As Transcending Obscurity Records has described, the Turkish band Carnophage do seem like some legendary mythical entity that arises every eight years, not slumbering as long as locust swarms but biding their time and making their plans for longer than most metal bands in between releases.
Their second album, 2016’s Monument, followed the first one, Deformed Future/Genetic Nightmare, by eight years, and eight years have again elapsed since then. Thus, it is time for a new Carnophage album to create havoc and wonder, and we will all have it via Transcending Obscurity on August 2nd.
The name of this new third album is Matter of a Darker Nature, and it’s the source of the song you’re about to hear: “Until the Darkness Kills the Light“.
The two Carnophage albums that have appeared so far have pleasingly created perplexities among genre-labelers. The music has been too brutal for a “technical death metal” label to be entirely adequate, and far more technically adventurous and accomplished for the “brutal death” label to make a good fit.
As the new album abundantly demonstrates, even the hybrid of those two labels wouldn’t capture everything they’ve accomplished in this latest arising after eight years. T.O., for example, refers to the music as “elegant and thoughtful”.
We can imagine you smiling now. Well, you will better understand that claim when you listen to today’s song premiere.
On the one hand, the song runs listeners at high speed through a mangling and mauling gauntlet, one in which the drums and bass bludgeon and batter in a multitude of continually changing ways while the guitars skitter, slash, and blare like the deliriums of demons, and the vocalist growls and barks like a big mastiff hungry to taste your guts but somehow able to make its intentions intelligible and rhythmic.
On the other hand, in the midst of the feverish and constantly twisting guitar contortions and tempo changes, the music inflicts thuggish sledgehammer blows and stomps on the listener’s prone form.
But yes, there is an elegance — a kind of blazing and berserk elegance — to what’s going on here. There is a well thought-out method to the instrumental madness, a mapping of the labyrinth, in which the blurting, blaring, and delirious guitar spasms are organized to create recurring motifs that become hooks and organizing principles.
To be clear, this is a terrifically head-spinning escapade as well as a brutish roughing-up, but the strangeness of its patterns turns out to be what also makes it exhilarating and infectious. Hold onto your heads so they don’t spin off your necks like tops, and press play below:
CARNOPHAGE now:
Oral – Vocals
Mert Kaya – Guitars
Serhat Kaya – Guitars
Bengi Özgün Öztürk – Bass
Onur Özçelik – Drums
The album features wonderfully horrifying cover art by the masterful Mitchell Nolte, and Transcending Obscurity has made good use of it in all the formats they’re providing — gatefold LP vinyl, 8-panel digipak CD, and digital — as well as on a multitude of apparel options and other merch.
T.O. recommends the record for fans of Suffocation, Disentomb, Ulcerate, Deeds of Flesh, Defeated Sanity, Dying Fetus, and Hour of Penance. Four other songs from the album have previously surfaced, and we’ve embedded the Bandcamp player below so you can check them out too.
PRE-ORDER:
https://carnophage.bandcamp.com/album/matter-of-a-darker-nature
http://transcendingobscurity.aisamerch.com/
http://eu.tometal.com/
CARNOPHAGE:
http://facebook.com/carnophageturkey