Not only is this self-proclaiming black metal cacophony, but we’re told it is “punctuated by giallo horror movie inspired synth and foreboding atmosphere”. It’s all about what’s going in the ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean. “The Abyssal Plain” is the band from Iowa’s debut album, but they’ve been around for 5 years and have released a couple of EPs in that period.
Sure enough, mysterious, intriguing sounds which could well come from the depths of the ocean are ready to greet us. The counterpoint is the distorted-sounding black metal of “Bottomfeeder”. The drums beat incessantly to a symphonic background and hissing vocals. The pace is punkish. The style is that of rampant old school black metal, crude sounding in its production, but enhanced with those hissing vocals, a dazzling guitar solo on “Trenches” and oceans (what else?) of bombast. The vocalist sounds increasingly like a strangled cat. The lyrics of “Loki’s Castle” reveal the poetic touch: “We won’t die for men’s weak shit. They’ll dig and purge, we’ll fight for it”. The moody synth-instrumental “Hadal” reflects those dark depths and leads into further introspective gloom and murkiness of “Pompeii Worm”, at least to begin with. What follows is an atmospheric nightmare of a thrash-black journey. It’s energetic and thrusting but I didn’t find it the easiest of journeys. “Chimera Monstrosa” takes us on the spookiest of trips with its mix of classical guitar playing and dingy black metal riff which again reminded me of early black metal times. The title song has that Mayhem like air of suspension in the riff to start, before it bursts into fire, brimstone and fury. Sophisticated it is not. Through “Black Smoke” whose title tells the story we eerily enter “Raptures of the Deep” for a couple of minutes of ambience and a few spoken words of little impact, before a return to hissy, punky, thrashy and black stuff. “Eutrification” is in its way dramatic. So too is the rather noir synthesised ending “A Nagging Thought”, whose stock goes up with a woozy, echoey and quirky end.
“The Abyssal Plain” features a mixture of musical moods. It has plenty of ideas and I got the oceanic theme but I’m not convinced it all fitted together. For me, this was too much of a patchwork.
(6/10 Andrew Doherty)
Leave a Reply