AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TER ZIELE — “EMBODIMENT OF DEATH”

(written by Islander)

“When we, as humans, accept subjection to suffering, resignation in life inevitably follows.”

With those words the Dutch band Ter Ziele introduce their debut album Embodiment of Death, which will be released on February 28th by Tartarus Records. The words pack a lot of meaning into a relatively brief sentence. They refer not just to human suffering, but to suffering caused by others or by oneself, hence the word subjection. They suggest that there is a choice among those who suffer about whether to accept the subjection or not. And they point to the consequences of acceptance: the inevitability of resignation in life.

And so the sentence is both an observation of bleak realities that beset the human condition and also (possibly) an argument. What does it matter if acceptance leads to resignation unless people have the ability to reject instead of accept? And what might motivate them to resist or to change?

Of course, the words don’t suggest that resistance or change will be easy. It may not even be possible. In some cases we know it will be futile, that some conditions are so terrible and hopes for relief so barren that despair seems inevitable, even when (and maybe especially when) those conditions are self-inflicted. But again, the words imply that acceptance is not the right answer, because that is the surest recipe for a never-ending cycle of misery. They seem to make an argument, though not a “preachy one,” for resistance.

Obviously, there is a connection between the sentence and what inspired the album’s music, and between the inspiration and the results. And you can draw all those connections today as we premiere the record as a whole.

Photo Credit: Wietske Elzinga

The design of the album allows for greater and lesser degrees of time to discover what Ter Ziele are up to along the way from their beginning to their end. Its opening track is brief; two of the songs are longer but not in the scale of monuments; and two others, including the final song, hover on either side of 12 minutes.

(The name of that final song completes a sentence begun in the name of the opening track, in a way that seems even more bleak than my interpretation of the band’s introductory sentence. The name of the short opener is “As Long As I Breathe.” The name of the closer is: “As Long As I Breathe, I Am To Suffer.”)

As you might expect even if you didn’t know, doom metal plays a significant role in the album’s music — leaving open the question of what kind or kinds of doom are in the mix (answer: it’s the sludge variety). But as Ter Ziele explore the album’s themes they pull from other heavy and intense musical wellsprings, including post-metal, black metal, and psychedelia. And while suffering inhabits the music in many forms, the album is far from relentlessly dour and defeated.

 

 

For example, my first exposure to the album was “The Separation of Body and Soul,” the album’s second track and one in the mid-range of durations. The band released it with a video that’s equal parts mysterious, haunting, and frightening. I found the music cataclysmic and wrenching.

In that song, Ter Ziele use the listener’s head as an anvil, and pound it with a titanic sledgehammer. They also drench the senses with increasingly dismal riffs that sizzle with distortion and ooze agony from every pore, and with cleaner guitar-leads that slowly writhe in misery. On top of that, harrowing screams coupled with gargantuan roars seem to manifest souls being ripped from bodies. They follow the admonition of Dylan Thomas, and do not go gentle into that good night, but rage against the dying of the light.

In the preface to that song and the album as a whole, the short opener “As Long As I Breathe,” deeply drones and strangely quivers, creating a mood both ominous and tension-filled… with the outcome in doubt.

On the other side of “The Separation of Body and Soul” lies the very long “Of Noumenon and Reality“. It may help to know that in certain schools of philosophy noumenon means “a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes,” and it stands in contrast to phenomenon, that which we perceive with our senses.

In Ter Ziele‘s investigation of the perceptible and the possibly unknowable, they begin gently and slowly, with picked notes that are brittle but glittering and seem to convey a lonely contemplation. But the intensity (and the suffering) gradually swell through the addition of tormented screams and riffing on the boil. And then Ter Ziele lower the hammer, pounding and ramming, and causing the guitars to slither and moan.

This band do know how to crush their listeners into paste, an ability they demonstrate repeatedly throughout the album. But as demonstrated again later in this song, they also know how to guide listeners into moments of haunting introspection. The way things go back and forth, it’s almost like we’re witnessing an internal argument; and as it goes back and forth the music hammers faster and the dissonant riffing grows more turbulent, to the point of sounding confused or deranged or desperate. The double-bass starts violently rumbling and the music seems to be madly scraping the listener’s mind with steel wool — and then things slow again, and the melodic motif is genuinely miserable, just as the vocals are lacerating. The music gradually becomes tragically beautiful but also more distressing when the pounding and scraping resume.

