If a band’s looking for a selling point, this is it “This is not elevator music”. That’s their words. They go on: “Trying to perform menial tasks while listening to this album will turn your brain into scrambled eggs”. This maelstrom of extreme and technical metal structures is born from the likes of Cynic and Atheist. Through its membership, the band has more than an element of Dødheimsgard in it. The album itself is a remix of the band’s 2015 debut release, since when there has been nothing. This more than fills the hole. It explodes.
It’s chaos out there. Every attempt is made through the medium of sound to make this as grisly and disturbing as possible. We are in deep and dusty torture chambers from which there is no escape. You can call it black metal if you want, and it’s that, but in its spooky, tortured, horror-filled way it’s a progressive journey laden with a multitude of styles. “Juvenihil” had a sad face and a dreamy guitar, drum and even saxophone line to go with it but the surrounding sound suggests that all is not right. The bleakness is tangible. It’s very skilfully done. In the second half it ramps up into violence and anger, which comes as no surprise before finally enveloping us in sadness and gloom. After the furious and substantial “Anti Horde”, “Dominant Outlaw Nation” takes us back to lush guitar work with a jazz-like edge to it. This album is dreams and nightmares. The nightmare begins as the tempo picks up, and amid stormy scenes and sophisticated instrumental work the music mixes thrashy urgency with vocal anger. It’s a whirlwind now. After this invigoration we are plunged back into industrial depths. Who knows what’s going on down there in that dark world?
The guitar strains are technical, unusual, disturbing and subject to the controlled vagaries of sound and tempo. It’s impossible to stop listening because this album is so full of unusual twists and styles. A Spanish-style guitar precedes the scenes of horror and outright heavy violence on “Darkspace Navigator”. The tempo changes and the atmosphere is deathlier. There is anger and noise. It’s all a hotch-potch but one which is under control. The short “Intermezzanine” regales us with the colourful strains of classical guitar, breaking out into a darker melody in the next twist of the many twists on this album. By contrast extreme blackened death metal fills “Apsylum Absolute”. It’s a vivid journey through infested and dangerous corridors. It’s brash, the air is full of smoke, and it’s tortured. Experimentation falls off the stage. It’s a case of going with the irregular but somehow comprehensible flow. The industrial cybermen are then out in force for the final 14-minute assault that is the title track. Fast and hard hitting, “If Nothing Is” is black metal of the overwhelming and frantic kind, but as ever it takes us all sorts of directions. The whole 14 minutes are packed with power and musical forces.
“If Nothing Is” is a substantial and dense affair, and in the eyes of most won’t be the background music of choice as you buy your tea and milk in the supermarket. Avant-garde and experimental this most certainly is, and so unconventional, but it’s cleverly constructed and delivered by a group of talented musicians who succeed in making something vastly complex and extreme into something wild, exotic and impactful.
(8.5/10 Andrew Doherty)
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