Doedsmaghird – Omniverse Consciousness Review

Here’s a funny thing for someone ostensibly in the business of making words about sounds: sometimes I just… don’t wanna. Sure, like a desperately hungry squirrel misunderstanding the meaning of “no nut November,” sometimes I just don’t have the energy, but more often I run up against the thought that this is not an effective way to convey that. To describe is not the same as to perceive; to say is not to sense. Dwelling on such things by way of introducing the debut album from Doedsmaghird might just be a lazy writer sloughing off responsibility, but it might just be [ed. It’s not] the stroke of genius your ears need to get right with this wrongness.

Omniverse Consciousness is the opening salvo – the confuse-bouche – from a name you may feel you’ve chewed on before. Doedsmaghird is the sprint-limping brainchild of Dødheimsgard’s Vicotnik and Camille Giraudeau (lately also of DHG, as well as Stagnant Waters, whose 2024 album Rifts plumbs similarly unrestrained depths), so if you’re familiar with the last several DHG albums (particularly A Umbra Omega and Black Medium Current), you know that weird is a given. The core of Omniverse Consciousness is rapid-fire black metal that has been touched by the blighted hands of dozens of degenerate angels. Look one way and you see the machinic industrial anarchy of Satanic Art and 666 International, but turn back again and the picture has shifted imperceptibly. The electronic elements are there, sometimes in a full-tilt pummel, but there’s an earnestness here, a yearning, searching drive that twists even the album’s most jagged sounds into a slipstream that goes down smoothly.

And that’s really the heart of it: Doedsmaghird spins out so many ideas that trying to keep a coherent mental sketch is like so much sand through your fingers. The words that you might use to tell your brain how to feel about the sounds, they… drift off and dissolve. The music beckons you close by virtue of how closely hewn its sounds are, spindly guitar lines and ricocheting drums that might be real or synthetic or both, voices and voices and voices overlaid and overlapping. The songs tumble on with a persistent drive, but hallucinatory fragments jump out and just as soon recede, throbbing and pulsing like the early onset of radiation sickness.

While album opener “Heart of Hell” is drifty and contemplative, “Sparker Inn Apne Dorer” opens with an aggressively woozy run and then blasts itself seven different types of sideways. “Then, to Darkness Return” is a blistering rager. Late-album gem “Adrift into Collapse” opens with seriously frantic tremolo guitar lines, but they’re laid atop half-time trap beats in a fusion that renders the listener something of a gelatinous suspension. Flick your arm – it’s like hitting a plate of Jell-O with a tuning fork.

Vicotnik’s vocals, a riveting presence in all his bands, truly run the gamut across this dazed and dazzling album. He moves between dejected crooning, wide-eyed howling, shambling spoken word, noisy hollering, and several other unclassifiable and frankly unwell sounds. In the back half of “Adrift into Collapse” he screeches and retches like Dustin Diamond on a fierce ipecac bender while a violin sketches out something beautifully compelling, like a cyber-noir take on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. While the music sometimes hulks and stomps like the clang of a factory floor, more often it amplifies the blistered hum of a distant forge.

Although the runtime is significantly tighter, Omniverse Consciousness still evokes a similar sense of feverish sprawl as A Umbra Omega and BMC, with the electronic elements often providing a compellingly cosmic lilt rather than industrial grit or stark avant-garde intent. This mélange of harsh and still, wild and kind, out and gone yields beautiful, unexpected results, like the latter half of “Endless Distance,” where a preoccupation with wild lunges of scything guitar arpeggios plays out like a robot-freaked interpretation of Coltrane’s Giant Steps methodology.

The point with this is, none of these words can make the sounds. The words are shapes about the sounds. The sound is what the body knows. Seek it to yourself and make it for yourself. Heaven knows, you could have been any number of other things, maybe. A pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas. A caveman at Lascaux trying to sketch the world’s earliest dick pic. (Don’t do it, Ghrurnk. Bwoghiilda deserves better.) You could have been you, seeing another you through a crack in the sky and knowing from some profound place that you – the one here, now, reading these empty words about sounds more full than the folds of time – are the double. What would that sound like?