To start, let’s acknowledge that you and I don’t really know each other. This means, among other things, that I can’t say what “war metal” means to you. To some extent, maybe you just throw your hands in the air and say, hey, if it looks like Sarcófago and sounds like Blasphemy and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck playing war metal. But as a genre, it’s a bit slipperier, right? Is it mostly black with some death? Death with some nice blackening? Grind with one too many Ken Burns documentaries and a severe attitude problem? Of course, trying to put boundaries around any musical genre is an abstraction at best, a kind of Saussurian nightmare where a word points not even to what we are currently hearing, but to whatever supposed Platonic ideal we are to assume subsumes the individual expression while also being nothing if not constituted by it.
A revision is necessary: you and I don’t really know each other, but I do know you are already tired of this. Friend, same. Shall we invite Ignobleth to join the conversation? If you just cried aloud, “No! I want to talk more about Ferdinand de Saussure!” kindly leave the hall (but gimme a sly high-five on the way out). So… Ignobleth! They are three people from Italy and on this their debut album, they make a whole lot of fucking good noise! To further tarnish my already-suspect writerly credibility, I don’t even particularly think Ignobleth is playing in the war metal sandbox on Manor of Primitive Anticreation! So, what the fuck, right? Well, try this on for size, toots: whatever style they might be playing, Ignobleth’s excellent album has got me thinking a lot about… visual art.
Just like music, visual art is a big tent, and it’s also just as rife with asininely arcane microdistinctions in lineage, technique, influence, intent, and style. But just to wrap our arms around a more manageable comparison, let’s think about drawing as death metal. Think of a kid fat-fisting a set of crayons in brownish reds and sickly yellow-greens, tongue poking out the side of the mouth while a waxy sheen gathers on the side-heel of the hand. Imagine an evocative, abstract monochrome of charcoal shadings, and then picture a sharp, stark geometry of ballpoint lines and scaffolded angles. All of these are death metal, so of course war metal can be, too, but… it’s mostly scribbles, right? Like, if I listen to war metal while thinking about drawing, I can easily conjure the smell of pencil shavings, the pile of broken graphite tips, the garish and glossy furrows delved into fibrous paper. The point is, all these expressions belong to the same basic artistic idiom, but often the only true way to parse them is to point your perceiving apparatus at them and… see if it moves.
Manor of Primitive Anticreation is satisfying and magnificently destructive across its 44-minute runtime, but of course it is hardly sui generis. When I listen to Ignobleth’s persistent racket, my busted ears mostly hear a kinship with bands like Embrace of Thorns, Blasphemophagher, Demoncy’s Joined in Darkness, Ascended Dead, Archgoat, and Ectovoid. Where some listeners likely find the rough stylistic ballpark that we’re mapping out with that constellation to be relentlessly frantic, in truth the best acts in this milieu are the ones that balance fast, frantic intensity with a relative economy of songwriting. So yes, Ignobleth spends plenty of time mashing their strings and bashing the drumkit with the fervor of an industrial meat grinder on PCP, but within each song, they are moving between a relatively small number of distinct sections with a clear, internal logic.
It is true that hundreds of bands can nail the general sound and aesthetic that Ignobleth displays, but in listening somewhat obsessively to Manor of Primitive Anticreation, the things that set the album apart as a real gem in this crowded and often undifferentiated black/death/war slop scene are: the clarity and intensity of the drumming; the rich, clear production that retains its power even when the band kicks the velocity to 11; the lurching, sometimes aquatic atmosphere of the album, both in its proper songs but also in its well-placed and highly effective interludes; and the robustness of its songwriting. The whole thing works wonderfully as a violent torrent of pure id, so if you want to just let these lashing waves batter you, it’s a feast of raw feeling. But the band’s songs are so smartly written that you can also enjoy it on the level of individual riffs, rhythmic change-ups, and well-mapped arcs.
“Obelisk of Deformity” starts things off with a massive death-doom heft and a patient lead-in before things whip into a full-on frenzy at 1:30 in. “And the Lunar Mass Shatters” is one of the least forgiving tunes on the album, but even here it pulls back for a (heavy) breather midway through and adds some extra layered octave guitar. Elsewhere, at around the 2:30 mark in “Warped Abyssal Architectures,” the band drops into a surprising, nearly funky half-time bridge with some slight guitar bends, and then again just before the 4-minute mark of the album’s closer, I could swear they’re having some fun (especially in the drumming).
The two-part “Proselyte Pig” might be the album’s finest section, though. Part I is a six-minute marathon of various hypnotically rhythmic sections of slipstream-quick drumming and head-nodding low tones, but as it burns out into Part II, the band pivots to an incredibly sparse drum and distorted bass opening, which patiently re-amps up to a core menacing tone. They string you along as if the whole piece will sit in an almost Blut Aus Nord-queasy churn, but then kick the chair out from under you. Listen carefully at about 2:27 for the album’s snakiest, most sneakily melodic riff, but then after that quit worrying about being careful about anything, because you know where you are? You’re in the [manor], baby. And you’re gonna [be anticreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeated].
Bryan Maita’s excellent artwork for Manor of Primitive Anticreation is instructive. At first glance, you might almost mistake it for something in the style of Gustave Doré’s famous wood engravings, especially with the winged figures in the sky. But then the eye settles into the squish factor, with mouths and tentacles and pustulated tree roots, and you consider how the composition could almost lean towards Seagrave-ish architecture. There’s dotting, curling, sideways slashing marks, and if the top leans mystical and ominous, the foreground seethes with playful malevolence. Doesn’t that tell you more than enough about the sounds behind the scenes? Be better than me: shut your trap and listen to Ignobleth. Grind your teeth, bang your head, coat the earth in the penstrokes of your intent.
