(Andy Synn shares some words of wisdom, and warning, about the duplicitous, dichotomous, and devastating new album from Defacement)
Everyone knows that the common trajectory for bands is for them to get mellower and more melodic – maybe a little proggier, here and there, but still more accessible overall – as their career goes on.
But what the hell would such a transition even sound like in the context of a band like Defacement?
Well, make no mistake about it, the aptly-named Duality is definitely the most “melodic” album of the band’s career thus far, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any more “accessible” than either of its predecessors.
The truth is that Defacement here utilise melody like others use peyote – injecting their music with a psychoactive stream of strange shades and captivating colours – in an attempt to expand the scope of their sound while still dwelling in a darkness of their own creation.
In doing so the group seek to explore the inherent duality between the visceral physicality of their music – a molten stream of churning distortion and scalding dissonance, heated by a fiery barrage of blast-furnace vocals and pounded into twisted, angular shapes by a punishing assault of devastating drums – and the esoteric, intangible mentality behind it all.
The theme of duality is even apparent when one takes a look at the track listing – one moment you’re micro-dosing eerie electro-ambience with “Vagus” or the haunting “Hypoglossal”, the next you’re macro-dosing on face-melting metallic fury and mind-warping melody with the likes of “Burden” and the chaotic “Barrier” – with the result being that the underlying complexity of the album is readily apparent at every point on the scale, from the top-level totality all the way down to the tiniest detail.
And nowhere is this dichotomy, and the tension it creates, more apparent than during the sixteen-minute title-track (which serves as the grand culmination of the preceding thirty-ish minutes), where the group’s penchant for spiky discordance and swirling dissonance, fused together by ragged-edged, acid-etched riffs and a run-away cascade of nerve-wrecking percussive patterns, is married to their newfound love of mescaline-laced melody in seamless, yet undeniably sinister, fashion.
Make no mistake, Defacement are a band who make art – horrible, uncomfortable, uncompromising art – purely for its own sake. And yet, by putting it out into the world like this, they invite the listener to experience it, to love or hate it, entirely on their own terms.
And that’s the true duality here… because this is one album that doesn’t exist for the audience’s comfort, but will likely be all the more successful because of it.