Album Review: Felgrave- Otherlike Darknesses
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
There’s a few ways to describe Felgrave, but “fucking bewildering” would be a good start. The genre tag on metal archives states “Death/Doom”, and while I don’t agree with that particular prescription it would almost be easier to outline what Felgrave aren’t than what they are. Sprawling in scope, it’s probably best described as “Progressive Black/Death”, but that doesn’t altogether come close to letting you in on just how dense this thing is.
“Heavy”. How about that? We’ll start there for a lack of a better place. “Winds Batter My Keep” is eighteen minutes long and is, for the most part, a cyclonic vortex of ear bursting horror. In some respects it feels similar to the psyche-violating stream of nightmare fuel that was last year’s “Ontology of Nought” album from Ingurgitating Oblivion. It’s a shapeshifter, it’s surface a pliable membrane of endless contorting faces, melting and reforming in collages of infinite variety. It harbours shelter within in, ghostly voids within which salvation from the lashing storm-fronts outside exists beyond the tumultuous writhings in the ether, shifting, flaying with a thousand unseen edges. But the ways in which it does this varies; “Winds Batter…” begins with a growling sludge riff that builds as it ascends. A guitar tone like jaws full of concrete teeth, bright tatters of man-flesh blooming through the gaps between.
As row after row of fangs like graves gape before you an eeriness slices in; piercing sustained synths over a tremolo riff that swaps on a coin flip between high and low; the sludge surges back accompanied by a pig squeal like the agonal breaths of a lich. This is your last chance, the final stop before the album dives off into psychopathic explorations of unreasonably heavy avant-garde death metal. From around the three minute mark the blastbeats kick in, followed up by the sort of riffs that sound like the physical manifestation of Deathspell Omega’s emotional issues. Less a wall of sound than the ceaseless knotting of uncountable hydra necks ever spiralling, it’s a manically intense explosion of sounds, melodies, consonances, dissonances, darting and intersecting. Then at 6.19, peace of a sort. Yet an uneasy peace, an armistice while resentment builds and on either side of the divide comes the harsh rasp of knives being sharpened. An acoustic respite; yet tension builds throughout it, ethereal wails atop it and chromatic discordance as the volume builds. With a crippling lurch, the earth shifts at 8.40; so much of this album proceeds like this, a tightrope over a hurricane, wheeling wars of distorted chaos convulsing below utterly inimical to your existence and indifferent to the suffering to be endured.
“Pale Flowers Under an Empty Sky” begins sedately by comparison. It’s gentle and tuneful, almost idyllic, I feel like I should be listening to it in Bermuda shorts with a mojito. Within its calm lurks danger; the serenity doesn’t last, shattered by a barbarous offensive of blasting and descending guitar licks backed by the brute force of murderous atonal chord progressions. There’s a moment at 4.00 of such repulsive ugliness that my face still hasn’t been able to thaw from the gurn it is fixed rigid in. it’s incandescent, unstoppable in its indignation. When the same riff is repeated over blastbeats later in the song, it’s like falling under a tank. It’s a story of contrasts, the dark and the light, each magnifying the impact of the other in ways that would be stunted if left independent of one another; it also uses contrasts in tempo, with some hideously deformed sludge riffs slathering miles about in corruption.
The interplay is fascinating; it never stands still, mixing and matching, riveting unholy disso-death to shrieking ambience with synthwork that swirls about it like banshees or some howling desert djinn pulled from the windswept sand dunes of Arabian deserts. The material is simply crushing, merciless in it’s application of force. Clean vocals cut through over a suffocating veil of ringing chords that swaps in and out with ablating grind riffs, theropod voracious throughout, and right when this scalding hail hits it’s zenith, it drops right back into it’s mild introductory riff. Felgrave are trying everywhere to subvert your expectations and mesmerise, either with an outrageous display of force, subtle shoegazey beauty, crushing doom riffs or more besides. Soundscapes mount atop each other, building coarse skin layers, and once more the blasts crash in; the frenzy builds, and then at 10.41 we finally plunge from the precipice into the waters below, ravenous tides, cold enough to suck the warmth from your bones even as the conflicting streams rip tendons from their perches and pull you limb from limb. The bass bursts to the surface with unforeseen flurries, sparkling water flash freezes to splash back to the depths in a savage rain of needles. We culminate with your sinking ruin descending further, further, to even darker places hidden below. Phantom ambience glides the song to terminus. Phenomenal.
