(On October 19th Debemur Morti Productions will release a new EP by The Amenta (albeit a 40-minute “EP”). We’ve already showered its advance tracks with attention, but today we have a review of the entire release by DGR.)
The fun part about any release from Australia’s avante-garde black metal clusterfuck The Amenta has always been the opening paragraph wherein the author spends a good five or six sentences tripping over their own feet while attempting to describe what The Amenta is. To say that the band have existed off the beaten path would be putting it politely; instead it’s more like The Amenta saw the ‘path’ and proceeded to beat it to death.
Early on, the group saw various permutations into and out of the symphonic black metal scene and their first few albums are jammed full of big sweeping synths, various noises, and plenty of riffs for their chosen vocalist at the time to soar over, but there’s always been a stubborn part of the band that has refused to be put down, and beginning with their V01D EP, the band have long settled into ‘fuck it’ mode and let their artistic tendencies run mad.
At least you’ll get the occasional author – yours truly included – who will settle on some form of industrialized death metal as a descriptor, which at the very least has nailed down the contributions of one Timothy Pope, the long-running noise/electronics/synths contributor to the band, but even then The Amenta have chosen to exist on their own branch of ‘weird’.
Even now, with their latest release Plague Of Locus, the band decide to throw a wrench in the works by referring to this as an EP – even though it is one song longer than, and gets close to the runtime, of their most recent album Revelator.
A collection of covers spanning the group’s eclectic tastes, one original song, and one opening audio experiment masquerading as a friendly ‘Intro’, Plague Of Locus maintains The Amenta as a frightening audio creature that should perk the ears of anyone with a fascination for strange takes on black and death metal; or if you’re familiar with the band, very, very interested in hearing them take an auditory sledgehammer to songs by Killing Joke, Alice In Chains, and My Dying Bride.
That only partially describes the extent of what is happening within the bounds of the ten-song Plague Of Locus EP. The Amenta dig deep on this one, pulling from not only a smattering of international favorites but also a few songs that impacted their own local inspirations over the years. The Amenta beat the hell out of those songs as well, morphing tracks that were already pretty extreme into their own multi-headed monsters – to a point.
Because the fun part about Plague Of Locus is that as tempting as it is for The Amenta to completely destroy and rebuild a different throne out of the bones of any particular song, they do play it straight from time to time, and so there are quite a few moments within Plague Of Locus wherein The Amenta sound like they hewing to tradional music and are mostly just in it to kick ass.
It’s a nice callback to some of the meaner stuff throughout Flesh Is Heir when the band do lean into a more standard beating, and at the same time it is a lot of fun to hear them turn a song into a fully-blown teeth-scraping black metal track like they do with their take on Diamanda Galás‘ “Sono L’Antichristo”.
When The Amenta turn their gaze upon more recognizable songs, they contort and twist them just enough to keep things interesting. “Angry Chair” from Alice In Chains takes an already doom-inflected trip through self-loathing and tries to make it more tense. The song is slowed to a crawl at times, distorted through multiple layers, and then has vocalist Cain Cressal still delivering a varied take on different metal stylings throughout the song. Every once in a while you are treated to a journey through a vocalist’s particular talents front to back, and the band putting “Angry Chair” through the Hellraiser-treatment seems to have been a call worth answering on that front.
Prior to it, you get the band taking “Asteroid” from Killing Joke‘s catalog, ratcheting up the speed and then allowing drummer Dave Haley to beat the hell out of the kit in response. The way Plague Of Locus flows up to that point is surprisngly punchy in its opening moments; you’re treated to an intro, followed by the previously mentioned infernal hellfire in song form, and then a percussive hammering for nearly three and a half minutes.
Weirdly enough, the point at which the album see-saws into the band’s noisier and stranger tendencies is the original song positioned right in the center of the EP – which also segues pretty well into the aural-assault that is the Wolf Eyes cover that follows.
As the one original track in the lineup, “Plague Of Locus” has a lot to carry. Representing new music from the band two years after the two-song EP Solipschism hit, “Plague Of Locus” is a snapshot as to where The Amenta are at this particular moment. Surprisingly, it covers a wide swath of the group’s career rather than sounding like it had fallen directly out of the Revelator era of the band.
The Amenta maintain many of those elements throughout “Plague Of Locus” but it also has a brutalizing heaviness to it before the inevitable drift into the nightmare realm that The Amenta like to take many of their songs to. The sense of immediacy to a song like this is one of The Amenta‘s greatest strengths and it’s why a song like “Psoriastatis” from Revelator, or “Disintegrate” from Flesh Is Heir before that, works out so well. Those songs are equally deranged despite appearing on their face as if they’re just going to be some hefty straightforward batterings. “Plague Of Locus” moves with a similar authority to it and makes for a nice tonal shift before The Amenta descend back into the realms of madness while playing with the bodies of songs that’ve inspired them previously.
Plague Of Locus still marks The Amenta as being a force in the multi-genre maelstrom of whatever you want to define them as. There may be only one original song within the ten tracks here, but their takes on so many of the other songs are demented enough that they might well be their own.
Every cover track has one segment of it that has been lifted out, dissected, and then highlighted and stretched for The Amenta to play with. Even when the band are playing it relatively straight, there’s still enough mad-scientist pyrotechnics happening that you never lose sight of the fact that you’ve still got the crew whose previous album had every song title be a series of portmanteau and the music inside them also sounding like two words being crashed together.
The Amenta remain adventurous in their demented quest to twist and contort music to the breaking point. Whether it’s from realms closer to home or the more spread-out international acts, Plague Of Locus does well in recasting them into multi-cornered and twisted sculptures all its own.
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