To tell you about Egregore’s second album, I’d like to first talk about wildness. If you traipse back to heavy metal’s origins, it was about wildness, right? “Helter Skelter,” Blue Cheer’s take on “Summertime Blues,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Child in Time,” and obviously our beloved Ozzy quaking in his marrow-deep terror: “Oh no… no! Please, God, help me!” Each of those opening shots across the bow feels like it was born of an unslakable thirst to approach some wild frontier and then to go beyond. But… beginnings are like that, right? It’s always easier to tap into something electric and potentially unstable at a time prior to the ossification of genre borders, stylistic signifiers, and listener expectations.
Even today, though, if you asked a random sample of people, you’d probably get a fair consensus that, yeah, heavy metal is wild at its core. But… is it? Is it always? What even does it mean, musically, to be wild? Because I don’t think it’s as easily quantifiable as something that’s fast, or aggressive, or raw. It’s probably not even quite right to say that everyone coming into the space of heavy metal since its feral beginnings is chasing that same wild fire. You might argue that we all should be, but the motivations for making art are as diverse and sometimes inexplicable as the effect of art. And to be truthful, friend? I don’t honestly have wildness in my heart. I’m lucky enough to be able to prioritize (and enjoy) things like comfort, routine, structure, safety.
Do you ever think about wildness? It seems to me there are a lot of people out there these days – many of them Men On The Internet who seem to be hawking, I don’t know, moose testicle protein powder and unearned expertise – who want to sell you an idea of wildness as some kind of exclusively masculine birthright apparently in need of reclamation. But there’s also a much longer tradition – far older and more interesting than these brittle, sad children – that links wildness with nature and the feminine. Of course, there’s a strand of that tradition that looks at nature, wildness, and femininity as things inherently in conflict with civilization, order, and masculinity, and just as with any binary system humans have yet dreamed up, it became a tool of oppression. But many pagan traditions looked at the idea of wildness in the light of fertility, fecundity, and creation.
To get a sense of which side might have gained the advantage in how we perceive wildness, consider how thoroughly our synonyms for it are negative. I don’t mean positive and negative as in good or bad, but rather positive as “a thing which something is” and negative as “a thing which something is not.” That skew is easy to find in alternate descriptions of “wild,” because so many of them frame the word as the opposite (or negative) of some other trait: to be wild is to be untamed, uncivilized, undomesticated, unruly, unrestrained. To bring things back to Egregore (“Thank fuck,” scream the blessedly patient hecklers in the back row), the reason that It Echoes in the Wild has lit an absolute fire in me every time I listen to it is that it feels like an album possessed of an absolutely positive conception of wildness.
Vancouver’s Egregore boasts members who have spent lots of time together in other bands including Mitochondrion, Auroch, and Ruinous Power. After the “duo plus guests” approach of 2022’s debut The Word of His Law, on album number two, Egregore has expanded to a permanent three-piece, with Shawn Haché on drums, lead vocals, and acoustic guitars, Sebastian Montesi on lead guitars, vocals, acoustic guitars, and synth, and Phil Fiess on bass and vocals. They are also joined by a stacked roster of guests, including additional lead guitar from Dylan Atkinson (who has spent time in Amphisbaena, Antediluvian, Rites of Thy Degringolade, and Weapon).
Despite the fairly tight stylistic Venn diagram of a lot of those associated bands, Egregore’s style is not easily reducible to any single thing. Certainly the most prevalent elements are drawn from black metal, death metal, and thrash, but this leaves all sorts of recombinant sequences where things fly off into moods covering black/thrash, prog death, shred, death/thrash, atmospheric death metal, bestial black metal, techy melodic thrash, and plenty more. My busted old ears pick up on bits of Absu, Morbid Angel, Aura Noir, Deceased, Voivod, Atheist, Abhorration, Khthoniik Cerviiks, Show No Mercy-era Slayer, and plenty more, but surely yours will hear other things. The most important thing, therefore, is the wild energy with which these songs consistently leap and lash. Each song is always in motion, propelled forward by Haché’s loose-limbed drumming and guitars that seem exclusively interested in doing the best shit constantly.
You know how Dark Angel’s Time Does Not Heal famously came with a hype sticker promising “9 songs, 67 minutes, 246 riffs”? If you want an easier way into Egregore than the treatise linking St. Augustine’s foundational dualism in The City of God Against the Pagans that I had initially planned to dump in this paragraph, please believe that It Echoes in the Wild is a wonderful place to be when you want to get in on that Dark Angel vibe and hear an abundance of guitars doing things that are fucking sweet.
“Six Doors Guard the Original Knowledges” has a slinky, Eastern-tinged theme that recurs, but while the guitars lead the action, the bass bends and swerves with the poised threat of a drunken giant. “Craven Acts of Desperate Men” features some pitch-perfect King Diamond vocal extravagance, but even better is the wild switch-up they pull starting at the 4:03 mark, in the super active bass that doubles the guitar but then later launches off down its own unruly corridors. “From the Yawning Crevasse” brings some of those early Atheist vibes (especially in the vocals), and at times like this when Egregore leans a bit more tech/prog death, it can feel a little like if last year’s tremendous Species album (Changelings) got totally Nuclear War Now!-ified.