The following song, the five-minute “Mortal Coil“, takes us back to the kind of moody mysteries presented in the album opener, but with harrowing gasps, and then reverts to the gut-slugging, skull-clobbering, mind-abrading agonies that Ter Ziele create so frighteningly well. They build that toward a peak of screaming and musical anguish — and then to a torrent of blast-beats and frantically contorted guitars that sound like things coming apart at the seams. There’s a video for this one too:

What the band have said about the song is revealing:

“Amidst a rapid, disintegrating world, ‘This Mortal Coil‘ is a cry for dignity — a final act of defiance against the relentless shift in an increasingly rapid, changing world, where the wish is to depart from it all, before the point of no return takes not only hold of our lives, but that of all things living. We embrace death, not as an end, but as a return to the ashes of what we once were. It is here, where we lost all hope, that we burn out — not out of hate, but as a final testament to the fragility of life, as we are consumed by the fire of the inevitable.”

One more long song left, the one that abysmally completes the sentence in the opener’s title, or completes it in a different way. Like all the songs on the album except the opener, it’s a sequence of ebbs and flows, episodes of lesser and greater intensity. Here, some of the slow and soft phases are more melancholy and wistful than haunted or grieving. They make the megaton heaviness and harrowing harshness of the following phases even more shattering — though nothing is more shattering than the vocalist’s shrieks and cries. Those heavy phases will also likely cause most listeners to headbang from the waist up, like the working of a lever.

The cycling throb of the bass gets one of the softer and most hypnotic phases, along with glinting chords suggestive of intrigue, of lurking answers to contemplated problems. The massive grooves of the harder segments create their own kind of hypnosis as they proceed, but it’s a ruinous kind of spell, eventually cast with the aid of squalling, wailing, and screeching guitars that wade into psychedelia — a spell broken by guitars that scald and the most impressively animated and acrobatic drum performance of the whole album.

The song’s name (again) is “As Long As I Breathe, I Am To Suffer.” But the way the song ends doesn’t sound like subjection or resignation. It sounds angry — in pain to be sure, but unwilling to let suffering define this life. (Or that’s how I choose to interpret it.)

And so here we are, finally almost ready to shut up and leave you to the album. It’s a remarkably intense and involving album, a deep dive into music of soul-searching, oppressiveness, and earthshaking trauma, a sludge/doom titan that’s also sometimes as fragile and poignant as a falling flower. It’s an interesting, often devastating, and thoroughly inescapable exploration of suffering, what it means, and whether it has any answer.

 

 

We’ll now share this further comment from Ter Ziele about the album:

With Embodiment Of Death we have been able to translate our collective experiences of loss, frustration and trauma into music. The process of musical refinement, finalizing and multiple lineup changes has ultimately resulted into an album that aligns with the vision we had since the band’s beginning. By addressing recognizable suffering and thoughts that we as humans struggle with, we have not only developed an authentic identity as a band but also demonstrated that our music can create a sense of unity among our listeners. Embodiment Of Death is a prelude to what is yet to come for Ter Ziele and with which we have embarked on a new chapter with Tartarus Records.

Following a successful previous collaboration with Stijn van Gestel, the band decided he would oversee production and mixing, with JB van der Wal (Gaerea, Herder, Ortega, Verwoed) handling the mastering. The album artwork was made by Jarek Kubicki. The video above was created by Richard Toepoel.

Tartarus Records will release the album on vinyl, cassette tape, and digital formats.

PRE-ORDER:
https://terzieledoom.bandcamp.com/album/embodiment-of-death

TER ZIELE:
Bandcamp: https://terzieledoom.bandcamp.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TERZIELEDOOM
Instagram: https://instagram.com/ter_ziele

TARTARUS RECORDS:
Website: https://tartarusrecords.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TartarusRecords
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartarustapes