(written by Islander)
The debut album from the Polish band Deamonolith is unusual. First, it comes with cover art by Michał “Xaay” Loranc (based on a concept by the band’s two founders) that will stop most people dead in their tracks when they see it.
Second, the album is just a single song — a single track that’s 35 minutes long.
Third, and most important, although the members of Deamonolith have been active in the metal scene since the 1990s and have made death metal the core of their first album, it’s far away from some kind of “OSDM” re-tread. Instead, it’s an enormously ambitious and thoroughly jaw-dropping extravaganza that pulls freely from multiple genres of music, both within and outside of extreme metal.
That’s a conclusion you might infer when you discover that the album’s music includes such ingredients as saxophone, classical guitar, piano, clean male and female vocals and choirs, and dark ambient accents. But you needn’t rely on inference, because today we’re premiering The Monolithic Cult of Death in its entirety, just a few days away from its co-release by Godz Ov War Production and Ancient Dead Productions.
The brief history of how the album came to be is this:
In 2020 Major and Desecrate began working on new material while simultaneously attempting to reactivate Gortal, which had been on hiatus since 2015. After two years of composing, it became clear this attempt had failed. However, a new energy emerged that needed an appropriate form. The choice was clear – and so, Deamonolith was born.
The initially composed material required further development, so Major and Desecrate started looking for ambitious musicians to collaborate with. In the first half of 2023 Sunrise (guitars and acoustic guitar), Kobuch (vocals), and Lukas (bass) joined the lineup, allowing the music to take its final form.
They began recording in November of last year, a process that continued until the summer of this year. And what they created was a concept album, one long song that narrates a tale of apocalypse.
Providing extensive written detail about what happens in an album like this one runs the risk of becoming tedious — because so much happens — and the music itself relentlessly banishes tedium. But of course I can’t resist providing a bit of a preview, even though you can now hear The Monolithic Cult of Death for yourselves.
This long song unfolds very much like the narrative it was intended to be, and ultimately very much in keeping with the cover art. Musically, it portrays a sequence of events and emotions, and thus varies in its sensations and moods.
Mysterious, haunting, and ominous at first, thanks to the ring of a classical piano overture and grim strummed chords, it begins to build tension and fear and then lowers the boom with massive, heaving and towering tones, detonating drums, screaming guitars, and ravenous growls.
The music explodes in deranged violence, with drums battering, the bass creating a subterranean earthquake, distorted guitars writhing and ripping, and the vocals viciously roaring and howling. But the music also brutishly and heavily pounds while shining synths sear overhead and choral voices rise high, and the guitars also slither and miserably wail, as if foretelling the ultimate agony to come, and they spasm and flicker in madness.
The music becomes an elaborate symphony of malice and terror, crushing and crazed in its impact, vast in its scale, towering in its height, swept by long saxophone blasts that sound just as vast as everything else, and it chugs and jackhammers with such malignant power that it’s easy to imagine the Earth fracturing apart.
But the saxophone also intriguingly warbles and revels, and there’s also a sense of revelry in the frenzied, charging riffage, the neck-whipping drums, the fanfare chords, and the extravagant guitar soloing — even though the vocals are relentlessly and ferociously ravenous or insanely baying at the moon like a pack of demon wolves.
There does come a point at which the music’s spectacular, pulse-pounding and mind-blowing intensity slowly subsides, yielding the stage to an elegant acoustic guitar and piano performance, somber at first but more lively later, backed by the crack of lightning.
After that interlude, things get wild again — very wild — like a confluence of tornadoes, wildfire, and earth-wrecking machines operating at over-driven speeds, all of it urged on by berserk demon howls and laced by more of those exhilarating and eye-popping guitar solos, as well as haughty choral voices that give the music the aura of a very dark opera, and growls that sound choked with viscera and bone.
The saxophone reappears, this time smoky and seductive, surrounded by brilliantly glittering sounds and big lo-frequency maneuvers, but from there the music descends into sounds of devastating sorrow and hopelessness. The guitars whir and trill in sounds of pleading and pain — but they’re answered by ruthless (but head-moving) pile-driver grooves and another whirlpool of maliciously writhing and insidiously diseased fretwork, accompanied by bursts of electrifying drumming.
We also eventually get one final appearance of the saxophone, beautiful in its spiraling magnificence, even though there’s a maelstrom happening around it. And how does something so extravagant as this song end? It ends gently, and coldly, as if witnessing the emptiness left by the world-ending malevolence.
Well, I guess I lied. That was more than “a bit of a preview”, but hopefully not a tedious one. And hopefully it will only give you more incentive to experience for yourselves a truly extraordinary album, an unexpected alchemy of death metal, progressive metal, symphonic metal, jazz, and a few other not-metal genres, all of it rendered in ways that make it easy to lose track of time.
DEAMONOLITH Line-up:
Major • Guitars
Desecrate • Drums & Dark Ambients
Sunrise • Guitars & Classical Guitar
Lukas • Bass
Kobuch • Vocals
GUEST MUSICIANS:
– saxophone by Łukasz Wypych
– piano appearance in the opening intro by Magdalena Sienkiel
– piano appearance in the interlude by Sebastian Świciak
– male clean vocals and choirs by Michał “Xaay” Loranc
– female vocals by Anna Malarz
Godz Ov War and Ancient Dead will release the album on October 18th, on CD and digital formats.
PRE-ORDER:
https://godzovwar.com/shop/
https://godzovwarproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-monolithic-cult-of-death
https://ancientdead.com/index.php
DEAMONOLITH:
https://www.facebook.com/DEAMONOLITH
https://www.instagram.com/deamonolith_official_pl
GODZ OV WAR:
https://godzovwar.com/
https://www.instagram.com/godz_ov_war_productions
https://www.facebook.com/godzovwar
https://godzovwarproductions.bandcamp.com/
ANCIENT DEAD:
https://ancientdead.com/
https://www.facebook.com/AncientDeadProductions