#skeptcism

Symptom: Caverns of Katabasis (2014)

If an extreme metal band's (black metal or otherwise) TRVE CVLT status is measured by how mysterious and obscure they manage to be, then Portland, Oregon's Symptom passed that credibility test with honors (they even had the requisite illegible logo) ... until it nullified their career prospects, anyway.

Ooops!

Formed in 2010 by one man wrecking crew J.T. Gilmore (vocals, guitar, bass, drums), Sympton self-released a pair of EPs in 2011 before signing with Mexico's Cráneo Negro Records and reissuing the tandem as '12's Beneath the Ossuary collection.

Next on the agenda, Symptom's first long-player, Opulent Atrocity (what a great title!), arrived in 2013 and today's subject, Caverns of Katabasis (an ancient Greek term for a voyage into the Underworld), followed a full decade ago, in '14.

Yet this copy must have sat, unwanted and forlorn, on a record store shelf ever since, because a few months ago it was tossed into a Discogs order I had placed -- free of charge -- by a retailer who, I can only surmise, made a business decision to free shelf space for more lucrative vinyl.

But the thing is: Symptom ain't half-bad; in fact, they're at least half-good, which is another way of saying they're competent without achieving anything truly original or transcendent with their familiar-sounding mix of death, doom, and other metallic forms.

"Risen from Shadow" is the token, atmospheric, instrumental intro, after which surprisingly frequent blast-beats often push "Marrow Spires" and "Omen of Crypts" into the black metal realm, before returning to their primary domain in slothful quasi-funeral doom dirges.

At their best, ensuing numbers like "Saturine" and "L'appel du Vide" (which translates to "Call of the Void" -- neat-o!) contrast the sort of detuned, leviathan riffs I can never get enough of with woeful guitar melodies or a lonesome, despairing piano ... lovely stuff.

But don't ask me about the unintelligibly howled lyrics ... I just can't be arsed to absorb their no doubt cryptic accounts of arcane lore.

And while I did look up the meaning of "Pnakotic" (Lovecraft, naturally), the song may as well -- indeed, would be better off, if you ask me -- recounting the exploits of Cthulhu (what it did on its summer vacation, etc.) as sharing a delicious panna cotta recipe.

All jesting aside, though, I've heard much worse albums of this ilk over the years from far more successful bands than Symptom, so I'll probably hang onto it for some time, in spite of the project's lacking personality or backstory.

About which, as I posited in my opening statement, maybe Symptom mastermind Gilmore was a little TOO successful at being UN-successful, but that hasn't stopped him from contributing his talents to other bands like Eosphoros, Ghoulgotha, and Void Manifest in recent years.

dISEMBOWELMENT: Transcendence into the Peripheral (1993)

Normally, my grammatical O.C.D. forces me to restore missing apostrophes to song titles and to refuse vanity band names that defy the natural order of upper- and lower-case letters (especially the dreaded ALL-CAPS), but I have to give metallic extremists dISEMBOWELMENT a pass.

Still deservedly revered in underground circles for their pioneering fusion of doom, death metal, and death-grind, these residents of Melbourne, Australia were active for less than five years starting in 1989, and, as far as I know, never even performed live before disbanding.

But dISEMBOWELMENT, which, in its longest-lasting line-up consisted of Renato Gallina (vocals, guitar), Jason Kells (lead guitar), Matthew Skarajew (bass), and Paul Mazziotta (drums) nevertheless excreted (sorry!) an influential and enduring body of work in that short span.

This consisted of two demos in 1990’s Mourning September and ‘91’s Deep Sensory Procession into Aural Fate, one EP, ‘92’s Dusk, that earned them a deal with Relapse Records, and one, absolutely essential full-length in today’s subject, ‘93’s Transcendence into the Peripheral.

When it was released, 30 years ago, the album’s epic compositions helped lay the foundation for what would later become known as ‘funeral doom’ with their hypnotic, glacial tempos and sudden bursts of double kick-drum speed, titanic riffs and ethereal melodies, unintelligible Cookie Monster vocals and oppressive atmospherics that lent a symphonic quality, even without the aid of synthesizers.

And, just like the album title says, the group was all about pushing musical boundaries, since ‘transcendence’ is defined as “the quality or state of extending the limits of ordinary experience,” while ‘peripheral’ “relates to the external boundary or surface of a body.”

In layman’s terms, or at least my chosen terms in another review, theirs was “a sound built to vibrate and loosen the viscera of its hapless victims with razor sharp riffs and subterranean tones.”

Sure enough, noteworthy emissions like “The Tree of Life and Death,” “Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory,” and “Excoriate,” trafficked in surprisingly cerebral lyrics, well worth reading, even as the surrounding, mercilessly grim and suffocating music appeared determined to destroy the listener’s body!

“A Burial at Ornans” and “The Spirit of the Tall Hills,” while less distinctive, are both heavy beyond belief, and yet the anomalous gothic interlude, “Nightside of Eden,” features guest vocals from a pseudonymous young lady credited simply as I’da.

