Listening to Akhyls is like clenching your teeth in the face of a howling ice storm. I mean it. After the rumbling, oddly unsettling intro ‘Somniloquy’ simply crashes over you, pulling you down into the storm of some truly harrowing dream. This raging has a strange…well not quite smoothness but a hurtling unfaltering force from torrential drumming to the surging keyboard wrapped riffing. There is melody here, insistent and dark, even almost gothic. A little touch of the kind of sound that From The Cradle To Enslave captured. Just deeper, darker and far more determinedly, genuinely malevolent.

It’s a hell of an introduction to a band I was aware of but had never been thrust into the path of… Colorado based, steered unerringly by the hand of Naas Alcameth but now grounded in a slightly more group orientated manner, this is total intensity. It never lets you surface, tearing and pulling you through some torture realm (the album being named for a chthonic goddess from Orphic hymns, a bringer of nightmares, of madness.)

‘Pnigalion’ offers us twisted, dripping, snarling spoken words before a slow gathering of darkness sets the stage for the howl. Distant tortured vocals, a discordant ringing melody in the waves of dense guitars. Nearly thirteen minutes of horror. It twists and it undulates, relentlessly disorienting and always with an undertow, a shift in the melody to pulls you away and under again. The sense of dread, of the genuinely macabre, is stunning. The epic length seems to finish in a snapshot as my connection to time is un-moored by it.

‘Succubare’ has voices in my head, overlapping and lying and speaking truth all at the same time. It gnaws and rattles and sinks into a still but profoundly wrong soundscape, the like of which The Axis Of Perdition could create but few others.

‘Ephialtes’ rises on the horizon of this place like a thick storm of black ash, winding up in a swirl of voices and edged guitar before it hits you. This is chaos and clouds and everything torn asunder by it. It settles into a crushing presence with the voice commanding you… “rise up, bow down” “breathe in, breathe out”. Unable to resist but complying is utter capitulation. The listener as puppet, nothing more. But there is no choice. And it is one of the darkest and most unhinged pieces of black metal I have heard in a long, long time.

‘Incubatio’ seeps out of this lesson in domination, a final passage through a dark and mythic world. It strides forward, emphatic and absolute. It shows you such sights indeed.

This album has to be experienced. The technical aspects of composition, arrangement, production; all mastered with astounding flair. Yet all would be for nothing if the extraordinary ability to use music to summon this world was not so perfect. If the sense of passing through a realm of dream and madness was not so mesmerising. The talent here is worrying and glorious. The vision and focus startling. The result is staggering and monolithic.

This late in the year and I get this.

Breathe in. Breathe out…

(9.5/10 Gizmo)

https://www.facebook.com/Akhlys-1512419082356682

https://akhlys.bandcamp.com/album/melino