We come now to the final stretches. What further torments have Felgrave in store for us? It’s called “Otherlike Darknesses”, and if ever I was to be convinced that they merit the “Doom” descriptor in “Death/Death”, this would be the song to do it. if you needed a song for dragging a corpse on a waltz through an ill-lit torture floor, this might be for you. If it’s slower on average than it’s brothers, “Otherlike…” hardly lacks for firepower. As opposed to the wanton berserker slaughter unleashed elsewhere, this one bears the gaunt, cold maliciousness of an absolute monarch, a King Leopold, a true daemonic presence in flesh clad and staring out through human eyes, with total power to inflict unspeakable misery at will. Which isn’t to say that it cannot move quickly when the mood strikes it.
Coming at the tail of a masterful build up, Felgrave suddenly smash the accelerator through the fucking floor with a chainsaw of a black thrash riff; harmonies stack, lead lines firing off in so many directions it’s hard to make sense of. It’s what I meant earlier when I described the album as “dense” – so much happening at once, so many individual sections moving and flexing simultaneously in this insane dance that feels seconds away from total disintegration at a moment’s notice. As it swings back into the riff it opened with at 16.12, it feels something more than sinister, as though meanness and sheer disdain themselves as concepts sprouted veins, nerves, dripping meat stretched taut and knitted over pale bone and stood glaring at you with an uninhibited loathing. It isn’t just heavy sonically, it feels heavy, paralyzingly so. It certainly helps that the musicianship is otherworldy as well, beyond there presumably being some unknowable nether-intelligence behind it’s construction to boot.
It's a one man project. Beyond being simply astonishing, that brings with it the virtue of a singular cohesive vision, but also the counteracting problem of an inability to self-edit. The album is almost 50 minutes long and is composed of 3 tracks, two of which are 18 minutes long, with the baby of the trio being a mere 12 minutes long. These tracks are frequently jaw-dropping, but are also bloated as all hell. They reach logical conclusions at which one might think the song could end and you’d be free to move to another, but no, on we go instead. There’s at least two instances of this in “Otherlike Darknesses” and while I’m not unpersuaded by the argument that it should be viewed as more like movements in a classic piece, classical music albums do segregate individual movements in their songs. The issue though is that sections will recur throughout the song, so you would also have to rearrange the track itself to do this. The effect is of material that is at once Magnificent but also occasionally awkward. I’m framing this as a flaw, but would I change it?...I…I don’t know. I really don’t. As is, the album feels like a journey, something epic, and while any such journey is never totally smooth the end result is nonetheless majestic. I can see from miles off how someone else wouldn’t care for this in the least, much less be willing to abuse adjectives as extravagantly in it’s honour as I’ve been compelled to do.
So it’s an acquired taste, for sure. Long, complex, unpredictable. Probably quite alienating for people who tend to stick to mainstream metal, and that’s not me attempting some pompous offhanded shot at gatekeeping either, there is just so much to dig into with this album that I can imagine it being something of an impenetrable blur for a lot of folks. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You do you. But I only grow more impressed with this album the more time I spend with it. Despite which, just in the effort to describe what’s happening, I fear I’ve failed to outline just how good this thing is. it’s the type of thing I can see myself returning to times without number. It feels bottomless, as though it harbours depths a million listens couldn’t probe. It’s shot to the top of the list of best things I’ve heard this year, but I feel as though I’m rambling at this point, so I’ll end with this: buy the album. It’s audacious, nauseatingly heavy, progressive, and Mariana trench deep. Maybe you’ll love it, maybe you won’t. All I can tell you is that I profoundly do.
