(written by Islander)
First impressions of just about anything can often be lasting impressions, not necessarily indelible, because further experience can result in reevaluations, but still significant. Which is why parents the world over try to teach their kids the importance of making good first impressions when meeting people for the first time.
For many of you, the first impression of Onirophagus might be Paolo Girardi‘s ghastly eyeball-filled cover art for their new album Revelations From the Void. Odds are, it will be a lasting impression, even though it isn’t the kind of impression that doting parents have in mind when trying to school their children. They don’t tell them to be as hideous as possible.
Photo Credit: Eduard Tuset
But Girardi‘s gruesome handiwork wasn’t my first impression of Onirophagus. That happened almost exactly six years ago when I heard some of the first music from this Spanish doom/death band’s second album, Endarkenment (Illumination Through Putrefaction), which also came with terrific cover art (Adam Burke that time).
I was moved to call that particular long song (“Dark River”) “tremendously dire and dismal,” “harrowing and pestilential,” and “haunting” — “a skull-smasher and a heart-breaker that’s hard to forget.” The rest of the album reinforced those first impressions, but caused some revision as well, because the rest of the album also introduced other experiences.
It proved to be a very good first impression, so good that I jumped at the chance to help spread the word about this new third Onirophagus album, which is set for release on January 17th by Personal Records. In this case, the spreading of the word is accompanied by our premiere of the second advance song from the album, “Black Brew.”
This black brew will blacken your heart from the first moments, through a complex of gritty notes that morbidly moan and miserably wail. That wretched introductory harmony creates a pernicious kind of spell, and easily might have gone on longer, but instead the band blow it up in an eruption of rapidly battering drums, searing and paroxysmal tremolo’d riffage, and horrid roars and screams.
The song recedes from derangement and back into its black pit of agony, though the animation of the drums and the ghastliness of the vocals don’t recede. In fact, the vocals become even more intense, as they rise into wild, tormented cries.
Onirophagus also bring in other variations along the path of this nightmare trip. They cause the music to lurch, stagger, and stomp. They un-spool eerily expanding webs of gleaming guitar melody (a different and more unearthly expression of wretchedness), and bass-lines that grimly heave and slowly writhe. They again infiltrate sizzling tremolo’d riffage that sounds like poison and pain, and percussive hammering that drives like pistons.
The music builds through increasing levels of catastrophe, always made more shattering by the cries and howls, and made more wrenching by a lead-guitar that has lost all hope.
And so, this is a somewhat different kind of impression than I was expecting based on first impressions years ago. The music is even more intense, even more frightening, even more pitch-black, yet still heart-breaking and still very hard to forget.
ONIROPHAGUS are:
Uretra – drums
Moregod – guitar
Obzen – guitar
Sir Vellum – guitar/bass
Paingrinder – vocals
Revelations From the Void was produced at the storied Moontower Studio. Personal Records will release it on CD and digital formats, and it’s available to order now via the links below. Also below you’ll find a stream of the first advance track from the album, “Landsickness“. Don’t miss that one either!
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.personal-records.com/product/pre-order-onirophagus-revelations-from-the-void-cd/
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/revelations-from-the-void
ONIROPHAGUS:
https://www.facebook.com/onirophagus