(Have they achieved enlightenment, or simply gone mad? Andy Synn sets out to see what eight years wandering the wilderness have done to Mitochondrion)
As we rocket towards the end of the year – looking at the calendar it appears I’ve got five, maybe six, weeks to start putting together my mammoth annual round-up of all the Good, Great, and Disappointing albums I’ve encountered since January – the pressure on my already limited time just seems to grow with each passing day.
But sometimes, when something special comes along… sometimes you just have to make time in order to give a record the review it deserves.
And the colossal, cacophonous new album from Mitochondrion – their first new release in eight years, and their first full-length album since 2011 – is one that both deserves, and demands, your full attention… and mine.
What’s particularly fascinating about Vitriseptome – and at a whopping 85 minutes, spread out over 2 discs, there’s a lot to be fascinated by – is how eerily, unnervingly compelling, borderline “catchy” in places, it all is.
Of a certainty Mitochondrion still sound as disgustingly dense and discordantly destructive as ever – “Increatum Vox”, for example, is seven-and-a-half minutes of acid-drenched riffs and whirling dervish drums, all whipped up into an ecstasy of tormented technical extremity, while “Flail, Faexregem!” delivers over eleven minutes of shapeshifting dissonance and scorching intensity which barely pauses for breath – to the point where even the album’s most atmospheric moments (such as the noxious, blooming horror of “[Malascension]” or the simmering ambient dread of “[Antimonphoresis]”) possess an ominous, oppressive weight.
And yet the band’s new found (or, at least, newly prominent) “melodic” edge – reminiscent of the likes of Mithras and Nile in the way it soars and spirals in strange loops and unpredictable occult patterns – also makes it by far the most hypnotic record of their career as well, with tracks like the seething “Oblithemesis” and the feverish “Vacuole” (two of the album’s many, many highlights) being as mesmerising as they are monstrous.
It’s both a profound, yet proportionate, change – one which accounts for eight years of evolution without betraying the band’s history or identity by seeking to make them something that they’re not – whose impact on the likes of the eerie undulations of “The Erythapside” or poisonously infectious strains of “The Prothanofuge” (which kicks off the second disc in soul-crushing style) helps ensure that not only do the songs themselves cut even deeper than ever, but that the wounds they leave behind will also last far longer.
True, the album’s sheer size means a bit of listener fatigue is perhaps inevitable – and the profusion of noxious, noisesome interludes (as exemplified by the back-to-back pairings of “Ignis Caesus”/”[Intraluxiform]” and “[ ]”/”Vitriseptome”) in the record’s second half definitely results in an occasional lull – but even so it’s difficult to deny, or fail to be impressed by, the piercing clarity of the band’s singular vision or the expansive scope of their artistic ambition when tracks like the claustrophobic, doom-laden “Argentum Mortifixion” (whose suffocating atmosphere will doubtless captivate fans of recent Ulcerate looking for an even nastier flavour of sonic nihilism) and the gut-churning grind of “The Cruxitome” continue to push their sound to new levels and new extremes.
In summation, then, Vitriseptome (which closes, in suitably uncompromising style, with the titanic twenty-two-minute duology of the blistering, blast-fuelled “Viabyssm” and the churning, choking “Antitonement”) is likely to be as utterly overwhelming and as unforgivingly abrasive, yet also as cunningly constructed and as deviously designed, an album as anything else you’ll have heard (or, at this point, that you’re likely to hear) all year.
Which is exactly what it needed to be – a statement of intent, a declaration of war, and (if you don’t mind me using the word myself for once) about as close to a masterpiece of brutally-focussed intensity and barely-controlled chaos as it’s possible to get.