(written by Islander)
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., where our site is headquartered. Among other things to be thankful for, those of us who live here are grateful that we don’t inhabit a country torn by war. The people who live in Ukraine aren’t so fortunate, and they’re on our minds today as we present the premiere stream of a new album by the Ukrainian death metal band Dying Grotesque.
This band was first created in the suburbs of Kyiv, Ukraine in 2018 as a one-man project by Vadym ‘Silvan’ Tsymbaliuk. With the addition of new members in 2020, the project became a band, they released their debut album Sunflower Tide, and they began performing live at a number of gigs and festivals throughout Ukraine.
The name of their new album is Celestial, and it will be released tomorrow by Archivist Records. Its themes are described as follows:
The story behind Celestial depicts the violent absurdity and the grim futility of human existence, which appears to be completely insignificant comparing to the endless darkness of cosmic void and all the undiscovered mysteries it conceals.
Along the path toward the album’s due date Dying Grotesque released two singles. The first of those, “Nuclear Meadows”, which is the album opener, was described as “an ode to the scientific progress that could destroy the world, and to the destruction that led to the progress of humanity.” It arrived with a lyric video.
In that song, Dying Grotesque rev up humongous HM-2 guitar tones that crawl, claw, slash, convulse, and bludgeon, accompanied by monstrous growls, equally monstrous bass-lines, eerily swirling, frantically writhing, and maniacally darting leads, and variable drumwork that hammers, scampers, and ruthlessly pounds.
As the pacing changes (which happens relentlessly), the mood of the music is alternately grim and berserk, frenzied and tyrannical, and the soloing sounds both miserable and desperate.
The second single was “Pneuma”. Dying Grotesque made this comment about it: “’Pneuma‘ refers to the Antique knowledge of human kind and tells of a long lost and forgotten concept of «spritus vitales». Maybe, the lack of understanding and inability to feel the ‘cosmic breath’ is the fundamental defect in the consciousness of modern people, leading to the decline of human race…?”
In the case of “Pneuma“, Dying Grotesque reinforce the impressions created by “Nuclear Meadows”, i.e., of a band whose songwriting emphasizes both dynamic pacing and multi-faceted tones and moods. This one again brings to bear crushing and mauling HM-2-powered riffs but also prominent bass maneuvers and shrill, eerily swirling leads and soloing that are both exotic and chilling, both agonized and deranged.
Again, the drumwork constantly switches gears, from punk-like jumping to piston-like pounding and weapon-like blasting, and the vocals are again malignant in tone and malicious in mood.
As you can already tell from just these two songs, Dying Grotesque‘s approach to death metal incorporates varied stylistic influences, most prominently those from the grisly old Swedish sound to standards from Florida and New York. The songs display impressive technical chops, evocative melodic components, and continual variation in speed and mood.
The new album’s other six songs are in line with those impressions. Anchored by tremendous low-end power and guitar-tones that are both massively crushing and mind-searing, they romp and ravage, viciously maul and inflict battering-ram blows, and spin up into displays of unhinged ecstasy.
The soloing continues to be fascinating in its variations, creating sensations that may be jubilant in one episode, creepy and supernatural in another, and ferociously demented in another. And the drumming continues providing non-stop shifts in speed and rhythmic patterns. Even the vocals bring in variations, moving from those horrifying gutturals upward toward equally horrifying howls and rabid screams.
For music that’s so unabashedly savage and frequently brutalizing, the songs are quite elaborate, and produced in a way that, despite the über-mangling distortion of the riffage, provides distinctive separation and clarity among the ever-changing ingredients.
It’s the relentless dynamism within each song, and the elaborateness of these fiendish creations that makes the album worth hearing all the way through. There aren’t any startling changes in the ingredients within most of the songs (though the softer and bleaker introductory phases of “Point of View” and “Mortality” are quite different, as is the truly celestial outro of the closing song), but each one is electrifying to hear, and that makes them all worth hearing.
And with that we’ll leave you to experience for yourselves one hell of a good death metal album:
CELESTIAL Lineup:
Vadym ‘Silvan’ Tsymbaliuk – vocals, guitars, lyrics, arrangements
Andriy ‘Nordwind’ Butok – drums
Volodymyr ‘Liquidator’ Degtyarenko – bass guitar, guitars, lyrics
Guest musician: Oleksandr ‘Archon’ Kharechko
As identified by Dying Grotesque, the main musical inspirations for this album were such bands as Bloodbath, The Black Dahlia Murder, Entombed, Dismember, Edge of Sanity, Gorefest, Revel In Flesh, Suffocation, Vital Remains, Necrom, Mutanter.
The album was composed and recorded during 2020-2024 at Intermodulation Studio in the Kyiv region. It was mixed and mastered by Vadym ‘Silvan’ Tsymbaliuk at Inetrmodulation Studio during 2022-2024.
Celestial will be released by Archivist Records on November 29th, on CDs and in digital format at all the main streaming platforms. For more info about the album and how to get it, check out the links below.
DYING GROTESQUE:
https://li.sten.to/dyinggrotesque_info
https://dyinggrotesque.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/dyinggrotesque/
https://www.facebook.com/dyingrotesque
ARCHIVIST RECORDS:
https://archivist-records.com/
https://www.facebook.com/archivistrex/