Reader, I started writing this review only after having sat for a long time with my head in my hands.
It’s one of those quirks of music reviewing that after a while, writing about it starts to feel a bit wrote. Ah, a thrash band – I will insert a quirky 80’s reference here. Ah, a black metal band – at this juncture I will mention something vaguely Scandinavian. The unwritten rules of heavy metal can be as rigid and inflexible as any other genre.
“Fuscus” is not an album which lends itself to quick, lazy or insipid reviewing. Even the phrase “denying convention” has, in itself, become a convention. I knew that this wouldn’t be an easy review to write. “Fuscus” is not an easy album to listen to, either. It is, however, excellent.
According to the blurb on the record label website, this is an album that continues a story about a witch who has been persecuted, and then goes on to transform children into something other than human. Suffice it to say, I don’t have too much to say on the narrative contained within, save that I do feel that I would have liked to have listened to the two preceding albums, as I am a sucker for concept albums.
The backbone of this album is deep, cavernous, atmospheric death metal that sounds as if it was written, played and recorded from within some subterranean, moss-covered lair. When I mention death metal, I mean in the very debauched, filthy tradition of Autopsy or Necrophagia; there are no complex time signatures or ultra-complex guitar work, but thrashed, hollow-sounding-drumming and ragged, simple but sickened guitar riffs that often veer between the painfully slow and the blackened-quick in the space of a single track.
What is so appealing about “Fuscus” as an album is the measure by which each song does away with strict genre rules, and has within it whatever is required to carry the track as a whole. My personal favourite track from the album, the penultimate “The Harrowed Column”, for example, has the underpinning structure of old-school atmospheric death metal, but has plenty of black metal influences, as well as a an almost-Mercyful Fate-esque sensibility for eastern-tinged guitar melody, with crushing, traditional doom-pacing towards the latter part of the song. In many hands, this would sound like a confused mess, but it is to the credit of sole-musician and writer Andrew Lampe that instead of collapsing into ruin, the song instead possesses a kind of alchemy that produces more than the sum of its parts.
This is a murky, mysterious, artful album that had be won over from the first couple of seconds into the second track. It’s relatively short in length, with an oppressive and crushing sense of dread that soaks into the ears. The production is as primitive and raw as it needs to be to directly connect the listener to the music, and certainly left me wanting more. It’s also the mark of impeccable song-writing that closer “An Ancient Tradition” feels much shorter than the actual length of 9:22 – my attention was gripped and retained until the final cackles of the witch at the end…
( 8.5/10 Chris Davison)
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