Each song here has insane chops, memorable moments, and rickety, often barely-holding-on energy, but one of the ways Egregore really taps into what feels like a positive, generative wildness is in its multiplicity of voices. Each of the three band members supplies vocals (plus additional vocals from Auroch’s Cuillen Sander), so although this is a very lyrically dense album (both in the content of the words but also the amount of musical time that includes vocals), the fact that the tones and cadences are switched up so frequently makes it feel less like a stultifying lecture and more like a restless collective interested in attack, attack, attack. This holds true for the guitarwork as well, which moves through a dizzying array of moods, rhythms, and elaborate counterpoints – yet none of this complexity detracts from the songness of each piece. To me, this is a particularly thrilling part of Egregore’s wildness, because it posits wildness in community, rather than the self-defeating, macho, lone wolf horseshit more broadly in currency these days.
“Servants of the Second Death” sneaks in a little bit of tricky disco shimmy in the drums, but when it switches into a more restrained pacing around the halfway mark, the rest of the song is absolutely littered with some of the album’s most soulful, expressive soloing and guitar leads. Elsewhere, “Nightmare Cartographer” leads straight into “Six Doors Guard the Original Knowledges” so seamlessly that it is truthfully awe-inspiring.
And even from the start, Egregore is not shy about telling you where they are planning to go, given how the album’s first proper song (“Voice on the West Wind”) whips up such an utter shitstorm immediately that it’s hard not to just let yourself be buffeted by the album’s beatific vehemence for its entire 48 minutes. That opening tune also carries the subtitle “Odyssey as the Great Work,” which highlights another fact that makes It Echoes in the Wild such a front-to-back triumph: the lyrics. The final chorus is a poetic reflection on the wanderings of Odysseus, but it also notably brings things back to a vision of wildness as the creative pursuit of uncertainty:
“There is no glass to harness the hours;
There is no compass with which to measure;
There is no chart to harness the stars;
There is no map with which to reveal.
The path is within this task of will and sin.
The voice on the wind; this great work begins.”
Friend, if that doesn’t give you at least a minor case of the “fuck yes”es, then you and I are rowing down different rivers. Following along to the album with its lyric sheet adds such a layer of, well, just plain fun, because the lads of Egregore are clearly literate as balls but also deeply in love with the idea of play (which is a rarity in this general area of heavy metal that more often tries to present itself as “no mosh, no core, no ice cream, no smiling”). Like, check this opening salvo on “From the Yawning Crevasse”:
“Scythian stripped at the teetering Tridecennial,
Cast chthonically in a gesture nearly final.
Reaping will fulfilled as basic rites are shunned,
trajectory unseen t’ward a peristaltic plunge.”
No, of course I don’t know what they’re talking about either, but goddamn do I want to join that wordplay party. Not only is the band invested in these rich, gleefully verbose lyrics, but they are also expert at the skill of deploying their lyrics as yet another element of pure sound, both in rhyming wordplay as well as how often the vocal lines are used to provide extra punctuation or counterpoint to the song’s rhythms. “Nightmare Cartographer” offers maybe the best example with this delicious couplet:
“Unknowing nous gnosis in non-knowledge expounds /
Within preternatura, the only secret is found.”
On the dead page, of course, that reads like absurdity, but when the band hits you with those lines in a thrashy, ear-catching cadence that drips with bile and spittle, the words come alive and feel like a truth you can neither articulate nor deny. But even for those of you out there, dearest neighbors and cousins and strangers, who couldn’t give three-tenths of a thesaurus-hammered shit about what Egregore might be jawing about, the band brings it home for you in the truest way, the only way: bulletproof songs that manage the delicate feat of telegraphing their perfect architecture while also sounding, at nearly every moment, as if the glittering shards of ore in each primordial vein they’ve tapped are being shaped extemporaneously as you listen, like a road whose every square foot and speck of asphalt solidifies just as you grind it beneath your hellion wheels; like a liquid-metal kiln fired by the unquenchable pyres of creation.
I think I’ve probably listened to It Echoes in the Wild a dozen times and I still don’t quite feel like I have my hands around it. In many other circumstances this might be a rhetorical move I pull to avoid outright criticism of an album with interesting pieces but which doesn’t seem to have the compositional acumen or raw heart to really stick to the ribs. In Egregore’s music, though, the live-wire blood and sinew of its wildness creates a disorienting effect where each perfectly mappable song also contains a spark that cannot be fully quantified. Take, for example, the final two-minute stretch of the title track which closes out the album: it jumps into a gleaming, incantatory mode that is as triumphant as daybreak, cycling through a beautiful clean-sung choral melody that opens with a line that adapts the inscription at the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Inferno in a way that might hold the key to the entire album.
“Abandon hope and fear / All you who enter here.”
Earlier in the same song, Egregore has already answered the unspoken question posed by the album’s title when they give us the message:
“The ancients speak, their voices all around.
Listen close: it echoes in the wild.”
Come, friend: let’s be wild together.
