Labels: Southern Lord
Review by: Kunal Nandi
Jesus fucking Christ. This is so densely negative I’m surprised that black holes haven’t developed around my suffering speaker cones. Here are the stats: four men, four songs (two of them at 20 minutes in length), sprawled over an hour. This is sloooooooow. Actually, no, it’s even slower than that. And then slowed down some more. It’s also loud at times. Fucking loud. Sometimes, the space between the intermittently bashed strings and skins takes on more importance than the notes themselves though. Tape hiss, feedback, electronic glitches and echoes fill the void, scratching at your brain like a burrowing maggot. This is where ambient meets extreme metal – a place not for everyone. In fact, it’s for no-one. This is anti-music. Riffs and rhythms don’t exist here, leaving you hanging for sixty tortured minutes of your wretched, miserable life. Maybe ambient is the wrong term, because it is neither relaxing nor background music. It demands your attention, so you sit there, unable to do anything, stunned, perturbed. As for the vocals… my god, it’s frightening. The man is clearly in some personal hell, and he wants to bring you down to the seventh circle with him. Lyrically, it’s abstract and intangible (“[screeched] Sink alone not seen, It was time, End, [whispered] You could have stopped it,” goes Dead, the obvious choice for single at 9 minutes, 27 seconds). In fact this whole record’s aesthetic is nigh-on impossible to fathom, even down to the near-monochrome artwork. What the hell is it? Shattered glass? A leaf? The body’s circulatory system? “Things Viral” is aptly titled – it feels diseased, queasy, slow-acting. It smothers you, enveloping you in claustrophobic dread until it’s hard for you to breathe. This is very nearly my album of the year. Your parents will HATE this.