It’s the time of year when many of us are reflecting on what we heard in 2022, sorting it out, making lists, reducing our bank account balances… but for the moment I’m thinking about a musical plague that infected me last year for which a cure hasn’t yet been developed.
That plague, Crepitation Of Phlegethon, was the full-length debut of Occulsed. It ushered listeners into a world of terrors, a world created from sounds that spawned electrifying visions of horror and disease, of madness and mayhem, and of blood-freezing intrusions from spectral realms. As I wrote at the time we premiered it:
“It takes a rare kind of talent to make an album like this one, a death metal album that creates such a viscerally disturbing impact, one that preys upon its listeners’ most deep-seated fears and does so in such thrilling and paradoxically enthralling fashion…. It’s all rotten to the core and as creepy as confinement in a coffin filled with wriggling maggots…. The moods change as well, though almost all the moods are ghastly. The music is both predatory and hopeless, noxious and deranged, horrifyingly imperious and seemingly gleeful in its deviant revels”.
Where in the world did that plague come from? How was it spawned, how did it grow into such a mal-formed but unforgettable monstrosity? We have answers today. Continue reading »