Finally, comes the album’s -- and maybe the band’s -- signature cut, “Cerulean Transience of All My Imagined Shores,” which had already appeared in an earlier guise on the previous year’s Dusk EP, and here gained extra heft from the double bass of Paul’s brother Tony Mazziotta, though nothing else is known about these two collaborators.

Come to think of it, little more was ever heard from band principals Gallina, Kells, Skarajew, and Paul Mazziotta, who all but vanished from historical record, except for brief associations with lesser known bands like Inverloch, Feralian, Wurms, and an ambient folk project called Trial of the Bow. 

What is known for certain is that dISEMBOWELMENT cast a very tall shadow, beyond their premature demise, and every funeral doom band that followed owes something to Transcendence into the Peripheral, whether they know it or not.

p.s. -- Some of these words hail from my All-Music Guide biography of dISEMBOWELMENT and a Loudwire article I can no longer locate online. 

Swallow the Sun: New Moon (2009)

My objectivity is a little suspect when it comes to Swallow the Sun -- one of my top ten favorite heavy metal bands of the Third Millennium -- but I clearly tempered my enthusiasm in this decade-old review for All-Music Guide, in which I wrote ...

Imagine the surprise of your average teenage vampire who erroneously purchased New Moon -- not the 2009 soundtrack album for the popular Twilight movie franchise -- but the fourth album by Finnish death/doom demi-gods Swallow the Sun?

Or vice-versa! 

In either case, there'd be little chance of an audience exchange program, given the band’s ongoing commitment to earth-vibrating volume, leviathan riffs, beastly growls and shrieks -- as well as the contrasting clean singing, gothic atmospherics, and symphonic backdrops that have served them well since the start of their career.

Yes, contrasts: that’s what it’s all about for Swallow the Sun, as textbook examples like “Falling World,” “Servant of Sorrow” (*), and “Lights on the Lake (Horror Pt. III)” liberally clash the black metal blast-beats of newly arrived veteran drummer Kai Hahto (Rotten Sound, Wintersun, etc.) with Aleah Stanbridge’s (R.I.P.) angelic siren’s call.

Contrasts are also the reason why frontman Mikko Kotamäki is best-in-class (if only he were more animated on stage), as few can match his incredible range, spanning the deepest guttural roars to tuneful crooning on studies in extremity like title cut (**) and“Sleepless Swans” (there’s a titular nod to goth rock).

But my personal picks from this wonderful littler are “… And Heavens Cried Blood” and introductory stunner “These Woods Breathe Evil” -- a cinematic tour de force, brimming with morbid horror (it was inspired by Twin Peaks), that helped convinced me New Moon is the best Swallow the Sun record, after their untouchable debut.

Maybe it wasn’t the “cinematic” experience that any lost or confused Twilight fans were expecting, but I’m pretty sure no one but me even made this tenuous connection, then or now, so maybe it’s time I just drop it.

The important thing here is Swallow the Sun’s willingness to tinker with their formula, without feeling compelled to abandon it, and they would carry on with this M.O. on 2012’s unusually accessible Emerald Forest and the Blackbird and ‘15’s sprawling triple LP, Songs from the North I, II & III.

* There are two versions of this song, because a guest solo played by Marillion’s Steve Rothery wasn’t captured in time to make the original release date, but was later used as a single B-side and on this vinyl reissue.

** Listen carefully to the ending because it quotes from Duran Duran’s “The Chauffeur,” just as the album title references Duran’s “New Moon on Monday”!

Ahab: The Call of the Wretched Sea (2006)

Germany’s Ahab accomplished two notable feats with their stupendous 2006 debut, The Call of the Wretched Sea ...

First, the quartet made up of vocalist/guitarist Daniel Droste, guitarist Christian Hector, bassist/producer Stephan Adolph and session drummer Cornelius Althammer proved that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was perfect fodder for their patented brand of ‘Nautik Funeral Doom.’ 

And second, Droste’s impossibly deep, guttural rumblings satisfied every metal-head’s subconscious curiosity to know what it might sound like if a heavy metal band was LITERALLY fronted by a great white whale!

In my 15-year-old All-Music Guide review, I wrote that the band’s “treacherous voyage to interpret Melville” wasn’t even that far-fetched, given Mastodon’s recent foray via 2004’s classic Leviathan, to say nothing of seafaring pirate metal adventurers like Running Wild and Alestorm.

But none of these bands could touch Ahab’s tsunami-like heaviness, and just as Nile’s Ancient Egypt-themed death metal seduced fans in need of topical variety, this album’s hulking husks of words and music offered a welcome diversion from funeral doom’s usual preoccupations with death and despair.

The titanic tandem of “Below the Sun” and “The Pacific” steers listeners away from port and casts them down into the darkest ocean abyss with their slothful down-tuned guitar waves, somber synthesizer melodies, echoing percussive thunders, and those aforementioned “whale vocals.”

