AN NCS PREMIERE: UNSOULING — “FLOATING KEY”

Unsouling is a new musical entity, a small needle in a vast haystack of metal. The project’s debut release might easily have been overlooked amidst all the straw no matter how vividly the needle gleamed, but a few important factors make that much less likely:

Specifically: Unsouling is the solo work of Feral Light‘s frontman and songwriter A.S. (Andy Schoengrund); the album was chosen for release by I, Voidhanger Records; and the cover art was created by the wonderfully talented Luciana Nedelea (don’t tell us cover art doesn’t matter because you’d be whistling in the wind around here).

So, this needle sticks out even before the playing of the first notes. Because of the music, it sticks out more like an impaling spear than a needle.

The whole album, entitled Vampiric Spiritual Drain, is one you’ll want to pay attention to, but for now please just pay attention to the song we’re premiering — “Floating Key“.

Listening to the song, you may understand why A.S. brought it forward under a new name rather than incorporating it into the works of Feral Light. That band’s music has been the subject of extensive writings here, with our own Andy Synn reviewing every single release. As he observed in reviewing the most recent Feral Light album (2022’s Psychic Contortions), the music has evolved since their 2016 debut, moving into a particularly “vicious and vitriolic” formulation of black metal but with an “increasing embrace of hypnotic, hallucinatory melody which serves as the perfect foil for their increasingly intense and unforgiving assault on the senses”.

Unsouling, on the other hand, applies the imagination of A.S. to death metal, or at least an amalgam of death and black metal. Perhaps it won’t be a surprise to learn that this music too is feral and ferocious, but with its own hallucinatory and psychedelic atmospheric qualities — and other musical ingredients that are usually kept on the outside of the barbed-wire death metal fence.

The results trigger the impulse to call the music “avant-garde death metal”, just as a way of trying to make clear that these sounds aren’t conventional.

“Floating Key“, for example, twists and turns as it goes, all the better to twist and turn the listener’s minds inside-out. In its opening phase, things happening in the low end bring bubbling magma and automatic weaponry to mind, while above that the music slowly and sickeningly heaves and brilliantly glitters, the dense collage of sensations pierced by frighteningly furious screams.

But Unsouling breaks up those stomach-roiling and mind-bending sensations with episodes in which the music jolts like the hammering of pistons and blares like mutated sirens.

Eventually, bouncing beats and eerily glimmering sonic sheens emerge, enmeshed with wailing and flickering electronics and exultant musical swirls. With an enormous crash, the song also explodes into a maelstrom of mutilating bass notes, battering percussion, and sky-high cascades of enveloping sound, somehow both glorious and grievous.

To repeat an earlier observation, this music is densely layered, and although it reveals visions of unnerving splendor, it’s (thankfully) not clean and pretty, but mostly harsh and skull-scouring, and those vocals alone will leave you raw as road burn.

 

 

In attempting to grapple with what Unsouling has done on the album, I, Voidhanger refers to “an atmosphere incorporating death metal and darkwave, as well as some goth tinged influences, creating a cohesive yet engaging and enveloping experience”.

In its themes, we’re told that Vampiric Spiritual Drain “deals with the inevitable pain associated with emotional and spiritual reckoning, as well as the insurmountable and uncontrollable nature of our universe”.

As for the fascinating cover art, we’re further informed that it was “imagined and painted by Luciana Nedelea specifically for the album” and “captures the feral nature of UNSOULING‘s death metal and simultaneously envelops it in nocturnal atmospheres steeped in mysticism and spirituality”.

 

Vampiric Spiritual Drain will be released by I, Voidhanger Records on January 26th, in a 6-panel digipack CD edition and digitally. It’s recommended for fans of Sacramentum, Grave, Morgion, and of course Feral Light.

The song we’ve just premiered is the second one to be revealed from the album so far. Invisible Oranges premiered the first one, “The Ladder of Broken Backs“, and we’ve included a stream of that one below.

Significantly longer than the track we’ve just premiered, it’s even more immediately vast in its expanse and even more dazzling, but becomes darker and more dangerous, more mind-contorting and assaulting as its permutations unfold.

When the music brilliantly rings and undulates like pythons, as it eventually does in its final phase, the effect is startling but mesmerizing — and it’s damned hard to get that out of your head.

PRE-ORDER:
Bandcamp: https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/vampiric-spiritual-drain
EU store: metalodyssey.8merch.com
US store: metalodyssey.8merch.us

FERAL LIGHT/UNSOULING:
https://www.facebook.com/ferallight