(Andy Synn celebrates, and mourns, the end of an era)
Well, this… fucking… sucks.
Not the release of a new Feral Light album – that’s always something to get excited about – but the fact that A Reckoning with the Intangible (which dropped last Friday) is going to be the band’s final album.
We’re not happy about this, obviously, but sadly there’s nothing we can do about it, so I guess all that’s left for us is to see whether they’ve elected to go out with a bang or a whimper?
Spoiler alert… it’s the former.
Now I don’t know whether the band knew this was going to be their last ride when they were working on it… but I have to imagine they did, if only due to how they’ve packed practically an album’s worth of blackened rage and blistering venom – along with a vicious array of their signature brand of craftily contorted, hellishly hooky riffage (plus an extra dose of dark, doomy weight) – into unrelenting opener “Rotting Linearity” alone.
And I can’t help but think that this knowledge must also have influenced their decision to build the record around titanic two-parter (or three, depending on whether you go by track list or track titles) “Shattered and Broken at the Base of Time”, which sees them throwing caution to the wind and pushing their sound to new extremes.
“Part I”, for example, combines an array of strangely-shaped chord progressions and weirdly-warped riffs – all topped off with some of the nastiest, gnarliest vocals of the band’s career, and interspersed with moments of morbidly infectious, moodily introspective, melody – with an asphyxiating atmosphere of simmering existential dread which, in a welcome twist, feels more like it’s channelling the spirit of Ligotti than Lovecraft as it gnaws away at the edges of your consciousness.
Building on this, part II and III (which, for some reason, are collected as a single song) push the envelope even further, ramping up both the velocity of the biting, blasting drums and the intensity of the churning, choking guitars while also finding space for narcotic threads of sinister pseudo-melody and passages of psycho-active ambience – with part III in particular exploring the outer limits of what the group are capable of at both ends of the scale, effortlessly juxtaposing eerie, hypnotic minimalism and punishing metallic excess in equal measure.
And even though the group chose to close the album – and their career – with the sombre acoustic strains of “Particles at Dusk”, this in no way lessens the impact of the record but rather serves as a fittingly gloomy epitaph, equal parts pensive reflection and poignant regret, for a band who never really received the attention or acclaim they deserved… and now never will.