There’s a short story by the English author P.G. Wodehouse called “The Purity of the Turf” that I think about a lot. Well, to be honest, it’s mostly the title of the story that frequently ricochets around my brain. Although Wodehouse is one of the funniest writers I have ever read, I think the reason the phrase has made itself at home is that purity – if we think about it as the preservation of some supposed essence of a thing – is just not very interesting. Musically, rhetorically, and politically, purity is a dead end.
The Ukrainian band Labyrinthus Stellarum is the current reason for this noodling. On their third album, Rift in Reality, brothers Alex Andronati (songwriting, vocals, programming) and Misha Andronati (guitars) offer a tantalizing affront to that most purity-besotted subgenre, black metal. Although Labyrinthus Stellarum is presented as an atmospheric/cosmic black metal band, in reality the songwriting here is more like Eurotrance metalcore. Yes, there are plenty of black metal-adjacent signifiers like spidery guitar arpeggios, blasting programmed drums, and Alex’s snarling distorted vocals, but they’re part of songs that also include loads of electronics, dubstop drops, chugging breakdowns, synthwave trappings, and Auto-Tune approximations of Cynic’s robotic vocals.
This might be the part of the review where any black metal diehards particularly fixated on the purity of their particular turf will find smoke starting to billow from their ears, but I should underscore that none of these descriptions are meant as insults. Labyrinthus Stellarum makes rubbery, synthetic music with surfaces that gleam like polished chrome. One of the album’s highlights, for example, is “Lost in the Void,” which makes great use of a synth effect like upright chimes being struck by mallets. Elsewhere, the synth patch that plays the first lead on the title track sounds almost like a hammered dulcimer rendered into binary. Misha’s guitar is a high-gloss and often high-fret metallic lullaby tone (see late-album winner “Liftoff” for a great example).
Rift in Reality is a glittering candy confection, and at 37 minutes, nothing overstays its welcome. I’m certain that I won’t remember any of the individual songs, but I don’t usually find that a very important basis for critique. Labyrinthus Stellarum is a very young band making music that pulls sounds from disparate sources, and that sort of recombinant excitement is infectious. Their music has such meticulously clean, rounded edges that it feels like the part of a sci-fi movie about a pristine, futuristic paradise just before its rotten dystopian underpinnings are revealed. There’s little subtlety or purity to be found here, but if you can silence your knee-jerk ironist, there’s an alluring musical playground. Couldn’t your sardonic bones use some time on the monkey bars?
