#tetragrammacide

Even after repeated spins of Tantric Aphorisms from the Arachneophidian Qu’ran, this reviewer can provide little enlightenment — though some sort of spiritual experience, likely involving rapacious sexual desire and significant acts of property damage, seems very much at stake in the music. Tetragrammacide is part of the ever-evolving death metal scene in Kolkata, and like fellow West Bengali band Aparthiva Raktadhara, the band seems intent on articulating a malign underside to India’s rich religious and cultic traditions. While the band’s semiotic antics seem superficially more suited to the perversely playful energies of dissonant tech death, on this record Tetragrammacide has pushed further into the black/death aesthetics they have explored for close to a decade.

That is: there is more speed and burl to this music than there is absurd complexity or an acrobatic, linear compositional sense. The riffs ring clear, and the rhythmic are flexible but driving. Tunes like “Fundamental Reconciliation between Maya and Yama through Perpetual Okbish-Ouroboric Cunnilingus” are less bestial, more ecstatic (no shit…). But that’s in the ear of the listener — and Tetragrammacide is taking a chance interweaving terms and concepts like Yama and Qu’ran in India’s current social and cultural climate. Some listeners might find those thought experiments more blasphemous than bestial, or criminally bestial in their blasphemy. In nations like the US or Sweden, adventurous death metal has always been intent on shattering taboos and offending moral sensibilities. In Modi’s India? The stakes of those intents and acts seem a lot higher.