of the album, as that coiled tension looses briefly towards the end – “GOD IS POSSESSION! GOD IS CONTROL!” – but the band never truly takes their hands off the reins, leaving that knotty energy to pace and paw the ground. Opening track “Compulsion (Ecstasy)” drops in brashly with wailing, processed vocals, but that initial intensity quickly vanishes in favor of a jittery landscape of squiggly guitar and funky bass/drums interplay. Vocals are handled throughout Humanism by band members Nuun and Kopczak, but Kopczak’s drumming just as often takes on a leading role. The crisp snare and full palette of active
talking to? Is something dreadful about to happen in another room, around another corner? Moments like this – the speaker mumbles, “Maybe I should have taken action against myself” – give Humanism a distinct noir sensibility, like Ulver’s Perdition City or the quieter moments of the Axis of Perdition’s Urfe, like something David Lynch would listen to while reading Raymond Chandler and making a stop-motion film of decaying peonies. The only element of Malconfort’s sound that gets particularly extreme is the vocals, but even so, the harshness is used sparingly, and is routinely interlaced with whispers, barely audible crooning, laughter, and spoken word asides. On “Rage (Indulgence),” for example, the lyrics are delivered as a detached monologue, just enough under the surface of the song that it sounds like you’re listening in to something happening just out of frame. Who is the speaker
like an image photocopied again and again and again until it blurs into a pulpy silhouette. You can think about other edge cases like Dodheimsgard, Fleurety, Code, and Virus, but with Malconfort’s sparse atmosphere, jazz- and electronic music-indebted drumming, and dubbed-out basslines, they will surely also appeal to fans of later Chaos Echoes and Aluk Todolo. The music’s oddness, however, is driven by its shape and execution rather than instrumentation, because with the exception of some understated synth work that paints around the edges, Malconfort works strictly with guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. Stylistically, Malconfort plays an avant-garde black metal that is so far removed from black metal’s origins as to be nearly unrecognizable,
ning of the first song? Humanism’s song structures are jutting, jagged, rarely cyclical, moving from one thought to another and sometimes stopping midstream to go somewhere entirely different. The album itself is a macro version of the same, swaying and looping as if each moment could be either beginning or end. You know how Pink Floyd’s The Wall has that almost hidden “Isn’t this where we came in?” that’s split across the very end of the final song and the very begin
