(written by Islander)
In the nearly 15 years of our site’s existence our changing cadre of writers have listened to a mountainous quantity of metal, but if any of us have spent time with the music of the Romanian band Cursed Cemetery we must have kept our thoughts to ourselves. Because until last month, their name has not been mentioned in any of our 15,918 articles, despite the fact that since 2007 they released four albums.
But now Cursed Cemetery are on the eve of releasing a fifth album (on the Dusktone label), and finally we’re paying attention, and wondering what we missed across the years when the first four dropped.
The new album, Magma Transmigration, is a mountainous piece of music itself, a massive and daunting range with four imposing peaks, just four songs but each of them exceeding 10 minutes in length and two of them topping 15.
When we used their name for the first time last month it was in the context of premiering a harrowing and hallucinatory video for one of those four songs, “Yajna“, and the shortest of the four at “only” 11 minutes (or nearly so). For an overview of it, I offered this:
At times it creates chilling spells, at others it shakes the ground and fractures the rafters. It builds searing crescendos of pain and soundscapes of vast catastrophe. From start to finish, even when viscerally muscular in its power, it sounds thoroughly unearthly, like a nightmare, or a guided tour through terrors of an underworld (or a ravaged inner world) made real.
In creating that nightmarish excursion Cursed Cemetery pulled from wellsprings of funeral doom, black metal, and psychedelia (to name just the most prominent of the wells). They do so again in the other three songs, but reveal other ingredients and stylistic accents as well.
Cursed Cemetery could have made shorter songs. With a scalpel, you might even be able to slice up each of these four and render smaller segments that themselves could stand alone. So why didn’t Cursed Cemetery do it that way themselves? And maybe more important for people thinking about diving into the album, would it have made the experience less daunting on its face and more survivable in its consequences?
The songs do ask a lot from a listener. They are challenging in more ways than their durations. They stagger the senses and play havoc with a person’s moods and mind. The length of the songs isn’t the objective, but rather the necessary method for what the band were apparently trying to accomplish — to make listeners feel drowned, broken, and terrified to their core, to profoundly experience the pain of existence and the dread of it ending, but also to both embrace and defy the pain and the dread, to live through it, as ancestors did, and to envision what might lie beyond, even to become spellbound.
Relentlessly, the vocals tear sanity off its hinges and trample it. If these maddened snarls, wails, screams, and roars don’t send shivers down the spines of anyone hearing them, it would be a surprise.
Likewise, it would be a surprise if listeners don’t periodically feel crushed to fragments by the immense weight and pulverizing power of the percussive detonations and the chords, which heave, groan, and smash, crackling with distortion. But the key here is “periodically,” because Cursed Cemetery wisely don’t do that all the time, and thus they don’t numb the listeners to the impact when they do.
Both to augment the catastrophes and to divide them, the band deploy a range of contrasting experiences:
In the title track they introduce the eeriness of high-toned ambient keys that shimmer and sweep (a recurring ingredient throughout the album), and in the song’s concluding phase, the vibrancy of strummed acoustics and hooking grooves, singing voices that wordlessly soar, and guitars that brilliantly sparkle.
In “Yajna” they exuberantly hammer and stomp, and the wails sound like a shaman in the throes of possession. There they also rock and romp, in between the crushing and crazed cataclysms.
At the outset of “Tad Ekam” a guitar twangs above a slow beat, spawning visions of a high desert, and it might be a baritone sax that’s strangely moaning there (and again later). In that song the band also introduce a sinister and exotic melody with a solitary picked guitar and then carry it forward with more ravishing weight while the drums drive into neck-snapping, head-hooking beats. They also part the veil into a very haunting and coldly frightening realm — which makes the ensuing crushfest even more shocking when it suddenly begins.
And finally, “Udva” has its own distinctive opening phase — primitive, drifting, deeply otherworldly, augmented with throat-singing, scary gasps, and the crash and shimmer of cymbals. What comes later (a humongously hulking stomp) also sounds primitive, or maybe primordial is a better word. What comes later still — glittering strummed chords and a big bass pattern — sound beckoning, kind of jazzy and kind of trippy, a little glimpse of light before the final convulsive upheaval.
And now, with all those words behind me, I invite you to set aside about 54 minutes and experience all the wonders of a rare album, start to finish:
Dusktone will release Magma Transmigration on October 18th (tomorrow!), on digipack CD and digital formats. They recommend it for fans of Esoteric, Thergothon, Convocation, and Abruptum. For more info and to pre-order, check the links below.
PRE-ORDER:
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/magma-transmigration
https://www.dusktone.org/band/cursed-cemetery/
DUSKTONE:
https://www.dusktone.it
https://www.dusktone.org
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/dusktone
https://www.instagram.com/dusktone
CURSED CEMETERY:
https://cursedcemetery.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067334137278