Let’s cut to the chase: What you’re about to experience is a completely unnerving combination of sights and sounds — music that will put your teeth on edge as it claws at your sanity and bludgeons your bones, and an accompanying video that’s equally nightmarish. The combined experience is harrowing and indeed uncomfortable, but so gripping that it freezes you in place, perhaps like waking to find a venomous serpent coiled on your chest, tongue flickering toward your face. You move at your peril.
Chariot Of Black Moth is a proven master at creating stark and startling visual hallucinations, never lingering for too long on any one element of the flashing imagery, so that you can’t be entirely sure what you’re seeing, but you feel its horror at a visceral level. Horror and insanity inhabit the music here as well, and we have the German band Abest to thank for it.
The song on which we’re fixated today is the title track to Molten Husk, a new album that’s set for release on August 19th via Moment of Collapse Records. While Abest continue their intertwining of post-metal and hardcore, it’s evident even from the one song you’re about to hear that the band have expanded their musical ingredients in order to achieve an even more oppressive and extreme experience. Not for naught does the label recommend it for fans of Full of Hell, Cult Leader, and Yautja.
Abest bassist Patrick describes the song this way:
‘Molten Husk‘ is one of the more slowly paced songs on the record. It‘s a song about derealisation, when you are feeling like a stranger in your own body. You want to get rid of the hull that is keeping you together because all you feel is unease deep inside. We wanted to incorporate this feeling in the music, too. So the instruments sound like claws scratching and pulling the skin off your body.
That is no exaggeration. Dissonance and discord pervade the track. The opening riff creates a sonic motif that inhumanly yowls, growls, and screams. It’s unpleasant but it burrows into the mind deeper and deeper as it continues, soon joined by turbulent, bone-rattling drumwork and sludgy, pulsating bass lines that seem heavy enough to maul through concrete. In keeping with the disturbing nature of these sounds, the vocals vent the words in a ruthless, enraged howl.
The guitars blurt and buzz, blaring and quivering as they soar, and creating terrible spasms of affliction as the pace slows and drags. There’s no relent in the bludgeoning either — the beating continues to the bitter end.
Paradoxically and perversely, this thing gets stuck in the head, so be forewarned: You will be tempted to listen again, and to let Jakub Moth‘s video continue its work of congealing your blood and disturbing your sleep.
Molten Husk (the album) was again recorded by Jan Oberg (Downfall Of Gaia, Deathrite) and it features contributions by Denise (Tuliips), Lars (Sun Worship, Ultha) and Yannick (Farson). Check the links below for more info about this stunning record and how to acquire it.
PRE-ORDER:
https://shop.momentofcollapse.com/collections/abest
ABEST:
https://www.facebook.com/abestmusic
https://www.instagram.com/abestmetal/
https://abest.bandcamp.com
