Deathspell Omega. Champions of the Emperor’s new clothes to some, grand innovators of occultist BM to others. 2007’s ‘Fas…’ always struck me as an almost impenetrably dense album, promising arcane wisdom but delivering only ecstatic dementia, sardonically laughing in the listener’s face all the while. Follow-up ‘Paracletus’ meanwhile sought to ravage the emotions as well as the intellect, taking a more progressive approach and injecting some warmer, post-rock elements into its maelstrom of jazzy BM and dissonant atmospherics. The results were stunning, avoiding any slips into grating incongruity and remaining instead a nightmarishly complex and uncompromising yet powerfully cathartic whole.
New EP ‘Drought’ gleefully smashes together the two albums’ extremes, plunging the listener headfirst into the abyss one instant with cacophonous outbursts of deranged technical riffing, then offering up perverse accessibility the next, with sudden interjections of awkward mechanical grooves that quickly deconstruct themselves as the rabid dynamics tear the songs apart from within. ‘Fiery Serpents’ flirts with a fairly linear prog-BM structure to begin with, but suddenly flies off on a writhing, polyrhythmic tangent, piling groove upon demented groove in a way that reminds a lot of the Norwegian Shining.
‘Scorpions & Drought’ is a furious barrage of building momentum, hints of dissonance peering through the cracks, the riffs all heaping up on top of each other as the song seemingly tries to compress itself into a singularity. ‘Sand’ meanwhile takes a back seat, yet more dissonant chords wrapping themselves around delirious, pounding, mid-paced riffs that bludgeon with their maddening repetition.
Flirtations with post rock aesthetics linger too, both in the delicate and drawn-out intro ‘Salowe Vision’, and on ‘Abrasive Swirling Murk’, which slips from blistering jazz-grind beginnings through into a slow, meandering melodic exsanguination. Finally there’s the superb closer ‘The Crackled Book of Life’, which takes the weird, atonal guitar sound used by Blut Aus Nord and gradually moulds it into a soaring and beautiful melody, allowed to flourish by the building, ambient passages of stripped-down bass, a simplistic drum-beat and soothing choral chants. It’s brilliantly done, and provides an appropriately epiphanic full-stop to the preceding 15 minutes of mind-shattering violence.
Whilst ‘Drought’ doesn’t reach the high watermark set by the finest moments on ‘Paracletus’, its still a more than worthy addition to the DSO canon. I would have liked to have seen some longer tracks further exploring the crawling, atmospheric side to their sound, but as it stands ‘Drought’ is a lean, ferocious beast of an EP that sinks its teeth into you immediately and refuses to let go.
(8.5/10 Erich Zann)
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