Lo-Ruhamah’s work calls on hallucinogenic imagery and alternate states of consciousness, they tell us. The framework is a dark and echoey form of black metal music from a chasm, with more than a hint of death metal, and here and there a post metal feel. Chaotic rhythms hang into this maelstrom of pungently dark metal. The nightmare is broken, and quietness descends, save a tinkling guitar rhythm and a shadowy voice, but this is broken up by an explosion, which is the call for more dissonant and dark atmospheres. In a sentence, no-one’s having a good day.
“Avant-garde” is a description used to describe Lo-Ruhamah’s music. It’s certainly different as while I could pick off a number of bands and styles their music sounds like, they very much tread their own path. At the centre is the roaring and echoing blackness. The instrumental style is of course dark and heavy. The drum pounds forcefully on “Rending” but whilst there’s drive, it seems to be about atmospherics rather than patterns. “Charisma”, which follows it, has that same deadened edge and contemptuous guitar line. It’s been ten years between albums, and the picture remains bleak and unclear. There’s nothing to hang on to here other than a lot of despair and darkness. I got the sense of delirium on “Vision and Delirium” but not the vision. The music is violent, the vocalist sounds like an angry crow, and it’s unfathomable, really. “The Corridor” seems a corridor of ghastly horror. The music builds up the tension in its irregular way. There’s a certain intensity in the darkened gloom of “Lidless Eye”, whose lyrics include such gems as “Then a swirling vibrancy spilling into endless expanse, involuting into paradoxical void pregnant with my consciousness”, and the more thematically quintessential (I think) “I am the ultimate preconceived, turning to myself for existential grounding. Separate entity from essence to enhance identity”. Obscure lyrics apart, the track does build up a head of steam and has rare and welcome epic moments. “Coronation” and “Aeon” take us back to the more familiar despairing dark mixture, growls, manic voices and dissonant darkness. Oh, and a cosmically-inspired industrial ending.
This album certainly has atmosphere. Lo-Ruhamah reflect the states of mind they are representing in the complexity of the music. It was never going to be anything other than a difficult journey. Ultimately I found myself listening to “Anointing” and trying to keep up rather than being swept along by it.
(6/10 Andrew Doherty)
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