By contrast, “Old Thunder” substitutes clean-droned baritones and an almost uplifting orchestrated middle section, then is linked by the brief and atmospheric “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales (Interludium)” to yet another colossus named “The Sermon,” which boasts a rippling, near-silent central passage that’s directly at odds with the album's prevalent, monolithic guitar grinds. 

Finally, The Call of the Wretched Sea achieves a resounding climax via twin standouts, “The Hunt” and “Ahab’s Oath,” both of them soaked in keening, surprisingly infectious melodies, but still capable of crushing listeners under the pressure of untold fathoms and/or enraged sperm whale -- take your pick.

Happily crushed, I should add, and the best part was Ahab kept on harpooning willing funeral doom aficionados for the ensuing decade, via stellar efforts like ‘09’s The Divinity of Oceans, ‘12’s The Giant and, to a lesser degree, ‘15’s underwhelming The Boats of Glen Carrig.

Here’s hoping they return to port soon bearing new musical tidings from their epic encounters with those behemoths of the deep.

Samothrace: Life’s Trade (2008)

A cult band’s cult band (which is to say, they don’t get out much), Samothrace was formed in Lawrence, Kansas circa 2006 and delivered their first long-player Life’s Trade -- a cult album among cult albums, if you will -- some two years later.

What we have here is a masterclass in modern stoned doom (verging on the funeral variety) and atmospheric sludge, reminiscent of Yob, Rwake and Deadbird, among others, and performed by Bryan Spinks (vocals, guitar), Renata Castagna (guitar), Dylan Desmond (bass) and Joe Noel (drums).

Adding to the head-scratching obliqueness of it all, the group’s name comes from a small island in the north Aegean Sea (*) that, in ancient Greece, housed the Sanctuary of the Great Gods -- an important site of Hellenic and pre-Hellenic religious ceremonies, visited by historical figures like Philip II of Macedon and, uh, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.

So, of course, just to keep things confusing, the album’s first of four, ten-plus minute movements (to call them songs would be a stretch), boasts a Spanish title, “La Llorona,” and recounts a popular Latin American ghost story with minimalist lyrics such as “You broke these arms, and out poured dust.”

The music is deliberate, haunting, full of soft/hard contrasts and quite passionate, as the band wrings a broad range of emotions, not just heavy metal’s usual violence and fury, from their instruments on their way to a climactic “guitarmonies” (**) and solos.

Next up, “Awkward Hearts” spends a little too much time exploring post-metal ambiance to really take off, the suitably-named “Cacophony” offsets brute force against tremolo-picked melodies, and the closing, swamp-thick “Cruel Awake” delivers another cathartic payoff, on par with that first cut.

Alas, like most works of this, shall we say, “extreme” doom ilk, Life’s Trade was one of those LPs that received semi-unanimous praise from a just few critics, and connected with even fewer fans (gluttons for punishment to a man), but 20 Buck Spin’s decision to reissue it is an endorsement in itself.

Samothrace would later relocate to Seattle and shed a few band members before finally returning four years later with a sophomore album called Reverence to the Stone, featuring just two compositions, running 14 and 21 minutes in length, one of which had already figured in their demo.

And with no more releases to their name since, other than a 2015 Live at Roadburn set (three songs, one newbie), it’s fair to assume Samothrace’s sluggish work rate may preclude the release of any further new material in our lifetime.

* Either that or it alludes to a race of Emperor rhythm guitarists!

** Their own description.

Morgion: Among Majestic Ruin (1997)

Orange County, California’s Morgion defied geographical profiling by conjuring up dour images of ashen skies, blackened earth, and impenetrable underworlds (more often evoked by Scandinavian doom ensembles like Funeral, Thergothon and Skepticism) from the temperate climes of their So-Cal surroundings.

Although, the three-year delay between the recording and release of the group’s impressive first album, Among Majestic Ruin, can most likely be attributed to this contradiction in adjecto -- to say nothing of the 1990s’ wholesale exile of heavy metal to the hinterlands of musical consumption.

Regardless, it was totally worth the wait!

On side one, a pair of eight-minute colossi, “Relic of a Darkened Past” and “In Ashen Tears (Thus I Cry),” effectively establish Morgion’s saturnine disposition, meshing guttural growls, earth-quaking guitars and thunderous drums with bleak melodies, atmospheric keyboards, and melodramatic titles worthy of goth-rock..

And on side two, one receives three, only slightly briefer creations that extend the band’s creative arsenal: ranging from the church-like organs shrouding “Travesty,” to the impossibly dreary “Basking Under a Blacksun Dawning,” to the unusually energetic “Invalid Prodigy” -- clear evidence of the band’s death metal roots.

All in all, Among Majestic Ruin surely ranks among America’s scant important entries into the global funeral doom movement (Evoken also coming to mind); and yet the album still paled in comparison to Morgion’s looming sophomore triumph, Solinari, which I believe determined their underrated legacy.

These and other thoughts can be found in my All-Music Guide review.