EP Review: Uthullun - The Barbed Thread of Madness
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Mysterious Illinoisians, Uthullun, have ended the five-year wait for a follow-up to their Dirges For the World debut, by releasing the two-track EP, The Barbed Thread of Madness, on both 12” vinyl and cassette, through Wolves of Hades this month.
Clocking in at less than twenty-minutes, you might be forgiven for thinking this EP would be a rollocking romp through excessive blasts and an outrageous BPM count, but Uthullum only seem vaguely interested in such capers. In fact, there’s a mere moment during the opening title track that the band briefly don their Mayhem-caps and significantly increase the tempo, supplement it with some first-rate Attila vocals, set low in the mix.
The whole EP is an exercise in atmospherics: from the early building dissonant guitars and unstable melodies, to the spectral vocals and drawn-out conclusion, the track, The Barbed Thread of Madness, is a seven-minute walk through a twisted nightmare brought on by a fever-dream.
The other track is Blessed Be Oblivion and is ten-minutes of some of the most unexpected music you’ll hear this year. Where Barbed Thread… pulsed with varying speed and intensities, Blessed… is a slow moving, steamroller of blackened doom. Based around the primitive foundations of Occult Rock, Uthullun utilise discordant, jangling guitars and asynchronous drums to create a cold, spacious atmosphere.
Acid vocals again lie low in the mix and the primordial sound oozes from the speakers like an amoebic cell looking to find form. Like the slow swing of a scythe, razor-sharp guitar cut and slice as the band resist the urge to blast, preferring instead to maintain the uncomfortable atmosphere.
Perhaps the most unnerving moment of Blessed… is as it nears its end, and an overbearingly oppressive vibration gives way to a gentle acoustic coda, something that the previous fifteen-minutes had not readied me for.
The press blurb that accompanied this release described the EP as a “profound and solivagant journey” and - once I’d looked up the meaning of solivagant (to wander alone) - I found myself agreeing with the statement.
Though brief, there’s no short-changing from Uthullun on this release. Loaded with unsettling and uncanny dissonances, and far-reaching ambition, The Barbed Thread of Madness, now available on analogue formats, takes the listener back to the origins of the black metal scene, when raw atmospherics were the order of the day.
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