AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HAND OF OMEGA — “THE END OF THE BEGINNING”

(written by Islander)

We live in a world where Darwin’s radical old theory has been replaced and evolution is now determined by the survival of the shittest, a world in which some are sworn to the Mentat’s Oath and others have become cyberspace conscripts, with our lives supported by nothing but foundations built on shifting sands, watching the Amazon burning (and much of the rest of the world with it), our shapes determined by a wretched new convolution.

And there I’ve managed to stitch together all of the song titles from the debut album by the UK band Hand of Omega, the name of which is The End Of The Beginning.

I have no idea whether Hand of Omega would endorse this way of interpreting their thematic intentions, but their music seems consistent with it, because it’s both crushingly bleak and destructively enraged — as you’ll find out today through our premiere of the album in advance of its September 13 release by the Irish label Cursed Monk Records.

Hailing from “the post industrial heartlands of Staffordshire, UK,” Hand of Omega describe themselves as “a distillation of members from fast bands playing slow and ones from slow bands playing fast”, and in genre terms you could think of their music as an alchemical synthesis of black, thrash, sludge, and doom metal, drawing upon each ingredient in whatever way best suits the band’s devastating mission.

Hand of Omega plunge their battle-torn black flag into the ground with “Survival of the Shittest“, opening the album in a grim and grievous assault of gigantic bass-lines chewing through subterranean bedrock, drums that chop like an executioner’s ax, and scalding vocal intensity.

The music in that opener drags and groans but also ruthlessly pounds and miserably writhes, and the vocals lacerate the ears with truly shattering screams, sometimes doubled to enhance their terrors. Near the end, the music also convulses in a mangling frenzy.

As a preview of what’s coming, “Survival of the Shittest” is a primitive and merciless beast, well-calculated to bludgeon and maul, and to use its mangled anti-melodies to portray the murder of hope and the fueling of disgust.

In the songs that follow, Hand of Omega continue to assault the senses with riffs that are humongously heavy and brutally distorted. At the high end of their speed, the music sounds like titanic excavation machines marauding. In the mid-range of their gears, it conjures either lurching monstrosities or enormous pile-drivers at work. “Cyberspace Conscript” gives you both experiences.

But the band have other ruinous mechanisms at their disposal too. Although “A Mentats Oath” inflicts thuggish rhythmic beatings, it also unleashes abrading blizzards of tremolo’d guitars as well as dismally wailing arpeggios, chime-like notes of misery, and martial drum-beats. (And anyone who’s a fan of Frank Herbert‘s Dune universe will appreciate the spoken words at the end.)

At 11 1/2 minutes, “Foundations Built on Shifting Sands” is the album’s longest song. It sounds eerily futuristic and haunting in its slow, atmospheric opening phase. There, the drums still come down like mallets, but only every now and then. But when the full band join in, still moving slowly, they then create an experience that’s so oppressively bleak as to be suffocating.

As the song evolves, in between those episodes of crawling and crushing hopelessness, the band both reprise the song’s haunted and emotionally depleted opening and stomp on the accelerator, surging into violent frenzies of roiling guitars and blasting percussion, while also revealing monstrous roars in tandem with those relentlessly incendiary screams.

“Amazon Burning” is another long song, though not as long as that last one. You can hear the tweeting of birds, but they’re soon drowned out by sounds of cold mechanisms at work. As this song evolves, Hand of Omega again move from phase to phase, intertwining prominent bass-throbs, sizzling and contorting guitars that reek of despair, and skull-smacking back-beats.

The song will get your head moving, and it may encompass the most hook-laden riffs of all the songs, but there’s no mistaking the music’s dark moods of desperation and disgust, agony and fury (the fury is particularly evident in the blackened paroxysm that occurs at the song’s end).

The album comes full circle with the closer, “Convolution“. It again sounds like a mid-paced primitive beast, hulking but a bit woozy in its maneuvers, yet when it speeds up, the beast becomes maniacal — and the song is also home to a guitar solo, relatively clear in its tone, that spirals up high (but still sounds emotionally decimated). The album ends with the reverberations of a collapse.

To sum up: The End of the Beginning is a threat to tender ears and tender feelings. Harsh in multiple ways, it’s a gutting and galvanizing experience, massively destructive and fueled by high-octane ferocity, but equally capable of crushing the listener not only between hammer and anvil but also emotionally, like a grieving but brutal funeral mass for ruined beauty and dead hopes.

Cursed Monk will release The End Of The Beginning on CD and digital formats on September 13th, and it’s available for pre-order now.

PRE-ORDER:
https://cursedmonk.bandcamp.com/album/the-end-of-the-beginning

HAND OF OMEGA:
https://www.facebook.com/handofomegaband