AN NCS PREMIERE: MERRIMACK — “APOPHATIC WEAPONRY”

 

In a career that stretches back into the stygian mists of the mid-’90s, the French black metal band Merrimack have released four remarkable albums… though roughly five long years have passed since the last of those, 2012’s The Acausal Mass. But those of us who have been hungering for more of this band’s brand of fervent and unflinching underground terrorism will have that hunger sated early this summer: On June 9, 2017, Season of Mist will release the band’s fifth album, Omegaphilia. To help prepare the way for its advent, we are helping to premiere a song from the album named “Apophotic Weaponry“.

As the song’s name might suggest, “Apophotic Weaponry” is both physically assaulting and dreamlike, both murderous and mystical. It strikes with cyclonic abrasive power, yet seems to cut through limitations of space and time in search of something formless and timeless.

 

photos by Alizee Adamek

 

Those contrasts become evident in the opening minute, as abrasive, dissonant, reverberating guitar notes appear and then flower into a mesmerizing cascade of melody. Even as the drums begin to thunder and sandblasting riffs attack in a torrent, chiming arpeggios surface above the maelstrom, as they do again when the song later becomes an assault of hammering destruction. Isolated guitar notes and chiming tones appear again, but as preludes to feverish, exultant crescendos that are as majestic as they are delirious.

We haven’t yet heard the rest of Omegaphilia, but this song only increases our own hunger for it. Today we begin counting the days to June 9… only 92 days left until we feast.

 

UPDATE: We now have these thoughts about the song from Merrimack:

“For this song, as on the whole album, we wanted to come back to something more rooted in the 90’s. With a less complex structure, and a sound not as modern and claustrophobic as on our latest albums, ‘Apophatic Weaponry’ still has our characteristic moody atmosphere with some crawling mid-tempos riffs. This is especially noticeable on the second half of the track. Our lyrics are dealing with the special connection between beings and their faith, even though it is constructed on a void trying to fill in another vacant space of nothingness. The divine cannot be observed, demonstrated, except by its consequences. In the end, this is the definition of faith as opposed to reason. This concept of negative theology is a mystical approach towards the divine that attempts to describe it through the impossibility of describing it. Eckhart. Jacob Böhme and most of the German mystics tried to increase their faith with such notions.”

 

 

To pre-order Omegaphilia, go here:

https://shop.season-of-mist.com/list/merrimack

Merrimack on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/merrimackofficial/