What we’re about to do is detonate a chaos bomb in the middle of your head. It comes seemingly out of nowhere, as if teleported in from off-planet or from some parallel dimension ruled by violent madness. The effect is like a shock-and-awe experience, and not merely because the sounds are so discordant and decimating but also because of how freakishly ingenious and technically impressive the songs are.
It’s one hell of a surprise, this debut demo of Anguine, in large part because it’s this trio’s first strike, but also because nothing is known about who’s in the band or where they’re located. That’s by design. Anguine have chosen anonymity, we’re told, “to terminate and minimize the cult of personality and possible pre-existing bias” and to direct all focus to the music. To help do that, we’re premiering this two-track demo today, in advance of its September 21 release by Total Dissonance Worship.
The tools of Anguine’s terrifying trade are a particularly dense, dissonant, and devastating amalgam of black and death metal, with the addition of a few other ingredients to help create unearthly atmospheric effects.
The opening track, “Shroud of Bloom” becomes a stunning upheaval of multifarious riffing that blares, slashes, and pounds in discordant tones, backed by rumbling bass mania and drumwork that attacks like automatic weaponry. The effect is somehow both entrancing and unnerving, and its ruinous impact is enhanced by horrid roars, deranged howls, and terrifying screams, which seem to reverberate from within walls of subterranean crypts. The intricacy of the fretwork contortions boggles the mind, as does the speed and destructiveness of the percussive assault — that’s part of what makes it paradoxically entrancing. When the drumming vanishes, the music shrieks and shines, like massed alien presences whose sanity has shattered and are now attempting to shatter yours as well.
The second track, “Gossamer” is just as mad and destructive, discharging a dense mass of brawling and swarming guitars and riotously tumultuous rhythms. No less disorienting than the first track, the second one incorporates jarring changes in rhythm and pace, dramatically slowing and remorsely pounding while ejecting jets of streaming dissonance like solar flares, and then erupting in a sheer cataclysm of sky-high unhinged riffing and rampant percussive obliteration, matched again by the violent lunacy of the vocals. The music inflicts pile-driving punishment and mind-mutilating mayhem, constantly flexing in its speed and spinning out a brain-blowing array of macabre and mutated guitar (and perhaps keyboard) sensations.
Together, these two tracks embody electrifying musical maelstroms likely to leave listeners fully adrenalized and gasping at the intensity and unpredictability of this chaotic experience. But don’t take our word for it — listen:
We’re told that the artwork of MMXXI “depicts the last remaining wooden beam from a theater that burnt down fifty years ago, representing the fact that art will live on in some form or the other, no matter what”.
The demo is available for pre-order now, and it’s a thrill to know that it serves as the precursor to Anguine’s first full-length, predicted for arrival in the spring of 2022.
PRE-ORDER:
https://anguine.bandcamp.com
ANGUINE:
https://www.facebook.com/anguinehell
TOTAL DISSONANCE WORSHIP:
https://totaldissonanceworship.bandcamp.com
